Events

[ROCK] The show must go on. And so it will. When guitarist Walter Becker died early last month at 67, Steely Dan fans all over the world were shocked. Although he’d undergone an operation that had kept him from performing at a pair of high profile festival dates this summer, his longtime writing partner Donald Fagen seemed confident he’d be back sharing the stage soon enough. Fagen took a solo trek over the summer with a newer, younger band – The Nightflyers — rather than doing the annual string of Steely Dan shows that usually ends in fall with multiple-night runs in select cities. During his show in nearby Northfield Ohio, he told the crowd that Becker was recuperating from a surgical procedure and was on the mend. Not two weeks later, he was gone. This was perhaps most shocking to fans that had eagerly purchased tickets to a new string of Steely Dan shows that had been announced in the interim, the Tuesday, October 17 gig at Shea’s Performing Arts Center among them, which seemed to come as a confirmation that Becker was doing well. In the days following his death, Fagen vowed to keep the music going, beginning with honoring the commitments for the upcoming tour.  

Becker and Fagen met while both attending Bard College in Annendale-on-Hudson, NY, which sets the framework for their tune “My Old School.” Steely Dan achieved a reasonable degree of commercial success straight away with “Dirty Work” and “Reeling in the Years” off the 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill. But by 1974, just three albums into their career, the band stopped touring in favor of producing more sophisticated, polished studio recordings, 1977’s landmark Aja among them. Becker, however, became saddled with personal woes: he’d developed a heroin habit. In 1978, he was slapped with a wrongful death lawsuit when his girlfriend at the time OD’d in his NYC apartment. Then he got hit by a taxi cab. By 1981, The Dan was done — but thankfully, not forever. Beginning in 1993, with technology finally catching up to their comfort zone and Becker’s addiction reportedly a thing of the past, Steely Dan hit the road again. Two new albums ensued in 2000 and 2003, the first of which won four Grammy awards . Since then, they’ve toured near-annually with an extensive lineup of brass players, a trio of backup gals and top notch talent in their core band. Never much of a singer, Becker released a pair of solo albums some fourteen years apart, finally giving voice to the more distinct aspects of his contribution to Steely Dan’s sound. Rickie Lee Jones, who achieved her last gold record to date with the Becker-produced  Flying Cowboys (1989), wrote a moving eulogy for Rolling Stone. “He was rather delicate looking. And he had a soft energy, nothing like what I thought I saw in the pictures,” she wrote. “A softy. A recovering addict. Hey, me too. He knew more about music right off the bat than anyone I had met in a long time. He didn’t patronize, he didn’t condescend, not even a tiny bit, not for one moment.“  The show goes on, Tuesday at Shea’s.