At the start you can barely hear the drums but as the track gets into
gear they are more and more discernible until, suddenly, at about the 1.30 mark,
they come crashing in with all the force of an avalanche. It could only be one
drummer and it is. No wonder Pete was pissed off.
This extract from Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff
Beck, by Martin Power, published by
Omnibus in 2011, tells of the story of ‘Beck’s Bolero’, the B-side of Beck’s
uncharacteristically poppish hit ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ and a highlight of his
debut album Truth. It is one of the
great curiosities of sixties rock, not least because the group that perform on
the track might well have been the first ever British supergroup – Beck, Jimmy
Page, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins and… Keith Moon.
An updated paperback
edition of Hot
Wired Guitar is scheduled for early next
year.
If ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ managed the job of making Jeff Beck
hugely irritated and a pop star all at once, then ‘Beck’s Bolero’ brought about
equal feelings of huge pride and lost opportunity. The instrumental would also
spark a long-running and still-unresolved debate about who wrote and produced
it, though no-one is in any doubt as to the musicians who recorded it. ‘...
Bolero’ was actually cut on May 16-17, 1966 at London’s IBC Studios (nearly
eight months before ‘... Silver Lining’) by a one-time only cast of players
that might have caused the combined might of The Jimi Hendrix Experience and
Cream to nervously study their ranks before running for the hills. On drums was
The Who’s resident madman Keith Moon, whose talent for lunacy was almost as
impressive as his skills with the sticks.
Filling in for
Moon’s band mate, John Entwistle, who originally agreed to play bass on the
session but pulled out at the last minute, was recurring session ace John Paul
Jones. Adding some classically-influenced sparkle to proceedings was keyboard
player Nicky Hopkins, a child prodigy/Royal Academy of Music graduate who had
carved a fine career as a studio musician, working with The Beatles, the Stones
and The Who. And completing the line-up were Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, then
only a month away from attending the Oxford May Ball where events would change
the terms of their relationship from the best of friends to duelling gun
slingers.
The ‘... Bolero’
session was conceived as part of Simon Napier-Bell’s plan for The Yardbirds to
engage with various side projects in an effort to ease mounting tensions within
the group, and part of the same nest of recordings that produced Keith Relf’s
‘Mr. Zero’ . In advance of the booking at IBC, Beck had visited Page to work up
some suitable material for potential solo release.
“Well, The Yardbirds
were dying and Simon suggested I do something to keep me quiet,” Beck told Elsewhere.com, “so I went around Jimmy’s
place and he came out with this rhythm on a 12-string guitar (actually a Fender
Electric XII). We wanted Keith, who was one of my favourite drummers, to play
on it.”
The rhythm in
question was inspired by Bolero, a
classical piece written in 1928 by the composer Maurice Ravel as an
accompaniment to Russian choreographer Ida Rubenstein’s short ballet of the
same name. Built on a persistent, repeating motif supported by a snare drum,
Ravel’s genius was in recreating the Spanish ‘Bolero’ dance pattern for full
orchestra, using flutes, horns and oboes to add melody to the steady yet
insistent tempo – thus matching the steps of the dancers as they built toward a
slow-burning crescendo on the stage.
In his treatment of
Ravel’s original idea, Jimmy Page opened up Ravel’s original two chord
progression and transposed it from the key of C to A, thus using the 12-string
guitar’s rich chiming quality to emulate the distinct, orchestral ‘Bolero’
sound. That said, who actually wrote the haunting melody that sits on top of
the chords remains a sticky point for both Beck and Page.
According to Jeff,
he is solely responsible: “Jimmy
was playing the bolero rhythm and I played the melody on top of it. I don’t
care what he says, I invented that melody.”
Not
so, according to Page: “I wrote it, played on it, produced it,” he later told Guitar Player, “and I don’t give a damn
what (Jeff) says. That’s the truth.” Page certainly took the sole writing
credit for ‘Beck’s Bolero’ when it appeared on the B-side to ‘Hi Ho Silver
Lining’, though Beck has become more philosophical than angry over time
regarding his part in writing the instrumental – even if he does still claim
the melody as his own. “No, I didn’t get a song-writing credit,” he said, “but you
win some and lose some down the years.”
Beyond
such disputes over authorship, ‘Beck’s Bolero’ has also taken on an important
status in the annals of rock history because of the musicians involved in its
recording, their unique collaboration on the track pointing the way towards
what might have been rock’s first true supergroup. Then unhappy that The Who’s
guitarist and principal songwriter Pete Townshend was receiving the lion’s
share of cash in the band, both Keith Moon and John Entwistle had let it be known
that they might be interested taking their talents elsewhere. Picking up on the
rumour, Page and Beck contacted the duo and asked whether they would consider
working on some material, with a possible view to even forming a band. Fearing possible reprisals from Townshend and Who manager Kit
Lambert if discovered playing away from home, but still interested in what
might come out of the session, Moon asked that the recording be conducted in
total secrecy. “Keith told us he could only give us about three hours before
his roadies would start looking for him,” said Jeff.
Evidently
such clandestine activity proved too much in the end for John Entwistle who
ending up ducking out, though Keith Moon’s nerve did hold – even if he went to
extraordinary lengths to disguise his involvement. “Moon got out of the cab
that morning wearing dark glasses and a bloody Cossack hat,” laughed Beck.
Moon’s contribution to ‘Beck’s Bolero’, was well worth the daftness, his
unique, propulsive drumming style adding much to the track’s mid-section rave
up.
“It
was my idea to cut off in the middle, Yardbirds-style,” said Jeff. “Keith upped
the tempo and gave it an extra kick. It’s like a bit of The Who, a bit of The
Yardbirds and a bit of me.” In fact, such was Moon’s enthusiasm for Beck’s
idea, he managed to smash a $250 microphone with his drumstick as the band
doubled the pace, thus rendering the sound of his kit inaudible but for the
cymbals. “You can actually hear him screaming as he does it,” Beck confirmed to
Guitarist.
A
wonderfully judged tune, ‘Beck’s Bolero’ featured Jeff at his very best, the
guitarist weaving his way across an alternating major/minor melody before
launching a barrage of sighing slide effects that soaked the track in slow
waves of echo and reverse phasing. When ‘... Bolero’’s tempo picked up, Beck
was again equal to the task at hand, providing a thick-toned, descending riff
that eerily presaged the coming era of hard rock and heavy metal. “The riff in the middle of ‘Bolero’ is the first heavy metal riff
ever written and I wrote it,” he later said with some pride. What makes ‘Beck’s
Bolero’ potentially even more scintillating is the knowledge that it wasn’t the
only track recorded that morning. “I think there were two or three tracks in
all,” Jeff confirmed. “They’re lurking about somewhere. But those were the days
that when you left the studio, you left the tapes. No cassettes, just
reel-to-reels.” *
Yet another hotly contested
issue concerning ‘Beck’s Bolero’ is who actually produced the track, with three
candidates eager to claim it as their very own. “Well, the track was done and then the producer, Simon Napier-Bell just
disappeared,” Jimmy Page told Guitar
Player. “He was never seen again. He simply didn’t come back. [Simon] just
sort of left me and Jeff to it. Jeff was playing and I was [at the recording
console].” According to Napier-Bell, his input was far more considerable. “I produced it,” he said. “But I was naive about ‘Bolero’. When Mickie
Most took Jeff, he asked if there was there any productions knocking around and
I said ‘Yes, we’ve got ‘... Bolero’. So it eventually came out as a Mickie Most
production, which has always pissed me off because it was such a great record.
My fault, no-one else’s.” Whether Most refined, enhanced or in all probability,
did absolutely nothing to the tapes he received is ultimately irrelevant. ‘...
Bolero’ bears his name alone as ‘Producer’.
Arguments aside, ‘Beck’s Bolero’
remains a delightful curio of the band that could have been but never was,
their efforts hermetically sealed within the walls of an instrumental lasting
just shy of three minutes. On its completion, Keith Moon immediately returned
to his full time position as The Who’s lunatic-in-residence though his act of
infidelity soon came to the attention of a vexed Pete Townshend, who took to
calling Beck and Page “flashy little guitarists of very
little brain” whenever the mood took
him. Elsewhere, Nicky Hopkins was now firmly back on Jeff’s radar, his
impressive orchestral swells at the end of the track alerting Beck to the
possibilities of adding keyboards to any future endeavour. But it was Jimmy
Page and John Paul Jones who probably gleaned the most long term benefit from
‘Beck’s Bolero’, the session planting seeds in both their minds of potentially
good times ahead. “‘Beck’s Bolero’ was Jimmy, Jeff, me, Nicky Hopkins and Keith
Moon,” Jones told Uncut. “Moon was
just brilliant, [the] life and soul of the party at all times... plenty
dangerous to go and party with, but never dull. We all thought, for about half
an hour, that it would be brilliant to take this line-up on the road, though
Moon said it would go down like a lead Zeppelin...”
Jimmy Page didn’t
capture Moon’s joke on tape. But he did remember it.
* Legend has it that
future Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was also involved in some
capacity at the sessions, though this has never been confirmed.
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