Little Did I Know, When I Bought “Blow By Blow”…

Sounds Good!

When I was 13 and 14 and 15 I used to catch the bus up to Gisborne to visit a friend. I had my Walkman to play tapes and if I was lucky I’d buy a new tape (or two) when I made it up the line – so that the bus-ride back had a new soundtrack.

That first trip, on a whim, I purchased Jeff Beck’s Blow By Blow. It’s been one of the most important albums in my life. I knew about Jeff Beck – I knew the story that he was one of the great British guitarists of the 60s (it was Jeff, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton that had each held the lead guitarist role in The Yardbirds). I had a cheap Yardbirds Greatest Hits tape. I couldn’t tell which was which really, but I loved Heart Full of Soul and that was Jeff. So I had to get some of his music. I knew he had a band that featured Rod Stewart on vocals but this was all pre-internet, you couldn’t just look up and find. You had to save up and try.

It was just as well I found Blow By Blow first. It’s Beck’s best solo record. His debut as a solo artist – it’s where he announces his voice as lead instrumentalist, a ‘voice’ that is not vocal. A jazz-rock album, produced by George Martin of Beatles fame. An enduring classic. Imagine if I’d found Flash first and bought that. It might have been my one and only Beck album.

I still think back to being 13 and counting my change in an aisle of a Deka store. In Gisborne. The tapes on a carousel, like a display of greeting cards. My mate bought a Deep Purple album (I seem to remember it being Who Do We Think We Are) and I chose Blow By Blow.

No idea that 30 years on I’d still be listening to it. No idea at all that about 20 years after making that purchase I’d be speaking to the man that made that very album. It’s crazy when you think about it.

Right through school I collected up all the Beck I could find – it wasn’t easy living in provincial NZ in the early 90s and still very much committed to cassette tapes, grudgingly getting on board with CDs a bit late in the piece. But then I moved to one of the big smokes for uni and started buying LPs as well as CDs. In a few years I had everything Beck had ever done. It’s a finite catalogue and you don’t need it all – and I imagine you could listen to Blow By Blow and love it without needing to hear much else by him (though Wired is pretty much a sister-volume).

And then I get into writing about music – and I don’t know if I ever really write about Jeff Beck at all. He’s not prolific, there were probably no new albums for me to review – and certainly none to rave about. But I get a call one day from The Listener. They want to feature him since he’s coming to New Zealand. Am I the right person to do a big Jeff Beck profile, some 3,000 words, spread across four pages? Am I what! Only catch? Ten minutes is all I’m going to get on the phone. Oh, only other catch? It’s that very next morning. Early. That’s okay though because I’ve been researching for this sort of thing for at least a decade, maybe two. My ship is coming in. It’s my lucky day.

And it was. The interview went well and the story was a thrill to write up. I included the interview in a recent e-book. You can buy it by clicking on that link – a dozen interviews from across the years, some of the biggest names in music (and, er, pro-wrestling) that I have spoken to. Or you can check it out on the Goodreads page to read more about it.

But today at the sake of bloating out this newsletter I wanted to include the full interview. You can’t find it online anywhere now – apart from in my e-book. And I appreciate that if you’ve signed up to this you may not want to stretch for the e-book too. But the link is there if you want it. I’ve dropped the price of it right back to $1.99 US as a special. Bargain!

Anyway, the full interview – the time I got to talk to Jeff Beck after being a fan my whole adolescent and adult life – is right here right now.

But hang on, a wee playlist of some of my favourite Beck moments is here to whet your appetite first. (And don’t forget to check the bottom of this newsletter for a non-Beck playlist, volume 11 of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!)

Jeff Beck: Always Moving, Always Playing, Always Listening and Looking For A New Sound

(2009)

As a 12-year-old I got hooked on The Yardbirds, mostly because of Eric Clapton. But you get the whole story, the trinity – Clapton, Beck, Jimmy Page…and from there I became a huge Jeff Beck fan. The “Beckology” boxset was one of my favourites and of course the Blow By Blow and Guitar Shop albums. Not long after that it was his entire discography. So, imagine my luck when the arts editor of a national rag comes calling with a next-day interview. Jeff Beck is playing a show in Auckland, am I the person to talk to him? Am I what! It was off to work early that next morning to do my first office break-room interview. There before the rest of the workers. Sitting at a breakfast-bar at about 7am. About to speak to one of my all-time favourite musicians…

“Maybe you need to push your two islands closer together and move them up nearer to Japan,” Jeff Beck says with a laugh. This, in answer to the standard touring question of why it has taken so long for Beck to play down this way – late January sees his first Australasian tour since 1977. But Japan is a regular haunt. “Playing live is a balancing act, you have to either have a successful record or a functioning band. And I’m more about the functioning band than the hit record,” Beck says with knowing laughter.

The guitarist’s guitarist, a virtuoso legend, is an interviewer’s dream. I had expected the erstwhile Yardbird to be spiky or at the least sulky. At 64, with increasing critical kudos, Beck is happy to look at his career in depth, laughing off the failures and revelling in the fan-favourites, like mid-70s fusion masterpiece, Blow By Blow (“yeah, it’s still a good album, I still like it, still play it and we still play many of the songs from it in our shows. Why wouldn’t we? They’re great songs”).

Born Geoffrey Arnold Beck, he is part of the pantheon of English blues-rock guitarists, in particular the holy trinity that includes Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton; all players in the British blues group, The Yardbirds. Beck’s first group in the early 1960s was The Tridents. He rose through the ranks with a guitar he built himself, first experimenting with the instrument in his pre-teen, post-piano lesson years. From there he replaced his friend Clapton in The Yardbirds, Eric became unhappy with the move towards commercial success and wished to stay true to his blues roots at that point. Beck saw the chance to create oily riffs (‘Over Under Sideways Down’) and fuzz-filled solos (‘Heart Full Of Soul’) before moving off to work with the then-unknown Rod Stewart, forming The Jeff Beck Group.

Along the way in the first part of his career Beck gained notoriety for his fiery temper which fuelled his passionate playing. He was at the birth of Heavy Metal, embracing the power-trio format with the group Beck, Bogert, Appice (with Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, both from the bands Vanilla Fudge and Cactus) and was already deemed an innovator for his use of feedback, double-tracked solos and harmonic picking. Working primarily within the blues idiom – moving on over into rock – Beck tells me that the first guitarist in his generation to mean something was Jimi Hendrix. “He still blows me away, to this day, just thinking about what he achieved, particularly in such a short space. I mean here was a guy who played and it made you just want to give up; to just sit down and listen to him.” Beck is very clear in how serious his worship of Hendrix was: “I wanted to be him. But then, after doing some stuff that was really just close to copying him I moved far away from that sound and decided I would just enjoy his music as a fan – and I am a life-long fan. Now I work on other sounds that interest me.”

The start of the Jeff Beck story makes him sound like a constantly rising star, moving up through a blues pedigree to help Rod Stewart and Ron Woods (now known as a member of The Rolling Stones) achieve fame, blazing through pop, rock and metal sounds.

But ask Beck about some of the mistakes he has made. Some of the chances he should have taken.

Peals of laughter precede the mock-wary, “Well, where do you wanna start?”

Beck was considered as a replacement for Syd Barrett when the psychedelic songwriter was maneuverered away from the helm of the band Pink Floyd. Roger Waters stepped up as the principle songwriter, David Gilmour, already a friend of the band, became the lead guitarist, Beck missed his first window. When he recorded his first album with the Jeff Beck Group it featured a one-off ensemble of Beck, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page (from what would be Led Zeppelin) and Keith Moon, drummer for The Who. Beck turned down working with Led Zeppelin to plough on with his own endeavours. And then came the big one: in the mid-70s the Rolling Stones needed a replacement guitarist for the disillusioned Mick Taylor. Beck was called in to work on some of the sessions for the album that would become Black and Blue and was in line to be a permanent group member. The truth of the situation is that Beck was left hanging, waiting in a hotel room for a call that never came, he had to move on. The eventual replacement guitarist was of course Ron Woods, from the early Jeff Beck Group.

Speaking about it now Beck explains, somewhat philosophically, “it’s one of those things where if I could have split myself in two it would be perfect. Half of me would go off and be a Rolling Stone and half of me would head off to explore some other musical ideas. But”, and there’s another dose of laughs as he delivers a line everyone can believe, “I don’t think I would have been able to keep up with Keith [Richards] you know? Or control Keith for that matter. I mean, can anyone?”

Also, while waiting for the call from the Stones, Beck was “given an opportunity to record an album with Sir George Martin. And that was something I did not want to turn down; something I knew I had to do”. That album, 1975’s Blow By Blow, is, to this day, his best-selling release. “I had given up trying to sound like Jimi Hendrix by this point and was going for my version of what John McLaughlin can do,” he modestly undersells. “Call it a simplified Mahavishnu Orchestra,” he adds, referencing the form of fusion that was making waves in the early 1970s, pushing jazz and rock tides in a swirl toward one another.

“We did Wired shortly after that album, and as we lost George Martin the sound became slightly more avant-garde, less accessible but it was still a sound I was very pleased with.”

Led Zeppelin were megastars by this point, Robert Plant the Golden God that is now parodied by mockumentary send-ups and earnestly re-attempted by a clutch of recent retro-influenced groups whose members were born in the 1980s.  Eric Clapton had transitioned to being a lead singer and guitarist, no longer the sideman in a band. His commercial success with his J.J. Cale covers (‘Cocaine’ and ‘After Midnight’) and his white-man’s cod-reggae rehashes (‘I Shot The Sheriff’, ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’) meant that a Clapton album no longer even required a guitar solo on each song.

It’s difficult to ask a guitar hero if the lack of mainstream success has actually been a positive. It could sound, well, a tad insulting. But as soon as I start, Beck picks up the thread. “That’s exactly it. I mean I am not saying I didn’t want to have a hit, I am sure I did, but there is no external pressure on me to deliver – whether it be more hits, or a song that sounds like the last one. It has allowed me to keep creating and to keep exploring.”

Beck is sure that if he lost that focus, he would not play at all. “There’s never been any interest in just doing an old set of songs I am associated with. I wouldn’t get up there and do instrumental Yardbirds songs or just play the old material. That would not be satisfying to me and my audience has moved with me – some of them anyway – following the twists and turns”.

Similarly, while there was a touch of acoustic guitar on very early Jeff Beck material and again on Wired, he has no interest in an ‘unplugged’ album. “Too many good acoustic players have done that already and I don’t think I could say enough by being that limited. I am interested in developing the sound I have been working on for the last three decades; and that has never been about following trends.”

That sound is essentially the guitar as lead voice in the band. Beck’s current group features journeyman keyboardist David Sancious, veteran drummer-to-the-stars, Vinnie Colaiuta and 22-year-old bassist Tal Wilkenfeld. “She’s really amazing, isn’t she?” Beck asks/states with regard to Wilkenfeld, an Australian guitarist who left school at 16 to move to America as a professional musician. She switched to bass guitar just three years ago and has been playing with jazz legend Chick Corea.

“Vinnie, my drummer, gave me an Mp3 file of Tal playing and said, ‘You just have to hear it’. And it was really incredible. She really is amazing”. Great players are important to Beck, particularly drummers, he says it goes back to the first sounds you hear, “if you don’t have rhythm then you don’t have anything. You have to have a groove and I think back to Elvis Presley’s drummer, DJ Fontana, to Keith Moon and John Bonham and then on to the incredible jazz-fusion players like Billy Cobham.” Beck’s band always features a strong musical personality driving the sound and with Colaiuta the trend continues. “Vinnie’s done a few tours of Japan with me, sometimes he has to go off and do other stuff, but this band we have now is really great, really something special. You guys are in for a treat.”

Jeff Beck has, as he puts it, “Always kept me eyes open” for other projects, for work. He refers back to the fact that he has not had a huge hit single or album to propel him. “The downside of that is that you are always looking for work. The positive within that is that working is good; I love to play the guitar. Most days anyway and I don’t believe in having a safety-zone, that would limit me, I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

This search for work has seen Beck return to some familiar faces, recording an entire album as sideman for the man he could have been playing beside full time (Mick Jagger’s Primitive Cool). And then, a few years on from that, working on Roger Waters’ Amused To Death (“That one was really simple, Roger called, I was fishing at the time, I did four days of recording and then it was buttoned up”.). And perhaps most famously there was the reconnection with Rod Stewart for one song in the mid-80s, Stewart’s rendition of Cutis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready’. “That one really was random. We had not seen each other for years and were in the same restaurant at different tables. Someone told Rod that I was there and so he came over for some drinks – in those days I suppose it was quite a few [laughs] and he tells me we should do the song together. I didn’t know if he was joking or whether he’d remember asking me but a week later I walked in and we cut that song.”.

There was also Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ with a distinctive Beck solo. And most recently there was work with American Idol-winner Kelly Clarkson (“A thing like that comes up, you don’t turn it down, people can tell me I’m selling out but there are not that many chances for me to reach a TV audience these days.”).

There were flirtations with what Beck describes as techno-music (2001’s You Had It Coming), including his interpretation of Nitin Sawhney’s ‘Nadia’, the guitar replacing Indian instruments and voice. “I would love to continue with that sort of sound, and write for that genre, drum’n’bass, electro material, but there are people like The Chemical Brothers who are better at it. So I’ll keep wandering…”

When he’s not playing the guitar, Beck is obsessed with cars, collecting them, tinkering with them and those same hands that built his first guitar are now put to work rebuilding engines. It’s the sort of work that would scare a lot of guitarists. Beck tells me he doesn’t really think about it. And then adds, “Well, I did nearly blow my hand off once with a sandblaster, after that you start to realise you need safety equipment. A visit to the eye surgeon teaches you the importance of protective eye-wear.”

But the cars are up on blocks for now with Beck most interested in his main vehicle, pushing new shapes into the air from his hip. “I practice every day. That’s the secret. There’s nothing more to it than that. Play every day and keep trying to find a new something new.”

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Jeff Beck fans comment away. And your prize for reading that far - or scrolling that fast - is this week’s Something For The Weekend playlist - which is right here.

Happy Weekend to you all.