Jeff Beck
Even if you've never heard of The Yardbirds, you're probably at least a little familiar with some of their former members. You know, guys like Eric Clapton, international superstar, and Jimmy Page, who went on to start Led Zeppelin. And then there's Jeff Beck.
On June 24, 1944, Geoffrey Arnold Beck was born in Greater London, UK. From an early age, Jeff showed a deep interest in music, singing with the church choir from age 10, but his greater love was the guitar. After learning to play on a friend's guitar, Beck tried several times to build his own, using cigar boxes, fence posts, bolts and wires to construct odd instruments that probably didn't produce the best sound. But where the sound quality might have been lacking, Beck more than made up for it with ingenuity and innovation.
Which might help explain why he's considered one of the greatest, most influential guitarists of all time. Hovering somewhere near the ranks of Jimi Hendrix and B.B. King, Jeff Beck built a career on exploring and inventing new techniques. He invented the use of feedback and distortion in his playing, as well as many other techniques that are still influencing music today.
Beck introduced many of these techniques in his brief stiint as a guitarist for The Yardbirds. Though he only played with the group for 18 months, the work that The Yardbirds released in this time is generally considered to be some of their best.
After leaving The Yardbirds, Beck started a new act called The Jeff Beck Group, featuring himself on lead guitar and a then unknown Rod Stewart on vocals. The 2 albums that The Jeff Beck Group produced, "Truth" and "Beck-Ola", were both critically acclaimed, and they are widely regarded as the inspiration for the heavy metal genre. In spite of their critical success, though, neither album was able to match the success of the newly formed Led Zeppelin, and The Jeff Beck Group broke up.
After the break up, Beck had plans to work with Bogert and Appice, from Vanilla Fudge, but a car accident left him with debilitating injuries and he was unable to play for nearly a year. When they finally did produce an album, it was met with lukewarm reception, and Beck embarked on his solo career.
The span of Jeff Beck's solo career spans many different styles and genres of music, a fact that might help to explain his lack of superstar success. He did create some critical work in this time, though, including "There and Back", an album he produced with Jan Hammer.
Though the 80s and 90s were a time of sporadic musical ouput for Jeff Beck, due to hearing and health problems, Jeff remains present and relevant in the music world today. But then, for a man who has spent his entire career exploring, and sometimes inventing, different genres of music, from Memphis blues to heavy metal to jazz fusion, that should hardly be a surprise.
|
Jeff Beck T-Shirts
|
