# Remembering of Jeff Beck, guitarist with a chapter in Blues – Rock history: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2023/02/02/jeff-beck-%d5%a3uitarist-with-a-chapter-in-blues-rock-history-video-photos/
- Published: 2023-02-02T00:04:09+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**His playing with the Yardbirds and as leader of his own bands brought a sense 
of adventure to their groundbreaking recordings.**

![A black and white photo of a long-haired young man holding an electric guitar.](
https://i0.wp.com/static01.nyt.com/images/2023/01/12/obituaries/11Beck1-print1/11Beck1-
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Jeff Beck performing in 1969. He was one of the most influential guitarists in rock
history.Credit…David Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images

Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history,
died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall, a rural estate in southern
England. He was 78.

The cause was bacterial meningitis, Melissa Dragich, his publicist, said.

During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his
own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make
the recordings by those groups groundbreaking.

In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton,
the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues
movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things”
and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped
signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution.

Three years later, when Mr. Beck formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck
Group — along with Rod Stewart, a little-known singer at the time, and the equally
obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for
heavy metal. Specifically, the band’s 1968 debut, “Truth,” provided a blueprint 
that another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, drew on to 
found Led Zeppelin several months later.

In 1975, when Mr. Beck began his solo career with the “Blow by Blow” album, he reconfigured
the essential formula of that era’s fusion movement, tipping the balance of its 
influences from jazz to rock and funk, in the process creating a sound that was 
both startlingly new and highly successful. “Blow by Blow” became a Billboard Top
5 and, selling a million or more copies, a platinum hit.

Along the way, Mr. Beck helped either pioneer or amplify important technical innovations
on his instrument. He elaborated the use of distortion and feedback effects, earlier
explored by Pete Townshend; intensified the effect of bending notes on the guitar;
and widened the range of expression that could be coaxed from devices attached to
the guitar like the whammy bar.

Drawing on such techniques, Mr. Beck could weaponize his strings to hit like a stun
gun or caress them to express what felt like a kiss. His work had humor, too, with
licks that could cackle and leads that could tease.

“Even in the Yardbirds, he had a tone that was melodic, but in your face — bright,
urgent and edgy,” wrote Mike Campbell, of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, for an
article in Rolling Stone magazine to accompany a poll that named Mr. Beck the fifth
greatest guitar player of all time. “It’s like he’s saying: ‘I’m Jeff Beck. I’m 
right here. You can’t ignore me.’”

“Everybody respects Jeff,” Mr. Page said in a 2018 documentary titled “Still on 
the Run: The Jeff Beck Story.” “He’s an extraordinary musician. He’s having a conversation
with you when he’s playing.”

Despite the accolades, Mr. Beck never achieved the sales or popularity of the guitarists
considered to be his peers, including Mr. Page, Mr. Clapton and one of the players
he admired most, Jimi Hendrix. Only two of his albums achieved platinum status in
the United States, including “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,” he told the arts website Elsewhere in 2009. “
Shutting those doors means you’ve only got a limited space to squeeze through.”

It hurt, too, that the mercurial Mr. Beck often worked without a lead singer, and
that his groups seldom lasted long. His first band, with Mr. Stewart and Mr. Wood,
stood on the cusp of superstardom, with an invitation to play Woodstock. But Mr.
Beck turned down the offer, and the group dissolved shortly thereafter.

Another band he led that held commercial promise, Beck, Bogert & Appice (featuring
the rhythm section of Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, formerly of Vanilla Fudge) 
earned a gold album in 1973, but Mr. Beck scotched the project after less than two
years. Not that he minded his status in the industry.

“I’ve never made the big time, mercifully,” Mr. Beck told Rolling Stone in 2018.“
When you look around and see who has made it huge, it’s a really rotten place to
be.”

Even so, he earned eight gold albums over more than six decades. He also amassed
seven Grammys, six in the category of best rock instrumental performance and one
for best pop collaboration with vocals. He was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall
of Fame twice, as part of the Yardbirds in 1992 and as a solo star in 2009.

“Jeff Beck was on another planet,” Mr. Stewart said in a statement on Wednesday.“
He took me and Ronnie Wood to the USA in the late 60s in his band the Jeff Beck 
Group, and we haven’t looked back since. He was one of the few guitarists that when
playing live would actually listen to me sing and respond. Jeff, you were the greatest,
my man.”

Geoffrey Arnold Beck was born on June 24, 1944, in South London to Arnold and Ethel
Beck. His mother was a candy maker, his father an accountant. Mr. Beck told Guitar
Player Magazine in 1968 that his mother had “forced” him to play piano two hours
a day when he was a boy. “That was good,” he said, “because it made me realize that
I was musically sound. My other training consisted of stretching rubber bands over
tobacco cans and making horrible noises.”

He became attracted to electric guitar after hearing Les Paul’s work and was later
drawn to the work of Cliff Gallup, lead guitarist for Gene Vincent’s band, and the
American player Lonnie Mack. He became entranced not only by the sound of the guitar
but also by its mechanics.

“At the age of 13, I built two or three of my own guitars,” Mr. Beck wrote in an
essay for a book about his career published in 2016 titled “Beck 01: Hot Rods and
Rock & Roll.” “It was fun just to look at it and hold it. I knew where I was headed.”

He enrolled in Wimbledon College of Art but spent more time playing in bands. Dropping
out of school, he began to do studio session work and in 1965 was invited to join
the Yardbirds through Jimmy Page, whom Mr. Beck had befriended as a teenager and
who had just turned that job down.

Though he was with the Yardbirds for only 20 months, Mr. Beck played on most of 
their successful songs, starting with “Heart Full of Soul,” which broke the Top 
10 in Billboard and got to No. 2 in Britain. It was fired by his burning lead guitar
line, which took influence from Indian music and which served as the song’s hook.

In 1966, the Yardbirds’ single “Shapes of Things,” which got to No. 11 in the United
States (No. 3 in Britain), included a frantic double-time solo by Mr. Beck that 
became one of the band’s most celebrated showcases.

At the suggestion of his manager, Mr. Beck recorded an instrumental piece for a 
potential solo project in May 1966 titled “Beck’s Bolero.” It featured on rhythm
guitar Mr. Page (who received writing credit on the song), the Who’s Keith Moon 
on drums, the future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and the in-demand session
pianist Nicky Hopkins.

A signature instrumental with a complex, unfolding structure, the song wasn’t released
at the time, dashing Mr. Beck’s hope that this lineup would comprise his next band.
Instead, he soldiered on with the Yardbirds, who then added Mr. Page, first on bass
and later in a dueling lead guitar role with Mr. Beck. That fleeting lineup was 
immortalized in “Blow Up,” the Mod-era film by the director Michelangelo Antonioni,
in which they performed a manic version of their song “Train Kept A-Rollin,’” recast
as “Stroll On.”

Tensions which had been brewing between Mr. Beck and the rest of the Yardbirds came
to a boil on an exhausting U.S. tour that fall, compelling him to quit. He later
considered this period the low point of his career.

“All of a sudden, you’re nobody,” he told Rolling Stone in 2016. “Because the band
were able to carry on” with Mr. Page, “it was almost like I was airbrushed out of
it.”

Even so, a single was released under his own name in March 1967, “Hi-Ho Silver Lining,”
which featured a rare vocal by Mr. Beck, which he abhorred. “I sound unbearably 
bad,” he told Music Radar in 2021.

Still, the song got to No. 15 in Britain, and its B-side provided a home for “Beck’s
Bolero.”

He found more satisfaction by forming the first Jeff Beck Group, with Mr. Stewart,
Mr. Wood, and Mr. Hopkins along with the drummer Mickey Waller. Columbia Records
signed them and issued their debut, “Truth,” in the summer of 1968. It boasted a
new, heavier version of the Yardbirds’ “Shapes of Things,” along with “Beck’s Bolero.”

“Truth” got to No. 15 in Billboard and went gold, fired by its fresh mix of booming
rock and emotive soul. Its follow-up, “Beck-Ola,” which subbed the drummer Tony 
Newman for Mr. Waller, was released a year later and mirrored the debut’s success.
But the band imploded almost immediately after.

“I don’t know what happened,” Mr. Beck told Music Radar. “It was a lack of material,”
he said, plus, he surmised, Mr. Stewart “wanted to see his name up there instead
of mine.”

In the fall of 1969, Mr. Beck tried to rally by planning a new group with Mr. Bogert
and Mr. Appice, but that fell apart after Mr. Beck fractured his skull in a car 
accident. In the meantime, the two other musicians formed the blues-rock band Cactus.

Following a long convalescence, a new version of the Jeff Beck Group emerged in 
1971, with the soul singer Bobby Tench, the drummer Cozy Powell and the keyboardist
Max Middleton, who encouraged Mr. Beck to explore jazz.

Their debut, “Rough and Ready,” released in October, featured more original compositions
from Mr. Beck than usual, but it barely made Billboard’s Top 50. Its chaser, “Jeff
Beck Group,” which tipped toward the soulful side of their sound, did better, breaking
Billboard’s Top 20 and going gold.

Again, however, the changeable Mr. Beck yearned for something new, so when Cactus
broke up, he reconvened with Mr. Bogert and Mr. Appice — the rhythm section he had
considered earlier — to form the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice.

A notable track on their 1973 debut album, “Beck, Bogert & Appice,” was a version
of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” But Mr. Beck was dissatisfied with both his band’s
version of the song and the band itself, and so, during the recording of a second
album, produced by Jimmy Miller, he broke up the group, although a live album, “
Beck, Bogert & Appice Live in Japan,” came out afterward, in 1975 — a year that 
changed Mr. Beck’s career.

Daringly, Mr. Beck devoted most of the “Blow by Blow” solo album, recorded in 1974
and released in 1975, to instrumentals, inspired by the creativity of the Mahavishnu
Orchestra and the soaring work of the band’s fusion guitarist, John McLaughlin.

To help capture that group’s feel, Mr. Beck hired the producer George Martin, who
had overseen Mahavishnu’s album “Apocalypse” the year before (and who had achieved
his greatest renown with the Beatles). Mr. Beck told The New Statesman magazine 
in 2016 that Mr. Martin had provided “a massive pair of wings.”

![Jeff Beck | Biography, Songs, & Facts | Britannica](https://i0.wp.com/cdn.britannica.
com/59/198959-050-313628A2/British-musician-Jeff-Beck-2006.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

“Just knowing that somebody with such sensitive ears was approving of what was going
on, you were flying,” he said.

Mr. Beck’s follow-up album, “Wired,” featured two players from Mahavishnu: the drummer
Narada Michael Walden and the keyboardist Jan Hammer, expanding the fusion element
in the music. Mr. Beck later toured with Mr. Hammer’s band, resulting in the album“
Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group Live,” which went gold in 1977.

Mr. Hammer was also instrumental in Mr. Beck’s 1980 album, “There & Back,” which
got to No. 21 on Billboard’s chart. In 1985, Mr. Beck returned to working with vocalists
for his “Flash” album, on which Mr. Stewart sang a version of Curtis Mayfield’s “
People Get Ready.” (The video became an MTV hit.) Another instrumental recording,“
Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop,” issued in 1989, became his final gold album.

Starting in the 1990s, Mr. Beck began to do prodigious session work, providing solos
on albums by Jon Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, Kate Bush, Tina Turner and others. He showed
the continued breadth of his style with his “Emotion & Commotion” album in 2010,
which included the standard “Over the Rainbow” and Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma.” The
latter track won a Grammy, and the album reached No. 11 in Billboard.

Over the next few decades, Mr. Beck continued to tour and to record, most recently
yielding a collaboration album with the actor and guitarist Johnny Depp, titled “
18,” in 2022.

Mr. Beck married Sandra Cash in 2005, and she survives him.

To his fans, and to himself, Mr. Beck was so deeply identified with his guitar —
particularly the Fender Stratocaster — that he seemed inseparable from it.

“My Strat is another arm,” he told Music Radar. “I’ve welded myself to that. Or 
it’s welded itself to me, one or the other.”

He added: “It’s a tool of great inspiration and torture at the same time. It’s forever
sitting there, challenging you to find something else in it. But it is there if 
you really search.”

![Jeff Beck, One of the Guitar Masters of the Rock Era, Dies at 78 - Variety](https://
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