Jeff Beck, RIP

Photo by Raph_PH, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Of the three guitarists to come out of The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck let us in on who he was as a person most fully through his playing.

This is not to say that they didn’t share a basic ethos, which came out in their work in that band.

The thing to remember is that, for all of the detailed genealogies of steeped-in-legend British rockers, plotting their official moves from one ensemble to another, many of them knew each other from an early age. Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, grew up in close proximity to each other in greater London. Beck’s sister introduced him to Jimmy Page when both were in their early teenage years. It was a milieu. These guys rubbed shoulders at the jams organized by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, and at clubs catering to the new musical rumbles.

Beck seems to have had no doubt about his life path from the moment he heard “How High the Moon” by Les Paul and Mary Ford at age 6. He borrowed guitars to learn the instrument, and tried his hand at crafting homemade models out of cigar boxes.

He gained a professional foothold in the blues subset of the British Invasion with a band called The Tridents. Alas, there was not the kind of media- and teenybopper-fawning over blues bands that there was over Brit groups with a pop basis, so Beck was by no means a rich man when Jimmy Page recommended him to The Yardbirds in early 1965 as Clapton’s replacement. In fact, to hear Beck tell it, he couldn’t afford new guitar strings. The other lads in the group took him round to Carnaby Street for some fashionable attire.

Beck was the lead guitarist on the band’s string of radio hits in 1965 and 66. With each one, he served notice more unmistakably that British blues was going in a psychedelic direction. On “Heart Full of Soul,” he used the fuzz effect to emulate the sitar sound that producer Giorgio Gomelsky was after. Recording on “Shapes of Things” began at historic Chess studio in Chicago during a 1965 US tour, but Beck wasn’t able to achieve the guitar part he envisioned until January 1966 at Columbia studios in Los Angeles. It blew the minds of all who were present for its laying down. By now, artfully manipulated feedback was a permanent part of The Yardbirds’ sound.

Bear in mind that pioneers such as Beck had no precedent for the expansion of the guitar’s possibilities into the realms that they were now exploring. Also bear in mind that the musical boundaries were being thrown open even as other aspects of the British Invasion, and rock and pop more generally, were jarring sociocultural foundations as well. Just as we take feedback for granted as a guitar technique today, it requires some perspective to understand the battles that went on at Western dinner tables over hair length. Abrupt changes were underway on pretty much all levels of life. Western youth were rethinking such fundamentals as sex, war and race.

And it all happened at a dizzying pace.

A track recorded in the spring of 1966 lay dormant until inclusion on Beck’s first solo album in 1968. It was from an impromptu session featuring Beck, Page, Who drummer Keith Moon, session pianist Nicky Hopkins and bassist John Paul Jones. “Beck’s Bolero” is equal parts solemn, anthemic power, let-‘er-rip rocking out, and layers of guitar parts that range from lilt to thud to the most lysergic expressions on that instrument yet committed to tape.

By mid-1966, The Yardbirds could feel the ground shifting under their feet. Bassist Paul Samwell-Smith left (later emerging as a record producer) and Jimmy Page was brought in to replace him. It was soon decided that rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja should move to bass, and that Page and Beck should be twin lead guitarists. Singer Keith Relf’s fondness for beer was an issue. And Beck, who destroyed a guitar onstage during the group’s cameo performance at a London nightclub in the murder mystery Blow Up, became increasingly erratic, missing shows and tossing amps out of windows. He was finally given the heave-ho and the band continued for two more years as a quartet.

Beck, working with producer Mickie Most, formed the first iteration of The Jeff Beck Group, which included Hopkins and Rod Stewart on vocals. That lineup recorded two albums.

A word should be said here about changes going on at the time in British rock music. The Yardirds had given the go-ahead to a second wave of the Brit Invasion  to play with an ever-more thunderous rhythm section and and ever-harsher guitar tone. This would eventually lead to the birth of the heavy-metal genre, but in the immediately preceding musical moment, no one was trying to fit what he was doing into an established category. Again, this was the first time all this ground had been plowed.

From there, the solo career that continued until this week unfolded. It was interrupted in 1970 by a car crash that resulted in a skull fracture, but resumed robustly.

Beck was able to use his guitar to convey emotions in much the way that singers do. His instrumental take on a classic Motown tune, Rita Wright’s “I Can’t Give Back the Love I Feel For You,” is heavy and loud, yes, but he faithfully follows Wright’s plaintive vocal licks  in crafting his own rendition.  “Black Cat Moan,” from his short-lived venture with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, shows that he could be raw and simple without sacrificing musicality. His lines on his interpretation of the Lennon-McCartney gem “She’s A Woman” range from rapid-fire snaky flourishes to his languid treatment of the refrain, over a vaguely Caribbean groove set up by the band. On “Scatterbrain,” his gritted-teeth-this-is-how-you-play-the-goddamn-rock-guitar approach is juxtaposed with George Martin’s soaring string arrangements. More recently, his rendition of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” articulates that tune’s expression of yearning for a realm where nothing is left unresolved in a way that would surely make Dorothy proud.

Far more than Clapton, who traded in his blues-purist status, as well as that of a psychedelia alchemist, for a balance between guitar legend and singer of accessibly structured pop-rock, or Page, who revved up the Yardbirds’ basic formula into a thunderous blend of riffs with esoteric touches during the Led Zeppelin years, Jeff Beck has stated who he was with every lick he played. You get a sense of his own emotional states. It’s all he had to offer.

And just who was this man?

We know he got married at 19 to Patricia Brown, a union that lasted from 1963 to 1967. That would cover his entire time with The Tridents and The Yardbirds. It can’t have been easy for her to deal with the whirlwind of fame, and Beck’s increasing moodiness, leading to the breakdown that led to his ouster from The Yardbirds. Groupies became increasingly key to the scene, and it seems to have been the main arena for Beck’s relationships for years. He didn’t marry a second time until 2005, to Sandra Cash.

He appears to have been equal parts irascible, impish, nerdy and musically insatiable. This can be gleaned from what others have had to say about him, but is the essence of his work as an artist. He took that seriously, but himself, not so much. In 2009, upon his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he said he didn’t deserve it because he’d been “naughty all my life.”

But naughtiness wasn’t a pose. The bad-boy persona wasn’t a brand. It was just the way a bloke from Wallington whose imagination was set on fire by the guitar went through life. We can overlook the difficult edges of a guy who can make that plank sing like that, can’t we?