How a classic Bob Dylan song inspired an iconic Steely Dan album
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How Steely Dan’s Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter became a missile defence expert
Steely Dan are undoubtedly one of the greatest bands of all time, and what they did for popular music, in terms of instilling it with real character, is something that cannot be understated. Duly, they rank amongst the most unique outfits out there, with their surreal rock style that draws on jazz, pop, and the avant-garde, proving incredibly influential.
It’s a testament to their work that they’ve managed to escape the trappings of any particular zeitgeist and remain highly popular, showing that class is permanent and everything else is just temporary.
Led by the misanthropic duo Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, Steely Dan’s disdain for the counterculture and their concentration on elements of high culture such as the avant-garde and intellectual literature immediately set them out from their peers, as did the evident genius of its two founding members. Coming complete with a name that was plucked straight from William Burroughs’s drug-addled novel Naked Lunch, the band were the complete package, and it did not take them long to rise to the very top.
Notably, Fagen and Becker formed Steely Dan in Los Angeles, and they enlisted some of the best musicians around, which included guitar-playing hero Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter whose skill and dovetailing relationship with their other resident master of the six-string, Denny Dias, unlike anything anyone had ever heard.
Baxter appeared on the first three Steely Dan albums, 1972’s Can’t Buy a Thrill, 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy, and 1974’s Pretzel Logic. Arguably, his most iconic moment came in the form of the frills and solo heard on 1974’s ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’, which remains the band’s highest charting hit.
Famously, Baxter left Steely Dan later in 1974 to join the Doobie Brothers after learning of Fagen and Becker’s plans to retire the band from Steely Dan and to work exclusively with session musicians. He joined the Doobie Brothers when they were touring their fourth album What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits and would be a mainstay in the group until he left in 1979.
Although he is hailed as one of the definitive funk rock guitarists, in the mid-1980’s Baxter would enact a stark career change. At the time, his lifelong interest in music recording equipment made him wonder about the hardware and software that was originally developed for the military such as data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices.
By chance, his next-door neighbour was a retired engineer who worked on the Sidewinder missile programme in the 1950s, and after getting to know Baxter, he bought him a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, which piqued his interest in the military, and particularly missile defence systems.
Clearly a brainbox, Baxter became self-taught in the area. Before too long, he had written a short paper that proposed converting the US Navy’s anti-aircraft Aegis missle into a missle defence system. He handed the paper to Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and thus, his long career as a defence consultant commenced. At one point, he even became the chair of the Congressional Advisory Board on missile defence.
“We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began to use them as instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles,” Baxter once explained. “My big thing is to look at existing technologies and try to see other ways they can be used, which happens in music all the time and happens to be what terrorists are incredibly good at.”
Acutely aware of just how stark his career change as been, Skunk recalled in an interview with The Star a hilarious moment in his recruitment process that involved the chairman of the Armed Service Committee, asking an advisor, “Is this the guy from Raytheon or Boeing?” To which the advisor replied, “No, this is the guy from the Doobie Brothers.”
