Parade Of Great Guitarists: Jeff Beck, Part One – The Yardbirds

As the greatest of The Yardbirds’ lead guitar Holy Trinity, he was the ultimate science-fiction bluesman. Then he invented garage, psychedelia, heavy metal, jazz rock, and genres no one's named yet.

The Yardbirds with their greatest guitarist Jeff Beck, center. His new foil, Jimmy Page, is far left.

“Everytime I see a punk band, I wonder if they got that way because of The Yardbirds?” grumbled Jeff Beck, the most creative and inventive guitarist rock ‘n’ roll has seen,  in his first Guitar World cover story back in 1981. “When I see punk rockers jumping up and down, thumping the guitar, saying ‘fuck you,’ is it because they heard The Yardbirds?”

Possibly, Jeff. Your old buddy Jimmy Page, who handed you the job in The Yardbirds because Eric Clapton had just quit and he was too busy playing sessions all over London to take the job himself, told Trouser Press a few years before of a Yardbirds performance for a university ball he’d caught after you’d joined. He said it was “the most anarchistic thing” he’d seen, even more than the Sex Pistols, right down to singer Keith Relf turning his back on the hoo-yaws and drunkenly snarling “fuck you.” So the attitude was certainly there. Page said the performance was “pure punk rock.” 

So punk, in fact, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith quit that night, bemoaning the band’s lack of professionalism. Well, with a hoo-yaw surname like “Samwell-Smith,” perhaps he didn’t dig the winding-up of the aristos? Whatever the case, it paved the way for Page to jump aboard on bass, before the band realized the ripe opportunity they now had with two such strong soloists in the band. Rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja assumed bass duties, and Page’s Tele and Beck’s Les Paul soon began butting heads.

A whole lotta people got whatever way they did because of The Yardbirds, especially when Jeff Beck was in the band. On his last trip through the States with the band in the summer of 1966, they played Corpus Christi, Texas’ Memorial Coliseum. Part of that year’s Dick Clark's Cavalcade Of Stars Tour – alongside such pop lightweights as Gary Lewis & The Playboys (led by comedian Jerry Lewis’ son), Bobby Hebb and Bryan Hyland – The Yardbirds were soundchecking that afternoon. The Zakary Thaks, a Corpus-based garage outfit booked as local support, were checking out their heroes, when they noticed Beck kept stepping on some box on the floor that made his guitar explode.

“Whut’s that thang you’re steppin’ on?” one Thak inquired of Beck.

“Oh, it’s a fuzz box,” he mumbled through his lank curtains of black hair. “It’s this new thing in England, gives your guitar a little kick.”

Apparently, Vox Tonebenders – Beck’s favored fuzz – were not available yet in the Sparkling City By the Sea. If they’d looked around the inventory at The Horn Shop on Kostoryz Rd., they might have found the original: The Maestro Fuzztone, used by Keith Richards on “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” the year before. Instead, they talked to a crusty old Horn Shop employee named Smitty, who worked on every amplifier in the area.

“Jeff Beck had this box with a button on it, between his git-tar and his ayump (South Texan for “amp”),” they drawled at Smitty. “And everytime he stepped on that button, all Hay-ull (South Texan for “Hell”) would break loose!”

For weeks, Smitty dropped by Zakary Thaks rehearsals with different prototypes of what became the Coastal Bend’s first fuzzbox: “Boys, see if this gits close.” They kept making suggestions, and he kept tweaking it, until arriving at this Rube Goldberg-looking contraption that sat atop guitarist John John Lopez’s amp. It had a power cable hardwired into it, which meant it ran on AC current. A VU meter was on its face, and a lightbulb stuck out of the top, making Lopez’s amp look like it had a great idea every time he switched it on. Which it did, come to think of it.

This box is best audible on Zakary Thaks’ 1967 fuzzbuster classic, “Face To Face.” Smitty began building his invention in bulk and selling them to local guitarists for $15 a pop. (A brief history of fuzz, as part of a general overview of guitar effects pedals, appears in this Austin Chronicle piece I wrote in 2015.)

“I tell you, Tim,” Yardbirds manager Giorgio Gomelski exclaimed when I told him this story years later, a tale about his former charges that he’d never heard. “The Yardbirds toured all over America in 1965. And when we came back six months later, every local band was The Yardbirds!”

Which is about the best two sentence explanation of The American Garage Punk Experience anyone’s ever uttered.

We can credit Jeff Beck and his aggressive six-string inventiveness for all of it. He practically became a human synthesizer through the Yardbirds, simulating a sitar through judicious use of fuzz and Middle Eastern modalities on “Heart Full Of Soul,” opening their blitzkrieg rendition of the rockabilly standard “The Train Kept A-Rollin’” with an overdriven Gibson train whistle, even simulating nuclear war on the epic “Shapes Of Things.” But Beck’s art was not based on gimmickry. It relied on a wide-open, overdriven imagination.

His effect on the art of playing the electric guitar was instantaneous, from the moment he initially set foot in a recording studio with The Yardbirds in 1965. He was clearly indebted to the blues, with a technique lashed with the innovations of Les Paul and various rockabilly guitarists, particularly Cliff Gallup of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps. But Beck turned the blues inside out, made science fiction noise out of it: Sick chords, nervous breakdown solos, amps tortured to near death with excessive volume and fuzz. He also played every part of an electric guitar, especially with the battered-to-fuck 1954 Fender Esquire that was his initial Yardbirds guitar before switching to a Gibson Les Paul. 

He’d play strings behind the nut, wrap his pinkie around the volume knob to create these sonic swells, and manually swept his tone control back and forth to produce a wah-wah effect at least two years before a pedal was designed to do that. When the flurries of notes weren’t enough to express what he wanted to say, he’d shove a slide on his pinky for bursts of crying melodicism. When he grew sick of his guitar being outscreamed by teenage girls on the road, he piled a wall of Vox AC-30 amps behind him, switching them all on and cranking the volume wide-open, until the only screaming the teenyboppers heard came from his guitar. As The Yardbirds toured Britain as The Rolling Stones’ opening act with this rig, headlines trailed them everywhere: “The Yardbirds: World War 3!”

The pairing of Beck and Page in The Yardbirds from June 1966 should have turned the rock guitar universe as over under sideways down as their hit from earlier in the year. Sadly, documentation of this team-up is as scarce as classy behavior from Marjorie Taylor-Greene. There’s “Stroll On,” a rethink of “Train Kept A-Rollin’” intended for their legendary scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Blow-Up, where they were cast as substitute for The Who, leaving Pete Townshend’s guitar-smashing theatrics to Beck. The scene comes off as a stagey version of the outbursts for which the moody Beck was already becoming notorious. Then there’s “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” with the duo blowing abstract expressionist feedback all over the joint. It has to be psychedelia’s natal cry.

Beck quit The Yardbirds the day after that Corpus Christi show, though the band told the press he’d been fired for being “difficult” – he apparently was a “perfectionist” with an “explosive temper.” His (and, consequently, Page’s) future direction was determined by an instrumental collaboration the two hatched in May 1966:  “Beck’s Bolero.” With Page on an electric 12-string, The Who’s Keith Moon drumming, John Paul Jones on bass, and Nicky Hopkins tickling the ivories in his lovely fashion, they laid down a piece of inspired bombast Moon drunkenly boasted would “go down like a bloody lead zeppelin.” Page and Jones must have shot each other a look and shared a grin.

End Part One

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