LIFE OF A PION EER
From the rebellious square peg of Swinging London to the still-questing elder statesman of the post-millennium, Jeff Beck reimagined the electric guitar as a magic wand in a career that could be both spellbinding and maddening
Among the golden generation of British guitarists who rose in the sweatbox clubs of 60s London, Jeff Beck was the great magician and lifelong contrarian. While peers such as Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page certainly boasted an eyepopping virtuosity and knack for melody, their playing was not unfathomable but squarely rooted in the American blues, revving up its stock vocabulary of slides, bends and pentatonics.
Beck could match his circuitmates at these traditional Delta-derived shapes: revisit such masterclasses as Steeled Blues or Going Down. But while most Brit‑boomers approached their work with a scholarly deference, their scarecrow-haired contemporary had a renegade streak. “If I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song,” Beck once reasoned, “then I’m not doing my job properly.”
On a good night, when Beck played guitar, all tactile fingers and smeared notes, the instrument became something else – a lightning rod for otherworldly tones and textures, a multi-tool for sonic mischief the like of which only Hendrix was conjuring in that fertile period.
Over time, his technique would become a tapestry almost impossible to unpick. A flick of the fingers, a shiver of whammy bar, a swell from his Strat volume dials that evoked whale song.
“It was like, ‘What’s he playing?’” remembers Phil Collen of Def Leppard. “It was like the first time you heard Eddie Van Halen tapping. Jeff Beck was like that his whole life.”
And while that same wave of 60s guitar gods – or at least, those who lived – would rapidly eclipse Beck in fame, fortune and sales figures, leaving their old friend to be occasionally cast as rock’s great underachiever, all acknowledged his touch was the unattainable gold standard and his discography the boldest in their class.
“The six-stringed warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions,” wrote Beck’s former Yardbirds bandmate, Jimmy Page, as black news broke of the 78-year-old’s sudden death from bacterial meningitis. “His technique unique. His imagination apparently limitless. Jeff, I will miss you along with your millions of fans.”
Born in South London on 24 June 1944, Geoffrey Arnold Beck had his antennae up. Cliff Gallup and Chet Atkins inspired his weave of top-line melody and thumbed bass, while BB King was another early favourite, the bluesman’s eerie ‘one-note’ style discernible in future Beck instrumentals like Where Were You. But it says much that a defining formative influence was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s 1951 take on How High The Moon, the British pre-teen entranced by its multi-tracked manipulations. “At six years old, everything is new and exciting,” he reflected, “but that never left me, the sound of that.”
Having built his first cigar-box guitars, then fast-talked hire purchase companies into leasing him the real thing, Beck’s studies at Wimbledon College Of Art bled into shifts with Screaming Lord Sutch and assorted nearlymen – The Nightshift, the Rumbles, the Tridents – before 1965 saw him handed the poisoned chalice of replacing Clapton in The Yardbirds.
Beck didn’t blink. Having wiped his illustrious forebear from the fans’ memories (“At The Marquee, I showed them what was what and got a standing ovation”), the newcomer set about bending The Yardbirds to his vision, introducing the feedback and fuzz of Stroll On and the Tone Bender-driven sitar emulation on Heart Full Of Soul. Yet the gear was moot. “With Jeff, it’s all in his fingers,” Clapton once said, and with the guitarist eschewing a plectrum, that was literally true. As an aside, those same digits would latterly be insured for £7 million after Beck chopped off the tip of his index finger while making a stew.
Remarkably, Beck’s maverick tendencies dovetailed with
The Yardbirds’ most successful commercial spell. But if things
“The six-stringed warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions” JIMMY PAGE
Beck became the so-called ‘guitarist’s guitarist’: a term that spoke of the reverence he commanded among fellow musicians
were finally going his way, the momentum didn’t last, as in the first of many snubbed career opportunities, the guitarist was fired – or perhaps “threw my towel in” – while the band’s bus crossed America.
There followed an unsatisfactory stretch under producer Mickie Most, whose remodelling of Beck as a pop star brought a UK hit but a despised legacy in the form of 1967’s Hi Ho Silver Lining. While it’s likely the song that has soundtracked most TV montages upon the guitarist’s death, Beck’s own assessment was that its ubiquity was “like having a pink toilet seat hanging around my neck for the rest of my fucking life”.
Fortunately, Beck was on the brink of what many consider his best work, recruiting Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood to flank him in The Jeff Beck Group and craft the heavy blues and nascent psychedelia of 1968’s Truth. Much of Beck’s greatest gold can be panned here and on 1969’s sequel Beck-Ola – respectively, revisit the wah-fattened take on Willie Dixon’s I Ain’t Superstitious and the rollicking power-blues stomp of Spanish Boots.
But the personnel scattered shortly after Beck fired Wood and ducked the chance to play Woodstock. “Apparently, he’d got wind from somewhere of a rumour, which turned out to be false, that his missus was having an affair with the gardener,” wrote Stewart, “so he was quite keen to go home.”
It was typical of an artist who always took the path of most resistance – and frustrating to think where Beck’s career might have flown with Stewart remaining his counterpoint on vocals. Likewise, had the guitarist played his cards differently, he could have joined The Rolling Stones in the mid-70s but chose instead to reject the stadium league in favour of the freeform joy he had witnessed on tour with John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra.
“It was the refinement of McLaughlin that presented a way out for me,” he told the
New Statesman. “Arriving at the soundcheck and watching him and the sax player trading solos, I thought, ‘This is me.’ He has such knowledge of scales, and he tells the story within the scale. Playing with McLaughlin and then The Stones – dang, dang, dang – can you imagine?”
While his accountant presumably howled, Beck’s single-mindedness paid off with 1975’s George Martin-produced Blow By Blow: an instrumental masterpiece of jazztinged adventurism, whose riches included the driving Freeway Jam, the talk box reboot of The Beatles’
She’s A Woman, and the keening leads of Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers. “Eric said to me, ‘I’m telling you, if you don’t sing, it’s going to be tough,’” recalled Beck of an album that reached US No 4. “And it was tough. But then, I can turn around and say, ‘ Blow By Blow, put that in your pipe and smoke it, mate.’”
From there, Beck seemed emboldened, and while his contemporaries softened into autopilot blues or curatorship of past glories, the guitarist’s path as a recording artist became impossible to plot. His was a discography that could veer from 1973’s dirtbox jam
Superstition with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, through 1985’s pop-leaning Flash album (helmed by Nile Rodgers) to the techno bent of 1999’s Who Else!. And all spiced with guest spots that segued from the astonishing slide break on Jon Bon Jovi’s Blaze Of Glory to Roger Waters’ Amused To Death album.
When Beck played guitar, the instrument became a lightning rod for otherworldly tones and textures, a multi-tool for sonic mischief
“I still don’t know how he does it,” said the former Pink Floyd bassist. “He’s incredibly technically gifted in ways the rest of us can’t even begin to think about.”
Along the way, as it dawned that Beck would never be a megastar, he fell instead into his status as the so-called ‘guitarist’s guitarist’: a term that spoke of the reverence he commanded among fellow musicians and hinted at his disinterest in the big-time. From Tony Iommi (“There will never be another”) to Steve Hackett (“He made the electric guitar sing”), the old guard were unanimous in their praise upon Beck’s passing.
It’s notable, though, that from Johnny Marr to Jack White, the wider tributes spoke of a musician with a cross-generational thumbprint. “To say we are all devastated is an understatement,” wrote Joe Bonamassa. “I simply cannot get my head around it. The greatest that ever touched a guitar.”
Like any genius, Beck could be frustrating. He ditched genres and disbanded line-ups when there was gas left in the tank. His weakest instrumentals veered into muzak, while on stage, he could be inconsistent. “Beck takes a chance every night,” Ritchie Blackmore once noted. “Sometimes he’s absolutely useless and you wonder why he’s got a name. Other times he pulls things off that sound like nothing you’ve heard before.”
Yet it’s the nights of wonder that we’ll remember. To witness Beck at full flight was to see a musician at one with his instrument in a state of pure expression. And while the mainstream media’s obituaries will be more lavish when the multi-platinum galacticos of the 60s check out, the connoisseurs know the death of Jeff Beck marks the exit of an all-time giant.
“Jeff was wild, he was unquantifiable and extraordinarily difficult to understand, but one of the greatest guitar geniuses the world has ever seen and will ever see,” said Brian May in a video tribute. “He brought an amazing voice to rock music which will never, ever be emulated or equalled.”
To witness Jeff Beck at full flight was to see a musician at one with his instrument in a state of pure expression