Marty Friedman

I BECAME AWARE of Jeff Beck a bit late in the game through my dear friend Jason Becker, who was constantly extolling Jeff’s many virtues. Beck is a peerless role model, especially in the sense that his playing identifies him immediately, and it is always played with so much finesse and the depth of a master. I knew how much Jason admired Jeff, so I made the rather foolish decision to play a Jeff Beck song for Jason at one of the first Jason Becker tribute concerts in Chicago. Doing that sounds nice on paper, but Jeff’s touch is inimitable; you would have to literally live his life and go through his experiences to play like that. And then you would need a master’s degree in unique techniques that he invented and polished over the years.

Still, I love Jason, so after playing a bunch of my own songs, I threw caution to the wind and ended my set with “Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers.” The song itself is a relatively simple and familiar melody that many guys have played pretty well, as it is kind of a “guitar standard.” The thing is, the more simple a melody is when it’s in the hands of Jeff Beck, the more exponentially difficult it becomes for others to interpret on the same instrument — because the feelings, inflections and emotions in the original version are Jeff’s and Jeff’s alone. The bill was full of super guitar players, including Eddie Van Halen, who was to follow my set. Imagine the tremendous stupidity (or balls... but probably leaning toward stupidity) I must have had to play a Jeff Beck song in front of Eddie Van Halen... and just before his set, no less. So, I played the song and survived it; maybe it was passable at best. Most likely, it just plain sucked. I am pretty sure it was the latter.

My point here is to point out just what an extremely unique and special identity Jeff Beck is and how playing his music further inspired me to try to carve out my own musical road. I’m not the only one Jeff inspired in this way. There might be something in the fact that when many of us tried to play some of Jeff’s material, we just gave up and sat there in wonder, thinking, “Who am I kidding? I’ll never be able to play like that.” I’m sure we have Jeff to thank for a lot of us taking inventory of what we could do on our own.