Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Good Bye Jeff
The Death Of Jeff Beck This Past Week Left A Permanent Rift in The Musical Universe and The Hearts Of His Fans
It’s going to happen to everyone in all generations.
The cultural and musical icons that are threaded into the sense of who, and what you are, will inevitably fall away, a cruel reminder that of all life’s uncertainties, there is one definitive thing: no one, without exception, stays around forever.
The Pretenders singer/songwriter Chrissie Hynde put it well:
“I’m not a philosopher, but I would say that it’s only when you turn about 60 that you start to see the decades as they unfold behind you and you can start to see the way it all fits together.”
I’m seeing that now at 65, and more importantly, feeling it.
Strangely, when I got the news of the sudden passing Of Jeff Beck, I was already in a state of mourning for the uniquely talented Mark Sandman, late of this earth, and the band Morphine. Not just for the band, but for a time when there was risk-taking and experimentation in music and art. That grief was re-catalyzed revisiting the incredible documentary about the band’s impactful but short-lived career “Journey Of Dreams.”
That documentary tells the story of how the Universe brought Mark, and his collaborators Dana Colley, Billy Conway, and Jerome Deupree together to make music so unique that it was inevitable that it grabbed the entire world’s attention. Morphine was a combination of luck, fate, and talent, but perhaps most importantly, adventurous experimentalism. They certainly lived up to the promise of that experimentalist adventure and gained fans like Joe Strummer of The Clash, and Henry Rollins, artists who recognized Morphine’s unique stamp: “Lo-Fi” deconstruction and aural space. Less is more. They made it work.
I was, and remain a huge fan.
I had the opportunity to meet Jerome at a drum clinic in Maine and got to chat. We were all bought together by the incredible drummer Billy Ward on his chat forum. Before the political wars and billionaire ownership that characterizes the majority of chat forums today, we had endless enthusiastic discussions of art, music, and drumming which bonded strangers together into a tribe of sorts. Jerome was kind enough to hang out for a bit and have coffee, where we chatted about drumming, Mark, and Morphine. I felt even more connected to the band and part of a larger community of drummers. It was an amazing day.
Hanging with former Morphine drummer Jerome Deupree,and independent drummer Billy Ward, at a DW drum clinic in Portland, Maine
Jerome tries out a ride cymbal.
Mark Sandman, like Jeff Beck, and contemporaries like Frank Zappa, lived his uncompromising artistic vision and died doing the very thing he loved the most, performing his music in front of an adoring crowd. The touring life, the pressure of living up to a recording contract with a major label, to which the band was newly signed, and a heart attack suffered literally while performing onstage, ushered Mark Sandman into the next world.
The ultimate sacrifice for artistic vision.
I wish I could say I was an early adopter of Jeff Beck’s music, but that wasn’t the case at all.
In the mid-60s, relying on radio, I was only vaguely aware of the Yardbirds, a band that launched a career for Jeff Beck, and showcased his unique approach to guitar. The “rivalry”, real or imagined, between the stellar talents of Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page, both fated to join the Yardbirds, tended to overshadow Beck as a unique voice.
Everyone alive in the 60s was influenced by the British Invasion. It was inescapable. As a kid rumbling through the record aisles, unable to afford the vast quantity of music I desperately wanted to hear, music exploding onto the world from “across the pond,” I knew Jeff as a name, but not as a sound. Jeff Beck’s albums “Truth” and “Beck-Ola” (featuring a Salvador Dali-esque giant apple as a cover) hinted at the promise of a guitarist with a unique voice and plenty to say. Having singer Rod Stewart fronting your band, with his distinctive, raspy, whiskey-soaked Blues voice ringing out in complement to Beck’s call-and-response guitar riffs, didn’t hurt either.
The Yardbirds were, unfortunately, unable to contain the volatile temperament of Jeff Beck, much less his talent, and he was dismissed from the band with all the attendant drama. Subsequently, Beck himself broke up the Jeff Beck Group just as success beckoned from the wings. Of his dismissal from The Yardbirds, Beck said:
“I had to go home and that was probably the worst because I had nothing. I’d given my guitar to Jim [Page]. And I was living back with Mum with no money,” Beck relived the nightmare he had experienced during the Yardbirds’ visit in the US, which, during this point, was the last straw he had endured with the band before he left.”
In the Jeff Beck Group, audiences and critics started to pay more attention to frontman Stewart, which Beck admitted suited him just fine, as he was always a bit uncomfortable and nervous in the scrutiny of the spotlight. Yet, it was undeniable that Beck’s voice as a completely unique guitarist was erupting into the public consciousness with cuts like “Beck’s Bolero:” wide, sweeping, majestic, guitar-themed anthems embracing experimentalism and breaking boundaries, at a time when having radio-friendly “hits” were the only thing that mattered. Beck was reinventing the role of the guitar player in the context of a classic rock band. The Jeff Beck Group could have played Woodstock, but Beck thought the pressure of being filmed and scrutinized was too much. He was not precious about his gear, but he was insistent on focus and attention in his performances. I learned more about Jeff in this post-gig interview after his 5-day residency at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club than in any previous interview, written or recorded.
As the 70s dawned Jeff Beck was still looking for a band that was the right fit and was collaborating with the stellar talents of Stevie Wonder, (who he greatly admired and had a chance to simply observe in the creative environment of the studio) Bassist Tim Bogert, and drummer Carmine Appice, late of the bands Cactus and Vanilla Fudge. In a notable, but unlikely musical moment, it’s said that Beck was fooling around on the drumset at the Motown studios, and Wonder encouraged him to keep playing. Thus, an accidental, experimental moment resulted in a classic, incredible riff, and became one of Wonder’s biggest hits:” Superstition”.
Beck’s collaboration with Bogert and Appice would result in one studio album and one live album, simply titled “Beck Bogert and Appice” another mildly successful but ill-fated outing where too much stellar talent was occupying too little space, but it did yield a heavier, sludgier rock version of Superstition. To this day, I find the recording quality and overall effort not quite satisfying. But it was, in hindsight, Jeff Beck fighting to keep his name out there. Beck Bogert and Appice failed to live up to its promise as a “supergroup” and flamed out, disbanding in 1974.
That would all quickly change within months when Beck let go of the reins of control, and allowed Beatles producer George Martin, as he did with The Beatles, to guide him in producing a work of recorded art that would change his career status and trajectory, “Blow By Blow”.
Martin said of making the record:
“I said this to him at the outset, I said, ‘I’m not gonna give you any magic if you’re thinking of that; I’m not gonna give you sounds that you’ve never had before. The sounds are gonna have to come from your guitar and you’re gonna have to work on ’em.’ …He would make the sounds himself in the studio and then we would translate them into recording. And of course then we would add a little gloss here and there but there was nothing specific about any particular tricks that we did on the album. “
“…there’s nothing [Jeff Beck] likes better than to get under the front of his car and change the oil and get himself all greasy. He loves playing about with mechanics and things. And he tends to look upon his guitars like a lump of old iron. It’s amazing to me how these instruments … he brings a battered old Fender in and says, “This bloody thing is no good.” And I say, ‘Well, haven’t you got another one?” And he said, “No, it’s all I’ve got.” And then he proceeds to pick it up and make the most incredible, beautiful, heavenly sounds imaginable.”
I’ve written about how this record changed my life, and generations of music fans and musicians cite this as not only Jeff Beck’s seminal work, but as a gateway event that kicked down the barriers of genre. Blow By Blow was literally indefinable, it was Jazz, Rock, Funk, and Soul, the beginning of a true fusion of music. Notably, with the exception of one vocal phrase delivered through the Talk Box, on the reggae-influenced Beatles hit “She’s A Woman” there were no vocals.
The tracks were brilliantly cross-faded and sequenced, with Martin’s tasteful string arrangements putting emotional force and weight behind tracks like “Diamond Dust”. Fortunately thanks to FM radio, free from the constraints of playing pop hits, the album gained traction and great critical reviews. Hearing it, you knew that barriers had been broken and nothing had ever been heard like this before. The band, seen below, was stellar:
The album was quickly followed up by another similar collaboration,” Wired” with keyboardist and drummer Jan Hammer, most noted for this “Miami Vice” soundtrack contributions. The recording was crisp, and the tracks were electrifying, but compared to the success of “Blow By Blow” “Wired” wasn’t comparable. I remember thinking that “Wired” was going to break Jeff Beck into the public consciousness as a household name and cement his legend. That was down the road a bit and would take more years of persistence and sacrifice, even disappearing from public view with occasional performances for most of the 80s. Just before that, another collaboration with Jan Hammer “There And Back,” came out, another underrated effort, The true fans of Jeff Beck, like myself, might have been saying to themselves “When will people get it?”
As the decades rolled by, I was, like most fans, delighted by the fact that Jeff put some of his least commercial, and arguably, most experimental offerings out. Even for loyal fans, this music tested the listener’s dedication. With the changing trends of the 90s, Jeff put out the uneven, techno-influenced albums “Who Else!” and “Jeff” based on loops and samples. Ahead of his time as always, Jeff Beck heard the sounds of the future before the rest of us and embraced it fully. Despite being challenging listens, especially in hindsight, they were Jeff Beck staking out his space in the sonic melange of grunge and alternative. I would argue that this was an alternative to alternative.
You had traditional moments in cuts like “Brush With The Blues” and weird, nearly incomprehensible cuts like “What Mama Said” and the eerie “Space For The Papa.” It took a while, but I grew to admire and respect Jeff’s “outside of outside” compositions as much as his more radio-friendly fare. To me, it was Jeff Beck saying, “This is who I am, take it or leave it. I can always go away and come back again”. Who else, indeed could do that?
When the news of Jeff Beck’s death officially broke, there was such an outpouring from his fellow musicians, that it was practically unprecedented. The tributes went on for days. Especially from guitar players. All of them acknowledge both his influence and impact. Jeff, said guitarist and producer Rick Beato, was literally uncopyable. I’m no expert, but this may be the result of Beck, sometime in the 1980s eschewing the use of a pick in favor of a completely impossible style to most:
“Beck stopped the regular use of a guitar pick in the 1980s. He produced a wide variety of sounds by using his thumb to pluck the guitar strings, his ring finger on the volume knob, and his little finger on the vibrato bar on his signature Fender Stratocaster.[89] By plucking a string and then 'fading in' the sound with the volume knob he created a unique sound that can resemble a human voice, among other effects. He frequently used a wah-wah pedal both live and in the studio. Eric Clapton once said, "With Jeff, it's all in his hands".[90]”
Perhaps, beyond the music, the greatest gift that Jeff Beck left behind was his performances and collaborations with some of the greatest musicians from across the planet. We have Jeff to thank for being a true believer, supporter, and touring partner of the incredible bassist and songwriter Tal Wilkenfeld, the drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, fellow fusion pioneer Stanley Clarke, the singer Imelda May, and a list that goes on and on.
There is no denying that the musical Universe is an emptier space without Jeff Beck. I know his music delighted me for decades, and it feels like I lost a friend I could rely on. He will be sorely missed.