"Jeff Beck could play the blues if he wanted to – listen to his slide playing on Heart Full of Soul’s B-side, Steeled Blues – but he was no one’s idea of a respectful purist. Tellingly, the song that had first piqued his interest in playing guitar was Les Paul and Mary Ford’s groundbreaking 1951 hit How High the Moon, a single that was as much about Paul’s electronic manipulation of sound through multitracking as it was about his guitar playing. When Beck’s mother dismissed it as “all tricks”, it only served to fire his enthusiasm further.
Throughout his tenure with the Yardbirds, Beck seemed as interested in the sonic possibilities of new technology as he did in demonstrating his instrumental prowess, “making all the weirdest noise I could”. The result was a succession of tracks that propelled the Yardbirds to the forefront of pop’s avant garde: Over Under Sideways Down, Lost Woman, Hot House of Omagararshid, He’s Always There. When Jimmy Page joined, briefly creating a lineup with two lead guitarists, their sound got more extreme still. The single that coupled Happenings Ten Years Time Ago and Psycho Daisies was impossibly potent and sinister, so far-out even by the standards of 1966 that it succeeded in alienating their fans – it barely scraped the charts in the UK – and the critics, one of whom derided it as an “excuse for music”.
Not long after its release, Beck acrimoniously departed the Yardbirds. “They kicked me out … fuck them,” he waspishly noted during the band’s 1992 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Producer Mickie Most attempted to fashion him into a pop star, a role to which Beck was entirely ill-suited, although the union produced the hit single and wedding disco perennial Hi Ho Silver Lining. His real future, however, lay on its B-side, an instrumental called Beck’s Bolero that he had recorded with Page, bassist John Paul Jones and the Who’s Keith Moon back in May 1966. It was epic, heavy and quite astonishingly prescient, pointing towards the direction rock would follow in the post-psychedelic era a year before the Summer of Love.
It still sounded ahead of the curve when it turned up on Beck’s solo album Truth two years later. By then, Beck had recruited singer Rod Stewart: with his bluesy vocals playing off Beck’s incendiary distorted guitar, Truth’s eclectic set of material – a reworking of Shapes of Things, plus versions of Greensleeves, Ol’ Man River and Willie Dixon’s I Ain’t Superstitous – presaged the sound of Led Zeppelin, the band Jimmy Page formed from the wreckage of the now defunct Yardbirds. Truth beat Led Zeppelin’s eponymous debut into the shops by six months.
Alexis Petridis / The Guardian
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