#secretagent

My roommate accidentally convinced our entire apartment building that he was a government agent because he didn’t know how to end conversations normally.

It started because he ordered a shredder.

That’s it.

Just a regular office shredder from Amazon.

But the delivery guy asked, “What do you need this for?”

And instead of saying “old bank statements” like a civilian, my roommate pauses for two full seconds and goes, “Can’t really discuss that.”

Why would you say that.

Now the delivery guy looks nervous. My roommate notices the nervousness. And instead of correcting himself, he doubles down because apparently social anxiety turns him into a Batman villain.

He leans closer and says: “Appreciate your discretion.”

The delivery guy left like he had just transported nuclear launch codes.

After that, weird things started happening.

Neighbors became oddly respectful. People stopped asking him dumb small-talk questions in the elevator. One old man saluted him once.

At first we thought it was coincidence.

Then our downstairs neighbor knocks on our door and quietly asks, “Are we safe?”

My roommate, who is eating cereal at the time, just stares at him and says: “For now.”

FOR NOW???

The neighbor looked like he was about to evacuate his family immediately.

Turns out the delivery guy had apparently told multiple people in the building that “federal people” were living on the third floor.

And honestly my roommate’s lifestyle was NOT helping.

He leaves the apartment at random hours. Owns three identical black jackets. Rarely explains where he’s going. Has terrible posture but walks fast enough to seem important.

One time he came home carrying a locked briefcase.

Do you know what was inside?

A sandwich.

But nobody else knew that. The paranoia escalated when building management installed new security cameras and my roommate casually muttered, “About time.”

Now everybody thinks he requested surveillance upgrades.

Then came the incident with Apartment 4B.

There was a huge screaming argument downstairs around midnight. Doors slamming. People yelling. Somebody crying.

The whole building could hear it.

My roommate walks into the hallway, listens for ten seconds, then calmly says: “They’re moving earlier than expected.”

EARLIER THAN WHAT??

A woman across the hall literally gasped.

The next morning 4B had moved out unexpectedly because apparently they were already behind on rent and the fight ended the relationship.

But now the building believes my roommate orchestrated a covert extraction.

People started treating him like some kind of undercover protector.

Neighbors would randomly update him on “suspicious activity.”

One guy whispered: “There’s a blue Honda that keeps circling the block.”

My roommate nodded and wrote something down.

Do you know what he wrote?

“Buy oat milk.”

But the guy saw the note-taking and immediately went, “Knew it.”

Then management offered him a free parking spot “for operational convenience.”

HE TOOK IT. At this point I asked him why he kept feeding the delusion instead of stopping it.

And he said something I’ll never forget: “It’s gone too far to explain naturally.”

Which somehow made him sound EVEN MORE like a spy.

Then things became catastrophic.

A package got delivered to the wrong apartment and went missing.

Management called a building meeting about “recent security concerns.”

In the middle of the meeting, somebody actually turned toward my roommate and asked: “What do you think we should do?”

This idiot crosses his arms and says: “Keep communication limited. Don’t panic.”

The room nodded collectively.

I was watching a man fail upward into the CIA.

Then an actual police officer showed up later that week because somebody reported “possible federal surveillance activity.” We thought the game was over.

Don’t ask guitarist/producer Jeff Baxter how he got his nickname, ‘Skunk’. He won’t ever tell you. It's not that he doesn't like the name, he just doesn’t want to tell. It’s his secret to keep and he can definitely keep a secret just ask the US Navy

One day, roughly 45 years ago, I was looking at the back of The Best of the Doobies album. Definitely one of the stellar greatest hits collections in American pop music history. On the back of the album is a typical group picture. It’s the 1976 version of the Doobies and one of the members stuck out to my wise-ass teenage mind. I kidded my sister’s boyfriend, Gary, about the guy at the left end of the picture, with the snakeskin cowboy boots. “What kind of boots are THOSE?” “And those tight pants?” “This guy looks like a freak,” my inexperience on full display. 

Gary tells me, “If you are as badass as Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, you can wear whatever you want.” I was a Doobie Brothers fan at the time, everyone was. But I was unaware of Jeff Baxter and his history. In 1976 it was rare to see a rock band on TV so I hadn't caught him in action yet.

Seated?

I did eventually catch the Doobies on TV and noticed Baxter because he performed while seated on a stool. He had headphones and dark sunglasses on. His long hair and walrus mustache flowed as he jammed flawlessly. He was uniquely cool. It is said that Jim Henson, of Muppet fame, designed a rocker puppet based on Jeff’s look to play along with Animal! The Muppet's name is Floyd.

I was unaware that I had already heard Jeff Baxter's guitar work many times on the radio. Baxter was a founding member of Steely Dan. Now it was all making sense. Again it was Gary who turned me on to a song called “Peg” by Steely Dan. My rock and roll heart wasn’t ready for Steely Dan at that time. It was years later that my appreciation came for these masters.  Baxter’s stint in Steely Dan ended up being very advantageous for the Doobie Brothers. It was through Steely Dan that Baxter met a singer/keyboard player named Michael McDonald. Baxter recommended McDonald to the Doobies when leader Tom Johnston left the group. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpaIfCY79gc One of the most memorable Doobie TV performances around this time  is from Soundstage

Musical Success

The addition of McDonald to the Doobie Brothers brought a string of hit records and a new sound. Thanks to Baxter’s recommendation, the band had new life! Baxter was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 as a member of the Doobies. Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s music career is considered a smashing success!  At 75 years old, he can look back and see evidence of his greatness all over music. As a bandmate, a session player or producer, Baxter did it all! However his music career is NOT the story I want to tell. 

The fascinating story of Jeff "Skunk" Baxter is his life OUTSIDE of the music business. The impetus for this post is my discovery of Baxter’s first solo album Speed of Heat, released in 2022 (it is extraordinary, by the way). This spurred me to, once and for all, get to the bottom of Baxter’s “day jobs”.  Actually he has multiple day jobs as a consultant on ballistic missiles systems and counterterrorism among other ‘secret agent’ duties. This fact has confused me ever since I heard it mentioned years ago.  Once I learned about Baxter’s early life and achievements, it became apparent, almost destined, that he would become much more than a rock star. From starting classical piano lessons at five to learning Spanish at age 9, after his family moved to Mexico City, the young Baxter was a prodigy. This is about the time a young ‘skunk’ first picked up a guitar.  Baxter was and continues to be an eager lifelong student with an insatiable appetite for learning. 

The Birth Of A Genius

When he was just 10 years old, he was playing in a little Mexican rock and roll combo. It was 1958, rock and roll was in it’s infancy but the young Baxter was absorbing all the music. He was especially fond of surf-rock pioneers, The Ventures. (Baxter’s amazing life came full circle when he produced a Ventures record). His love of the guitar and natural curiosity caused him, like many guitar-heads, to take apart his guitar and learn how it worked. This helped him later in his teens when he began working part-time in Manhattan for legendary guitar maker Dan Armstrong.

The Birth Of A Musician

The young, brilliant Jeff Baxter turned to music full time after he spent a year in New England at the University’s School of Communication. He joined a psychedelic folk-rock band Ultimate Spinach in 1968. Two years later his guitar playing was featured on a recording by Tim Buckley and Linda Hoover that recently resurfaced. This song was written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. These two future Steely Dan founders were impressed with Baxter’s guitar chops. After a move to Los Angeles, Steely Dan was born with Baxter onboard on guitar. That debut album “Can’t Buy a Thrill” drew a lot of attention. Scoring Baxter many, many jobs as a studio musician. In 1974, he left Steely Dan for the Doobies where he remained until 1979.

Finally...the story

Somewhere around this time is when our story takes a severe turn. Baxter was helping a neighbor in Los Angeles dig out from a mudslide. This neighbor was a retired engineer who helped design the Sidewinder missile for the US Navy. As a thank you for his mudslinging, this neighbor gifted Baxter subscriptions to Aviation Week and Janes Defense. Baxter took to these publications and found his interests pointing to missile defense systems. This began a deep-dive that lasted years and resulted in Baxter writing a paper proposing a conversion of the military’s Aegis plane defense program. How does a musician, no matter how brilliant, go from playing and producing music to designing a missile defense system?

CDs and Defense Missiles

It was the early 1980s and the music industry was changing from analog to digital! A producer with the curiosity of “Skunk” would have learned all he could about digital compression and how to manipulate it. His deep-dive into the new technology opened up a new world and stimulated him to imagine applying the technology to other scenarios.

He married this knowledge with what he was studying in defense missile systems and the result was a technical paper. Baxter shared the paper with a California congressman friend of his, Dana Rohrabacher, who shared it with the chair of the House Military Research and Development Subcommittee. This must have made an impact because in 1995 Baxter was nominated to chair the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense.

Many Jobs

The rocker who sits and plays beautifully, whose likeness is borrowed by a Muppet, is indeed working for the government and he CANNOT discuss any of it with you. This was only the beginning for ‘Secret Agent” Skunk. The government then asked Baxter to lead enemy forces in war game simulations. When pressed, Baxter will reveal his other affiliations over the years.  He is a consultant for the Global Security Sector of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a member of the Director’s Strategic Red Team at MIT Lincoln Laboratories and a Senior Thinker for the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition. He is also the chairman of the Civilian Advisory Board for Ballistic Missile Defense for the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies.

Rebecca Sapp  Getty Images for The Recording Academy

More Jobs

In between guitar solos, Hall of Fame Inductions and winning 2 Grammys, Baxter has worked as a consultant for Northrop-Grumman, Science Applications International Corporation, Ball Aerospace, General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Photon Research, General Dynamics Information Technologies, and other companies. He is also under contract with the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense among others. 

A secretive coyote agent with high-tech gadgets on a mission

Aston Martin DB5 Burgundy

Name: Andrea [redacted]

Nationality: Eastern European [???]

Gender: female

Date of birth: unclear; date 19XX, claims at least 3 times a year that it's her birthday; looks in her early 20s

Family: Unknown, probably dead

Eye color: green

Hair: wavy, long, brunette

Skin: fair

Height: 169 cm

Body: hourglass and athletic

Powers: regeneration, enhanced strength, endurance and reflexes

Former agent of the terrorist organization [redacted] from 1955 until 1985 (defected in June 1985), now serving the European Union International Security and Counter-terrorism unit. Secret, unofficial member of Global Defenders. The role in the team was [redacted].

Lots of [redacted] from experimentation. Not a team player.

Best asset in covert operations, but she has a messy manner of conduct. Very skilled in most types of physical combat and weapons

A pangolin in a spy thriller, embarking on covert missions