The 1973 show Jeff Beck wanted to erase from history: “I went ballistic”
Was there ever a moment in history when Jeff Beck wasn’t perfect?
Even though there are more than a few records where he felt that his playing wasn’t the greatest, the subpar moments in his catalogue are practically the best records ever made by guitar player standards, half the time, anyone tries to figure them out. This was the kind of music that everyone needed to do some serious homework to parse out, but even when Beck was having fun, there were a few moments where he was too embarrassed by what he had done onstage.
But if you look through every single one of his live performances, the audience was usually in for a treat every single time he went out onstage. There isn’t a soul on the planet who could play like him, and even if he was playing one of the most decrepit amplifiers imaginable, he could still find a way to pull notes out of the guitar that no one would have ever thought of when they first heard him.
A lot of what he was doing sounded like it was beyond rock and roll altogether, but Beck still wanted to hold on to his rockstar credentials. He had a healthy respect for genres like fusion when he heard some of the biggest names of the 1970s, but he was also interested in seeing what other musical mavericks were doing whenever they came on the scene. That’s what got him interested in jamming with Stevie Wonder, but David Bowie was practically a separate entity whenever he played.
‘The Starman’ almost defied any characterisation whenever he came out with his face full of makeup, but even if Mick Ronson was his partner in crime, anyone would have loved to work with Beck one time or another. And while Bowie had the opportunity to get Beck down to one of his shows to jam on some of his tunes, Beck was far from impressed by the job he did when looking back on his performance.
Granted, Bowie’s songs were still indebted to the same kinds of bluesy rock and roll that Beck had cut his teeth on, but it wasn’t necessarily the most exciting thing to play. A lot of Bowie’s best work at the time came from him taking these great songs and making them larger than life onstage, and while Beck could do the same thing, it didn’t exactly fit with his style of playing when he looked back at the footage.
Even after he left the stage, Beck wanted to do everything he could to block his performance on songs like ‘The Jean Genie’ from coming out, saying, “I remember they were filming, and the cameras panned in on my wah-wah pedal during ‘The Jean Genie’ and I was wearing these dirty white platform shoes. I went ballistic when they said they were using me in the film, so I refused to sign the release.”
“Bowie goes, ‘Oh, you might as well agree, they’re already showing a bootleg version at the XXX theatres on 42nd Street, and you didn’t look any dafter than me.’ In the end, I agreed.”
Jeff Beck
But Beck’s frustration had a lot more to do with the fact that he was worried that everyone would discover what he was working with. Beck was a sonic magician half the time, and since the golden rule is that a musician never reveals their secrets, having someone zoom in on his wah-wah pedal meant that he would have to change things up the next time he put out a record to keep people guessing.
That’s not exactly the optimal way of working, but Beck knew that this was the kind of life he had signed up for. He was always evolving just like Bowie was, and if someone felt that they had him figured out for even a second, that usually meant it was time to start experimenting and seeing what other sounds he could get out of his guitar.
