Rock Stories #6: Jeff 'Skunk' Baxter & John Allen Cassady
Beat son is Steely Dan man fan
John Allen Cassady, son of Neal, Kerouac’s model for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty, and Carolyn, has become something of a legend of the wider Beat Generation community. He has many anecdotes concerning his father and his own friendships with writers and musicians drawn to that creative hub of activity and adventure.
Last year, John launched our new Rock and the Beat Generation series ‘Rock Stories’ with his memory of an encounter with Carlos Santana. Since then, he has described meetings with Elvin Bishop and Jerry Garcia. He now shares a further musical recollection with celebrated guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, whose early band Steely Dan just happen to reference William S. Burroughs in their name…
This guy Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter is simply brilliant. I just watched his hour-long talk at the ‘InnoTown Conference’ on YouTube. The lecture was called ‘Asymmetrical Thinking in a Conventional World’.
I first met Jeff on the Doobie Brothers' bus on the way to a benefit concert near Santa Cruz in 1975. I wondered why his nickname was ‘Skunk’. Well, he smoked reefer ALL THE TIME! The whole bus smelled like a skunk!
The Doobies got him from Steely Dan because he was such a great guitar player (almost as good as I am, ha ha). BTW, some people don't know that Steely Dan was the name of Bill Burroughs’ dildo in his novel Naked Lunch. Leave it to Donald Fagen and Walter Becker to name their band after it! Jeez.
Pictured above: The Doobie Bros with Jeff ‘Skunk Baxter’ (left)
He wrote ‘My Old School’ for the Dan, and he said that paid his rent for a while. Then the Doobies hired him.
But he was such a genius, he was hired by the Lawrence Livermore Labs in Berkeley, on the Laser Advisory Team of Theoretical Physics, where he taught ‘The Power of Frequency’ for starters. ‘Just like in music, it's a matter of coherent oscillations.’
He would then pick up a guitar. ‘This note, “A”, vibrates at 440 vibrations per second. When you double that...’, etc. ‘It's called “The Blues” because all the notes are in the pentatonic scale, which is in the “Blue” range on the chart of the...’, etc. You get the idea.
I forgot to mention, when I was on the Doobie Brothers' tour bus, I just assumed that Jeff was just a long-haired hippie pothead guitar player (kind of like me! Ha ha), but lo and behold. He became a Missile Defense Industry advisor for the Pentagon!
I mean, come on! Really? Where did you learn THAT stuff? He didn't talk about all of that too much, but Jeff inspired me, beyond his guitar playing.
He told me another story from a recording session: ‘So the sound engineer finally shows up at the studio, and he's fried. He'd been up for three days straight. He was heavily into the “Devil's Dandruff” or, as it's called in Egypt, “Toot-In-Common”!’
Anyway, Jeff still has his signature walrus moustache (now grey, of course).
He's a funny guy. He's also a pretty good guitar player (almost as good as I am). Listen to ‘Reelin' In The Years’ by Steely Dan and ‘Neal's Fandango’ by the Doobie Brothers. He's talented. I should look him up. We could write some hit songs together! (Yeah, as if. But who knows?)
So keep rockin’ on, Jeff!
John Allen Cassady
See also: ‘Rock Stories #5: Jerry Garcia & John Allen Cassady’, December 11th, 2023; ‘Rock Stories #4: Elvin Bishop & John Allen Cassady’, November 6th, 2023; ‘Rock Stories #1: Carlos Santana & John Allen Cassady’, August 27th, 2023.