Parade Of Great Guitarists: Jeff Beck, Part Two – The Jeff Beck Group

Second installment of our extended tribute to the greatest of The Yardbirds, dead two months ago at age 78. In our conclusion, he follows up the invention of sci-fi R&B with heavy metal.

Rod Stewart (l) and Jeff Beck onstage with The Jeff Beck Group, ca. 1968: “Erm, Roderick? I’m not s’posed to be the one in front of this mic! Didn’t ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ make that clear?!”

Yes, Jeff Beck pioneered heavy metal with “Beck’s Bolero.” (Which, as we noted last time, also gave Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones both an idea and a band name.) Then he watched Cream and Jimi Hendrix run away with his own innovations, as producer Mickie Most saddled him with a slate of pop singles featuring the guitarist doubling on rather off-beat vocals. The whimsical knees-up “Hi Ho Silver Lining” forever embarrassed Beck thereafter, likely propelling him to react with two LPs with The Jeff Beck Group mining the heaviest musical ore of the day. Refusing to sing again, bassist Ron Wood referred him to a singer who wailed like Sam Cook tearing out his tonsils: Rod Stewart. Not yet the swaggering rooster-cut Jack The Lad he’d transform into once he and Wood defected for The Faces, Beck was at last paired with a vocalist who could howl with as much force and invention as his Les Paul. Or at least, the way he played his Les Paul.

Indeed, Beck had fully committed to the late ‘50s PAF-equipped Gibsons all other blues-inspired British guitarists began favoring since Eric Clapton jacked one into a wide-open Marshall combo on 1966’s Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton album, his first with John Mayall’s band. Only Beck switched over to Marshall’s 100-watt stacks, like most of his peers. (Although Beck was of such a caliber that he really had no “peers,” save for perhaps American Mike Bloomfield.) The additional firepower allowed his chords to crush bones at 50 paces, and his solos to sing with an endless sustain that turned his guitar into a great soprano. Via highly musical use of a wah wah pedal, Beck could also make his Les Paul snarl or rasp like an angry rattlesnake. 

Over Micky Waller’s 50 megaton drumming, The Jeff Beck Group turned blues standards like Howlin’ Wolf’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” or rockers like “Jailhouse Rock” into the heaviest boogies ever. Especially instructive was their deconstruction of “Shapes Of Things.” The Yardbirds’ original was propulsive, abstract expressionist garage punk-cum-proto-psychedelia, with a solo section featuring Beck replicating nuclear war. The JBG’s version is darker, slower, exploding as they surgically disassemble it, Stewart seemingly writing an entirely new vocal melody as Beck moodily ignores whatever he did on the 1966 recording.

So, what the hell happened?

The band relentlessly toured America’s psychedelic ballroom circuit, putting them on the brink of superstardom. Stewart went from shyly retiring behind the amps at the Boston Tea Party to becoming the strutting, mic stand-manhandling polecat who’d eventually front The Faces as the ‘60s crumbled into the ‘70s. According to Wood in the 2018 documentary Still On The Run: The Jeff Beck Story, Beck walked away from the band two weeks before they were to play a modest little event called Woodstock.

This wasn’t Beck’s side of the story,

“We were phased out by Led Zeppelin, you know,” he told music journalist Natalie Nichols in an interview conducted Feb. 10, 2001, at West Hollywood’s famed Sunset Marquis Hotel for a Los Angeles Times piece. 

The Jeff Beck Group backstage, ca. 1968: (l-r) Micky Waller, Beck, Stewart, Ronnie Wood. “Rod, you’d better not sing that poxy fucking song you brought in about some old bird! ‘Wake up, Maggie - I think I’ve got sumpfin’ t’say t’ya,’ my arse!”

“Coupled with the fact that Rod [Stewart] had no intention of seeing the band through. I think he subversively got hold of Ronnie Wood and talked him into leaving as well, so I lost my bass player as well. That sucked, y’know? Because we could've made amends, we could've -- if we'd had a really strict outlook on it and got a proper manager. Well, not that Peter Grant wasn't, but he didn't really pay attention to [the Jeff Beck Group], because what was brewing in the background was Led Zeppelin. And he knew that Jimmy [Page] was well-committed. And less unpredictable, less aggressive, less moody and all that.

“And it was a wonderful decision, y’know. The world got Led Zeppelin, and the music business got straightened out, and certain few promoters got straightened out as well. [laughs] But that left me with nothing, and I had a car crash that wiped me out. So that was it, bye-bye! I didn't want to hear any music after that.”

Basically, this was a pattern going back to The Yardbirds: Throughout his life, anytime whatever Beck was involved with started becoming massive and out of his control, he would throw a moody, walk away, and fuck off to England to wrench on his hot rods. Then he’d start getting the itch again, after a while.

Meantime, he’d watch fuming on the sidelines as either someone like Led Zeppelin manicured his innovations to greater fame and fortune, or see former sidemen become huge making music he considered lesser.

“Every fucking radio I'd listen to, there'd be Rod Stewart coming out of it, singing ‘Maggie fucking May,’” Beck fumed to Nichols. “I thought it was like a vicious conspiracy, that the world had decided they were going to piss on me, y’know? And I thought, ‘That is not what's designed to happen. But it was ironic that every club I went into, every shop, you'd hear the top 20 records, and [Faces] would be there. And then not only that, you'd overhear conversations in America, y’know. Even when I came over here just for a break, I'd hear people talking about Stewart. It sucked. and I just thought, 'Right. I'm just going to move right away from this shit, riiight away. If I come back, it will be with something else.'”

That “something else” turned out to be a retooled Jeff Beck Group, applying his singing, crying guitar work to a sort of supercharged soul music. But that’s a tale for another day.

End Part Two

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