Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, ex-Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers guitarist, has been talking about his career after those bands, the decades when he worked as a session guitarist for hire.
His CV is a veritable Who’s Who of rock and pop royalty. Baxter has played with the Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Cher, Elton John, Rod Stewart and many many others. In an interview with Guitar Player, Baxter, now 77, reflected on the strange requests he’s had from artists down the years.
“Sometimes you get requests like, ‘Can you make it more green?’ or, ‘I need it to ooomph more,” he said. “So you say, ‘Okay,’ and think about all the times you’ve ever done sessions and people have said to you, ‘Boy, that really ooomphs,’ or ‘That sounds really green,’ and you start from there.”
One time, Dolly Parton asked him for something that sounded like fireworks for the track Baby I’m Burnin’. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’"
“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s (pitch) transposer, slapping it back up and down. She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’”
“There have been a couple of dates like that. I enjoy it,” he admits. “I get a lot of calls for steel guitar where they say, ‘Can you make it not sound like a steel guitar?’ That’s always a request. They want something different. They want a sound that has the fluidity of the steel guitar but doesn’t sound like Six Days on the Road.”
Then there was the session with Steely Dan producer Gary Katz, which ended up with Baxter playing… nothing. “He told me to bring all my stuff,” Baxter remembers. “I charged him triple scale because it was on a Saturday at a place way the hell out.”
Baxter arrived, set up. Then Katz played him an album’s worth of songs and asked what he thought they should do.
“So I listened to ten tunes, and each time one would finish I said I didn’t hear anything. When we finally finished, I said, ‘Gary, there’s really nothing you need. It sounds fine.’ He said that was all he wanted to hear and paid me my money. Fair enough.”
“You just don’t play sometimes,” the guitarist reflected. “I found that one of the harder things to learn to say is, ‘There’s no need for it. You know, as much as I’d like to play on this track as a businessman, as a musician, I know you don’t need it.’”
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