Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter picked his favourite Steely Dan song: “What Steely Dan was all about”
The story of Steely Dan understandably centres on its two founders and leaders, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. Known as rock music’s resident misanthropes, they pioneered a unique blend of refined, jazz-inflected rock and wry social commentary, continuing a tradition started by acts like The Fugs and Frank Zappa. Despite their originality and brilliance, Becker and Fagen relied on a diverse cast of collaborators, including Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter.
Although Becker and Fagen had a clear vision for their music, their seamless success was greatly aided by the talented musicians they collaborated with. They worked with many renowned artists, such as Steve Gadd on Aja and, briefly, Mark Knopfler, whose spirit they nearly crushed with their relentless perfectionism. Among these collaborators, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter stands out as one of the most crucial to their story.
When Becker and Fagen moved to Los Angeles, they assembled a band of adept musicians who could keep up with their aptitude and ideas, and Baxter was one of this trusted collection of maestros. Not only did he play a key role in their blending of a host of styles, as successfully evidenced on their 1972 debut Can’t Buy a Thrill, but he also formed a brilliant partnership with the other in-house six-string maestro, Denny Dias.
Baxter’s talent courses through the first three Steely Dan albums, with 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy and the following year’s Pretzel Logic building on the ice-cool foundations of their debut. His most famous moment with them is their highest-charting hit to date, 1974’s ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’, marked out by his blistering solo.
Despite his significance to their arc, Baxter’s time with Steely Dan was short. In 1974, he left to join the Doobie Brothers when he heard that Becker and Fagen were electing to retire from the band and work only with session musicians. Later, in the mid-1980s, he enacted a stark U-turn when, by way of his longstanding interest in musical hardware and software and a chance encounter with a neighbour who was a retired missile engineer, he eventually became a missile defence expert. Unsurprisingly, that chapter produced its own array of astonishing anecdotes.
As an accomplished voice on US defence systems for decades, Baxter’s work was undoubtedly crucial to the Steely Dan operation in its early years. While the way he managed to segue between two markedly different professions is a significant mystery in itself, the question of his favourite songs with the band is also complex, but one that’s undoubtedly easier to answer.
When speaking to Mojo in 2024, Baxter was invited to name his favourite Steely Dan songs and why. Like a man who’s spent half his life in politics, his first point was that asking him to do so is like pushing him to pick his favourite child. However, he did relent and chose ‘Razor Boy’ from Countdown to Ecstasy as symbolic of the band’s essence, as well as their cover of Duke Ellington’s ‘East St. Louis Toodle-Oo’.
He explained: “Trying to pick a favourite song is like trying to pick a favourite from your own children! I think Razor Boy was a defining song as to what Steely Dan was all about, fundamentally, stylistically and musically. I do have a bit of a special liking for ‘East St. Louis Toodle-Oo’. It was a Duke Ellington song, and we were all fans of the Duke.”
Regarding the cover, the idea was to choose an instrument from the original orchestra and play it on a completely different instrument. Baxter picked the trombone for his pedal steel, and in true Steely Dan style, it was a huge challenge to bring it to life, but he relished it.
