Geoffrey Himes, the Washington Post,
December 1994
As the team called Steely Dan, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote, produced and performed some of the smartest, most seductive rock’n’roll of the ’70s. Fagen’s two subsequent solo albums sounded just like Steely Dan releases and fans were left to wonder exactly what Becker had contributed to the partnership. When Steely Dan took to the road last year, Becker’s guitar solos were so modest and his few vocal spots so thin and shaky that doubts about his talent only grew.
In that context, Becker’s first solo album, 11 Tracks Of Whack, qualifies as a major surprise. It too sounds like a Steely Dan release, with the same sort of literate, elliptical lyrics and jazzy chord changes. The vocals are underwhelming, but given repeated takes in the studio they’re much better than his live performances and serve the songs adequately. The songs, all but one written by Becker alone, are powerful and bleak portraits of characters who have slid from a wild, glamorous youth to a bitter, damaged middle age.
‘Lucky Henry’, a racetrack jockey, becomes a homeless drifter; Johnny Boy, a hang-glider daredevil, falls out of the sky and leaves his family searching for his car keys; one college-town partier becomes a ‘Junkie Girl’; while another, in ‘Cringemaker’, becomes ‘the wife from hell’; an old college pal becomes ‘This Moody Bastard’; a good-time Romeo becomes a bitter drunk without his ‘Girlfriend’. These cynical but sharply drawn vignettes suggest Becker’s contributions to Steely Dan were his lyric detail and anti-romantic sensibility, two qualities missing from Fagen’s sketchy, sunny Kamakiriad last year.
Becker and Fagen produced 11 Tracks of Whack at Becker’s home studio in Hawaii. If the minimalist results lack the usual Steely Dan lushness, the arrangements are marked by meticulously planned and sparklingly executed jazz-rock parts, often played by Becker himself on guitar. Even as he unflinchingly describes his characters’ fall from grace, Becker implies a lingering fondness for them, often in the seductive melodies that accompany every song.
Becker and Fagen collecting one of the three Grammies for Two Against Nature in Los Angeles, February 2001.
Kirk McKoy/Getty Images