Posted on 10/15/2018 11:09:11 AM PDT by billorites
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter has earned eight platinum records in a music career that started in the 1960s, and he has received numerous security clearances and contracting jobs since the 1980s as a self-taught expert on missile-defense and counterterrorism.
Baxter was one of many luminaries at the White House on Thursday to watch President Donald Trump sign the Music Modernization Act, which reforms copyright laws.
Unlike every other musician in the room, including Kid Rock, Baxter has built a successful second career as a defense consultant.
Baxter dropped out of college in Boston in 1969 to join a short-lived psychedelic-rock band. After that, he moved to California and become one of the original six members of Steely Dan, which he left in 1974 to join the Doobie Brothers, which he left in 1979.
Baxter has said he "fell into his second profession almost by accident."
While living in California in the 1970s, Baxter helped a neighbor dig out their house after a mudslide.
"Afterward, he invited me into his study and I saw all these pictures of airplanes and missiles on the wall — it turned out he was one of the guys who had invented the Sidewinder missile," Baxter said in a 2013 interview. "As a gift for helping him clean out his house he gave me a subscription to Aviation Week and to Jane's Defense. It was amazing."
Baxter found the technical aspects of music and of defense, particularly missile defense, coincided.
"Technology is really neutral. It's just a question of application," he told MTV in 2001. "For instance, if TRW came up with a new data compression algorithms for their spy satellites, I could use that same information and apply it for a musical instrument or a hard disc recording unit. So it was just a natural progression."
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Hedy, I think. She and her husband were brilliant and patriotic.
Our torpedoes were very poor, and easily scramgled, hence their inspiration, as I recall.
Midway was an early disaster partly because our torpedoes performed poorly.
Music is Math.
I am an NT with a background in mathematics and science.
I took up music at 44, got the top grade, and was asked to tutor students in theory. I did not know what exactly a chord was when I started, but my test average was 99%. My teacher was amazed, but I saw it as reasonable:
Music is Math.
The trick is to pick equations that look and sound nice (or cool). Most serial/atonal stuff simply does not sound nice or cool to ordinary Homo sapiens. The fault is not in them, but in the composition.
“Thats right I forgot about him. Now the rappers also have...........nevermind.”
Several have had brief, but productive careers in ballistics testing.
yes sadly those types of incidents seem to be all too common in the rap world.
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