“Who knows what would have happened”: The artist Jeff Beck said gave him a career
Jeff Beck was not going to suddenly become the world’s greatest guitar player overnight. He was certainly one of the best in his field during the late 1960s when he first arrived on the scene, but his run throughout the 1970s saw him continue to innovate every single time he went into the studio, to the point where he was one of the most original voices on the instrument by the time he passed away in the 2020s. Anyone in that position may have a bit of an ego to them, but Beck was nothing but complimentary to the people who brought him to the top of the guitar world.
If Beck had decided to keep going down the same road in 1966, chances are he would have been playing blues for the rest of his life. He was always deeply entrenched in the sounds of artists like Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, but when you look at where he went after that, he was always looking to make something different from the typical blues scales that Eric Clapton was doing.
What he was playing had to have more of a voice behind it, but no one imagined that it would sound as human as it did on records like Blow by Blow. There had been countless guitarists who were making instrumental albums to show their skills, but where some of them could get overindulgent, hearing Beck pull out all the stops on a track like ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’ felt like his soul was coming out through the speakers when he played.
But if you look at the production credits, Beck was in more than capable hands with George Martin behind the board. Even after The Beatles had broken up, Martin hadn’t lost his knack for song craftsmanship, and despite many people in the industry telling him that working with Beck was a dead-end road, chances are Martin saw the same potential in him as he saw in those scruffy Liverpool lads back in the day.
Granted, Beck did take a few liberties on the album, like reinterpreting the Fab Four’s ‘She’s a Woman’ with a talkbox, which must have been strange for the person who finetuned the original. When listening to tracks like ‘Freeway Jam’, though, Beck and Martin manage to go beyond rock altogether, making the kind of tunes that wouldn’t feel out of place if jazz connoisseurs were playing them, only this time, he has a Marshall stack behind him.
Most of the pressure may have been on Beck to deliver the best performances he could, but he knew that he would have gone nowhere had Martin not been there to oversee his productions, saying upon hearing word of his death, “To work with someone of that calibre… he gave me a career. Without him, who knows what would have happened.”
That might be selling Beck a bit short as well. He had already laid the groundwork for what he would sound like with Rod Stewart behind the microphone on albums like Truth, so even though a lot of the critics might not have understood him at the time, Blow By Blow was proving to all of the guitar players listening that this was someone who deserved to be in the same conversation as people like Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
But Beck’s praise for Martin goes beyond strictly the material that they collaborated on. Martin knew how to make any guitarist sound fantastic, but any musician who has ever laid ears on a Beatles album owes the producer a debt of gratitude for teaching everyone the standard for what excellent rock and roll should sound like.
