“I got pretty graphic”: the artist Jeff Beck said was torture to work with
There wasn’t much covered in rock music that Jeff Beck couldn’t interpret in his own strange way. He was more than willing to try something new every time he made a new record, and since he never sought to repeat himself all that often, that usually meant him rethinking what the guitar was supposed to be in his hands. But even when playing amongst true legends of the genre, he knew there were a few times when the collaborations didn’t go as smoothly as he would have liked.
Regardless of the pedigree of musicians that anyone is working with, there’s no discounting the importance of chemistry. The entire point of having a band is to have people that are able to speak to each other solely through the music they’re playing, and if someone doesn’t get off on the right foot, it can be almost impossible to get them back on track if they’re working with someone who’s on a different page.
A perfect example is the way that Beck worked with Rod Stewart in his early years. Truth is among his finest albums, and both of them could complete each other’s musical phrases if they wanted to, but given the massive disconnect in how they approached the stage and Stewart’s growing star power, it was no use having someone overshadow Beck in his own group. If he was going to get the people screaming, he was going to do it purely through music.
Which is probably why records like Blow By Blow and Wired work so well. There are pieces of the albums that have a main melody they can call back to, and no matter how much of a badass that someone thinks they are behind the fretboard, no one is going to be nearly as cool as him ripping through guitar solos that you can sing on tracks like ‘Freeway Jam’ or make a song as ridiculous as ‘Constipated Duck’ work.
“It’s torture for me to try to interpret his songs, to try to supplant some kind of notion of what I want to do without sounding like some goof who can’t remember what I want.”
Jeff Beck
But Beck’s approach to craft always meant learning something new, and that meant switching up his band every now and again. Even though he had worked with some of the best, like Stevie Wonder, in the past, he knew that Tony Hymas was going to be a completely different kind of challenge when he began working with him on his Guitar Shop album.
Hymas had already turned in time working with people like Jack Bruce of Cream, but Beck said that the pianist’s work on his albums was not going to be easy, saying, “It’s torture for me to try to interpret his songs, to try to supplant some kind of notion of what I want to do without sounding like some goof who can’t remember what I want. I got pretty graphic with some of the stuff that you hear on the record.”
The same thing could be said about what Beck does, though. There are many moments where he’s willing to be a great collaborator, but if there was anyone else playing opposite to Beck who wasn’t at least as famous as Jimmy Page, there was no point in trying to improve upon the ideas that he had or claiming that they could make a tune even better with one special lick.
It’s intimidating for any musician to put their two cents in like that, but Beck’s discomfort with Hymas is a problem everyone must overcome when working in the industry. It’s easy for someone to spend their entire lives trying to reach the level of heroes, but it’s important to realise that, for as much as they might be perfect in your eyes, they’re still human.
