Quintessence of Old Wave (6 of ??) (Skunk versus Punk)

The three iterations of Skunk Baxter's guitar solo in Steely Dan's "My Old School" - but especially the second run-through at 2.27 -  distil Old Wave's quintessence in all its glory. There’s a blend of flash and feel, sophistication and funk, that's irrecoverable and out-of-reach for guitarists who came up through the New Wave. (Not that they’d even want to reach for this type and level of lickmanship, of course)

The full length studio version with the third solo at 4.45 included, Baxter wringing every last drop outta that riff

In the TV appearance, I like the way that during the second astonishing bit o' pickin'  Fagen seems so riveted he almost forgets to carry on playing the piano. I also enjoy the nonchalant nose wipe Skunk does when he’s finished showing off. (Of course it could be nasal drip, nudge nudge wink wink).

The only places this kind of flash/feel combo pops up its hairy head during the postpunk era is Old Wavers Disguised as New Wavers (John Turnbull in The Blockheads - check this for sheer flash-for-flash's-sake). Or just Old Wavers Carrying On being Old Wave Despite the New Wave and its Strictures and Edicts.  (In which category would fit Old Wavers At Heart Who Happen to Be New in the Marketplace – Mark Knopfler)

Rest of “My Old School” is fairly dispensable to me -  the hot horns, the chick backing singers, Fagen’s true-life tale of getting busted while at college thanks to some uptight female student grassing him to the cops. But I keep replaying that second solo. I’m surprised no one has isolated it and just looped it endlessly.

Getting into the nitty gritty of it with a guitar expert who asks, "Is this Steely Dan's’s greatest guitar solo?"

He points out that one of the reasons the solo is so exciting is that it is essentially rhythm-guitar-as-lead. 

Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter is ubiquitous in the Old Wave world – playing on records by sundry West Coast and elsewhere superstars (I did not know he appears on Hissing of Summer Lawns) but also leaving Steely Dan and joining The Doobie Brothers for their most sustained stretch of suckcess. 

Baxter was instrumental in the recruitment of Michael McDonald so we have him to thank indirectly for “What A Fool Believes”.

Via Phil in comments, a brand new Beato interview with Skunk Baxter on the Steely-Doobie years, off the back of that Yacht-Rock-doc

 He also facially looks Quintessentially Old Wave.

 

Skunk joined Spirit in the 1980s, which is about as Old Wave Will Never Die a thing to do as imaginable.

Goodness me, he played in Ultimate Spinach before any of the famous work.

 But here’s an interesting thing – while continuing to play with all sorts of legends to this day, he also opened up a second career front: as defense consultant,

“Baxter fell into his second profession almost by accident. In the mid-1980s, his interest in music recording technology led him to wonder about hardware and software originally developed for military use, specifically data compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices. His next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who had worked on the Sidewinder missile program. This neighbor bought Baxter a subscription to Aviation Week magazine, provoking his interest in additional military-oriented publications and missile defense systems in particular. He became self-taught in this area, and at one point wrote a five-page paper that proposed converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He gave the paper to California Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, and his career as a defense consultant began. Baxter received a series of security clearances so he could work with classified information. “

He ends up on the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense, gets consulting contracts with  the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, serves similar sort of roles for the US Department of Defense, US intelligence,  the NASA Exploration Systems Advisory Committee,  and various military-industrial complex corporations in the aeronautics field.  “He is listed as "Senior Thinker and Raconteur" at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition”

Baxter is respected in the defense and intelligence community for his ability to think outside the box.

Baxter: "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. 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."

That’s a pretty wild tangent, for someone of that generation!

It’s also a good example of the opposite syndrome to Wiki Fizzle, which I have teased at various points and one day will unpack thoroughly, with numerous examples. The gist is that it's to do with the way that thanks to Wikipedia, nowadays you can find out about the career-peak aftermath of musicians, actors, entertainers, writers, film directors etc. Whereas pre-Wiki / internet, they would essentially disappear from view - unless you really tracked them through periodicals in the public library - and even then the spoor would get thinner and thinner as they grew less noteworthy, less noticed. As far as general public consciousness, their career profile would dip to near-invisibility. But thanks to Wiki etc, you can now see what they've been up to since they stopped having hits or being in the public eye. What you often find is that they have kept surprisingly busy - even immensely busy -  with all kinds of business ventures and artistic projects, attempts at reinvention, dabbles in unexpected fields e.g. writing a musical, career diversification, or just slogging away making record after record. But for all the persistence and productivity, the unmistakable bathos of decline hangs over the arc as detailed in the Wiki entry.  The career fizzles, fecundly (perhaps because if you ever had big success, people are more likely to indulge your reignite-career attempts, or fund your later pipe dreams?)

Conversely, Baxter's Act Two would represent Wiki Flourish if anything. 

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Tyler reminds, in Comments, that Skunk did the Astounding Lickmanship on Donna Summer's rock-ified "Hot Stuff"

Until  recently I have confused Skunk Baxter and Waddy Watchtel in my head as West Coast axeman-for-hire 

He looks quintessentially OW himself