Walter's Studio

I can give my personal feelings on this, for anyone who feels inclined ot listen to my ramblings: Walter Becker was important. He made a lasting contribution to popular music and to popular culture. It is not only interesting, but academically and historically important that we seek to preserve anything which lends insight to the way creative people consume and create art. If we have access to a list of the music Walter owned, the books he read, the ideas he jotted down, we have a more complete, and hopefully more true, idea of what went into the creation of his art. The academic issue is best addressed by institutions. Whether a museum or a library or a university would want to house the Walter Becker Archive is an interesting question, but one i want to shelve for just a moment. Another question is public access. It would be an undertaking to house and provide access to the public of the thousands of cds, books, pieces of ephemera, notebooks, printed lists, hand-written lyrics, scores, DATs, cassette tapes, multi-tracks, etc. in Walter's collection. But I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to believe that we can at least provide access to some of the information online. Maybe we can't set up a cd lending library where we physically send Walter's own copy of that one Art Tatum album to Bob in Peoria, but we could curate a list on some page on the web with a list of the cds Walter owned, and maybe links to places where an interested party could listen to or purchase these albums. So maybe we have a Spotify or iTunes playlist of Walter's library, or even smaller lists comprised of the songs that were in Walter's playlists on his iPod, or whatnot. Or a Youtube playlist with links to a publicly available version of the songs in the library. The books could work in a similar way, with a list of the books Walter had in his library and web-links to where those books are readable or purchasable online.

One idea I've toyed with is the creation of something like a Beckerpedia, a wiki for Walter. Something where the work could be crowdsourced to the kinds of people that care about legacy. The Hey 19 database is a good example of something like this. That was (and remains) a massive undertaking, but it comprises just a small sliver of who Walter was and why his legacy is so remarkable and important. Those are massive amounts of data for just one section of one song for 20 or 30 dates a tour for one decade. That's so fractional to Walter's legacy. Image we decided to document every cd he owned, ever book he read, every extant recording of every concert he played, every piece he wrote for steelydan.com, every album he produced, every song he wrote or co-wrote, ever cover version of those songs...the impact of this man was enormous. Quantifying and cataloging proves the point. And to return to the original idea, I do think that his collection belongs to a museum. I think the Rock Hall places primacy of importance on the visual. You can see a stage costume or a played instrument. I don't think they would appreciate 38 boxes of cds and a truck of books. And that's before we ask if Walter would have wanted his collection housed in a place that didn't even want those 3M machines. Maybe a smaller museum, either in a location that was important to Walter (Manhattan, Queens, LA, Maui?), or one that specializes in pop culture or rock and roll music specifically. Or we start the Walter Becker Museum and Concert Venue with a generous grant from whoever is giving out generous grants these days. Hell, you can visit the Towing and Recovery Museum in my hometown of Chattanooga, the Uncle Remus Museum in Eatonton, Georgia, or the Salt and Pepper Shaker Museum in Gatlinburg, Tennessee...and those are just the ones I can think of that are both ridiculous and within a few hours of my house. Why not a Walter Becker Museum? I'm only half-joking.