R.I.P. to Legendary Guitarist Jeff Beck

Rolling Stone- Jeff Beck, the blues-rock innovator and two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who revolutionized how the guitar is played, died Tuesday at the age of 78.

Beck’s family confirmed the former Yardbirds guitarist’s death Wednesday. “On behalf of his family, it is with deep and profound sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck’s passing,” Beck’s family said in a statement. “After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday. His family asks for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.”

Beck, an eight-time Grammy winner, was twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — both as a member of the Yardbirdsas well as for his work with his own Jeff Beck Group.

I'd be lying if I said I was extremely familiar with Jeff Beck. I saw this news this afternoon, put two and two together with The Yardbirds, (which I am familiar with), and hoped somebody with more knowledge on Beck like Read Ad or Robbie blogged it. We've been getting a bunch of dm's and tweets to the Barstool Backstage account about this so I wanted to do him justice.

Upon brief research, Jeff Beck placed #5 on Rolling Stone's "Greatest Guitar Players of All Time" list. Which is pretty incredible.

Beck grew up with and became friends with, and later bandmates with the aforementioned Jimmy Page.

From all accounts, Jimmy Page revered Beck in such a way that he believed he could throw down with anybody: Clapton, Hendrix, you name it. 

He called him "the greatest guitarist you never heard of", and once said he was "your favorite guitarist's favorite guitarist." Amazing compliments from one of the best to ever do it.

Slash said of him: “It’s a lot easier to appreciate Beck’s guitar playing if you’re a guitar player. He just has such a natural control over the instrument. It’s the ability to make it do something that you’ve never heard anybody else do. Blow by Blow is the album I had when I was a kid. He would go from love songs to a really blistering, hard-rock, heavy-sounding guitar without ever going over the top.”

He’d later audition for the Yardbirds at the encouragement of Page, who had become a successful session guitarist, in 1965 after Eric Clapton quit the group for becoming too poppy. Nevertheless, Beck remembered frontman Keith Relf as being something of a blues purist. “I thought, ‘You can be a purist and you can be poor; I’m gonna do what I think is best,'” he said. Beck had a natural penchant for psychedelia, experimentalism, and jazz (two of his favorite musicians in the Sixties were Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk) and his avant-garde side fit perfectly with the pop scene in the Sixties.

Page joined the band in 1966, first on bass and then eventually as a co-lead guitarist. The Yardbirds performed “Stroll On” (a version of Jimmy Burnette’s “Train Kept a-Rollin'”) for a sequence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, in which Beck smashed a guitar a la Pete Townshend. “Well, clearly the Who was asked to do it and they said no,” Beck recalled. “I wasn’t in the position to argue when they paid us a lot of money. … [Antonioni] just said, ‘You’ll smash your guitar.’ And I said, ‘No, I won’t.’ It was a sunburst Les Paul. He said, ‘We’ll buy you another one.’ He didn’t grasp that you don’t do that to most guitars. So they rented six beginner guitars, and they were so cheap they came in a clear plastic bag.”

The Yardbirds' sound is unmistakable. At the time, it was cutting edge. You can hear the elements of funk and "pyschedelia", as well as the familiar bass riffs that would become a Led Zeppelin signature as well.

But Beck would no longer be in the band by the time the film came out. He quit in November 1966 after an illness and suffering a breakdown. In 1967, he recorded the pop single “Hi Ho Silver Lining,” a track on which he sang lead vocals, that became a hit, 

while its B-side, “Beck’s Bolero,” foreshadowed Led Zeppelin as it featured Page and bassist John Paul Jones accompanying Beck alongside the Who’s Keith Moon and pianist Nicky Hopkins. 

That same year, he founded the heavy-blues focused Jeff Beck Group, which featured singer Rod Stewart and future Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood on bass. The group issued two albums — 1968’s Truth and 1969’s Beck-Ola — and turned down an appearance at Woodstock before Beck disbanded the ensemble, leading Stewart and Wood to join Faces.

(Sidebar - "Ooh La La" = one of the greatest songs of all time)

(Fun Fact - I learned today that Beck decided to explore his interest in Motown and sat in on some of Stevie Wonder’s sessions for Talking Book. At one point, Beck started playing the drums and when Wonder walked in, he liked the groove and wrote “Superstition” around it. Unreal)

He spent the rest of the Eighties working as a guest musician, adding solos to albums by Tina Turner, Mick Jagger, and Jon Bon Jovi. But he had trouble replicating his success as a solo artist for decades. The Nineties found him bouncing from rockabilly on 1993’s Crazy Legs to techno, on 1999’s Who Else!

In 2009, 17 years after Beck was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Yardbirds, he delivered one of the greatest induction speeches of all time when he reentered the Rock Hall for his solo work. “Someone told me I should be proud tonight. But I’m not, because they kicked me out. They did. Fuck them,” he quipped at the 1992 ceremony. “I couldn’t believe I was even nominated,” Beck told Rolling Stone at the time. “I thought the Yardbirds was as close as I’d get to getting in. I’ve gone on long after that and gone through different musical changes. It’s very nice to hear that people have been listening.”

Rest In Peace Jeff Beck.