Jeff Beck, 78, virtuoso guitarist who was influence on generations
Jeff Beck, the British guitar virtuoso who rose to prominence in the 1960s as a member of the Yardbirds, a blues-rock powerhouse, then went on to an adventurous career as a genrebending solo artist, died Tuesday. He was 78.
A statement on his website said that Mr. Beck died ‘‘after suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis.’’ Additional details were not immediately available.
Widely considered one of the greatest guitarists in history, Mr. Beck masterly and seamlessly shifted among genres while recording albums that incorporated hard rock, heavy metal, jazz fusion, blues, funk, and electronic music. Playing a Fender Stratocaster with the amps turned way up, he helped unleash new sonic possibilities with the guitar, along with contemporaries Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, and his friend Jimmy Page.
‘‘I don’t care about the rules,’’ he once said. ‘‘In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I’m not doing my job properly.’’
During his brief tenure with the Yardbirds, Mr. Beck helped pioneer the use of feedback and distortion, developing a hardedged new sound that informed hits such as ‘‘Heart Full of Soul,’’ ‘‘Shapes of Things,’’ and ‘‘Over Under Sideways Down.’’ He later formed the Jeff Beck Group, a rotating group of musicians that initially included singer Rod Stewart and bassist-guitarist Ronnie Wood. That lineup was featured on his 1968 solo debut, ‘‘Truth,’’ which peaked at No. 15 in the United States and showcased his blues-influenced playing style, notably on a psychedelic cover of Willie Dixon’s ‘‘I Ain’t Superstitious.’’
‘‘At every break, Beck’s aqueous wah-wah tone makes his instrument sound like it’s talking — Chicago blues upgraded for the age of the bad trip,’’ Rolling Stone later wrote, including the song on its list of the 100 greatest guitar tracks.
Mr. Beck seemed to agree with that assessment, once telling the magazine: ‘‘That’s my whole thing, trying to explore the blues to the maximum, really. It’s in the blood.’’
Mr. Beck received eight Grammy Awards and was twice inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, first as a member of the Yardbirds in 1992 and then as a solo artist in 2009. But his standing as a brilliant and inventive musician was shadowed somewhat by his reputation as a moody egotist, a bandleader who struggled repeatedly to keep his bands together.
‘‘My problem is that I'm not very professional,’’ he said. ‘‘I get bored very quickly, then I get irritable.’’ After collaborating with Stewart, Mr. Beck worked with singers as varied as Macy Gray, Buddy Guy, Wynonna Judd, Cyndi Lauper, and Luciano Pavarotti. He also recorded predominantly instrumental albums such as ‘‘Blow by Blow’’ (1975), which reached No. 4 on the Billboard chart, and joined supergroups including Beck, Bogert & Appice, a power trio that featured bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice. In the 1980s he played with the Honeydrippers, a rock group that included Page and his former Led Zeppelin bandmate Robert Plant.
“Jeff could channel music from the ethereal,” Page tweeted Wednesday.
He also recorded with a 64piece orchestra, “Emotion & Commotion.”
“I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever, as long as you don’t have too much of it. It’s got to be in balance. I just saw Cirque du Soleil, and it struck me as complete organized chaos,” he told Guitar World in 2014. “If I could turn that into music, it’s not far away from what my ultimate goal would be, which is to delight people with chaos and beauty at the same time.”
Mr. Beck continued to make music, partnering with actor and musician Johnny Depp last year to record the studio album ‘‘18.’’ But he also fell out of the limelight while avoiding interviews and turning down corporate sponsorships, cherishing his privacy, and seeking to avoid distractions. When the creators of the video game ‘‘Guitar Hero’’ asked him to be an avatar in their musical world, he was uninterested, telling the New York Times in 2010: ‘‘Who wants to be in a kid’s game, like a toy shop?’’
Still, even when he faded from view, his fans and his peers never doubted his greatness.
‘‘Jeff Beck is the best guitar player on the planet,’’ Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry told the Times. ‘‘He is head, hands and feet above all the rest of us, with the kind of talent that appears only once every generation or two.’’
Geoffrey Arnold Beck was born in Wallington, south of London, on June 24, 1944. When he was 6, he heard electric guitarist Les Paul play ‘‘How High the Moon’’ on the radio and asked his mother to tell him the name of the instrument. ‘‘That’s for me,’’ he said in response.
His first break came via another young musician on the London scene, Page, who turned down an offer to join the Yardbirds as a replacement for Clapton, recommending Mr. Beck instead. Mr. Beck went on to perform on their only UK studio album, which became known as ‘‘Roger the Engineer’’ (1966). He lasted only 20 months with the band before moving on to work as a solo artist.
His talent and personality were such that members of Pink Floyd considered asking Mr. Beck to join the band, according to drummer Nick Mason’s 2004 memoir, ‘‘Inside Out,’’ but ‘‘none of us had the nerve to ask.’’
Survivors include his wife, Sandra Cash, whom he married in 2005.
Mr. Beck usually avoided stage banter while performing, letting his guitar do the talking. Seeing him at Madison Square Garden in 2016, Times music critic Ben Ratliff noted that ‘‘there was something particular, specialized and unusual about pretty much every individual sound he produced,’’ including ‘‘his ways of making a phrase sound physical, falling and rising and pulsating.’’
‘‘This is prestidigitation,’’ Ratliff added, ‘‘a kind of large-theater magic-show. (It feels very early-20th-century.) You wonder, ‘How did he do that?’ once, then twice, and then you have too many questions to keep track of: He’s got you.’’