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Walter Becker
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Walter Becker was an American musician, songwriter and producer, and, together with Donald Fagen, the core of Steely Dan. He was born in 1950 in Queens, New York. He began on saxophone and switched to guitar, on which a boy from the neighbourhood taught him the blues. At Bard College Fagen heard him play in a coffeehouse and thought it sounded very professional. Together they started a student band and then tried to make a living in Brooklyn as a songwriting duo. For a time they played in the backing band of Jay and the Americans.
Music and breakthrough
In 1971 they moved to Los Angeles, where they became songwriters at ABC Records and started Steely Dan. Fagen sang and played keyboards, Becker played bass and later guitar. From 1974 the band stopped touring and worked only in the studio, with different top musicians for each album. Albums such as Pretzel Logic (1974), Aja (1977) and Gaucho (1980) combined pop songs with jazz chords, tight grooves and ironic, cryptic lyrics. Becker and Fagen wrote everything together and were notorious for their perfectionism in the studio.
Influence
The years around Gaucho were hard for Becker, with a drug addiction and an accident, and in 1981 the duo stopped. Becker moved to Hawaii, got off drugs and became a producer, among others for China Crisis and Rickie Lee Jones. In 1993 Steely Dan got back together. The album Two Against Nature (2000) won four Grammys. Becker also made two solo albums. He died in 2017.
Listening
Discography
Studio albums
- 199411 Tracks of Whack
- 2006You Gotta Walk It Like You Talk It... Or You'll Lose That Beat (soundtrack)
- 2008Circus Money
In School of Rock
The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.
- Mixtape 4: When Rock Was Still PopNL Reader
- Mixtape 5: Jazz FestivalNL Reader
Mentioned in other articles
- Aja Album
For this sixth album, Steely Dan, under bandleaders Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, had themselves surrounded again and again by different session musicians: almost forty in total.