Q&A: Steely Dan's Walter Becker

After fourteen years, it's still a thrill to listen to Walter Becker's 1994 solo debut 11 Tracks of Whack, an album that boasts tracks that stand up to his best work in Steely Dan, like "Surf and/or Die," "This Moody Bastard" and "Hat Too Flat." Becker's second solo disc, Circus Money, out in June, is just as compelling, and was inspired in large part by the Sixties and Seventies Jamaican grooves Becker finds endlessly fascinating. Unlike most Steely Dan-related projects, Becker maintains basically the same band throughout the disc — SD vets including drummer Keith Carlock (a monster), guitarist Jon Herington and keyboard player Ted Baker (Becker plays righteous bass). Becker also collaborated with songwriter/producer Larry Klein, known for his work with Joni Mitchell (Klein's ex-wife), including his production on River: Letters to Joni, the Herbie Hancock album that took top honors at last year's Grammys.

Check out the world premiere of "Somebody's Saturday Night" below, a song about a certain slutty chick. Our favorite lines? "She's no fool/But she's none too bright/She's just somebody else's Saturday night." Or is it, "Drink drink cigarette talkie talk drink drink smoke smoke cigarette."

Have you and Larry Klein been friends for a long time?
We've been friends for a while and I was at a point where I had about 800 different ideas for records that I thought I might make. And Larry said, "I'd love to make a record some time," and he was very helpful in condensing the ideas that I had down to a good workable set. I'd been listening to a lot of Jamaican music from the Sixties and Seventies and there was all sorts of ideas I had about the rhythms and bass patterns that they used and also about the way in which they re-used tracks, re-mixed tracks, the way in which ideas circulated, filtered through their culture via records — successive records with the same rhythm, sometimes with exactly the same track, sometimes with the track and the rhythm re-cut in somewhat in a more current style. I could just listen to that stuff endlessly, just the way those guys play, the way that the drums and bass interact is fantastic. That was the jumping off point and then we just ended up writing. A couple of things came out sounding sort of Jamaican and [some] didn't, but that was the idea, I guess.

What Jamaican music, specifically?
Well we're talkin' about everything from the sort of Rock Steady period on. I'd say everything from ska through 1980, when they started using drum machines. So that would be ska, Rock Steady reggae, rockers, steppers, all these different variations on the patterns as the drumming changed a little bit and the tempos changed. A lot of Lee Perry stuff, the stuff that the rhythm section from the Wailers played on — Style Scott, Sly & Robbie, Flabba Holt. There's just a ton of music from that period.

I notice a lot of Jamaican influence on 11 Tracks of Whack, as well.
I had started listening to that way back in those days and at one point Donald [Fagen] and I actually experimented with the idea of doing an album with reggae-type beats on it in the Eighties. I think "Snowbound" that was eventually on one of his albums was from that period. And the original version of "West of Hollywood" was from that period. It's always fascinated me the way they use the same elements of rhythm and blues playing, but they turn them around in a way and yet they still get a great feel on it, you know? And as a rhythm section guy, those rhythm sections are sort of the ultimate — the tightness of it, the complexity of the feels.