Billy Joel on his favourite guitarist of all time: “He was a freak of nature”
The role of a guitarist and pianist always seemed at odds. In the early days of rock and roll, both managed to fill up the sound whenever a group played, but in terms of the midrange instrument that pumped out the hooks, it’s easy to find a keyboard player stepping on the guitar’s toes and vice versa most of the time. While there’s no debating that most people come to a Billy Joel concert for the piano, he admitted that one of the best guitar sounds he ever heard came from Jeff Beck.
But back when Beck was first coming into his own, there was still a fairly even split between the guitar and the piano in rock and roll. Yes, Chuck Berry was the man who invented rock and roll with his riffs, and Elvis Presley used it as a prop for every rock and roll fan to aspire to play, but Little Richard and Fats Domino were just as likely to get people interested in tickling the ivories now and again.
While The Beatles and The Rolling Stones weren’t afraid to put some piano on their songs, there was no debating that The Yardbirds were a guitar band. Since they had one of the premier blues guitarists of all time in Eric Clapton, the group made their living playing blistering hard rock before ‘Slowhand’ was replaced by Beck and a fresh-faced session musician named Jimmy Page.
Once both of them decided to make music on their own, though, no one had heard anything like what Beck was doing. There were still blues tropes sprinkled in, but when you listen to how he played every track, you would swear that he was trying to get alien noises out of his guitar half the time.
Joel was proud to follow in the footsteps of more traditional composers like Beethoven and Mozart, but even he had to give it up to Beck for branching out, telling Howard Stern, “My favourite guitarist died very recently, Jeff Beck. My favourite guitarist of all time. He was just a phenomenal natural musician. Kind of like Hendrix. He was a freak of nature. His technique was taboo, but he did his own thing and created his own chord structures. Brilliant.”
While any guitar instructor who taught by the book would say that Beck was doing everything the wrong way, no one could argue with the results. Sometimes, he may have done things all wrong, but his way of following his muse no matter what means led to him pushing his sound forward on every track, whether he was covering someone else’s tune or trying to squeeze as much emotion out of one single bend.
That unconventional structure probably impacted how Joel approached many of his greatest songs. I mean, if Beck taught everyone that it was okay to think outside the box with their instruments, it wasn’t that hard for Joel to try something new like playing drums on the piano for ‘Angry Young Man’.
Because that’s what rock and roll was all about. Above all else, it taught everyone that there were no rules for what constituted good music, and Beck was a master of following the sounds heard in your head rather than what’s laid out in a textbook.
