Walter Becker: Co-founder, guitarist of American jazz rock band Steely Dan dead at 67

Walter Becker, co-founder of the influential jazz-rock band Steely Dan, has died at age 67, according to his website, which did not disclose the cause of death.Becker, who played lead guitar, formed Steely Dan with Donald Fagen, its keyboardist and lead vocalist.In its heyday in the 1970s, the band scored hits with Reelin’ in the Years, Do It Again, Rikki Don’t Lose That Number and Deacon Blues.

A 2012 photo of Walter Becker of Steely Dan smiling while holding an acoustic guitar.Photo: A 2012 photo of Steely Dan co-founder Walter Becker. (Wikimedia, file)Becker and Fagen became friends as students at Bard College in New York in the late 1960s.

“We started writing nutty little tunes on an upright piano in a small sitting room in the lobby of Ward Manor, a mouldering old mansion on the Hudson River that the college used as a dorm,” Fagen said in a statement on Sunday published by Variety.After working as touring musicians they moved to Los Angeles, releasing the first Steely Dan album in 1972: Can’t Buy a Thrill.The band took their name from a fanciful dildo that appears in the beat novelist William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch.The band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in 2001, where their official biography describes their 1970s albums as “wry, nuanced and hyper-literate” that are “highly regarded by connoisseurs of pop hooks, jaz

Source: Walter Becker: Co-founder, guitarist of famed American jazz rock band Steely Dan dead at 67 – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)