My Reflection on the Recent Death of Walter Becker

Simon overshadowed Garfunkel. Oates took a backseat to Hall. Hardly anyone remembers Wham! was a duo. In the long list of music tag-teams, there was typically one person in the driver’s seat and the other in the sidecar. With Steely Dan, not only did Walter Becker and Donald Fagen have gas in the car, they each had a hand on the wheel and a collective foot on the accelerator. Their early bandmate and later studio go-to Denny Dias said Becker and Fagen were two people sharing a brain.

Although Donald and Walter rarely if ever divulged details of their writing process, there was never any doubt it was a duo of equals. Through nine studio albums they only once shared writing credit with someone other than themselves. Could it be merely a coincidence they were one of the few duos still happily working together after 40 years? Their mutual interests in jazz, literature, science fiction, and blues coalesced into a shared musical id that produced songs that were both indulgent and gritty, sophisticated and snarky, nihilistic and hedonistic, populated by characters who were lonesome, mentally ill, sexually deviant, drug addicted. They even managed to score a couple of hits along the way.

A musician’s death is a very intimate death when compared with purveyors of other art. When Andrew Wyeth died, it was sad, but he was never in your kitchen. When Philip Seymour Hoffman died, it was tragic, but you never felt like you knew him - and he probably wanted it that way. When a musician we love dies, it feels like a personal loss, because it is. If you got beat up in the school yard, you didn’t go home and lock yourself in your room with your mom, you locked yourself in your room with Henry Rollins. When a significant other broke your heart and you couldn’t imagine moving on, you wore out your copy of Sea Change. When you were getting ready for a hopefully wild night out, you weren’t talking to your favorite aunt or uncle, you and Prince were singing a duet in falsetto. Thanks to the format and accessibility of music, we have close relationships with people we are likely to never meet, let alone have a personal relationship with.

Although the closest I ever physically came to Walter Becker was in lawn sections of outdoor amphitheaters, and although Becker and Fagen didn’t trade in self-introspection and self-expository music that was quite popular at the time, I still can’t help but feel like I knew him and had shared experiences with him. Perhaps the Golden Rule of any type of writing is to write what you know. It’s been said over and over that audiences can smell a fraud. But that doesn’t necessarily confine one to only writing about first-person experiences or fictionalizations of people in your own life. There’s much to be learned by the types of characters portrayed, the motivations and outcomes of their actions, the overarching point of view, the mood of the language, the use of humor, the small continuities bridging years of work. Through the explicit and implicit in their music, it’s not much of a stretch for me to feel like I share Becker’s mood, humor, and outlook, and with his death, that’s one less bond I have in a world that is increasingly cleaving and that I often feel is mostly devoid of others who share a perspective I believe Walter (and Donald) and I share.

My affection and appreciation for Becker’s work has only grown in recent years as I have been using the pen more than the plectrum. Try to write a three-act play with a fully developed protagonist in under five minutes, oh, and fit in two guitar solos. That’s not easy. While I don’t fashion myself in their genre nor has it ever been a goal of mine to write like Becker and Fagen, it certainly doesn’t hinder the process to look up to mythic and aspirational figures and think you can see part of yourself in them, and that they were successful being nonconformists in a medium that rewards conformity.

Popular music became sentient and unleashed its newly discovered powers in the 1960s. The authors of that music who were fortunate enough to survive the excesses of success and the decade’s drugs of choice are now succumbing to ordinary illnesses and painful diseases with snappy acronyms. It’s not a luxury anymore to think I’ll skip that band or this musician this year and see them when they come around next year. In numerous years I’ve said that about Steely Dan…and here we are. While we can at will blast the soundtracks of our lives in our cars, in our bathrooms, in earbuds in our cubicles, the original voices of angst, insecurity, protest, sexuality, and liberation are going silent at an accelerating pace. Not to sound like a shill for Ticketmaster, but the odds will only continue to increase that there won’t be another summer tour for a beloved band or musician.

It’s been close to two years since Glenn Frey died. Although he was the founder of one of the most successful rock bands that ever was or will be, through his music and lyrics and affable interviews, you’d be forgiven for thinking of him as a chummy uncle. Then there’s David Bowie, who was more a pop culture fugue than a human being. Walter Becker is somewhere in between in my world of influences, so it’s probably not surprising his death has prompted a long-winded reflection. He and his music was accessible enough to converse with, but mysterious and out-of-reach enough to chase thinking you might one day find The Truth in his work.

While I am happy to hear Donald Fagen said he will continue to keep alive the music he and Becker created, by definition Steely Dan has died. It can incarnate itself in other forms, but it can never be the same. For those of us who know every lyric and every change, it’s incumbent on us to share their music with others who may not be hip to what they offer. And for someone like me who tries in my own way to express myself through my own music, I can do what I can to take his creative breath and breathe life into a new cast of characters however demented or hopeful, seeking The Truth not in flourishing gardens but in seedy alleyways, defined more by their vices and incongruities, in other words, characters like me and Walter.