Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter recalls the time Dolly Parton asked for “fireworks” on a guitar solo: “She said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’”
With decades of session work under his belt, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter is no stranger to unusual requests in the studio. The guitarist, best known for his work with Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, recently recalled one particularly colourful brief from country legend Dolly Parton, who passed away last week at the age of 80.
Speaking to Guitar Player, Baxter looks back on the session for Parton’s 1978 song Baby, I’m Burnin’, where she asked him for “fireworks” on a guitar solo.
READ MORE: Jeff “Skunk” Baxter on surviving the excess of the ’70s: “There was always something in the back of my mind that scared me. I didn’t want to lose my chops”
“Dolly Parton asked me to make fireworks one time,” he says. “I was working with my Roland guitar synthesizer, and she said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’”
“So I thought about it for a second, and then with one hand I played as many notes as I could while the other hand was working the Roland’s [pitch] transposer, slapping it back up and down,” Baxter recalls. “She was going, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s it. Whee!’”
As unusual as the request might sound, Baxter says this is simply part of being a session player. Artists don’t always explain what they want in technical terms, so it’s often up to him to work out what an abstract or non-musical description actually means in guitar terms – and turn it into something that works on the record.
“Sometimes you get requests like, ‘Can you make it more green?’ or, ‘I need it to ooomph more,’” he says. “So you say, ‘Okay,’ and think about all the times you’ve ever done sessions and people have said to you, ‘Boy, that really ooomphs,’ or ‘That sounds really green,’ and you start from there.”
“There have been a couple of dates like that. I enjoy it,” Baxter continues. “I get a lot of calls for steel guitar where they say, ‘Can you make it not sound like a steel guitar?’ That’s always a request. They want something different. They want a sound that has the fluidity of the steel guitar but doesn’t sound like Six Days on the Road.”
The post Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter recalls the time Dolly Parton asked for “fireworks” on a guitar solo: “She said, ‘Can you just make it, like, reds and greens and sparkles?’” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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