Considered one of the finest guitarists in the history of rock, Jeff Beck, who has passed away at the age of 78, was known for leaping between genres, recording music that incorporated rock, jazz fusion, the blues and hard rock.
During the ’60s and ’70s his groundbreaking style of playing added an adventurous note to his work with the Yardbirds as well as his own bands, especially The Jeff Beck Group, which featured Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood.
The man will be remembered for playing the Fender Stratocaster with the amps turned way up. He had as contemporaries legends like Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix. In the process of pioneering jazz-rock, experimenting with fuzz and distortion effects, and leading the way for heavier subgenres, Beck had his fingers and thumbs famously insured for £7 million. The British musician was an eighttime Grammy winner, recipient of the Ivor Novello for outstanding contribution to British music and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame both as a solo artiste and as a member of the Yardbirds.
When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame the second time in 2009, Beck said: “I play the way I do because it allows me to come up with the sickest sounds possible.”
The early days
The career trajectory of Beck is an envious one. In 1965 he joined the Yardbirds to replace none other than another guitar legend, Eric Clapton. The group became a defining act in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. He will be remembered for his leads on songs like Shapes of Things and Over Under Sideways Down.
A few years later he came up with his own band, The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart, who was on the verge of breaking into a successful solo career, and Ron Wood, who went on to have a successful career first in The Faces and then the Rolling Stones. Beck’s 1968 album, Truth, inspired another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, who went on to found Led Zeppelin.
It would be remiss to not mention his solo recording Beck’s Bolero. It was an epic instrumental track recorded in 1966 with future Led Zeppelin musicians John Paul Jones and Page, as well as pianist Nicky Hopkins and drummer Keith Moon of the Who. The track went on to feature on his album, Truth, which featured his backing band the Jeff Beck Group.
He took a new direction by going solo and the 1975 album, Blow by Blow, became an essential ingredient for the era’s fusion movement. The album became a Billboard Top 5 and sold a million or more copies.
“I don’t care about the rules. In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I’m not doing my job properly,” he once said.
Not working with a leadw singer
Beck was also a musician whose discography didn’t achieve the sales figures of those of Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix. Only two of his albums achieved platinum status in the US — Wired, his 1976 follow-up to Blow by Blow.
“Part of the reason is never having attempted to get into mainstream pop, rock or heavy metal or anything like that. Shutting those doors means you’ve only got a limited space to squeeze through,” he told the arts website Elsewhere in 2009.
Perhaps Beck’s biggest problem was that he often worked without a lead singer. The Jeff Beck Group was about to become a sensation and had an invitation to play at vocalists for his Flash album, on which Rod Stewart sang a version of Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready, the video of which became a sensation on MTV. In the 1990s, he did a lot of session work, offering solos on albums by Jon Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, Kate Bush, Tina Turner and others.
In 2010, came his album Emotion & Commotion, which included Puccini’s Nessun Dorma. The track won a Grammy, and the album reached number 11 on Billboard. His most recent collaboration was for an album, titled 18, with the actor and guitarist Johnny Depp.
Born Geoffrey Arnold Beck on June 24, 1944, in South London, it was his mother (Ethel Beck) who “forced” him to play piano two hours a day when he was a boy. He warmed up to the electric guitar after hearing Les Paul’s work and was later drawn to the work of Cliff Gallup and the British player Lonnie Mack.