Jeff Beck: Guitar World Interview June 2009

Diving into Jeff Beck: A Glimpse of Rock Guitar Legend

In this episode, PJ Pat explore's an article from Guitar Legends magazine, delving into the world of Jeff Beck, one of rock's greatest guitarists. We'll uncover Beck's unique picking style, his early influences, and his legendary relationships with Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix. Tune in for stories from Beck's days with The Yardbirds, his experimentation with different music genres, his collaboration with Rod Stewart, and his boundary-pushing use of the 'mouth bag' instrument. Get ready for a journey through rock history filled with amazing anecdotes and musical revelations!

00:00 Introduction and Overview
00:48 Jeff Beck: Early Influences and Techniques
03:00 The Yardbirds Era
06:56 Collaborations and Rivalries
11:29 Fusion and Solo Career
14:19 Jeff Beck's Signature Style and Gear
17:52 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

[00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Rock on everybody. Today I'm going to read you an article from this amazing magazine, Guitar Legends, the 30 greatest classic rock guitar heroes. Now I'm going to read you something about Jeff Beck, the legend himself. Now shame on me, I should be more into Jeff Beck than I am.

[00:00:25] And I know he's amazing. I've heard amazing songs from him. But, he's a guy I just never got into. I'm interested in reading this article, and maybe this is the article that's really gonna push me over the edge. And if I'm interested in this, I know there's at least one person out there in the world that wants to know a little bit more about Jeff Bench.

[00:00:45] Let's get into it. Alright, reading glasses on. Jeff Beck, one of rock and roll's greatest virtuoso guitarists, recalls his glory days and friendships with Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jimi Hendrix. Reprinted from Guitar World in June of 2009. Alright, so it starts the question with Guitar World, you're one of the few rock guitarists who picks with his fingers instead of a flat.

[00:01:11] Plectrum, i. e. a pick. Is that something you got from your early interest in country influenced rockabilly players? Absolutely! From Cliff Gallop, guitarist in Gene Vincent and the Blues Caps, and Chet Atkins. I was fascinated with how Chet Atkins played a bass part and the melody simultaneously. I had to learn that.

[00:01:34] It helps the brain with coordination to keep a rhythm going with claw hammer style picking. It all comes from folk, banjo, and God knows what else. Is it fair to say that your rockabilly influences set you apart from many of your blues purist contemporaries like Clapton and the Stones? Jeff answers, yeah, I remember having an insulting criticism from Eric Clapton saying you gotta get rid of that folk style of country picking.

[00:02:00] Probably because he couldn't do it. I know it used to annoy him. I'd be out in the middle of some simple groove and then out would come this claw hammer picking. I feel like doing it, so I did. So who was doing feedback first, you or Clapton? Man, personally, I thought it was Hendrix. No, I did it way before Clapton, of course, he would say that.

[00:02:21] Probably in 1960, with the Tridents. I guess that's one of his former bands. Because I had a terrible amp that fed back anyway. And when we started playing in big ballrooms, you'd turn up the volume, and the amp would go, VWEEEEE! And everybody would start looking at me, thinking I wanted to be dead, because I made this mistake.

[00:02:41] So I had to turn a horrible sound into a tune to make them think I meant it. That's where it all came from. The inability of sound systems to cope with the needed volume. I had no real PA. The singer would use the house PA with a terrible microphone. One of those little square things that was all bass and nothing else.

[00:03:00] And then, of course, The Yardbirds enabled me to continue experimentation. That's right! It was part of that legendary band, The Yardbirds, with Clapton, I think? And, yeah, Jimmy Page. Wow. That's why I really enjoyed that time. Singer Keith Relf and bassist Paul Samuel Smith used to write these very skeletal kinds of melodies that enabled me to do tricks they otherwise probably wouldn't do.

[00:03:25] All I needed was three good melodies and away I went. How long have you known Jimmy Page? We must have been 12 or 14 when we met. My sister gave me the introduction. She went to the same art college or tech college, whatever it was. She came home and said, There's a guy with a goofy looking guitar like yours at college.

[00:03:43] And I went, Where is he? Take me to him! Because there was nobody else on my block or even in my town who even knew what a Fender Strat was. So it was great to find Jimmy. Like meeting your long lost brother. And we've got on ever since. GuitarWolf asks, you had actually asked Jimmy to join the R Birds before Paul Samuel Smith left the band, hadn't you?

[00:04:07] Yeah, and then when Paul did leave, it was quite a blow, because we didn't have that huge bass sound. He pioneered those four note bass chords. Jimmy Page was not a bass player, as we all know, but the only way I could get him involved was by insisting that it would be okay for him to take over on bass in order for us to continue.

[00:04:28] And gradually within a week, I think we were talking about doing duo leads. Then we switched rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja onto bass. to get Jim onto guitar. Smart move, Jeff Beck, smart move. It said that Page first played guitar in the Yardbirds because you collapsed in San Francisco and he had to cover on guitar while Chris switched to bass.

[00:04:53] Oh, I can't remember, Jeff says. I collapsed everywhere, didn't I? Yeah, it was terrible. I also collapsed in Marseille, once with food poisoning. Obviously, the idea of having Jim and me on guitar was a great one, but it was fraught with disaster because sooner or later, one of us would have been cramped, style wise.

[00:05:12] I don't know, maybe it would have worked something out, but I said, wait a minute, I just got my best mate in on guitar. He's gonna see me off up the road if I'm not careful. Was that part of the tension that led you to quit the Yardbirds in 1966? No, it was really just those packaged tours that got me down.

[00:05:32] When we were touring alone it was alright, but banged up with 15 other acts, it was really dreadful. On stage for 15 minutes, then you drive 600 miles and do another 15 minutes, I just couldn't stand it. I just got off the bus and literally went home. I loved being in that band, but I could see the end in sight anyway.

[00:05:52] So it was that, coupled with the rigorous touring, being misrepresented, being put on Dick Clark roadshows and stuff was not where I wanted to go. But it was still traumatic leaving the Yardbirds because I walked out on the one thing that gave me life, gave me recognition. I didn't feel proud about dumping them in the shit.

[00:06:11] I got home and faced a bleak winter in England with nothing to do. So I must have been desperately unhappy to do what I did. I guess I thought they were going to call me up when they came back and say, Sorry I upset you, please come back. Instead, it was more like, Sorry I upset you, fuck off.

[00:06:34] Then I got really seriously ill several months afterward. That food poisoning and mastitis took care of me big time. I couldn't get my strength back. I think it was a lot more serious than it was diagnosed. It was more like meningitis type of headache. Terrible. So silly it was a pain. I just felt somebody must be able to hear it.

[00:06:55] It was that bad. Why did you decide to recut the Yardbirds Shape of Things with the Jeff Beck Group? Because lead singer Rod Stewart loved that song. He thought it would be a great idea to do another angle on it. And I just wrote that complete other riff for it. Well, I had no idea Rod Stewart was a singer in one of Jeff Beck's bands.

[00:07:14] Alright, I super dig Rod Stewart's voice. I think he's amazing. He has that kind of like raspy voice, which I love. I also love, for example, Brian Adams voice. Man, this is really starting to get me into wanting to check him out even more. Okay, where were we here? And it became the precursor to a lot of power rock and roll.

[00:07:35] That plotting sort of rhythm that we nailed. I suppose whenever I get named as a heavy metal innovator, that's probably one of the best examples of heavy metal in embryo. Is it also the period where you got to know Jimi Hendrix? You say, no, Jimi Hendrix? It was all too brief. It was just one year, 69, it would have been, when the Jeff Beck Group was playing Manhattan Rock Club, Steve Paul's scene.

[00:08:02] We were there for weeks and Jimi would come in just about encore time and everyone would freak out. He'd come on stage and completely overshadow and undermine what we'd done, but nobody cared. It was so great and to have Rod Singing as well. Two guitars blazing away. Forget it. It was just crammed to capacity every night.

[00:08:22] Oh man, what I would give to be there at that club those days. Oh my god. Can you imagine Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Rod Stewart singing? Wow. And I'm sure the drums and bass were right up there on par too. Woof. Talk about musicianship. Did playing with him goad you to whip out some of your most amazing stuff?

[00:08:43] Jeff answers, yeah, I thought, if he's not afraid to stand on stage with me, I'm not ashamed to go anywhere. There was such a contrast between the way he was on stage and the way he was off stage. He spoke in whispers. He would never raise his voice above a whisper. That's pretty neat. We're getting some insight on Jimi Hendrix himself.

[00:09:02] It was all in his expressions, in his hands. Unbelievable comedy and profound statements just by the raising of an eyebrow. He did burn a candle though. I couldn't keep up. We went out one night from the scene. We'd already played two hours of raving rock and roll with him, and coming on for the encore.

[00:09:23] Then we went to the New York Brasserie to have something to eat. And somewhere after that, at four o'clock he said, let's go back to the hotel. I thought, thank God. He'd fall asleep and I'll go home. But instead he'd start playing stuff, and we'd go somewhere else at five o'clock. This was just an everyday occurrence.

[00:09:41] I'd be history for two days afterwards. And he'll be still at it. It was as if he'd been commissioned to be Chief Motherfucker. In charge of everything. Suddenly, this guy comes along and upturns the whole apple cart. Playing with his teeth, behind his head. He made the rest of us look like a bunch of librarians standing up there.

[00:10:02] Wow, that's Jimmy. I guess the drugs really worked back then for him. But he was definitely building on what you, Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Pete Townsend were doing. That's right. We just didn't realize that someone was going to come along and whip the carpet out from under us in quite such a radical way.

[00:10:21] And there wasn't anything turning back after that. You can't un pull the carpet. You just do something else. That was the most ponderous time in my life. What to do now? What to do now that guy's done what he's done? And when I found out that people still wanted to hear what I had to say, I carried on. But it was pretty rough, I must say.

[00:10:42] A pretty grim time with no one to talk to about it except Jimmy himself. It was almost the end of my career. Wow, really? You brought him down that much? Jimmy was that good? Can you imagine this Jeff Beck talking here? Crazy. I probably would have packed up if he hadn't spoken. I used to say, Jim, what the fuck?

[00:11:02] And he said, Man, you know when you play blues, it's as boring as a monkey. Your next step should be to take the electro stuff further. Experiment. That's what I respect about you. That's your thing. Don't try to play the blues. And that's with Eric as well. He said, Don't mess with my music. So I forgot about the blues with a few notable exceptions.

[00:11:25] Wow Such cool stories. Okay, so Guitar World asks You've always moved with the times and worked in whatever the current musical idiom was at any given time Whether it was heavy rock, fusion, Jeff answers Can we say that word now and get away with it? Can we say fusion? Quote unquote, without getting arrested.

[00:11:46] He laughs. Then I first heard the jazz rock fusion group, Mahavishnu Orchestra, playing in Central Park. I just began to develop wings because of that. They were hugely popular at the time, and it seemed to me that everyone was getting so involved, and so in love with playing music. It was a vital thing for me to have that.

[00:12:08] A lot of people like Blow By Blow, Beck's 1975 solo album because it's synthified McLaughlin and a complicated rock and roll. That album was just one of those things that was so easy. There were great players willing to play decent material, and in four days, we tracked all the songs. Wow, four days! Of course, the overdubs then took four years.

[00:12:33] But the tracking was really quick. For one, we didn't have a huge backlog of dough. And producer George Martin certainly didn't know what he was getting involved in. I put some tapes on his desk one day. He saw through the mists and said, There might be something there. He showed interest at that point where I was really wondering whether I should continue in the business.

[00:12:54] Wow, looks like George Martin kind of saved him in a way. Okay, Guitar World asks, Would you assess George Martin's contribution to Blow By Blow and Wired in 1976? I was looking at George sort of as a parental figure. Apparently, that's what the Beatles said about George as well. He was more of a parental figure because he was much older than them.

[00:13:14] Someone to help me present some of my more outrageous visions in a way that would be acceptable to the general public. And he did quite well. Some of my favorite solos got trashed because he thought they were hideous, not musical. He'd say, that's really the most dreadful noise I've ever heard, and I'd say, that's what I want!

[00:13:33] But I'd usually come around to his way of thinking. George is almost like a dad. Relaxed, very focused on the sound. George Martin was probably the best producer I've had. The guy who could framework what I do without interfering. Tonally and melodically, your playing entered a new phase with Blow by Blow.

[00:13:53] Jeff says, well, Blow by Blow is when I started messing with the Strat. Really? I thought he was a Strat man the whole time. I wonder what he was playing before that. Les Paul, maybe? I thought, I can't be dicking around with a lot of different guitars. Cause it was a totally different feel from one to the other.

[00:14:12] I wanted to be absolutely comfortable. And the Strat is what I started on. I became interested in going back to that again. Freeway Jam from Blow By Blow became one of your signature tunes. One that almost every guitarist learns at some point. Yet it was written by your keyboard player, Max Middleton.

[00:14:29] Actually, I hate that tune, he says. It's pretty awful. I could care less if people still like it. It felt like a slowed down Irish reel to me. Was it your idea to record the Beatles She's a Woman on Blow by Blow? No, Max Middleton was playing in a band for Linda Lewis. She was a wife of Jim Cregan, who is Rod Stewart's guitar player.

[00:14:51] And she started making waves playing Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club. And Max said, she does this song, she's a woman, and people go crazy, they loved her version, and I turned it into a reggae, and that really seemed to make it take off. That's one of the best known tunes where you employ the mouth bag, the precursor to the talk box, that consisted of an air filled shoulder bag with cables and tubing emanating from it.

[00:15:15] Created by Custom Electronics and marketed as The Bag, it allowed guitarists to create vocal like sounds with their guitar. How did you get into using that? There was a guy called Mike Panera, a guitarist for Iron Butterfly, who had one, and he used to do just bass, riff, noise, and guitar lines with it. It took me about three or four days to get some of the vowel sounds out.

[00:15:40] Amplified through a mic, it gives you even more flexibility. Because the mic reads certain frequencies more accurately. It would just floor people. They'd go, What the hell is that? And they'd see this sort of colostomy bag stuck to me. In fact, there was a concert review where the writer thought it was a bladder.

[00:16:00] I have never seen that. I don't know if any of you have, but I, I've heard of a, what's it called? Uh, a VoxBox where the guitarist plays and he has these voice sounds into this box that's uh, right beside the mic. And that kind of gives like a vocal effect as he's soloing. But this sort of the bag thing they're talking about, never seen it.

[00:16:22] Did the mouth bag become a burden in the same way that Freeway Jam did? Jeff says yeah years ago I checked into a hotel and the radio had been left on in the room and I heard the bag being used and it was Frampton comes alive. They were playing. Frampton reportedly used a hell talk box on the record I thought wait a minute someone's bootlegged my album because no one else was using that thing at the time But it was Peter Frampton and that was the abrupt end to my use of the bag From that night on, I never used it.

[00:16:55] Okay, Jeff Beck. Looks like he has a thing against Peter Frampton for some reason. Alright, there's another little piece of information here that you might be interested in. It says, Essentials, Jeff Beck was born in June 24, 1944 in Wellington, England. Bands, he only had two, The Yardbirds and Jeff Beck Group.

[00:17:14] Guitars, The Fender Strat, obviously, including Jeff Beck's signature model. Fender Esquire, Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul. Did you know, Jeff picks primarily with his thumb and often keeps his fingers wrapped around his guitar's tremolo bar to manipulate the notes. Wow, I didn't, his thumb? Really? Versus his fingers?

[00:17:35] That probably gives him that unique sound that no other guitar player can reproduce. Selected albums. With the Jeff Beck Group, Truth, Beck Hola, Solo, Blow by Blow, and Wired. Okay, there are four albums right there that I definitely need to check out. There you go. Hopefully you enjoyed this article. Let me know if there's any other guitar players you'd like me to read I'd be happy to until then rock on