Before Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter became the revered Steely Dan guitar player and famed session hand that worked with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Donna Summers and Dolly Parton, he began his career working at a guitar store.
It was a vocation that gave him the opportunity to meet countless electric guitar heroes, who’d all visit the store he worked at repairing, setting up and selling instruments.
Les Paul, Frank Zappa, Eddie Deal, Mike Bloomfield and Sam Brown all frequented the guitar stores he worked at, as did Jimi Hendrix, who once came through the doors of Jimmy’s Music Shop in Manhattan with a busted Fender Duo-Sonic.
As it so happened, Baxter was on-hand to attend Hendrix’s guitar needs, and the two ended up shaking hands on a rather questionable exchange that saw the teenage store worker get punished by his manager.
“Jimi Hendrix had a band called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, and he came into Jimmy's music store with an old, beat-up Duo-Sonic,” Baxter remembers in a new interview with Rick Beato.
“If I'm correct, he was playing with Joey Dee and The Starliters, but I think he just got off the road with Little Richard. He had his beat up Duo-Sonic 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 and intonated and everything – for a person that never had showed up. So, it was sitting there.
“I went, ‘Okay, I’ll trade you even.’ So Frank and Jim Squillaci [his managers] docked me three weeks pay’ because they said that was not a good deal. And these guys are businessmen.”
Guitar deals aside, Baxter’s chance encounter with Hendrix that day would prove to be the start of a long friendship.
“Jimi then invited me to come down to hear the band,” he goes on. “The bass player was late, so I got a chance to play a tune or two. After that, we became friends, in a sense that… you probably have friends that you don't see for a long time, but as soon as you sit down with them, it's timeless, yeah? It's perfect. So it was the same thing with Jimi.”
Head over to Rick Beato’s YouTube channel to watch the full interview.
In other Baxter news, the Steely Dan guitarist recently recalled how he recorded his classic Hot Stuff solo on a cheap guitar he bought right before the session.
