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Property from the Estate of Walter Becker October 18 and 19, 2019 | Beverly Hills, CA With Julien’s Auctions All auction items are now online and open for pre-auction bidding at:  https://www.julienslive.com/m/view-auctions/catalog/id/312 The printed catalog is also online in flip-book format at: https://www.juliensauctions.com/auctions/2019/Walter_Becker/Walter_Becker_Flipping_Book/ Julien's Summary Post with links to all relevant pages at: https://juliensauctions.com/auctions/2019/Walter_Becker/Walter_Becker_Subscriber.html Known for his sublime and immediately identifiable guitar tone, his intimate knowledge of the tools of studio and stage, and his unique, impeccable ear, Becker is heralded as one of the most potent forces in popular music of the last 50 years. “Julien’s Auctions is thrilled to offer this exceptional collection of musical instruments and gear owned and cherished by Walter Becker, the co-founder and creative genius of one of the most acclaimed and visionary bands of all time, Steely Dan, and a solo artist of uncommon uniqueness and creativity,” said Darren Julien, CEO/President of Julien’s Auctions. "Walter Becker was legendary for his unique tone, his curiosity, his knowledge, his high audiophile standards, and the pleasure he took in experimenting to create just the right sonic landscape that would best support his creative and musical intentions. This fine and wide-ranging collection reflects all of these characteristics — and more — that helped make Walter Becker one of the most talented and respected all-around musicians and sonic connoisseurs of his generation." If this event interests you, your first visit should be to Julien’s Auctions, my carefully-considered choice to handle Walter’s much beloved babies and to usher them into what we all earnestly hope are new loving and musical homes. Do your old D-Mod a solid — would you? — and send up a little wish for just that outcome? That’s what Walter wanted, of course. And I like to think his legacy deserves no less. The Julien’s Auctions folks have been truly spectacular, and I’ve been blown away by their knowledge, the care they are taking with this inventory, and what appears to me to be a truly above-and-beyond effort to do this one up right! They value Walter Becker, his work, his legacy, and his stuff! Wonderful! Their site dedicated to The Becker Auction will be updating with details and news --- such as today's Rolling Stone piece on the auction -- and all you need to know to view the live auction online or even bid remotely, if you're so moved. I strongly urge you to sign up for their newsletters and alerts! No way will we keep up with all the happenings and must-knows; So, please sign up with them if you are interested in following along. No doubt I will have more to say as time goes on about what is for me, at least, a rather momentous event, although I’ll be leaving all the informative details to Julien’s, who will do a fine job of informing prospective bidders and observers. But now, to no one’s surprise, I’d like to indulge in an initial observation about this collection, things you may not hear much about elsewhere, even though they speak eloquently, I believe, about the man and the cherished possessions I witnessed him acquire and use (and use! and use!!) for the last few decades. And it is this: I believe the collection reveals a somewhat unique aspect of Walter and his place — and reputation — in the music-making community both as a connoisseur and as a so-called “collector”; namely, his championing of up-and-coming luthiers and other sound professionals. To be sure, we find in his collection the Fenders, the Gibsons, the Guilds and the Marshalls; but we also find the Hahns, the Ian Andersons, the Grimes’, the Monty’s, the Satellites, the Dr. Zs (I’ve left out plenty of others’ names). And of course, when SD Mach 2 all began, there was that scrappy genius Roger Sadowsky already in fast mid-flight, building his his now-mighty empire. Finding, supporting, and mentoring talented and aspiring professionals was important to Walter, and resulted in discovering and giving feedback on — and sometimes even helping to shape — personalized “boutique” instruments and gear, and then applying his innovative mind to benefit from their use. Watch amplifier developer Dr. Z here for an insightful and informed discussion of Walter’s use of creative and unique amps and amplification schemes, and how he would “play the amp as an instrument.” His enthusiasm and creativity in wringing the best out of every noise-making contraption he came across — well, let me tell you, it was a sight to behold. There will be others along, I hope, who will speak more knowledgeably about Walter’s perhaps surprising (and not widely known) reputation within the guitar and gear community. But as far as I'm concerned, these pieces hold a special place in Walter’s collection, reflecting as they do his deep engagement with the gutsy and talented souls who help put more and better music into the world, and whom he so appreciated and valued. Over and Out for now...., D

(Becker/Fagen ©Zeon LLC 1992 / ©Freejunket Music 1992) Adam Rogers - Guitar Dean Parks - Guitar Fima Ephron - Bass Ben Perowsky - Drums John Beasley - Keyboards Dave Russell & Roger Nichols - Engineers Trouble on the left, trouble on the right Trouble in front of you The yellow man is still the mellow man You know what you gotta do No mistake my friend they seen your end She'll take it out of you Buddy, it's your skin, where do I come in To begin doubting you You got Dana with the vibe And Annie with the heavenly body Carrie with the furs and diamonds Now that's three sisters shaking At the same time Summertime is here, lust is everywhere This is your lucky day Dance that little dance, give yourself a chance Say what you wanna say Its a trip I swear when they find you there Asleep at the matinee I just wanna be in the balcony When they give the bride away Is it Dana with the vibe And Annie with the heavenly body Carrie with the furs and diamonds You got three sisters shaking At the same time Trouble on the left, trouble on the right Trouble in front of you A yellow man is still a mellow man You know what you gotta do You take Dana with the vibe And Annie with the heavenly body Carrie with the furs and diamonds You got three sisters shaking At the same time

June 10 2008: New York City WB and I walking along in the Upper East Side of manhattan, mid-afternoon, wondering if anyone was across town at Tower (the closest brick-and-mortar music store still open by that point) looking at CM in the racks, maybe picking one up...feeling good... ...approaching an intersection of 72nd and Madison -- a car pulls up to the light, windows rolled down, someone waving something from inside the car - we look over, it's a young couple waving their copy of CM, apparently just purchased an hour before. Big grins and thumbs up exchanged all around as the light changed.... what are the odds of that, honey? He was so proud of CM -- he was especially grateful for Larry, and especially especially grateful for "his" musicians, who "played their little hearts out" for him on this album, all of them so engaged and invested and, we've heard since, proud of their work on this little beauty. It was a happy day.... walterbecker.com/cm.html

1. Door Number Two 2. Downtown Canon 3. Bob is Not Your Uncle Anymore 4. Upside Looking Down 5. Paging Audrey 6. Circus Money 7 .Se;fish Gene 8. Do You Remember the Name 9. Somebody's Saturday Night 10. Darkling Down 11. God's Eye View 12. Three Picture Deal (13). Dark Horse Dub (Bonus, Euro Track) (14). Circus Money Hammerhed Remix (for Newsletter Subscribers) (15). Bob is not your Uncle Anymore - Demo (B-side for Euro Single) Songs by W. Becker and L. Klein except Circus Money By W. Becker Produced by Larry Klein Lyrics and credits here from Official Walter Becker

1997 He Wants You (Out) words & music Walter Becker (1997) © Zeon Music LLC 2018 Well we all ride together in this world Fall together where we stand And we all got one slim chance to be heard It's all written in the plan This is all I ask of you Tell me sweetness tell me true From that very first soul kiss You knew it would be like this We all ride together in this world Well didn't we just girl He reads you — he reads you loud and clear He wants you — he wants you out of here He needs you — you and what army dear He wants you — he wants you out of here Well we all need protection from the pain For protection we will pay And we all seek the shelter from the rain Here comes that rainy day It won't make it real again Not all the horses all the men It won't do you any good Not all the pills in Hollywood We all need protection now and then Here it is again He loves you —he loves your story dear He wants you — he wants you out of here He sees you — he sees you disappear He wants you — he wants you out of here Well we all ride together in this world Wait forever on the curb And we all ask for much more than we need And we get what we deserve He hears you — he's seeming not to hear He wants you — he wants you out of here He's got you — he's had you up to here He wants you — he wants you out of here He needs you — you and what army dear He wants you — he wants you out of here He reads you — he reads you loud and clear He wants you — he wants you out of here Another one of Becker's infamous "Love Songs"! Anyone woman at all familiar with his Whack work and demos would think long and hard before sweetly trilling "write me a love song, dahling!" -- knowing she was as likely to get one of these than an Almost Gothic or a Paging Audrey. That musical bouquet of his was always as likely to conceal a shiv than sweet-nothings. This tune was one of three demos Walter sent me on a DAT in late 1997  (ever-thoughtful, he bundled it with a portable "Walkman"-type DAT player. Sort of like Voyager. I was impressed). I asked him: "so these are rejects from Whack?" to which he replied nah,  just a few things he'd been working on lately. By this time he was  deep into writing for Two Against Nature with Fagen, so it took me a couple of beats to realize that after his Whack work, he and his Opcode had apparently just kept on trucking along.  He must have liked this one, must have been keeping it on his "potentially active" list, since he was still occasionally listening to it few years later...  ...as he was one afternoon in late '99 .... PS: His vocals on these three '97 demos were uncommonly lackluster, to put it kindly.  One of them, in fact -- a tune called The Love You Ax -- will remain forever sealed, falling into the rare category of the demo vocal  he would never allow out of the box. It's a nice tune though; perhaps one day 'll post an instrumental of its solo and outro, for a sense of its feel. I just have to guess first  if that would make more of you pissed or pleased.

Live now! https://www.julienslive.com/m/view-auctions/catalog/id/326

1. Down In The Bottom 2. Junkie Girl 3. Surf And/Or Die 4. Book of Liars 5. Lucky Henry 6. Hard Up Case 7. Cringemaker 8. Girlfriend 9. My Waterloo 10. This Moody Bastard 11. Hat Too Flat 12. Little Kawai 13. Medical Science (Japanese Bonus Track) Produced by Walter Becker & Donald Fagen All songs by Walter Becker Except Cringemaker by Walter Becker & Dean Parks Lyrics , credits at this page on Official Walter Becker

By Walter Becker & Rickie Lee Jones We will fly way up high Where the cold wind blows Or in the sun, laughing and having fun With the people that she knows And if the situation should keep us separated You know the world won't fall apart And you will free the beautiful bird That's caught inside your heart Can't you hear her? Oh she cries so loud Casts her wild note Over water and cloud   That's the way it's gonna be, little darlin'   We'll be riding on the horses, yeah   Way up in the sky, little darlin'   And if you fall I'll pick you up, pick you up You will grow, and until you go I'll be right there by your side And even then, whisper the wind And she will carry up your ride I hear all the people of the world In a little bird's lonely cry See them trying every way they know how To make their spirits fly Can't you see him? He's down on the ground He has a broken wing Looking all around   That's the way it's gonna be, little darlin' You'll be riding on the horses, yeah Way up in the sky, little darlin' And if you fall I'll pick you up, pick you up Don't worry 'bout a thing little girl Because I was young myself not so long ago And when I was young, when I was young And when I was young, oh I was a wild, wild one. vocals: Rickie Lee Jones string synthesizer: Rickie Lee Jones drums: John Robinson electric guitar: Buzz Feiten bass: Neil Stubenhaus electric guitar: Dean Parks keyboard: Greg Phillinganes percussion: Bob Zimmiti organ: William "Smitty" Smith piano: Michael Omartian Engineers: Greg Penny, Roger Nichols.

I'm putting this under street legal because it certainly was public ,sanctioned material that changed every couple of years . I am speaking of course of the storied Becker Bathroom Break ( or Becker Beer Break to some.) Lutz put up a fine, wide-ranging post over in "Everything Else" which included some opinions about a few of Walter's more frequent tunes , Walter tried a wide variety of them over the year,s, including tunes from Whack and even "Our Lawn". Thus the Becker Bathroom Break was born . The combo of a non-DF noise presenting something no one had ever heard before was just a bridge too far for many DanFans and so would commence a depressing exodus of concert-goers choking the aisles headed for the john or the bar. But I digress. Last night I thought of two songs in particular that I believe broke the pattern. One was so counterintuitive, so wrong for his voice, so unlikely to be a Becker tune, that it actually worked --although plenty of folks might disagree. I'm speaking of course about Mother F-ing Gaucho ! Count me among those who thought this was an absolutely inspired pick and delightful performance (with a fulsome assist by the ladies). Not that the tune suddenly revealed him to be an expert Pitch Perfect singer. No, it was still him...but like we've never quite seen -- or heard -- before. And it went over! Hard to find a good quality version of this, but here's one that, echo aside, captures I believe the gusto with which he approached the sad Tale Of Love Gone extravagantly wrong, It's from 2000. (another excellent take is at https://youtu.be/MPaB_MRTFwA) Honestly, now -- what do you think?

This 3-parter on "11 Tracks of Whack’s" Girlfriend has been in the works for a while.  But we've finally pulled together a few interesting and, we hope, illuminating bits from the voluminous Vault versions of this popular tune.  But it’s more than just a full-band rundown, which many of you have requested over the years.  Because the twists and turns and — some would say — surprising resolution for this cut are pretty good Exhibit-As for one of our WBM lief motifs: the persistent and oftentimes iterative process of songwriting and track production.  It also happens to illustrate that sometimes the right step forward may be a step back.  And zooming in to the personal, we’ll consider that Walter really seems to have dug in ... to get this tune emotionally, psychologically right; to discover and distill some core subjective truths which he felt compelled to express.  1) Full Band Rundown "I am a person! “  We’ve noted your requests for a (any) full band versions of GF that might exist, We know some of you have live versions from the SD ’93 tour, and several folks even mis-remembered it being in the Slim's ’94 set (it wasn't). Here is one of several rundowns* from “the Maui band” of Perowsky, Ephron, Rogers, Parks, and Beasley. It’s not necessarily the “best” rundown, nor even their last — but it does have W's audible singalong,** and is roughly representative of other rundowns we’ve heard.    *Rundowns: meaning, the tryouts and rehearsals and all the playing and tweaks and arrangements and part decisions and sound/tone choices etc that proceed moving on to a “take”.  A “take” track is when the band, having all those rundown adjustments and decisions under their belt, quiet down, take a breath, Dave Russell runs tape, and the tune is played— without vocals (which will be booth-recorded later) or overdubs. A selected “Take” track — many are rejected! — becomes the base upon which subsequent vocals and overdubs are laid.  ** Luckily for us archivists and Beckerphiles, Walter decided to sing along during most rundowns — not necessarily a choice that other artists automatically make. He decided to do this early on (and even noted as much in his preparatory project notes), thinking that the band would benefit  from hearing the melodies, lyrics, and — he emphasized this — the rhythmic swing and emotional feel of his vocals. Of course it also gave him a chance to try out and rehearse his vocals — seeing as he was, after all, a novice solo singer in those days.  Walter Becker - Girlfriend (Full Band Rundown) Dean Parks - Guitar || Adam Rogers - Guitar || John Beasley - Keys || Fima Ephron - Bass || Ben Perowsky - Drums || Walter Becker - Vox Dave Russell - Engineer Video Stem: Dan Belcher (thanks!). 2)  Trio Rundown "No?? OK…”   A stripped-down trio session. Surely Walter didn’t conceive of the track as a bass-less trio. More likely, rundowns like these were opportunistic experiments in “feel” —  which apparently Walter wasn’t hearing to his liking just yet. Walter Becker - Girlfriend (Trio) Dean Parks - Guitar || John Beasley - Keys || Ben Perowsky - Drums || Walter Becker - Vox Dave Russell - Engineer 3) Walter and Dean do a Strip-tease But in the end, the on-record Girlfriend used neither of these approaches, nor built upon any of the several other band rundowns of this tune. Question: How then did they execute the final track? Answer: Piece by piece   That’s right. In the end, Walter and Dean Parks built the song up from components they recorded themselves, one at a time, and the final 11TOW version added tweaks, overdubs, some re-done vocals, and a few effects to this LegoLand creation. The audio below contain excerpts of each component part. The visuals point to relevant parts of the DAT label containing the component audio, with some of Walter’s working lyric notebook pages appearing about halfway though.  Walter Becker - Girlfriend (In Pieces) Dean Parks - Guitar and machines || Walter Becker - Vox, keys, and machines Dave Russell - Engineer Hearty kudos to First Lieutenant Atticus Matticus, Director of Operations, Technology, Motivation, and All-Around Righteous Action — Matthew Kerns —  for splicing up the DAT contents and laying them together so beautifully in this AV— all without benefit of the reel-to-reel timestamps. Thanks Matt! So — Walter chose what was essentially a demo recreation, over some great-sounding band renditions.  Why? Why would the manifestly “skilled enough” co-creator of some of the most lush audio soundscapes of the 70s — also apparent in his pre-Whack production jobs —  elect to build so much of his solo debut on such a relatively stripped-down sonic base?  God knows it’s been asked often enough. The “Demo Aesthetic” (???)  We’ve mused about it here before — as in our Paging Audrey Demo post : " If the writer has written a successful demo for a particular song ... knows what must be included, and knows what must be cut … some writers — Walter among them — believe that they’ve acquired both a map to and guardian for the soul of their song, " Walter spoke many times in interviews about both the found and the lost of life with your song. You find your song when you decide that this demo, as you've crafted it, has the essentials you need to always recognize, if you are to remember its soul, and what of yours you gave it. Walter once described good demo like a fire pot. It will carry what’s alive and crucial in your song wherever you may need to go". Walter also said it’s all too easy to leave the firepot behind on the way to a track, to loose touch with the essence of the song, or what made the demo comfortable to sing with, or otherwise Just Not Sound And Feel As The Writer/Performer Wants It To anymore.  That sounds tautological, but it isn’t, really. Consider, first, that Walter’s demos are themselves the product of work and change and time and adjustment; he didn’t just smash the “SpaceGroove Bass N' Drum #51” module on a Casio and...bam-done. He often labored over a demo for days and weeks and sometimes months; tweaking the drum pattern and sounds; bouncing the baseline just so; all the while singing over every version — even before he had all the lyrics or even, sometimes, the verse melodies locked.  It’s about support He was doing that because writing a song through to demo form isn’t just transcription — at least not for most musicians, and certainly not for Walter. Writing is discovering —and in crafting his demos Walter was, among other things, building the best, most natural support structure for presenting and singing a song with ease and flow; with pocket and bounce* *For every professional singer I know — and as Walter said in more that one interview and notebook page —  the flow of their best performance (or, sometimes, any performance at all) is completely reliant on a just-right (to them) feel of the backing track or band. People, I’ve got pages of rough drafts on this idea;  testimonies from performers; first-hand observations of recording and touring; tales  of discarded tracks and unreleased songs…  but all that's for another time, perhaps. So thinking of 11TOW features in terms of a “demo aesthetic” really isn’t a complete or accurate categorization. Rather, Walter simply invested heavily in finding that just-right feel. Sometimes that came from a band of musicians — his dispositional preference,  stalwart as he was for Live vs ProFools music. He certainly brought everything he had to a band, to different players, in Maui and in LA. And often enough, those great bands delivered the track that Walter wanted to hear — and bones he felt comfortable in.  But … sometimes not. So in the end, we’re compelled to acknowledge that Walter Becker simply chose; he went with what felt and sounded right — to him.  And he did so utterly unbothered by the prospect of listeners’ somehow expecting “a Steely Dan album without the singer from Steely Dan”. ( There’s already some really good group discussion of this and related notions on the site here and here).  Not to mention multiple interviews in which he expresses his explicit intent for a  “very stripped down sound, with strong emphasis on melody and bass line, and not too much in the way of chording. The idea was to get a kind of spacious feel, where the harmonies were more defined by melodies and roots than spelled out with static vertical comping type chords.”  and an "emphasis on the songs and the groove.” and a  " minimalist approach that would enable me to focus on the overall thrust of the song, rather that bogging down in harmonic complexities and ornaments that were perhaps irrelevant ...” He had a vision for his songs and his sound.  He was drawn to a new, different musical vocabulary.  And he had nothing to prove.  Perhaps his most direct and potent mission statement appears in a very early note for 11TOW — written in large letters in the center of the page:    All that really matters: Songs Structure Soul An Interior World (and sound). Finally, consider for a moment something obvious about bands: they ring; there’s room sound; there’s ambient aural space; there’s natural decay of notes and sounds. Live music played on band instruments makes music and sounds we mentally place somewhere “out here”.  So... what?  So … bear with me a bit:  Walter’s notebooks and text files show that he really worked and re-worked the lyrics to this one; he dug in to get them emotionally, psychologically right.  And just as writing is discovering in the demo realm, so it is especially for lyrics and prose. Those pages and files weren’t just refinements of words and lines — although there was plenty of that too — they contained a lot of what is considered “emotive free-writing”; uncensored phrases or feelings or images that were never headed for “lyric”-land, but which helped him discover, explore, and distill some core subjective truths which he felt compelled to express.  To my ears at least, it lands as an intensely internal dialog. Consider the central phrase “Girlfriend — if it can’t be you…”. It sounds like a question sent out to another —  but in context, it’s more a rhetorical, hopeful-but-hopeless, almost anguished phrase put in an oddly affecting form (is it a "counterfactual conditional interrogative”...or something? eek! grammar nerds, help me out here). Somehow, it feels more characteristic of how we express our hopes and needs —  and fears — to ourselves. And of course the rest of the lyrics are recognizable as similarly interior ruminations. All of this is just one listener’s impression.  But if it holds any water, then perhaps Walter’s opting for flatter, more controlled, less ringing sounds for his track — especially in the verses and interstitials —  comported well with his lyrical sentiments and expressive intent. Compared to a live kit, the tom and kicks here thud; the beats flatly thump; the guitar lines are small, picked, and palm-muted ... with that eerie opening twilight-zone clock tick-tocking the seconds away. It all sounds so inside to me. The interior of one’s own brain is a relatively small space, after all; there’s not a lot of ringing and sound decay and big room ambiance in there. Thoughts (and plaintive aches) seem to thwack against close-in walls with flat, echoless color. So — maybe his sonic choices are substantively of a piece with his adoption of an internal narrative voice.  I’d hoped to also consider the momentary exceptions to this sonic “interiority”: when an instrument suddenly breaks through with an expansive, ringing gliss or honk. And of course how the chorus  opens up — as any good Becker chorus is want to do.  But... a posting deadline looms.  In fact, that deadline is looming bigly, telling me to pack it up here. Make like a tree and split. So.  Looking forward to your discussion and comments…

This moody bastard remembers… He remembers that in the depths of the pandemic/lockdown/toilet paper shortage of 2020, we did nothing to mark the 25th anniversary of Walter’s lone solo show at Slim’s in San Francisco on April 7, 1995. Unfortunately, Slim’s closed its doors on March 18 of 2020, another victim of the aforementioned plague and the plethora of problems it produced. We cowered and quaked in our respective hidey-holes, and while it's not quite in the long ago and far away, it does appear that with the help of some hand sanitizer, billions of masks, and the height of medical efficacy by the Brothers Johnson, Pfizer, Moderna, etcetera etcetera, we’re able to at least glimpse the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. We might have missed the 25th anniversary of THE event, but we can get together (virtually) and belatedly celebrate the 26th. We’ve already given you Three Sisters Shakin’ and Cinder Annie, two tracks from that night that weren’t on 11 Tracks of Whack in its final form. So we thought we’d give you a more familiar track, specifically requested on the walterbeckermedia.com forum, in This Moody Bastard. If you’re thinking to yourself, “man, I wish it had been Down in the Bottom, or Girl Next Door to the Methadone Clinic, or Tennessee Jazz Odyssey, or, or…” well all I can say is get on the forum and join in the conversation. Someone who did is getting to hear the track they most wanted. That could be you. This Moody Bastard has been oft interpreted, with answers posed for questions like “Who is the moody bastard? Who is the little friend? When were the salad days? Where were the ivy walls?” I’ve believed at least three completely different internal explanations for this song, which might be why I’ve always found it so damn compelling. Most of the times I’ve listened to it, I was the moody bastard who once in a blue moon really needs a friend. But sometimes, I was reaching out to one of the many moody bastards in my own life, reminding them that I was some kinda friend now and again, and that I was still there if they needed me once in a great while. Honestly, there’s a lot of mileage in this one, and I’m glad we all get to hear Walter sing it live. I’m struck again by how close this version is vocally to the recording on 11ToW...for whatever technical limitations Walter may have had as a vocalist, his phrasing, timing, and tone are consistent and consistently great. So give this a listen. Somewhere a couple of minutes in, I hope you’ll be smiling. In fact…

And then, in the Spring of 2020, did they find themselves trapped in their own domiciles. Hunkered in their houses, huddled in their hovels, hiding in their homes. They had hoarded their toilet paper, learned to pronounce new words like COVID and Wuhan, they could now properly spell quarantine on the first try. For the first time in a very long time, they thought having a case of Corona was a bad thing, even with those little lime wedges. They had rewatched all the seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and found themselves struggling with a new sexual awakening, brought on by repeated viewings of one Commander William Riker. They begged for some good news, some sweet release; from their mayors, their governors, their senators, their President. Each request was met with a negative, or a positive that they knew should have been a negative. You know how that goes. The immediate future looked bleak. They turned to the place they had always turned for comfort, to the smooth styling and rich wit of Uncle Walter. And there they found what they sought. A warm blanket on a cold night. A cold beer on a hot day. A homecooked meal and a handjob goodbye. There they found peace and there they found joy and there they found hope. Except of course they didn't. Take a look up at the top of the page. This is the Walter Becker Media Site. You know, the place for the guy who "sang about the good bad and ugly, and all and everything in between." So we're giving you a song about the Apocolypse, or at least the post-apocalypse. A hellscape...no, that's too harsh. A heckscape full of toxic suburbs and golden ghettos, petrol slicks and triple killzones. And wandering westward through the wasteland we find a trio of academics with their spouses... Boom Baby Walter Becker and Larry Klein © 2005/2019 Zeon Music LLC,  Strange Cargo/Downtown Music Three half-wise professors co-ed wives in tow Putting up the sled now to the flatlands we must go Searching for salvation following that star Cross the purple plains of fair Amerika Down in that golden ghetto Cal-i-forn-i-ay These are the toxic suburbs that once was San Jose Must be almost there  now, can’t be very far Which way to the lost Messiah our reluctant avatar? Boom baby boom baby where are you? The whole round world’s turned black and blue Wake up tomorrow what you gonna do Laugh baby cry baby boom baby where are you? (Boom baby where are you? The whole round world’s gone black and blue Wake up tomorrow what you gonna do Laugh baby cry baby where are you?) Ah say can you see from miles away Wading through the petrol slick at Half-Moon Bay Ah so sorry that you can’t come out And see for yourself what this brave new world is all about Fanned out in concentric circles in dustbowl brown The triple killzone running round the old agro town Froze in fatal shades of biochemical surprise Globally warmed-over for your unseeing eyes Boom baby boom baby where are you? The whole round world gone black and blue Wake up tomorrow what you gonna do Laugh baby cry baby boom baby where are you? (Boom baby where are you The whole round world gone black and blue Wake up tomorrow what you gonna do Laugh baby  boom baby where are you?) Wandr’in through the files down where the ugly truth was hid Before that info shitstorm fractalized the entire grid Sifting through the ruins, what’s it gonna be? Intellectual deprivation,  virtual unreality? Holed up in the numbers the aborted d-base runs Between the empty zeros and the lonely ones Conspicuously absent, set off in silhouette He must be here somewhere we just haven’t got to yet Boom baby boom baby where are you The whole round world gone black and blue Wake up tomorrow what you gonna do Laugh baby cry boom baby where are you? (Boom baby  where are you The whole round world gone black and blue Wake up tomorrow what you gonna do Laugh baby boom baby where are you?)