by Jerome du Bois
Finally some of the story comes out, one I've known hints of for years: a wonderful American Tale, about a musician whose heart and brain were more capacious than his music, and who stayed out of the channels, away from the abyss, and out of the long, gray, line; a man who got as hooked on his own curiosity about data-compression algorithms as he used to get hooked on his own guitar hooks.
Jeff Baxter, of Steely Dan and Doobie Brothers fame, author of some of the sweetest, fiercest licks ever, is a well-respected Pentagon and DoD consultant on terror tactics, asymmetrical warfare, and especially missile defense. Has been since the early Eighties.
From an article by Yochi J. Dreazen in the May 24, 2005, Wall Street Journal online:
One morning recently, a black government-issued sport-utility vehicle picked him up outside a Washington café as soon as he had finished breakfast and whisked him to a Pentagon agency for nearly 12 hours of meetings. That evening, he traveled to Ohio's Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for several days of briefings and meetings. He flew 230,000 miles last year, and makes a point of dissolving brightly colored packets of vitamin supplements into his drinks to stave off illness.
Mr. Baxter, who joined his first band when he was 11, began studying journalism at Boston University, but dropped out after a year in 1969 to begin working with Ultimate Spinach, a short-lived Boston psychedelic rock band. He moved to California a short time later and became one of the six original members of the avant-garde rock group Steely Dan. He quit the band in 1974 and joined the Doobie Brothers, helping to remake its sound into a commercially appealing mix of funk and jazzy pop. Mr. Baxter left the group in 1979 after a long tour in support of its most popular album, "Minute by Minute."
His defense work began in the 1980s, when it occurred to him that much of the hardware and software being developed for military use, like data-compression algorithms and large-capacity storage devices, could also be used for recording music. Mr. Baxter's next-door neighbor, a retired engineer who worked on the Pentagon's Sidewinder missile program, bought him a subscription to an aviation magazine, and he was soon reading a range of military-related publications.
Mr. Baxter began wondering whether existing military systems could be adapted to meet future threats they weren't designed to address, a heretical concept for most defense thinkers. In his spare time, he wrote a five-page paper on a primitive Tandy computer that proposed converting the military's Aegis program, a ship-based antiplane system, into a rudimentary missile-defense system.
On a whim, he gave the paper to a friend from California, Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher. To Mr. Baxter's surprise, the congressman took it seriously, and the idea proved to be prescient: Aegis missile-defense systems have done well in tests, and the Navy says it will equip at least one ship with the antimissile system by the end of the year.
"Skunk really blew my mind with that report," Mr. Rohrabacher says. "He was talking over my head half the time, and the fact that he was a rock star who had basically learned it all on his own was mind-boggling."
As an undergraduate in the mid-Seventies, I once researched and wrote a speech about the trajectory of a MX missle from launch to impact, taking into account all known variables. I read deeply in journals like International Security. My conclusion? The damned thing was frighteningly inaccurate. So I'm glad Jeff Baxter's been on the job all along.
Getting hooked on your own curiosity --on the treasure within you-- is a lost art that needs to be recovered. It's an American art, I believe. And dedicating it to the good of humanity is the best offering ever, no matter the distant reward. Can you hear me, America? Jeff Baxter is America's Bell ringing. Listen!
I am glad for Jeff Baxter. I thank him for who he is. Godspeed, my man.
Posted by Jerome at May 27, 2005 08:30 PM | TrackBack