30 Jan Jeff Beck / Tom Verlaine
The news of the untimely passing of Jeff Beck last week landed like a lightning bolt in the firmament of the guitar gods. By any estimation, Beck was one of the select few—the very top elite players to emerge from the musical/cultural crucible of the 1960s and go on to a career of sustained greatness and glory. His primary peers were his fellow Yardbirds Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, along with Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend. In terms of direct equivalence regarding instrumental genius, innovation and influence—that’s it. That’s all.
Admittedly, this critical assessment is a matter of personal taste—but only to a degree. For the most part, this is historical fact. Obviously there are and have been many, many great guitarists in rock & roll—some of whom I listen to much more frequently than I listen to Jeff Beck—but that doesn’t change anything. Jeff was one of the greatest, most virtuosic and most influential, EVER. Any list that purports to quantify the Greatest Rock Guitarists that doesn’t include Beck in its top five, or at least its top ten, is sadly misguided, or at least misinformed.
Jimi Hendrix left us long ago—a tragic loss at the classic rock & roll age of 27—but he accomplished an incredible amount in his short time. His recorded legacy is substantial and has rightly preserved his legend as a visionary and otherworldly virtuoso over the 53 years since his passing. The remainder of the six-string quintet outlined above carried on and remained productive, to one degree or another, all of these long years—until now. Setting aside Hendrix for the moment, let us consider the other four, one by one.
Eric Clapton was/is the consummate white bluesman. He was already a legend by the time he quit the Yardbirds in 1965, just shy of his 20th birthday. His reason for leaving: The group had forsaken its energetic blues rave-up roots for commercialism with the release of the hit single ‘For Your Love.’ Through his subsequent days with John Mayall, Cream, Blind Faith, Derek and the Dominoes and as a solo artist his passionate, tasteful, melodic playing has remained the gold standard. Clapton has few, if any, peers—a true genius and one of the most influential players ever.
Jimmy Page is the great sonic visionary/riff architect of rock & roll. Page parlayed a lucrative career as a boy-genius London studio ace into his stint with the Yardbirds followed by 12 years as the leader of one of the most successful rock & roll bands of all times: Led Zeppelin. Perhaps you’ve heard of them. He oversaw the final phase of the Yardbirds, replaced the rhythm section and the lead singer, and rechristened the new entity as Led Zeppelin (Zep’s first tour being a string of Scandinavian dates in 1969 as the ‘New Yardbirds’). In the early days Page played with a fire and fluidity that rivaled Beck (check out Page’s reissue of a late live Yardbirds’ set Yardbirds ’68), but his exceptional chops eroded badly from the ‘80s onward due to drug abuse and inactivity. Regardless, his prodigious studio wizardry (he produced all ten of Led Zeppelin’s albums) helped to propel the group to the pinnacle of global acclaim and his legacy as one of the all-time greats remains unassailable.
Pete Townshend is the conceptual genius whose relentless/restless creativity propelled the Who from the first note they played to the last. Despite the extraordinary and unique contributions of Keith Moon, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, the Who were always the vehicle for Townshend’s vision: With just a bare handful of exceptions, he wrote everything they ever recorded. As a guitarist, Townshend has long belittled his abilities, especially in comparison to his peers enumerated here, but methinks he doth protest too much. Okay, perhaps Pete never quite had the same speed, fluidity and melodic flair as Hendrix, Clapton, Page or Beck, but whatever he lacked as a soloist he made up for in spades with power, passion and wildly rhythmic propulsion. In the footage of the Who’s legendary set at Woodstock the blood on the back of Townshend’s white boiler suit is clearly visible, wiped from his right hand as he beats and wrings the music out of his suffering Gibson SG. That’s the only way that music could be played: You have to be willing to bleed.
And then there’s brother Jeff. Jeff Beck stands apart from his peers for a few significant reasons: Unlike Clapton, Hendrix or Townshend, he was not a vocalist (the exception being his one-off 1967 hit single ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’, a recording which Beck denigrated for the rest of his life). Unlike the other four guitarists he was not a particularly prolific composer, and, from the early ‘70s onward, his music was almost exclusively instrumental. Much more so than Jimi, Pete, Jimmy, or Eric, he was a six-string virtuoso to the exclusion of all else. He enjoyed commercial success, especially in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but professed to being grateful for not having the albatross of excessive popularity hanging about his neck. He never stuck with one group format or lineup for very long and, in the process, earned himself a reputation for being mercurial and moody—a perfectionist and a loner.
Like a lot of people, I turned onto Beck through the Yardbirds and his status as one of that group’s triumvirate of guitar greats. After bailing out/getting fired from the Yardbirds (by not bothering to show up for gigs during a 1967 tour of the U.S.) he quickly hit his stride by putting together one of the all-time great, short-lived groups consisting of himself, Ronnie Wood on bass, Mickey Waller on drums, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and a then largely-unknown singer named Rod Stewart. Their first album, Truth, 1968, is rightfully regarded as a classic. It’s a recording that is in close step with the late Page-led Yardbirds/early Zeppelin template, with a lot of amped up blooziness and back-and-forth synergizing between the guitar and vocals. Beck’s ensemble is a more rollicking, looser-limbed affair than Page’s, though: The lads-down-the-pub vibe generally predominates, later to be continued and expanded upon with the great Small Faces/Faces/early Rod solo albums.
The Beck/Wood/Stewart/Waller/Hopkins lineup lasted for one album more (1969’s Beck-Ola), though Tony Newman handles most of the drum duties on the second release. Beck-Ola wasn’t up to the standard of its predecessor and the band broke up shortly thereafter, thereby squandering its scheduled slot to perform at Woodstock. Beck later claimed to have done this on purpose because he ‘didn’t want it [the band’s performance] to be preserved.’
Beck retooled the group for the next two albums, settling on a lineup of vocalist Bobby Tench, drummer Cozy Powell, keyboardist Max Middleton, and bassist Clive Chaman. The overall vibe varies from heavy (‘Situation’ ‘Going Down’) to jazzy (‘Max’s Tune’) but these records never really pulled me in—certainly not in the way that Truth did. To my ear, the band sounded kind of anonymous and the compositions not particularly inspired, even if Beck’s playing has its usual rude and raucous highlights. I never felt that these were bad records, per se, just that they weren’t great—they weren’t keepers. It was never a question of Beck’s musicianship, but rather a matter of the right material and the right collaborators for him to knock heads with.
For me, the best bit is ‘Going Down’ from the 1972 Jeff Beck Group album. Beck sounds like he’s actually having fun with this one and his playing on the cut ranges from odd little finger picked sections to wild swoops and whammy bar power dives. Unlike most of his work from this period it seems apparent that he’s playing a Strat, rather than a Les Paul, and that seems to really free him up.
This second iteration of the Jeff Beck Group blew apart in mid-’72 and was followed by the similarly short-lived Beck Bogert & Appice combo, wherein Beck went in the direction of the power trio with bassist/vocalist Tim Bogert and drummer/vocalist Carmine Appice (both formerly of Vanilla Fudge and Cactus).
Committing to a hard rock/quasi-metal aesthetic appears to have been Beck’s strategy for winning over American audiences, whom he characterized as being desirous of ‘vicious, violent rock and roll.’ A perceptive fellow, our Sir Jeff. The trio’s one studio album seems to strive for a Cream-y sort of a vibe at times, but largely offers a dismal choice between soppy ballads and blatantly commercial mainstream rockers. Dreadful enough, to be sure, but the live recordings are genuinely cringeworthy, replete with bellowing exhortations of ‘Do ya wanna BOOGIE??’ from the rhythm section.
Looking back over Beck’s career I wondered why I hadn’t gravitated to the BB&A material back in the ‘70s when it was initially released (it has been 50 years, after all), so I delved back into the recorded evidence to refresh my memory. Within seconds it all came flooding back to me: ‘Oh, right—this stuff SUCKS! That’s why!’ Beck’s playing remains powerful and nimble if somewhat gimmicky (this was the ‘70s, and the guitar ‘voice box’ effect was in its heyday), but, in general, BB&A makes Led Zeppelin seem dignified and understated in comparison. A few minutes of bludgeoning from Beck Bogert & Appice Live in Japan and you’ll want to retire to your cork-lined study, don your velvet smoking jacket, decant a snifter of fine cognac, put Houses of the Holy on the turntable and settle back with a volume of Proust.
By the BB&A phase Beck was switching back and forth between a modified oxblood Les Paul and a white Stratocaster—the two instruments that were to become his signature guitars.
BB&A shuddered to a halt in the spring of 1974 and Beck retreated to the studio—George Martin’s AIR studios in London—and reunited with keyboardist Max Middleton. With bassist Phil Chen and drummer Richard Bailey on board they began recording instrumentals (several of which were Beck originals) under the watchful eye of Sir George, who signed on as producer and arranger. Stevie Wonder participated in the sessions and provided Jeff with his songs ‘Thelonious’ and ‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers’ in addition to playing clavinet (uncredited) on the former. These sessions produced the album Blow by Blow, released in March of 1975.
With Blow by Blow our hero finally comes fully into his own, as a purveyor of intelligent, dare I say tasteful (!!), rock-tinged jazz fusion. Despite Jeff’s characterization of his American fanbase as a horde of bloodthirsty goons, Blow by Blow became an unqualified hit in the US of A, achieving number four on the Billboard charts and selling over a million copies. Back in the day, everybody I knew had a copy of Blow by Blow in their collection—and I mean everybody, as if mandated by law or something. Ubiquitous, I believe, is the word.
Further sessions with Sir George at AIR continued with Middleton, joined by former Mahavishnu Orchestra members Jan Hammer on synthesizer and Narada Michael Walden on drums. Wilbur Bascomb supplied bass and Richard Bailey returned to contribute drums on a couple of tracks. These sessions were released as Wired in the spring of 1976 and the album rose to number 16 on the Billboard charts, eventually going platinum as well.
Taken together, these two records represent the commercial and, arguably, the artistic pinnacle of Jeff Beck’s career. The combination of solid material, sympathetic and intelligent production, and, of course, top notch musicianship provided the foundation for Beck’s finest work. For me, two tracks in particular stand out. The first is one of Stevie Wonder’s contributions to Blow by Blow—‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,’ the first track on the second side of the album (I’m speaking ‘vinyl’ lingo now, for all you young whippersnappers out there).
The song starts in a hushed mode with Middleton’s lush Fender Rhodes in its full stereo/Leslie glory and delicate cymbal washes from Bailey, who uses brushes throughout. Beck joins in, employing note bending in combination with volume swells to create an emotive, crying vocal quality. Initially, Beck bends the notes up and back down a full step as he swells the volume, omitting the sound of the plucking of the string. The introductory portion of the cut lasts 45 seconds and then Beck introduces the main theme of the song, consisting almost exclusively of short statements of two or three bent single notes in a descending register. This back-and-forth quality creates what feels like a conversation between two guitars. I can’t be absolutely certain how many guitars were utilized on this cut, but there are at least two—a Les Paul and a Strat. Beck shows his hand at around minute 1:53 when he plays a phrase on what is clearly a Strat with the pickup selector in the out-of-phase position between the bridge and middle pickups.
‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers’ serves well to illustrate an aspect of Beck’s technique that is central to his approach: volume Volume VOLUME. In order to fully exploit the tonal dynamics of an electric guitar—especially in the mid and treble ranges—you have to come to terms with LOUDness. The primary impetus behind the invention of the solid body electric guitar was to eliminate feedback when playing at volume in a live situation. Therefore, if your intent is to induce a Strat or a Les Paul to misbehave and feed back you must crank it UP.
Beck had a very full appreciation of this and he was a consummate master of deftly controlled feedback mayhem. With his amps (typically the Marshall JTM Plexi at this stage of his career) at a suitably crunchy volume, Beck was able to straddle the fine line between nuance and clamor. On a Stratocaster the volume knob is conveniently located the barest fraction of an inch below the bottom edge of the bridge pickup and the high E string. The picking hand can therefore remain in playing position while the pinky or ring finger wraps around the knob. When the amps are cranked up the smallest adjustments to the volume knob can have a significant effect, and this is probably the technique that Beck is employing at the beginning of ‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers.’
By contrast, a Les Paul has two volume knobs and both are located a few inches below and behind the bridge. With a lot of practice and quick hands you can still do onboard volume swells on a Gibson but most players would probably employ a pedal to accomplish the effect (I’ve seen the great Bill Frisell do this masterfully in concert with an SG, a volume pedal, and a borrowed Fender Deluxe).
At about minute 2:40 Beck departs from the song’s main melodic theme and launches into a solo section of snarling notes, hammer on/pull off flourishes and lightning riffs, all with a tonality that suggests the guitar is balanced on the knife edge of feedback—like it’s trying to tear away from him and Beck is just barely holding it back.
Beck’s solo steadily builds the tension until about 3:49 when he cuts loose with a wild lightning flurry of notes, dramatic upward bends and a series of descending trills before returning to the theme at 4:20. He works through numerous variations on the theme before the song ends quietly with Beck sustaining a single note until you can just barely hear the lingering undertone of wire on wood as he applies vibrato to the fade.
‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat‘ is Charles Mingus’s 1959 tribute to the late Lester Young, who had passed away that year at the age of 49. When I first heard the version of this song on Wired I was unaware of the original and didn’t know who Lester Young was. That’s Beck for ya—he was the gateway drug for the jazz-curious.
On ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ it appears that Beck is playing his Strat (the white one pictured on the cover of Wired) all the way through. He switches around on the controls, changing the pickups, exploring the variety of tones he can coax out of his instrument, employing volume swells and a variety of picking techniques. Several times uses this little touch that I love—pulling the pick across the strings that he’s muting up to the fretted note. It’s another display of the consummate power and grace that is Beck at his best.
Back in the day, people who had no jazz albums whatsoever in their collections always seemed to have copies of Blow by Blow and Wired. Jazz purists would most likely express horror and dismay at Beck’s cover—appropriation, some might say—of ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,’ but brother Jeff managed to straddle worlds, much to the ultimate benefit of listeners such as myself.
Both ‘Lovers’ and ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’ provide Beck with a straightforward, relatively simple but highly effective melody as the basis for his signature combination of subtlety and pyrotechnics—Beck as a sort of six-string chanteuse, a song interpreter. These recordings embody a sort of proto-shred style guitaristics, but it never feels like Beck is putting down a display of wanky guitar technique solely for the sake of wankiness: Everything is in service to the song. Jeff has touch, nuance, restraint. Jeff’s playing has soul.
Just as I was finishing my appreciation of Jeff Beck, the news flashed through the intrawebs that Tom Verlaine had passed away suddenly at the age of 73. Verlaine was a guitar god of an era just ten years removed from Beck’s heyday with the Yardbirds—an era when the very concept of the ‘guitar god’ was being challenged as bougie, outdated and lame. It says much to Verlaine’s genius and charisma that, with his group Television, he was able to transcend the anti-musicianship prejudice of the day and create one of the most acclaimed albums to emerge from the downtown NYC/CBGB scene of the mid/late ‘70s.
Television was one of those bands that had an immediate effect on me, to the point that I can recall exactly where I was and exactly what I was doing when I first heard them. It was the summer of 1977. I had just graduated from high school in New Orleans and was painting houses for a living. I was up on a ladder in the blazing sun on the side of a double shotgun in Uptown, a few blocks below Audubon Park between Magazine Street and the river. I had a sturdy AM/FM radio that I brought with me to work—it was liberally splattered with paint and when I rode my bike to the job site I tied it to the handlebars with a similarly paint splattered bandana.
I always had the radio tuned into WTUL—the great Tulane University radio station. My friends and I listened to WTUL constantly. WWOZ did not yet exist and WTUL was the one and only alternative to all the commercial sludge that clogged up the local airwaves. So there I am, up there on a ladder, sweating like a pig, covered from head to toe in toxic lead-based paint dust, when this honking, clanging guitar sound starts blaring out. It caught my attention immediately. What the hell is this? After a moment a second guitar comes in, playing little trills to compliment the alternating partial B minor/D 5 chords played by the first instrument. The bass enters and inserts a two-note counterpoint line between the two guitars. In the sixth bar the drums arrive, pulling the whole weird, angular aggregation together, but just those few opening bars were galvanizing—this was something new, different, exciting.
Then the singer comes in. His voice is reedy, slightly strangled, not conventionally attractive. The lyrics are obscure, vaguely ominous, noir-ish: Darkness, rain, lightning, graveyards, the moon, strangers down at the railroad tracks and behind the wheels of mysterious Cadillacs.
After the second verse and chorus the guitarist panned right takes a short, fluid solo. Following the next verse and chorus the guitarists switch parts: The one panned right takes over the rhythm part and the guitarist panned left/center begins a solo, nervously agitating a single note, low on the neck. The solo moves slowly upwards, still oddly off-kilter. The soloist gradually picks up speed, returns to bottom of the neck and starts working his way back up, adding an open drone string to the fretted notes. A third guitar track appears on the left, playing open, sustained chords. Returning to the low frets again, the lead guitarist heads back up the neck, this time bending notes on two strings.
The solo builds steadily to a crescendo and the entire band, which has been swinging away with increasing ferocity the entire time, suddenly locks into a pounding three-note sequence with the bass and guitars moving sequentially upwards for a fourth time. By about 8:40 the intensity has become almost unbearable and the song explodes into a orgiastic swirl of ringing chords and arpeggios that crashes through several changes before finally resolving and fading out on a sustained D.
After a few seconds of silent, blissed-out afterglow the band executes a re-intro, but this time in reverse order to the beginning of the song: Drums first, followed by the bass, then the guitars. The singer yelps out the first verse and chorus again and the song clangs through the changes and returns to the D major for the final fade.
Ten minutes and forty seconds later…
I had come down off the ladder and was sitting by my radio, transfixed. I had never heard anything quite like this before. I had never heard guitar playing quite like this before. It was ferocious yet highly structured—this was composed music, but with imbued with a wildness and intelligence that totally fucked with my head in the best possible way.
The WTUL DJ returned and advised that the band was called Television and this was the title song off their debut release, Marquee Moon. The band was led by a singer/guitartist named Tom Verlaine. The second guitarist was Richard Lloyd, Fred Smith was on bass and the drummer was Billy Ficca. I bought a copy of the record as soon as I could find one and I haven’t been without it since.
Television released its sophomore effort, Adventure, in 1978 and then—bang—the band broke up. Verlaine released nine solo albums between 1979 and 2006 and Television reunited briefly to release one more eponymously titled album in 1992. There’s good, even great, music to be found in this material, but neither Adventure nor anything that came afterwards was quite up to the eccentric brilliance and audacity of Marquee Moon—the album or the song. It was the curse of the brilliant debut album: The band hit the ball out of the park on the first swing and it proved to be an impossible act to follow. The critics swooned, the general public shrugged. None of Television’s albums ever charted in the the United States. And that, as they say, was that.
In some ways, Tom Verlaine and Jeff Beck couldn’t be more dissimilar, but in other ways they’re remarkably alike: Both were stubborn, idiosyncratic iconoclasts who exhibited an aversion to the artistic pitfalls of mainstream success (Richard Lloyd said of his bandmate, ‘Shooting himself in the foot was a particular talent of his,’ and Verlaine summarized his life to the New York Times as ‘Struggling not to have a professional career’). Both Beck and Verlaine emerged from scenes of intense musical ferment and innovation—London in the ‘60s and New York in the ‘70s—to become iconic, era-defining musicians. Both have exerted a huge influence on subsequent generations of guitarists and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
Interviewed by Rolling Stone in 1981 Verlaine said “When I was 16 I listened to Yardbirds records and thought ‘God, this is great.’ It’s gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.” So there ya go.
As for myself, I admired Beck hugely but Verlaine’s influence has been more immediate. If you’d care to sample that influence you can go to the Music page of this site. There you’ll find a song composed, played and recorded by Your Humble Narrator titled ‘Moses (Pt. II)’ This song is a shameless, straight up homage to/rip off of the song ‘The Dream’s Dream’—the final cut on Adventure. I appropriated the structure of the song—intro, verse, outro, extended noodling—and tried hard to approximate Verlaine’s signature herky jerky guitar style. It’s no masterpiece, but I can still bear to listen to it some thirty years later without being horribly embarrassed. A small victory.
So, in summary, thank you for everything you gave us, Jeff and Tom. Rest in peace.
