Jeff Baxter
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:Cleanup-date Template:Not verified
Image:Jeff baxter.jpg Jeff (Skunk) Baxter (b. December 13, 1948 in Washington, D.C.) is an unusual hybrid: a well-respected American rock guitarist and an equally respected consultant to the US government on how to apply theoretically unrelated technologies to understanding terrorist thinking and planning. The latter side of his life still surprises music fans when they learn about it. However, music fans often do not recognize him at all, as he has yet to record an album as a leader in his own right. His reputation rests upon his participation in the early incarnation of Steely Dan and the transitional incarnation of the Doobie Brothers, as well as longtime session work for a diverse array of performers.
Contrary to rumours that the nickname "Skunk" alludes to anti-social habits (his self-deprecating wit may cause some to mistake it for social reluctance), or that a band member hung it on him in a lefthanded tribute to his looks (unknown or unconfirmable), its actual origin is unknown. And Baxter has been quoted as saying he has no intention of revealing just where it came from, or why.
Contents |
The Musician's Musician
In spite of his considerable ability, Baxter has preferred the life of a "musician's musician" rather than stardom in his own right. He first reached the larger rock audience---or tried to, anyway---as a member of the ill-fated Ultimate Spinach, one of the bands hoisted as the "Boss-Town (for Boston) Sound" MGM Records tried to hype in 1968. Baxter wasn't part of that hype: he joined the band in time for them to cut their third and final album, III, a mishmash of psychedelic and hard rock music that sounded like almost everyone else except themselves.
Sleek Steel
His musical futured proved to be California, where he moved after Ultimate Spinach broke up. He joined the original Steely Dan, then a fully constituted sextet but one formed originally, by its two songwriting leaders (guitarist-bassist Walter Becker and keyboardsman Donald Fagen), as a vehicle to promote their songs. Baxter's playing on the band's first three albums, Can't Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy, and Pretzel Logic displayed a flair for melding rock thrust with sleek jazz and blues references, entirely in line with what Becker and Fagen envisioned for their cynical lyrics and their hybrid pop, jazz, and blues-influenced music.
Baxter received respectful notices in the band's reviews. But the band's tour in support of Can't Buy a Thrill was a disaster: the band wasn't as well rehearsed for concert performances as they were to record the album, and audiences lured by the hit singles "Do It Again" and "Reeling In The Years" weren't quite ready for the full array of their hybrid music, and Becker and Fagen decided---following a tour to support Countdown to Ecstasy---that the stage wasn't meant to be Steely Dan's home away from home. In fact, the twosome graduated Steely Dan to what amounted to their company name, with a rotating array of studio musicians, Baxter among them, playing their music on future albums. Until their surprise reunion tour in 1993, Steely Dan (they took the name from a dildo in the William S. Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch) was strictly a studio proposition until Becker and Fagen put the project on ice in late 1980.
Vices, Habits, Moments
Baxter's next band stop was the Doobie Brothers, already well underway as a hitmaking concert attraction. He joined up after finishing work on Pretzel Logic, working on the Doobies' 1974 set What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits, and he became an official member of the band with their next album, Stampede. When the band's founder and leader, Tom Johnston, was hospitalised with a stomach ailment, Michael McDonald---a soul style keyboard player and singer who had also worked with Steely Dan---stepped in for him on tour.
Stampede's comparative failure (it hit as high as number four on the album charts but wasn't even close to equaling the sales of the band's previous successes) provoked the Doobies to let their two Steely Dan alumni/contributors reshape their style away from airy, post-hippie harmonies and guitar-weighted rock and roll with country and folk overtones, and with McDonald up front as the new lead singer. The support voices of the other members made sure they still sounded like Doobie Brothers. But the net result was a rock and soul hybrid with hints of jazz as well as their former rock. The first flight, Takin' It to the Streets, album and hit single alike, proved how right the McDonald-Baxter revamp was, even if it might have dismayed fans accustomed to their original, breezier style. Baxter's jazzy and idiosyncratic guitar stylings dominated the Doobies' next record, Livin' on the Fault Line.
One album later, with Minute by Minute, the revamp paid off with the biggest success of the Doobie Brothers' career. But Baxter left the group after the mammoth tour to support the album and its blockbuster hit single, "What a Fool Believes," which helped make McDonald a star in his own right as much as it kept the Doobies in front of the record-buying public. Maybe more so: after Baxter and co-founding drummer John Hartman left, the next Doobie Brothers album, One Step Closer, sounded like a Michael McDonald album with the Doobies as his backing group, and that's the way the band pretty much remained until they split up in 1982. (They have since reunited, with a lineup shifting as often as it did in the salad days.)
Most Valuable Player
Baxter was at least as well-suited as a kind of most valuable player in the 1970s and the 1980s, and with remarkable constitution considering the Doobie Brothers' schedule he did exactly that otherwise: Bryan Adams, Hoyt Axton, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow, Freddie Hubbard, Joni Mitchell, Rick Nelson, Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand, and Donna Summer are just a few of the performers to whom Baxter has lent his hydra-headed guitar playing over the years. He also turned his passion for technology into a brief career as a producer, mostly for heavy metal rockers Nazareth. He has eight platinum albums on his resume, yet has never recorded a solo album of his own.
The Unconventional Defense Thinker
Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. Always a technology-oriented man, he began to ponder whether hardware and software developed for the military—data-compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices—could also be used in making and recording music. As it happened, his next-door neighbour was a retired engineer who worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbour bought Baxter a subscription to an aviation magazine, and it provoked an interest in a wide range of military-oriented publications . . . and an active curiosity as to whether incumbent systems could meet future threats they weren't designed to meet.
To some analysts, that represented heresy for most defense thinkers. But Baxter, entirely on his own, researched and wrote a five-page paper using a primitive Tandy computer that suggested converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave the paper on a whim to another California friend, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. No one was more surprised than Baxter when the Republican lawmaker took the paper seriously.
It turned out that Baxter knew what he was talking about. The converted Aegis missile defense did well in tests and the Navy planned to equip at least one ship with the newly converted system. But Rohrabacher was impressed with Baxter himself as well. "Skunk really blew my mind with that report," he was quoted as saying. "He was talking over my head half the time, and the fact that he was a rock star who had basically learned it all on his own was mind-boggling."
Start Spreading the News
Rohrabacher passed the report to another influential lawmaker, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pennsylvania), who said he recognized at once that Baxter (an unapologetic Republican himself) could be useful as a public advocate for missile defense. Baxter's pedigree as an influential rock musician proved valuable in attracting attention to the issue.
Backed by several influential Capitol Hill lawmakers, the former Doobie Brother received a series of classified security clearances. Known as a witty if low-keyed man, Baxter in one background interview was said to have been asked whether he could be bribed with money or drugs. ("Doobie," after all, has been slang for marijuana cigarettes for what seems ages.) He told the investigators not to worry because he had already "been there, done that, and given away the T-shirt" during his music career. By 1995, Baxter's work had become so respected that Weldon, then the chairman of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee, nominated him in 1995 to run the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense.
The Skunk in the Pentagon
Baxter's work with that panel led to consulting contracts with the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the Pentagon also asked Baxter regularly to lead fictitious enemy forces in war game exercises, and he developed something of a reputation for using very creative terrorist-style tactics. "I'm told," he says wryly, "I make a very good bad guy." In the late 1990s, he led a fictional future alliance of Iran and Iraq that was trying to drive the U.S. Navy from the key oil-shipping routes through the Persian Gulf. Facing a massive military imbalance, Mr. Baxter had covert operatives introduce oil-eating bacteria into the Saudi Arabian oil supply that rendered its petroleum shipments worthless. In the exercise scenario, the Navy was forced to pull out after oil-dependent American allies threatened to pull their financial assets out of the U.S.
Pentagon officials say they appreciate Baxter's creativity. "He's imparted some new ways of thinking about the ballistic-missile threat and the technology that might be necessary to defeat it," says MDA spokesman Rick Lehner. "It's been a good interchange of information."
Baxter's friends in Washington take him seriously as a defense thinker but they admit his rock and roll life carries its own advantages. During a trip to Manila with Baxter in 1998, Rohrabacher found himself having a difficult time getting permission to fly over a number of contested islands—until he brought Baxter to a meeting with then-Philippine President Joseph Estrada. At once, Estrada placed one of his government's C-130 transport aircraft at the disposal of Rohrbacher and Baxter. "He's apparently just a huge Doobie Brothers fan," Rohrbacher said.
Today
Baxter now consults to the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as for defense-oriented manufacturers like Science Applications International Corporation ("SAIC"), Northrop Grumman Corp. and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. He has been quoted as saying his unconventional approach to thinking about terrorism, tied to his interest in technology, is a major reason he became sought after by the government.
"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," he has said. "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."
One Baxter Client, General Atomics' vice president Mike Campbell, compares him to a "gluon," a term drawn from quantum physics that refers to the particles binding together the basic building blocks of all matter. Contractors and policymakers say Baxter can see past bureaucratic boundaries and integrate information drawn from a variety of sources, though some who have worked with him say he can also be a self-promoter. Baxter himself can speak the acronym-heavy vernacular of the professional defense consultant, but his equally low-key appearance---the bushy mustache and ponytailed hair, his self-deprecating sense of humour, his pop culture references, and his periodic appearances on VH1 music retrospectives---make him almost impossible to mistake for any kind of conventional bureaucrat.
But Baxter is very careful not to discuss current or past projects that might be classified and keeps to a punishing schedule. Perhaps he developed that kind of constitution as a constantly working guitarist at the peak of his musical career. One morning a black government-issued sport-utility vehicle picked him up outside a Washington cafe as soon as he had finished breakfast, whisking him to a Pentagon agency for nearly twelve hours of meetings. The same evening, Baxter traveled to Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for several days of briefings and meetings. He flew 230,000 miles one year, and he is said to make a point of dissolving brightly colored packets of vitamin supplements into his drinks to stave off illness.
"Most of Hollywood is from the liberal, 'let's hug the tree and be warm and fuzzy and sing Kumbaya,' bent," Mr. Weldon says. "You put Jeff Baxter up against them, and he cleans their clocks because he actually knows the facts and details." Baxter has also appeared in public debates and given numerous press and TV interviews on CNN and Fox News advocating missile defense. He also served as a national spokesman for Americans for Missile Defense, a coalition of conservative organizations devoted to the issue.
Baxter could make his life entirely a life of defense consulting if he chose: he has a continuous pile of job offers from the Pentagon and from defense contractors who hope he can help them, too, anticipate new terrorist tactics and strategies. In April 2005, he joined the NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee (ESAC).
Still a Musician
Baxter has not abandoned his music career, either. He is said to be working on a solo album at long last and continues accepting lucrative studio work; his most recent such work involved tribute albums to Pink Floyd and Aerosmith. Between his music and his defense consulting, Baxter has said he earns "a good, comfortable, six-figure income," making more in 2004 for his defense work than he did for music. It hasn't compromised his reputation as a "musician's musician." And, whenever classic rock or oldies stations play one of the Steely Dan or Doobie Brothers sides on which his guitar playing features prominently, Baxter is still one of the most respected players in the game.
External links
- Yochi J. Dreazen (May 24, 2005). "Rocker Jeff Baxter moves and shakes in national security". The Wall Street Journal. (available through the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: article)