We often hear about the meticulous preparations session players put in to make sure that they are ready when the red light goes on, but every now and then they have got to shoot from the hip and live in the moment, and Jeff “Skunk” Baxter’s gig on Donna Summer’s 1979 mega-hit Hot Stuff was one of them, with Baxter revealing that he nailed in one take with a $35 electric guitar from the bargain bucket at Guitar Center.
Written by Pete Bellotte, Harold Faltermeyer, and Keith Forsey, Hot Stuff was the big one for the Queen of Disco; a number one in the US, a dance-floor stable in clubs as the disco revolution gripped pop culture. And Baxter’s involvement in it all is quite the tale.
Baxter wasn’t the only session ace on the track. He was joined by Paul Jackson Jr. Baxter handled the solo and “some of the rhythm parts” but in a recent YouTube interview with Mason Marangella, CEO of Vertex Effects, he admits that he nearly missed out on the gig entirely when his assistant forgot to pass on the message that Giorgio Moroder had called looking for him.
Luckily, Baxter got the message and returned Moroder’s call. What kind of music was it? Disco, said Moroder. Stylistically, this was not a handbrake turn for Baxter. In fact, it was quite the opposite, and that was the problem. He and Jay Graydon had been tracking a lot of disco. Another disco gig didn’t exactly sound so interesting in the grand scheme of things.
“It was getting to the point – not to be snotty about it – but Jay and I would get together on a Monday and decide what riff we were going to play,” says Baxter. “For the whole week! To us it was all the same. I said, ‘Call Jay.’”
Moroder did call Graydon. But Graydon told Moroder to call Skunk. He did. Back came the offer. Ultimately, it would be an offer that Baxter would accept on one condition.
“So I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do the session, but I mean there are a million guitar players that can do this,” he says. “If you want something different then I am happy to do it. But I’d like to have some space. I hadn’t even heard it [the track]. And he said, ‘Play whatever you want.’ Because I think what he was trying to do – which she did, because you can see it from the results – was he wanted to move Donna into more of a rock thing.”
There was another problem and it was major. Baxter was moving house and all of his gear was were stuck in transit. He and no guitars, and needed one for the session.
“I went down to Guitar Center,” says Baxter. “Paul Herman was the manager, the one down in Hollywood. I said, ‘Paul, I need a guitar. Now! So he laughed. He pointed to a box in the middle of the store. It had a box, ‘Buy me, 25 bucks!’ and it had a bunch of weird guitars in it. It had a Burns Baby Bison, with five regular tuning pegs and somebody put a Gibson tuning peg on it.”
“And so I picked it up, plugged in and played it. ‘Okay, fine.’ I gave him 35 bucks, bought a six-pack of Bud, went down to Rusk Studios, and they played me the song and I said, ‘Fine.’ There was a Deluxe Reverb already there, turned everything up to 10, plugged the guitar in and said, ‘Roll tape!’ And that was it. It was one take.”
And the rest is history. The track became a glitter-ball anthem. Moroder ultimately secured the services of Graydon for the album. Donna Summer won a Grammy for the track and Bad Girls cemented her place on the pantheon of disco greats.
Chalk it up as another good day at the officer for Mr Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, and that Burns Baby Bison turned out to be quite the investment, showing just what you can do with a cheap electric guitar, a dimed tube amp, and a great song to work with.
Check out the full interview with Baxter above, and subscribe to the Vertex Effects YouTube channel for more.
