Any album of the same vintage of Walter Becker’s 11 Tracks of Whack, like a fine wine, can ferment gracefully or go sour.
First, a little background on the album, released on September 27, 1994. After Steely Dan went dark in 1981, Becker spent the 1980s moving to Hawaii and doing some production work, most notably for China Crisis, Michael Franks and Rickie Lee Jones. Other than that, not much is known of the extent of his activities. Somewhere around 1992, he and his old partner Donald Fagen started working together again and when Fagen decided to record his long-awaited follow up to The Nightfly, he chose Walter Becker to produce it, provide some guitar work, and even co-write one tune (“Snowbound”).
The resulting Kamakiriad (1993) didn’t garner much critical acclaim, but it was the first step toward a full bore Steely Dan reunion that culminated with Two Against Nature seven years later. Right after Kamakiriad, though, Becker was ready to record his own album and asked Fagen to return the favor and produce it.
That Walter Becker would make a solo record seemed to be a odd proposition at that time, since he never really sang and it was assumed that Fagen was the major songwriting talent of the two. After all, The Nightfly was every bit as good as almost any Steely Dan album and Becker was nowhere to be found on it.
With 11 Tracks of Whack, Walter Becker showed that he could carry a tune, even if Donald Fagen had the better pipes for Steely Dan. Becker dispelled every other notion about him being the junior partner in the band. On the contrary, he is responsible for much of the smartass drollery behind some of Steely Dan’s clever lyrics — and while the two share a love for jazz, it’s Becker’s blues and rock personalities that balance out Fagen’s penchant for classic soul.
These and many other inspirations come together in a delightfully peculiar album. Not peculiar in the unlistenable sense, mind you, but just strange enough to set it apart from mainstream rock and just sophisticated enough to set it apart from alt-rock. I mean, how many rock records have things like medieval incantations at the end of one song and a Eric Dolphy-esque bass clarinet solo right in the middle of another one? Not thematic in the least, 11 Tracks of Whack finds Walter Becker covering a lot of bases. The lyrics are as cryptic as what you’d expect from his prior work, but not so obscure that the astute listener can’t pick up the gist of the story.
“Down in the Bottom” is a great introduction tune, with a insistent, mid-tempo beat and Becker’s well worn warble introduced to most of the world for the first time. The Neil Young-soundalike “Junkie Girl” is a sparse, harrowing folk-rock ode to a strung out hooker. “Surf And/Go Die,” a sly requiem to a friend who perished in a hang glider accident, is underpinned by a energetic beat and a funky bass. With Becker reciting the vocals as much as he’s singing them David Byrne style, it has all the earmarks for a classic Talking Heads tune.
“Book of Liars” is a softer, jazzier number that sounds perhaps most Steely Dan-like, showcasing a Becker’s rarely seen ballad side. Perhaps it’s no surprise that a live rendition of this cut found it’s way on Steely Dan’s Alive In America the following year. “Lucky Henry” is a rollicking rocker in the verses, contrasted with a jazzier bridge. Dean Parks and Adam Rogers trade guitar solos, stealing from the playbook of Steely Dan’s first two or three albums.
Broken relationships are looked at with measured humor as in the bottom heavy faux-calypso of the self-mocking “Hard Up Case,” followed by the slick Nashville sound of “Cringemaker” and the Hall & Oates plastic-soul of “Girlfriend.” In the first two tracks, Becker’s distinctive bluesy noodling can be heard in the instrumental breaks; nothing fancy, but it fits the mood.
Unfortunately, 11 Tracks of Whack begins to run out of gas toward the end. “My Waterloo” is reggae-lite that foreshadows much of Becker’s subsequent Circus Money, as are “This Moody Bastard” and the aimless “Hat Too Flat.” The album redeems itself right at the end with a charming, Hawaiian-flavor ditty called “Little Kawai.”
As for the aging process, well, all that electronic percussion is a bit dated (often sounding more like 1989 than 1994), the synths are cheesy-sounding on some songs and the recording comes across awfully compressed. That seemed to be characteristic of that era for Walter Becker and Donald Fagen as Kamikiriad suffered some from similar flaws.
More often than not, Walter Becker’s risk-taking shone through all that. It’s exactly Becker’s gambling and carefree attitude, rarely seen on most Steely Dan records, that ultimately makes 11 Tracks of Whack such a neglected minor treasure today.
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Nice article on a forgotten album. Actually Fagen and Becker reunited earlier than 1992, having both played on Rosie Vela’s Zazu LP from 1986
I just discovered this review today. So call me way late to the party. 🙂
First, RIP Walter Becker, he was the best! I definitely wish we heard his voice with the Dan sometime before Slang of Ages. I get that he’s not “technically great”, but I actually rather like his sound quite a bit! Almost “southern rock minus the southern”. It would’ve been nice to hear it more.
Second, I always interpreted the creative relationship between Becker and Fagen as Fagen being the bigger half of the music, and Becker being the bigger half of the lyrics, but that it was all mostly collaborative, and relatively close to center throughout, rather than an “I do my thing, you do yours” situation. Circus Money, for as reggae heavy as it is, sounds much more like a Dan album than this one does. I suspect that it wasn’t that Walter was unable to capture the Dan sound here (which we only hear very small whispers of, in my opinion), but rather that he was probably making a deliberate creative decision not to, but to attempt to do something markedly different.
I both deeply admire that decision and also somewhat disagree with it because it kinda feeds into the idea that Walter was more along for the ride of the Donald-driven Dan show, when as I said, and as I think Circus Money shows, Walter was much more musically involved with the Dan sound than this album here implies.
3) I love this album! And I agree with 90+% of what you say about it. Here are my disagreements:
a) Hat Too Flat is actually one of my favorite tracks on this album, probably second only to Surf and/or Die. I’m actually listening to it on a repeat-one loop as I’m writing this. It’s weird, dark, goofy, and fun. C’mon, “my English is more better”? That’s good stuff! And the repeat of it towards the 3/4, 5/6 mark of the track is actually one of the stronger blips of Walter’s vocal performance on the whole album. And I love the music in the chorus too with the almost bad notes on the guitars getting to jingle-ring out, with the nice synth layers. Love it!
Also, it’s a great example of how two things can sound virtually nothing alike, and yet still very strongly remind you of one another. The opening of the track reminds me of some of the weirder moments from the “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” album by, of course, Genesis. And as we get into the song, we stick with Steve Hackett, who I also love, and some of the goofier stuff he did, like “Ballad of the Decomposing Man”.
In total, no, I don’t think of the song as pointless or aimless at all.
b) This is less of a disagreement per se, and more of a sense of a key aspect in the lyrics to Surf and/or Die being missed. Here’s this horribly tragic and traumatic event that is supposedly based on a true story, and to someone that Walter knew and loved, and rather than it being this deeply moving, rousing, stirring emotional moment, it’s treated with this studied detached, emotionless coolness that manifests itself in the cold practicality of logistics in the first verse (finding the car keys, call Grandma, calm down Suzie, etc), and then sheer abstract thought in the second verse.
It’s delivered in a nearly emotionless, nearly deadpan vocal performance, and even the music is basically a two-chord drone throughout with Buddhist monk chants to bookend, and peppered throughout.
As such, this is actually my number one favorite song ever in terms of how it treats the subject of death. Leave it Walter. It’s so powerful precisely because of its studied illusion of powerlessness, and in its purposeful neutrality is probably ten times as rousing, fitting, and meaningful a tribute to his dearly departed friend as the most rousing string-filled tear-jerker you could ever imagine.
3) Only tangentially related, but I actually rather like Kamakiriad. I think it’s a marvelous album, although I will freely grant that a number of its very “time piece” arrangement choices have aged much less gracefully than the more timeless sounds of Nightfly, Morph the Cat, or even Sunken Condos.
Beyond that, I think I agree with every word you said! A great review of a great album that was – and still is – quite underappreciated!
Cheers!