Recently, Jeff Beck gave an interview to NPR’s ‘Weekend All Things Considered’ promoting his new CD. From what I could tell from the snippets played, this was yet another of Beck’s grab-bag recording affairs of recent years spanning an unlikely arc, from robot-shred to a Strat-version of Puccini’s Nessun Dorma. JB said he uses his guitar more and more as “an approximation to the human voice”- cleaning up ye olde fuzz box approach to electrified guitar he pioneered during his early rock & roll days.
A few weeks ago, the guy turned 66! To me, he continues to be the role model of a musician who remains phenomenally contemporary and flexible in his musical outlook, while continually refining his craft. And doing so well into an age usually associated with a rock musician’s retirement, liver transplant or, worse, milking dry and dragging down his past musical glories on state fairground stages.
I could never figure out how JB could get better as a guitar player from decade to decade, considering numerous stories of yearlong hiatuses, when he would rather play grease monkey in the garage pit under his hot rods instead of practicing scales for hours. (There’s yet another role model for every aspiring guitar god: play with the best sidemen/women on the best stages all over the world, and never practice!)
And, I don’t mean ‘better’ as in: ‘not bad for a sixty-six-year-old’; but simply better, by any definition of what makes a guitar player’s output more refined.
There was the night, at Frankfurt’s Storyville Club, ca. 1970, when a couple of JB aficionado buddies of mine and I were patiently waiting out (better: enduring) a three-hour set by opener “Fat Mattress” (Noel Redding’s short-lived solo-project), only to be told by the promoter, around 1:20 in the morning, that JB would not show.
“Why?” the enraged crowd demanded to know. “Because he didn’t feel like playing tonight!” the resigned promoter intoned from the stage. On the way home that early morning my emotions vacillated from feeling insulted (who does he think he is!) to insecure (did JB peek through the curtains during the opener and decided that I and my German peers were simply not sophisticated enough an audience for the British master to waste his talents on?)
Whatever the cause of his absence, I reciprocated with my own JB abstinence for a few years, only to be transported within the first few notes from Beck’s black painted Gold Top Les Paul to absolute bliss at his show at Berkeley’s Greek Theater, ca. 1978. Simon Phillips on drums, Max Middleton on keys as I recall; I forgot who was on bass.
It was heavenly: The tone! The power! (four Marshall stacks discretely hidden behind a black curtain) The dynamics!
Sitting there that evening on the cold stone bench in the chilly amphitheater with the backdrop of sun’s last rays bathing the Golden Gate bridge in warm orange-red I recognized JB’s solution for any guitar (and bass) player who has ever been driven insane by incompetent FOH mixers: do not chance some hack behind a 96-channel board to ruin your tone! JB delivered the sweet, powerful overdrive blow from his guitar directly, right out of his battery of KT88s or EL34s or whatever glows out the back of his Marshalls, into the assembled Celestions below, out to my ears, keeping full control of his tonal and dynamic expression; and not to be messed with by crystalline PA tweeters or other interlopers to good sound.
I found JB’s 1980’s and early ‘90s recorded output lackluster, and, despite ever more nuanced and inventive use of the Stratocaster-by then pretty much his exclusive tool of expression-his playing was stylistically all over the map, patches of textures or riffs with little discernible song material; recordings I bought of that period were one or two-time listening events before being filed under ‘B’ in my LP/CD rack.
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Jeff Beck’s recorded output throughout the 1990s remained thematically scattered. Not unlike Neil Young, he flirted with the cutting edge stylistics of the decade- rock hard drum machine loops, wrapped in barbed wire and submerged in digital ice. Yet, his musical maturation and technical mastery of the Stratocaster continued to dazzle in his live shows. His ingenious use of the vibrato bar (an evolution continuing to date) made him the true successor, rather than imitator, of Jimi Hendrix’s pioneering use of the whammy bar as musical expression rather than gimmick effect.
Considering JB’s unlucky hand to fully communicate his art to the listener through his records- and I mean most of his recordings past his two George Martin-directed masterpieces of the mid 1970s- it is not surprising that one of the finest testimony to his genius is a live-DVD, recorded last year, at Ronnie Scott’s in London. With Vinnie Colaiuta on drums and the astounding female Australian bassist Tal Wilkenfeld, who at the time was barely 23 years old (where could she possibly go from here?), JB’s playing is not showing the usual ravages of time, drug use or arthritis, even if I tried hard to find them. Aside of his furrowed face, and a gallon of hair dye that’s keeping his 60’s style mane jet black, one would be hard pressed to detect a flattening or decent in his artistic arc in this latest documentary of his masterful guitar playing.
But actuary tables can’t be beat: make an effort to catch the master live, while he’s at the top of his game!
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Topic: Critic At Large, Vo. I to IV (Read 19496 times)