(Credits: Far Out / Carl Lender)
Mon 10 November 2025 1:30, UK
Steely Dan were always a band looking to truly champion the power of songwriting. In order to really achieve this, they decided to leave touring behind.
Their rationale was simple: If you’re writing a song and constantly worried about how things will sound when you go on tour, you will be subconsciously holding yourself back creatively. The idea of playing live stopped Steely Dan from well and truly going as experimental as they could with their music, and as such, it was time to give up life on the road.
Pushing the boundaries of music with what they wrote came relatively easy to the band, as Donald Fagan and Walter Becker always had great ideas, but they were also surrounded by some of the greatest minds in session music. One of these was Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, who was always on hand to deliver killer guitar solos whenever needed. So many iconic guitar lines in Steely Dan’s discography are the result of Baxter.
To give you an idea just how much of a formidable guitar-playing talent Baxter was, despite Steely Dan often wanting multiple takes of the same piece of music to pick up on different sections, Baxter was able to nail the solo for ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number’ in one take. As soon as he played the section, he knew that he had stumbled upon something special, and was adamant on keeping it as it was rather than doing multiple versions. The rest of the band agreed, and one of Steely Dan’s best solos continues to inspire to this day.
“Yes, the solo on Rikki was one take, which was somewhat unusual for the way we approached the recording process,” said Baxter. “Becker and Fagen usually wanted to have me play the solos through a number of times, sometimes to capture specific ideas and sometimes to capture special performance moments.”
Of course, while the band were willing to use just the one take of Baxter’s solo on this occasion, there are some Steely Dan songs which Baxter believes he could improve. He was never given the chance to do this when he was actually in the band, but when members all parted ways and Baxter started working on some solo projects, he decided to re-record one of the band’s tracks in order to shape it in his image.
Two songs in particular got the Baxter treatment on his record Speed of Heat, which were Steely Dan’s ‘My Old School’ and The Shadows ‘Apache’. “Oh, thank you. Of course, I was familiar with both the Jørgen Ingmann version and the Shadows’ version – Hank Marvin and the Shadows. I always loved the song,” he said, first discussing the track ‘Apache’, “And similar to ‘My Old School’, I always thought there was a seed of power lurking in that composition. I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to have a try at seeing if I can inject some horsepower into this. And we definitely did.”
It takes a bold person to take a much-loved Steely Dan song and change things up, but if one person was right for the job, it was Jeff Baxter.
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