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We’ve pointed before to Walter’s earliest recorded cassettes from 'the modern era' (circa 1989-90).  He used these “little instrumental pieces” to teach himself his new MIDI set up, and mentions them in the 11TOW EPK clip below: [you can see the full EPK here].    Mystery Whack - Walter Becker They’re what you’d expect from someone just learning keystrokes and sound banks: skeletal; monostructured; experimental. Here's a short clip from one of them  [© Zeon Music: 1990/2019] Since he soon moved on to writing “tunes that had some lyrics to them” (the EPK again), nothing more became of these early exercises. Or so we thought….  A few years ago, we happened upon an unlabeled cassette boxed with an entirely different project. In the middle of the project's audio, we suddenly heard 40 minutes of live guitar, bass, and keys running down one of those earliest MIDI riffs.  We’re sharing a bit of that live segment here: [Pro Tip: the vamping only starts near the end, c. 4:20] [© Zeon Music: 1990/2019] We have to call this Mystery Whack for now, because despite months of digging, deducting, and poking the memory banks of sundry living musicians, we've yet to obtain a definitive account of the who, when, and where. I think one attribution is clear, however: the hyperactive maniac leaping about on the drum machine track? That’s gotta be our boy. Hopefully, our favored theories will get sorted out if and when “new shit comes to light”. Stay tuned ...

Photo: Joni Sarkki Just got the hideous news. Don't have details. Don't need any Just ... fuck —————- Maybe it’s just me. But when a human vanishes, trying to acknowledge it with mere words feels like the ultimate fools errand. Still, I know it counts for something to express our most sincere compassion for all those who loved the vanished one. And we do. But mostly, we acknowledge to them that such unfathomable loss resides in a wordless, silent void — and that we will just sit with them there for a while —————————————————————— Jim had a stunningly prolific musical life. In fact he was perhaps the prototypic ‘SD collaborator Iceberg’. The education, experience, achievement, and artistry of most everyone who played with Donald and Walter rendered the label of “sideman” a hilarious, inside joke. Many saw but tiny tips of the mighty, massive talents mooring those few hours of magic on stereo or stage And shameless fan-girl that I truly am of all SD collaborators, I will still share my humble opinion that when Jim joined the band, the final tumbler clicked into place; the secrets to presenting SDs music in its fullest flower were finally click-click-click-unlocked. And fan-girl nerd that I am, I could tediously dronesplain for hours on the particular whys, the picayune wherefores, whereby I imagine that locked was picked — how a particular individual contribution synergized into a band’s Group Mind. I could also share how Walter understood, with the deepest gratitude, the centrality of Jim’s sensitive contribution to the heart and intention of Circus Money, and how only Jim could have inspired a loony idea (unrealized, alas, because of lack of time) that Walter and Larry had for those last few hours in Avatar; an idea inspired solely by their faith in Jim’s ability to leap tall, ‘impossible’ musical challenges in a single, fluent, beautiful bound. All perhaps for another time. For now … just a silent void in which unfathomable loss resides

Have been listening deeply to Dr. B today, especially to his many allusions to the tattered scrim between this life and... other, nether dimensions. I so miss his presence in this one and send out love and peaceful, harmonious wishes to his family and all the fandom. Remembering, oleander

Hard Up Case - Live at Slim's April 7, 1995 (Lossless Audio file available on the Downloads (https://www.walterbeckermedia.com/downloads)page.) Walter Becker (Guitar/Vocals) Adam Rogers (Guitar) Fima Ephron (Bass) Ben Perowsky (Drums) John Beasley (Keyboards) Bob Sheppard (Sax) You told me once I was your pride and joy I guess those days are dead and gone You must have took me for some golden boy You didn't know what you were taking on It was a hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case Now all the angles have been played in three's There isn't much that I can say I know you gave your little heart to me I guess I threw the thing away It was a hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case Sometimes the truth is kind of hard to find But don't you worry I can read your mind And you don't have to tell me to my face You put some other joker in my place They dealt us houses full with the queens and kings And now they're calling out our bluff ' Cause you and me girl we had everything But it just wasn't quite enough Now that's a hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case You say the truth is gonna set me free Like you might throw a dog a bone I know you're thinking that the joke's on me Just take a look at what you 're dragging home -- Another hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case It was a hard up case Just another hard up case Are the games we play stacked against us? Is it inevitable not only that we’re gonna play, but that we’re gonna lose, no matter what we’re holding when it's time to show? The song we're sharing today in honor of Walter's birthday is the live version of Hard Up Case, from the Slim's show in San Francisco on April 7, 1995. For those of you playing the home game, this is the fifth track from that night that we’ve shared with you, the others being This Moody Bastard, The Girl Next Door to the Methadone Clinic, Cinder Annie, and Three Sisters. I think this is a good opportunity to look at one of the metaphors/themes that pops up in both solo WB and SD, that is gaming or gambling, structured so that we glimpse behind the curtain at life's casino to catch a glimpse of just exactly why the house always seems to win. For the sake of comparison, I want to look at this track, "Hard Up Case," and the classic Steely Dan initial single,"Do It Again," taking careful note of the situation(s) in which everything comes down to a pull of the handle, a hand of poker, or a roll of the dice. In "Do It Again," Becker and co-conspirator Donald Fagen paint a Sisyphean picture of an inexorable repetition and inexorable repetition and inexorable repetition. The song's protagonist, trapped in a perpetual motion machine of his own carefully honed vices, finds himself back in Vegas, a handle in his hand, ensnared in a relentless cycle of chance and consequence. The metaphor of the gambler, black cards carefully hidden when able, paints a portrait of a man in a casino, but also of a more universal figure, ensnared in life's big gamble. The song’s fatalistic chorus, “You go back, Jack, do it again,” might in this context be viewed as a sardonic nod to our collective propensity for repeating our mistakes, with the resigned wisdom of someone who knows the game is rigged, yet plays anyway. In "Hard Up Case," Becker transitions from the gambling dens of "Do It Again" to the poker table of romantic entanglements. The metaphor shifts from the broader strokes of fate to the intimate dance of love and deceit. The narrator alludes to a relationship gone bust, using phrases like “played in threes” and “calling out our bluff.” It’s a more mature, nuanced view of the gambling metaphor, suggesting that in the game of love, the stakes are personal and the losses more poignant. Unlike the resigned gambler in "Do It Again," the narrator in "Hard Up Case" seems to possess a more seasoned understanding of the emotional games people play, yet finds himself ensnared in them all the same. We have, or had, a full house, "Kings and Queens," but they’re calling us on it anyway. We thought we had everything we needed, but damned if it" wasn’t quite enough." The common thread in both songs is the inescapability of cyclical patterns, whether in the throw of the dice or the turn of a lover’s card. With his usual acerbic wit, Becker seems to suggest that we are all players in a game, or maybe a series of games, where the rules are opaque and the outcomes are predetermined. In "Do It Again," the cycle is overt and existential, while in "Hard Up Case," it is subtle and relational. But in both, there’s a sense of deja vu, a feeling that no matter how savvy we think we are, we’re just participants in a grander scheme we scarcely understand, clinging on while the wheel spins. In his solo work and with Steely Dan, Walter crafts narratives that resonate with anyone who’s ever felt like they’re spinning the wheel of fortune, seeing an array of numbers and colors, only to land on the same space repeatedly. His use of gambling metaphors in "Do It Again" and "Hard Up Case" is not just a clever lyrical device but a mirror reflecting our own follies and foibles in the game of life and love. With a mix of erudition, eloquence, and a biting sense of humor, he points out just how bad it feels when we don’t get dealt the card we need on the flop, the turn, or the river, when we pull the handle but the little dials never seem to land on "three bars, three cherries, three lemons, or three pigs." One can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all, recognizing something perhaps painfully familiar in the haplessness of our narrative protagonists. In the end, we are left with the wry acknowledgment that in the casino of life, there’s “No original sin…the house always wins.” -Matt

Girl Next Door to the Methadone Clinic

© 2010, 2020 Walter Carl Becker. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Walter Becker (2010)  Whatever "we" were now that we'd been living here and eating the food in the house, here where the fungus ran itself onto and right through the skin of the cheese for example —  it caved in the sides of blocks of the common sorts like edam and cheddar — whoever and whatever we were now, living here in the house, we were confused and dislocated and we were most definitely scared. Delia lay sleeping heavily in the bed next to me, but I was three quarters awake and yet halfway stoned to the gills, and you could easily hear the unknown “insurgents" out there on the streets of the neighborhood, thinking their angry thoughts of extravagant reprisals, of justice-plus-10, dreaming their unknown dreams and making their plans.  They played their weird jam-in-the-park style of slow groove music all night, compositionally loose and telepathically tight, all of it closely based on something they knew from down through the generations but you, the interloper, had never heard at all before now.   ...and yet, however scared, however certain of being caught far off base in a supposedly familiar yet utterly strange homeland inflamed and possessed by the certain knowledge of crimes and cruelties for which we were certainly not "been there done that" responsible, which had happened while were we gone, while we were out, we were now just as certainly going to be held to blame simply because we had come back and dared pretend that the place was still or ever ours —  even here in this worst case scenario. For in the end, here as elsewhere, there would be a final reckoning devoid of any attempts to settle with clarity what had happened and who was responsible, who could have done what more or less they actually did, to make it possible for things to have turned out a little less bloody and fucked —  because it was always ever going to be this way and no other, and no effort or abstention on our parts were going to change any of that.  The horrible progression and the ghastly climax was all written long ago, with no help or collaboration on our parts, except that we too were written into the as-yet-unforeseeable final reckoning, while writing ourselves into an inconceivable larger sense of the thing.  We thought: was this not the case where any and all places we go back from or forward to  —  was not the whole world now a killing field, and were we not at least guilty of having known the kinds of things that were being done while we slept and sea-gazed and ate our tainted foods, wondering idly about what walls had been collapsed, about what deep holes in the landscape filled with fetid rainwater of many seasons, trying to conceive of what had happened here and why, in the time that we were gone… and what it would cost to set such things right?

Yes yes we know and you know; nostalgia ain't what it used to be. Still, something must be in the wind tonight, blowing our way, as it did, two mighty jolts of historical Hz, crackling. I. A Gig Anniversary Hard Core Beckerphiles know the date: April 7, 1995. That makes it 24 years today since  Adam Rogers (Guitar) Fima Ephron (Bass) Ben Perowsky (Drums) John Beasley (Keyboards) and
 Bob Sheppard (Sax) joined Walter for the first and last live gig of his "new music" from the 11 Tracks of Whack era at Slim's, in San Francisco. For roughly 23 of those years, it was presumed that no record of the evening existed. But Lo, in amongst the stacks of DATs and cassettes we  found a great-sounding recording by Dave Russell, engineer extraordinaire -- still in good condition and sounding pretty great. So to mark the date, we've dropped a cut from that rainy San Francisco evening: Cinder Annie, which was the last song of the evening before his encore. So to our resident show-goers, count off please; What’s the delta between what you hear on this tape and how you remember it in vivo? II. A Classic Web Thread By coinkidink or by quantum entanglement, one of us (D-Mod) also found herself running smack up against the classic Hall Of Fame thread -- Countdown to Infamy -- on the steelydan.com archive site.  I must have read or sampled this thread dozens of times since its publication and knew well why it was a classic. Or so I thought. People I swear that reading through the whole thing -front to back --
 opening every entry, following every link -- produced more chuckles,
 spit-takes, and belly laughs than I remember having in years, taken together. You think you remember why it was so funny, and so great --- but you don't.
 If you give yourself 30 minutes with this thing, you'll see all you've forgotten.
 Many of us bemoan that Becker didn't write, He was so talented. 
Well, he did write, and this short story is among his finest work.  Today I really needed lifting up, I really needed something to lighten something that was pinning me down...and I found it. That's why I'm pestering you all with this personal review; maybe I'm not the only one who needed this kind of lift tonight. Did anyone revisit the archive site ? Did anyone find something they had forgotten there?

© 1992 Zeon Music Vocal: Walter Becker Drums: John Keane Bass: Neil Stubenhaus Guitar: Dean Parks Keyboards: John Beasley Saxophone: Bob Sheppard Engineer: Roger Nichols Recorded at Signet Studios, Los Angeles, 1992 In case you're wondering it's alive and well That little habit that you left with me Here in the suburbs where it's hard to tell If I got the bear or if the bear got me How did you know that it would take me down Down to the bottom of the wine dark sea Where you were waiting there to bring me 'round Where you knew all the dopest cuts to be Drowned at the bottom of your mystery Down in the bottom of the wine dark sea Saw your old lady in the park today The legendary smile is wearing thin Behind that guessing game you make her play Now that she knows that she could never win I guess you're never gonna take her down Down to the bottom of your little black heart Lay with her naked on the cold hard ground To watch the sunrise in the dopest part Down in the bottom where your lifeline shows Down in the bottom where nobody goes I like the feathers and I love the hat I like that little gypsy tune you're humming I guess I'm happy now we've had this chat Oh yeah I'm really glad I saw you coming There in the corner of the eastern sky The tortured angel of your rising sign Darkens the evening with his one good eye An evil omen of the dopest kind Down in the bottom where your demons fly Down in the bottom of the eastern sky Down in the bottom where your lifeline shows Down in the bottom where nobody goes Drowned at the bottom of your mystery Down in the bottom of the wine dark sea

Like everyone else, working studio musicians like to take a break and blow off steam now and again during a long session of serious focused work, as several clips on this site testify: e.g., Prison Story, “Hold it, Hold it," among others. And it’s a fact that for the best musicians, especially if they know each other well, a “break” or “blowing off steam” will not be coffee and kvetching in the lounge, but just more music — only something fun, unrehearsed, a chance to stretch out a little after the hours if not days of focused playing. Here’s one that the Whack band(s) broke into more than once across the months of recording. This particular clip comes from the Signet sessions (“Do you hear the bass, Rick?”). It should surprise no one that it’s a 12-bar blues. We’re calling it Black Dog — for reasons that will become obvious— and we’re crediting it to that very prolific fellow “Trad”; there was a song Black Dog Blues in the ‘20s but — other than that they’re both blues — it bears no resemblance musically or lyrically to the Becker Band confection here. All sorts of clever web searches and a few inquiries haven't turned up the song in this clip either. But there’s nothing like wide distribution to shake out some 411, so perhaps more will be forthcoming. We suspect it's simply made up of the constituent parts common to virtually all spontaneous, improvised blues: a well-known structure and set of changes; lyric segments pulled from one or more blues idioms scrambled with the singer’s own improvisations; resulting in refreshed musicians ready to return to the wash rinse and repeat of their professional efforts. There are several other recordings of this “song”, when the band pulled it out almost like a familiar palate-cleanser, a bit of ginger between songs and takes. Some of these are longer, with more verses of W’s singing and improv lyrics, and more kick-ass solos from Parks. If we find them again (don’t ask) we’ll add them here. And finally, although we’re calling this Black Dog, you’re about to hear why we should probably call it All Bow Down Before Dean "Black Dog” Parks. Movie: Matt Kerns. Special appearance by Lucy. Black Dog (Traditional © 1992/2020) Black Dog Black Dog is barkin' all night long Black Dog Black Dog is barkin all night long Black Dog baby, barkin’ all night long Black snake Black snake is in my room Black snake Black snake is in my room Don't wanna tell anybody but Black snake is in my room Black Dog Black Dog is barkin' all night long Black Dog Black Dog is barkin' all night long Don't wanna tell anybody but Black Dog is barkin' all night long ———— Vocal: Walter Becker Drums: Rick Marotta Bass: Neil Stubenhaus Guitar: Dean Parks Keyboards: John Beasley Snake Rattle: ?

Don’t Let Us Go Down   Walter Becker  © 1991/2018 Zeon LLC  And when I talk to you girl Whatever am I gonna say I already I told myself I’d Never let it be this way The late rays of the sun All but gone and settling slow The evening’s last gasp Drips  down to the courtyard far below The flagstones flicker fade to grey Don’t let us girl go down that way Ah Mrs. Johnson swore If it was the last thing she ever did The deadbeat on the 2nd floor Would never get her precious angel  Where is that splendid vow today Don’t let our deal go down that way Hey there momma momma See what your beatnik boy has done Righteous  stack of empty pages A pocket full of crumpled ones And all they’d ever hope to say Don’t let us girl go down this way Too many nights too many days For us to just go down this way  Imagination has it’s say Taking you off where it will Thought you’d brush that buzz away Like  a pidgin off the windowsill Embrace the first blow of the day So easy now to go that way Every little fool cracks wise Wants to know what life is this Comes on like a day In June and Winds up like a week in Jersey Settled that we’ve  gone astray Were never meant to go this way Hey there mommy mommy mommy Look what your golden girl has done Shoebox full of empty vessels Pocket full of brand new ones I’m standing here and still I say Don’t let us girl go down that way Got miles to go and hell to payI t hurts like mad and yet I say We’ll curse ourselves and rue the day We let our thing go down this way

When we posted Golden City a few toll booths back, I wrote : An early recording also includes a strange and wonderful duet; if we can find a good edit we’ll post it here. In honor of Sayan Becker’s recent birthday — a special day for Walter’s pride and joy, whom he adored “to the next galaxy” — here’s a snippet of that duet performed many many years ago (completely uncorrected for the harsh sound levels). Sa could often be found on dad’s lap as he fiddled with his little midi set-up. She was a really musical tyke — still is; musical that his, no longer a tyke but now an amazing young woman — and in this brief excerpt you may be able to hear a few early indicators of that talent. (Skip my observations please if you simply want to enjoy the sweetness, unadulterated). First, young as she was — oh gosh, she must have been no older than 3 or so — she had the good instinct to blow over the segments when her dad wasn’t singing. In other words, she took solos … and knew where the blowing should go. The full duet also evinces a narrator’s soul; she told stories about her life, her family, the fun to be had…and issued invites to her listeners to come along for the ride (or for the cookies). I’ve not posted a longer segment because some of you may be coping with diabetes, and I doubt your pancreas could handle such a dumptruckload of sweet. But one of the first things that struck me when I heard her duets was that she had a natural way with syncopation. You guys can hear that, right? Indeed, throughout this full track, she actually approaches rapping at times. Was that from listening to her similarly rhythmic dad…? Or was it already in her genes? Probably the latter; she also became a very talented dancer while still quite young, and damn sure she didn’t get that from observing Daddy Longlegs B. Her intervals are pretty interesting, too. While I don’t know many itty-bitties, I’m quite sure I’ve never heard any tiny humanoid jump and scat like Sa does here, and elsewhere in her early recorded oeuvre. So please to enjoy just a little bit of Sayan Becker and her dad making some sweet music together, as they always did...and still do…and always will. Happy birthday, SaGirl Auntie D

By Walter Becker & Larry Klein Now and then a person needs to hear a pretty story Even when her heart’s been broken for good You know the kind I mean Something sad and sweet A fairy tale of longing and belonging One that goes down like bourbon Once upon a moonless night a hungry heart is waiting There among the shadows someone appears However did you know To be pale and dark Strange and quiet angel of the evening How’d you know I’d be waiting On some distant star Nobody cares much who we are Love is for strangers Love is for strangers Yes its true, I know my dear You must have come from somewhere You grew up in a house then went on your way You traveled far in a broken line Lived lives and loves too numerous for telling Here you are I believe you All your words are lies Truth is the fire in your eyes Love is for strangers Love is for strangers This is all for you my dear I give it to you gladly Yours to have for now, for many a while Let us not pretend we know what we know And if we can’t say why or where we’re going All the same We are leaving When all is said and done Even the true of heart will run Love is for strangers Love is for strangers Now and then a woman wants to tell a pretty story Even if she’s sure how the story ends