Advertisement
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.
Advertisement
And on Circus Money you get to play bass with Keith Carlock on drums.
And I get to play bass with Keith Carlock. Exactly. Not a bad deal — for me.
"Circus Money" is the only song on the record that you
wrote without Larry. But I'm sure that has nothing to do with the
fact that it's also the title of the record.
That was just a coincidence. Larry and I were going back and forth.
He was coming to New York and I was going to California. He was
working on other things and so on. And that particular tune I wrote
during a holiday when he was I think on a vacation somewhere and I
had taken some friends and dropped them off at the Big Apple Circus
and I came home and had this idea for this thing. It's allusive
with an "a." You don't exactly know what it means. So it's allusive
and illusive. It feels like it must mean something, but you're not
such which of the many things that it might mean it would be. I
just thought it was a nice combination of words for a title.
As far as your mentality going into the studio —
and perhaps feeling more comfortable behind the microphone —
how is this process different from 11 Tracks of
Whack?
I was definitely more comfortable singing, plus a lot of the
singing for 11 Tracks I just did myself with the engineer,
so it was a little more tedious. There was a learning curve for me
as a singer making tracks that I got out of the way making 11
Tracks. And also, I realized I wanted to make this record with
basically the same band, or slight permutations on the same band.
Doing all the tracks and getting that kind of unity of playing and
concept and feel. Playing without clicks and stuff like that, so it
would be like the good old days of, you know, where the musicians
set the tempos and the feels and everything. So that was the main
thing that changed it. So once we had the basic tracks, which we
did in 10 days or something, the basic music of the thing was
there, you know? And it didn?t need to be invented as you go along.
A lot of the things that Donald and I have worked on in recent
years have been built from the ground up. And I get too old and too
bored to do that anymore. And this is just much more fun. You have
a bunch of people there and they all are contributing to the thing
at the point where its taking shape for the first time, so you get
a much richer — to me — a much richer texture to the
thing.
I understand completely that you want do your own thing,
but what if somebody were to ask, "Where's Donald on this record?
Why isn't Donald a part of this?"
I think Donald might have been working on his own record at the
same time that I was working on this. And I just ended up doing
this pretty much as it fell together, and that's the way it fell
together. So it wasn't really actively excluding him or anything,
he was doing something else at the time. So it just worked out that
way.
I wanted to ask you about a couple certain songs, like
"Downtown Canon," one of my favorites. Is that an autobiographical
song?
No, not really, although it was an early dream of mine that I never
actually quite got to, to live in one of those lofts, or the dream
pad on Greene Street, and live happily ever after.
Well, not happily ever after, because there's the
inevitable breakup.
Well, you think it's happily ever after. Happily ever after is
always in quotes.
Advertisement
And you've got Muscatel in there again [a reference to a sweet and fortified wine Steely Dan referred to in their rare single "Dallas"].
Muscatel, sure. You've gotta have Muscatel. Well, I remember using it myself in the Sixties occasionally, for a headache — that I didn't have yet.
Is another Walter Becker show in the
works?
Oh, I don't actually know, because we're gonna go out and do the
Steely Dan tour and that's gonna pretty much occupy a big chunk of
time for me, and energy. At some point, it might be nice to do
something, although at that point, I'll probably want to do
something slightly different. I don't know if I would aspire to
actually re-create the stuff I recorded. It might be more fun to
play live with a slightly different format, with more blowing and
stuff like that. Maybe.
And the Steely Dan tour ? What have you guys thought up
for that?
Well, we're revamping our show to change the pace and the flow of
the show and to include songs that we haven't been doing as much
recently. We haven't really started rehearsing yet, so I don't
really know how it's gonna turn out. We just want to make sure it
has a fresh energy for people that have come in previous years,
even though they'll still get to hear basically what they wanna
hear: the Steely Dan songs played more or less how they were
recorded. In some cases, we'll do rewrites, segues and stuff, make
it a different live experience. There's a couple songs that I'd
like to do that we'll maybe get to do this year. But I hate to say
in advance, in case it doesn't happen. And then fans are coming to
the shows with signs and stuff, throwing rotten tomatoes at us if
we don't do certain songs.
I'm still waiting for you to bust out the bass,
man.
Well, Freddie's over there ["Ready" Freddie Washington, Steely
bassist for the last two tours]. I'm not gonna be bustin' out any
bass as long as he's around. It'll be virtually the same band as
last year.
And any talk of writing with Donald?
Sure, anytime. I think that's always a possibility. We've written
so many songs together, and I think we're probably both writing all
the time. For me, and I think Donald might agree, it's more fun to
just play live, get out there and do it, play a song once, and not
agonize over a record. We sort of fell into this trap of feeling
that we had to record definitive versions of our songs, because
probably nobody else would ever record them again, which may be
true. But I think there's something about playing a song once the
best you can, and then moving on and playing another song —
that's how playing live always is. That's good for us. So we ended
up doing that instead of recording and writing. And it's also
lucrative, it's fun, it gets us out of the house, get a little
exercise, a little sweat. Get to do different jobs. I get to play
the guitar all night long, which is just fun.