Jeff Beck was a supremely talented guitarist with a restless soul. He never stayed in one musical place very long, whether it was with the Yardbirds, Rod Stewart, or Beck, Bogart & Appice. Because of a nomadic career that included stretches of inactivity, it hasn’t always been easy to be a fan of Jeff Beck.
I thought about this after receiving several calls from younger friends about the guitarist’s death. Each expressed guilt for not knowing his work better. I told them it wasn’t their fault; Jeff Beck was someone you had to search out. As brilliant of a guitarist as he was, his album releases were infrequent, and he didn’t often tour the states. His reputation was solid, but few encountered his music with regularity.
I first became aware of Jeff Beck through old Yardbird albums. Even by the early 1970s, people respected that band’s history, but you rarely heard their music. A couple of compilations led to my acquiring their complete catalog at used record shops. It’s not all good, but the high points were very high. I listened to these records, not always sure which guitarist was in the Yardbirds at any given time. “Jeff’s Boogie” was an exception, with the guitarist namechecking himself in the song’s title. I felt ultra-hip for recognizing this instrumental when a local band played it at a high school dance.
Jeff Beck long ago achieved musician sainthood for being one of the three influential guitarists that came out of the Yardbirds, the other two being Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton. But while Page took the ashes of the Yardbirds and turned them into Led Zeppelin, and Clapton first gave John Mayall a career and then formed Cream, Beck never had a convenient hook for rock journalists to summarize.
Beck’s first post Yardbirds band boasted “vocals extraordinaire” by Rod Stewart. The albums Truth and Beck-Ola are great records for fans of both Beck and Stewart. But that group didn’t last. Half the line-up left to join what would become the Faces. Jeff Beck formed another group and put out increasingly less successful records. This band also didn’t work out.
He later teamed with the rhythm section of Vanilla Fudge to form Beck, Bogart, & Appice. Even Beck would later say that the musicians in this trio were not a particularly good fit. They put out one studio album, toured, released a live album available only in Japan, and broke up. Bogart and Appice reformed Vanilla Fudge and Jeff Beck dropped out of sight.
By the mid-1970s, few were talking about Beck. Everybody was talking about Page’s Led Zeppelin, while Clapton hit No. 1 with “I Shot the Sheriff.” Then in 1975, with no fanfare, Jeff Beck’s album Blow by Blow was released. It was a remarkable, completely instrumental record. Something unheard of for a rock musician. It was also unusual because, in my neighborhood, both rock and jazz enthusiasts loved it. Blow by Blow included two new Stevie Wonder songs – at a time when Wonder was hot! Beck’s guitar often rocked but was just as often subtle. The playing was endlessly nuanced, and his intricate guitar work stood up to repeated and close listening. George Martin produced the sound, and Blow by Blow remains a landmark record.
It was followed by the studio album Wired and a live record with the Jan Hammer Group. For me, neither had the charm nor majesty of Blow by Blow. After this, Beck retreated from the public eye and many, including me, again lost track of him. He explained once that his intense approach to the guitar made it physically impossible for him to play in that style every night. As such, normal touring schedules did not appeal to him.
One of my favorite memories of Beck involves a guitar duel with Les Paul. In the early 1980s, both men were emerging from periods of career silence. They now shared the stage at a televised music festival. After one particularly fiery exchange that Jeff Beck had clearly won, Les Paul looked at his jousting partner for a moment and then simply reached over and unplugged the cord from Beck’s guitar. The crowd, and Jeff Beck, loved it.
My other memory comes from 30 years later. I only saw Jeff Beck perform once, in October 2013, on an unexpected double bill with Brian Wilson Both Beck and Wilson played full length sets. Beck did a variety of his own numbers that night, like “Big Block” and “You Never Know.” He also performed Jimi Hendrix’s “Little Wing” and Wonder’s “They Won’t Go When I Go.” There were lesser-known instrumentals, like the challenging “You Know You Know.” The two groups also played a few songs together, including “Surf’s Up” and “A Day in the Life.” They encored with “Danny Boy,” a song that we were told had special meaning for both performers.
This was a very good concert but, like all of us, I would have also liked to have seen Jeff Beck with the Yardbirds in 1966. However, as famous as the Yardbirds period of his career has become, Beck was only with that band for about a year. A very productive year it was, though, with Beck’s guitar featured on some of the groups best known songs—from the radio hits “Heart Full of Soul” and “Over Under Sideways Down” to the rave-ups “Lost Woman” and “Shapes of Things,” a song the guitarist would appropriate to start his own solo career.
In 1991, Beck received the box-set treatment with a three-disc package called Beckology. It does a solid job of summarizing the first 25 years of the artist’s music. This overview is now more than 30 years old. A few more good records would follow Beckology but, even so, since that 1991 retrospective Beck has released only five CDs of original material. That’s about one every six years — a leisurely pace for maintaining a career. But maybe this was no longer the goal. In 1993, he released the curious Crazy Legs, a tribute to Cliff Gallup, guitarist for Gene Vincent. I admire this heartfelt homage to a musical influence, but it’s still pretty obscure stuff.
Jeff Beck’s most recent album came out just last year and is perhaps even stranger. It’s a collection of cover songs with collaborator Johnny Depp. This duet project, called 18, was met with poor sales and worse reviews. It’s a rough way for one of the greatest guitarists of the rock era to go out, but one can always put on Blow by Blow and Truth. Play that record “at maximum volume,” as the cover demands. And just be glad we got as much great music from Jeff Beck as we did. Pick up Beckology for further proof.
Tom Wilmeth is a freelance writer who lives in Grafton, Wisconsin – former home of the Paramount Records label. He has a podcast called The Vinyl Approach, available on Spotify, and is the author of the book ‘Sound Bites: A Lifetime of Listening’ (Muleshoe Press, 2016), available on Amazon.
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