Major Dudes: A Steely Dan Companion by Hoskyns Barney

Author:Hoskyns, Barney [Hoskyns, Barney]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781472127532
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

3

Walter Becker:

Breaking the Silence

Mark Leviton, BAM,

December 1985

One of the most difficult-to-understand phenomena in a musician’s life is silence, the silence that comes occasionally when a talented performer or songwriter simply stops working after years or decades of dedication to The Muse.

Walter Becker, as co-leader and co-songwriter with Donald Fagen in Steely Dan, has more than his share of sterling moments to look back on. Few popular musicians have achieved fame from the kind of idiosyncratic recordings Steely Dan issued, and fewer still ever manage to combine left-field lyrics with a glossy, professional sound that’s the envy of the industry.

Since Steely Dan’s last LP Gaucho in 1980, Becker has remained completely silent, while Donald Fagen has issued only one solo album and co-produced one original cast album. But recently Becker finally emerged with a one-off production job on China Crisis’ album Flaunt The Imperfection. He then flew into Los Angeles from his home in Hawaii to do a little more nosing around in search of production work, just putting one toe back into the water of the music business he’s had nothing to do with for five years.

‘The last few years were a period of readjustment for me,’ he says. ‘I had to change certain things about the way I was living and get into a whole different groove. And that meant living in Hawaii and having no ambition to do anything in the business. I stopped practising scales on my instruments, hardly picked up a bass or played the piano and felt no pull to write songs either. Then about a year ago I started missing those leather couches, those little knobs and faders on the control panels … I thought producing would be a way of getting back into it without living in LA. When I was in Steely Dan, I’d get up at 4 p.m. take a shower, go to the studio and work all night, and that was all my life. For a long time, rock’n’roll was all I wanted to do. By switching to family life more, I lost the interest in music that used to be so central.

‘I figured with production I could make my little contribution and then get out. So I dramatically announced the availability of my services to some people at Warners, which is my record label – even though Steely Dan never got around to recording anything for them. I looked over the roster and came up with China Crisis. I thought their first American album was pretty good.’

The album at moments (especially on ‘Black Man Ray’) sounds as if Becker had a hand in songwriting, although he’s credited only with production, arrangement and a bit of synthesiser. ‘As it turned out, some of the songs weren’t finished when I first met them and they were counting on the producer in the process of recording to contribute certain things. Their other albums were not tremendously textured, they had a few ideas with a kind of fill-in “wash”. Gary Daly and Eddie

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