CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM (8)
By:
October 27, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… creators switching art forms and/or careers! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT
When it comes to famous musicians, they usually don’t (or seemingly can’t) ever do anything else, which is to be expected, right? I mean, if you’re Paul McCartney, you eat, drink, sleep, and fart music every day of your life…why would you do anything else? (And whatever you feel about his paintings, he’s kept focused on his dayjob.)
Years ago when I was poking around YouTube, watching videos of my favorite Classic Rock bands, I came across some very interesting information about the legendary Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.
“Skunk”? Yeah, he gave himself that nickname, and has never told anyone what it means or how he thought it up. I think it’s obvious that it referred to the smelly weed he smoked.
You may know him from his time with Steely Dan, where he was the founding lead guitarist, and of course, The Doobie Brothers. He’s a great session guy/hired gun who has played with Dolly Parton, Elton John, Carly Simon, Ringo Starr, Donna Summer, Linda Ronstadt, and a zillion others. Basically, if you’ve listened to Rock and Pop music since the ’70s, you’ve heard his guitar playing.
Like a lot of musicians, especially guitar players who I believe are high on The Spectrum, he was mechanically inclined and when he was a kid he loved to take things apart and put them back together to see how they worked. Also like a lot of young guitar players he built custom guitars and became an expert guitar tech.
He’s a classically trained pianist too, playing that and his guitar (which he taught himself) since childhood. By high school he was working at Jimmy’s Music Shop in Manhattan, where in 1966 he met a guitar player then calling himself Jimmy James to whom he traded a custom white Strat for something. You may have seen Jimi Hendrix playing that guitar in a video.
Jeff’s other talent was coincidence — he got his first professional music gig when he was drafted to replace a missing demo musician at a record company he was delivering an amp from the store to. And later on, when he realized his passion for recording tech overlapped with hardware and software originally developed for the military (like ways to compress data and increase storage capacity), it turned out his next-door neighbor was a retired engineer who worked on the infamous (now ubiquitous) Sidewinder missile. They got to talking and the neighbor bought Jeff a subscription to Aviation Week, which led him to a second career: missile defense consultant.
What? It’s true — he of course taught himself that too and wound up writing a five-page paper on converting the ship-based anti-aircraft Aegis missile into a rudimentary missile defense system. He somehow showed it to an impressed California Congressman, then was named chair of the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense, then got consulting contracts with the DOD’s Missile Defense Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and you get the idea. That’s a long way from smoking a lot of pot and creating great guitar riffs with The Doobie Brothers, or getting yelled at by Donald Fagen!
Now he makes the rounds of cable news and public debates as well as the concert circuit, and considered then rejected a run for Congress himself.
One of my favorite quotes of his is, “We thought turntables were for playing records until rappers began using them as musical instruments, and we thought airplanes were for carrying passengers until terrorists realized they could be used as missiles. Among other things, what I do is look at existing technologies and hypothesize how they might be applied in non-traditional ways, something that happens in music all the time and also happens to be something that terrorists are incredibly good at.”
Now I want you to listen to his solo on “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number” and think about him walking around Washington DC with major security clearances.
CROSS YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | James Scott Maloy on DAVID LEE ROTH, EMT | Lynn Peril on HEDY LAMARR AND GEORGE ANTHEIL, INVENTORS | Crockett Doob on LARS ULRICH, TENNIS ACE | Mimi Lipson on DANIEL DAY-LEWIS, COBBLER | Mariane Cara on BRIAN MAY, ASTROPHYSICIST | Carlo Rotella on CURTIS COKES, FIGHTING ACTOR | Josh Glenn on GEORGE HARRISON, FILM PRODUCER | Crystal Durant on SKUNK BAXTER, DEFENSE CONSULTANT | Adrienne Crew on HENRY ROLLINS, PUNK POLYMATH | Deborah Wassertzug on JOHN LURIE, DISRUPTOR | Heather Quinlan on HARRY NILSSON, COMPUTER GENIUS | Adam McGovern on JOSEPHINE BAKER, SPY | Douglas Wolk on RICHARD McGUIRE, GRAPHIC-LIT INNOVATOR | Jake Zucker on SYDNEY POLLACK, CHARACTER ACTOR | Rani Som on RACHEL POLLACK, SEEKER | Jeff Lewonczyk on ANDY WARHOL, FORMER ANDY WARHOL | Nikhil Singh on ADOLF HITLER, FORMER PAINTER | Holly Interlandi on ADAM JONES, DIRECTOR | Jonathan Pinchera on PETER CAINE, CONSPIRACY STAR | Miranda Mellis on EVE KOSOVSKY SEDGWICK, ACADEMIC WEAVER | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on BRENT SPINER, SINGING NOVELIST | Christopher-Rashee Stevenson on QUENTIN TARANTINO, CRITIC | Sangamithra Iyer on MADHUR ANAND, LITERARY ECOLOGIST | Marlon Stern Lopez on GREG GRAFFIN, HARDCORE ZOOLOGIST | Pichchenda Bao on WENDELL BERRY, FARMING POET.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!