JEFF BECK – Trying Something Different

“I’ve no idea what I do on guitar when I get up there,” Jeff Beck told me in 1976. “I don’t have a clue musically what it is when I’m working the fretboard. It’s all totally by ear. I don’t even watch my fingers which is good because if someone ever poked my eyes out, I’d still be able to get a job.”

        Getting a job never worried Jeff Beck. Throughout his career he was wilfully nonchalant about job security or what might be beyond the next horizon. What he was secure about, though, was his own talent, an extraordinary dexterity that astonished his peers. Most of them will happily admit he was eclipsed only by Hendrix. 

        Then again, I don’t think anyone, not even Hendrix, explored the sonic possibilities of a Fender Stratocaster more than Jeff Beck. In his hands, an invariably pristine white Strat with a rosewood neck became a tool box, a paint brush and, eventually, a laptop. Picking predominantly with his thumb and, occasionally, fingers, he conjured up a palette of sound as broad as the horizon, a cello, a trombone, a weather event, a hot rod, you name it. He pulled and pushed on his whammy bar and even fiddled with his tuning heads, and adjusted the pick-up, tone and volume controls while applying his own unique string bending and hammering techniques, playing chords, runs, scales and arpeggios, and single notes that flew off like sparks or sustained until he whipped his hand off the neck for a second then reconnected elsewhere in lightning time. For Jeff it was effortless, as if his hands and fingers had minds of their own, and while doing what he did, sometimes grinning, sometimes wandering purposefully around his stage, he always, like really always, looked outrageously fucking cool. I once wrote that Jeff could impress an audience while performing on a block of wood with strings made from rubber bands. Make that one rubber band. 

        My long interview with Jeff from which the quote above was extracted took place backstage at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island in New York before a show with the Jan Hammer Group, and the chief sub at Melody Maker chose to headline the 2,000+ word piece I wrote LIVE WIRED BECK. It was apt. Beck was a live wire. Though I never saw him playing one, I have no doubt he was adept on acoustic guitar but for me he was always an electric guitarist and an electrician to boot, the kind of craftsman who would spend many happy hours taking his instrument completely apart with a screwdriver and pliers, then tamper a bit, perhaps rewire a pick-up or the control knobs, or adjust the action by fiddling with the bridge, then reassemble it piece by piece, and finally plug it in, turn the volume up to 11 and check the results by playing the same scales he learned as a teenager. By all accounts he could strip a car and reassemble it, so doing the same with an electric guitar would have been child’s play to him. If his reassembled guitar didn’t sound like it did before, or like anyone else, the experiment was worthwhile.

        This need to alter things was reflected in the restlessness that characterised his career. Unlike his two great ex-Yardbirds rivals Eric and Jimmy, he never stayed in one place too long. “I don’t like the responsibility of having a permanent band because I don’t work that much,” he told me in that same interview, the only one I ever did with him. “I can’t have a group hanging around my neck all the time because I can’t provide them with enough work. I’m not the type to say, ‘Come with me for all time. We’re buddies in this forever’ to musicians.”

        In this respect, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Jeff was working in the wrong genre, that his talents might have been better suited to jazz, in which musicians switch and rove far more than they do in rock. He half agreed when I put this to him, but while acknowledging that Page and Clapton found greater acceptance and, consequently, greater fame because they stuck with groups, he cared little about the situation. “It doesn’t take much to work out why it’s happened that way,” he told me. “They’re band-type players who form groups, whereas I’ve gone from pillar to post and I’m too elusive for the average person to be able to latch on to what I’m doing. 

        “I’m indecisive in what I do and you can understand people preferring to get into something that’s more permanent. I’m too mobile. I’ve probably got a lot of the old sound still in me, but my mind is miles away from it. I can’t put myself in the same comparative class as Page or Clapton because I’m strongly jazz-influenced, whereas they’re flat-out white rock and roll with stereotyped vocalists with fancy clothes and all that.

        “I mean... it’s all right, I’m not knocking them, but I couldn’t see me doing it. I’d just be another one of the bunch if I formed a band like that. I like to feel that I’m at least trying something different. I’m making a good living at it. I’m not starving by any means.

        “I would hate to live and die in the same band. That wouldn’t be my idea of fun at all. A lot of these groups stay together because they are insecure individually.”

        I began this little tribute to Jeff Beck with a comment on his lack of insecurity. In 1984 I happened to be sitting behind him at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road where the film This Is Spinal Tap was having an invite-only UK preview. It’s no secret that Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel, played by Christopher Guest, was the spitting image of Jeff, perhaps even modelled on him. While some musicians might have been insulted, or just a bit miffed, by this evident parody, it gives me enormous pleasure to record that Jeff laughed his head off throughout the entire movie. No insecurity there, I thought.