Why Steely Dan’s Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter was fined for helping to launch Jimi Hendrix
Sometimes, musicians can have fortuitous encounters with one another without even knowing how important they’ll be down the line. Hall and Oates initially met while trying to escape a brawl that broke out at the Adelphi Ballroom in Philadelphia as they were both scheduled to go on stage to perform in different shows, while the Pet Shop Boys had their first encounter in a shop, of all places, where Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe were discussing electronics and synths, and struck up a relationship.
While these two tales of musicians encountering one another led to two iconic pop acts forming, there are other examples where such meetings have led to other events unfolding. For example, The Beatles were introduced to smoking pot by none other than Bob Dylan, who Paul McCartney maintains is one of the coolest people he ever had the opportunity to meet while in the band. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young also both penned songs that paid tribute to one another, having both met in their early 20s at the University of Manitoba’s Fourth Dimension folk cafe.
All of these are slices of luck that may have seen musical history unfold in many different ways had they never occurred, and Steely Dan’s guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter has a story of his own about how he met one of his earliest guitar-playing influences while working at a music shop in New York City during the mid-’60s.
Speaking in a recent interview with Rick Beato, Baxter recalled his first encounter with a guitarist known as Jimmy James in Manhattan, who would later go on to be known to the world as none other than Jimi Hendrix. Having been playing in his own group, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, for a short period of time in 1966 during Hendrix’s stay in Greenwich Village, he would one day enter the shop that Baxter was working in prior to his career taking off.
“He came in with an old beat up Duo-Sonic,” Baxter told Beato, “and he wanted to trade it. I had just put together a beautiful, white Stratocaster – a right-handed Strat that I’d strung up left-handed – for a person that wanted it, but they never showed up. It was sitting there, so I went [mimes grabbing the guitar] ‘okay, I’ll trade you even’.”
Stringing and playing his guitars in this manner already, he could not claim to be the person who influenced him to play a re-strung right-handed guitar, but the Stratocaster would become Hendrix’s go-to instrument in the years after this encounter. However, not everyone was impressed at the time with Baxter’s business that he had conducted with Hendrix, with his bosses at the music store docking him three weeks’ pay because they said it was “not a good deal”.
Speaking about how encountering Hendrix before his breakthrough release Are You Experienced? in 1967 affected him, Baxter explained that the two would become friends after the incident. Describing his demeanour as “very quiet, very pensive”, Baxter asserted that “the first time I heard him play ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, I said ‘that’s it’. This guy had synthesised Little Beaver and Curtis Mayfield into a style of guitar that I will strive to learn to play and to perfect.”
With Baxter going on to enjoy a successful career with Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers and Spirit in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it’s quite a claim to be able to say that meeting a guitar hero such as Jimi Hendrix prior to his death was an influential experience, and one that many guitarists would be incredibly jealous of.
