01/16/2023
RIP Jeff Beck
I’m devastated. People ask me a lot “who’s your favorite living guitarist?” and the answer would always have to be Jeff Beck. So much so that I’ve always made a point of being careful not to listen to him too much for fear of wanting to imitate him. I was lucky, thanks to my older brothers, to have discovered Beck at a very early age, even before I started playing guitar. He was ferocious — not just inventive but totally unique. Nobody played like that. I loved everything he did. All the “guitar heroes” back then were thrust into recording at an early age so we could hear tremendous growth in a lot of cases from album to album, year to year, but with Jeff Beck even more so. Every time he released something new we all waited with anticipation to hear what new direction or directions he would take. It was uncanny. He seemed to not want to define himself with what he had already done so each new venture just added to an already broad scope of not only “influences" but also the uniqueness that was there from the start. No matter what direction he chose he approached it in a way that only he could. As someone who started singing before I started playing guitar I always loved the vocalists that he worked with in addition to the great musicians so I was a bit surprised, as were a lot of people, when Jeff released Blow By Blow in 1975 which turned out to be his first all instrumental album. It came at a good time for me as I had been playing guitar for 3 or 4 years at that point and was just starting to discover a lot of instrumental music but none of us were prepared for the huge stylistic leap we were about to hear in Jeff’s playing. His last studio recording prior was the collaborative Beck, Bogert & Appice which was great like all his previous works but gave no indication as to what doors would be opened up with Blow By Blow. Every guitar player I knew was mesmerized. This changed everything. We were all dropping back the needle incessantly to try to learn anything we could from Blow By Blow. And then along comes Wired, a year later, which took his playing to even greater heights. I think the most remarkable thing about Jeff Beck as a guitarist however is the way he continued to grow and expand his own style year after year, album after album, in a way that I can’t recall anyone else ever doing — EVER! He didn’t record or tour nearly as much for quite a while after the release of Wired but every time he did there was some new chapter that came with the new music. Thankfully in recent years he appeared to have been on a mission and was incredibly prolific. But again the most amazing thing was his playing that somehow continued to get better. I saw him perform quite a few times over the last fifteen years or so and I have to say that every time he played even better than the time before. I’ve never seen anything like it. Jeff Beck changed music in a very profound way but unless you’re a guitar player you may not understand. He changed our lives. He created a style of playing that was instantly recognizable and almost impossible to replicate. I made the decision a long time ago not to try to copy him — what’s the point? Any of us would only wind up sounding like a bad Jeff Beck imitator. For over fifty years however I have studied him and learned from him and a large part of my style and vocabulary came from him. So, now when someone asks me “Who’s your favorite guitarist — living or dead?” I will say what I always say: “I can’t answer that.” But my very short list will include Jeff. There will never be another Jeff Beck.- WH
