Eric Clapton on the most unique guitarist he ever saw: “Probably the most devoted”
One of the biggest hurdles any guitarist must overcome is being original. Especially in rock and roll, thousands of fretboard masters that came before you have covered new territory, so what are you expected to do when all of the good songs have already been covered? Even the most legendary guitarists find themselves uninspired to push things forward, but even with decades under his belt, Eric Clapton considered Jeff Beck to be in a class by himself.
Looking at the famous British blues boom, though, it’s almost insane to think that all of the greatest blues guitarists of the modern age came from the same place. Despite each of them having different flavours of playing, Clapton, Beck and Jimmy Page all came from the same area of England, and yet each of them seemed to bring something slightly different to The Yardbirds.
Once the blues legends had started, Clapton was more than happy to just play blistering blues leads, but once they veered towards pop music, he figured that Cream would be a better outlet for him to let himself fly higher than anyone else could. That left Page and Beck to take the reins, and while the idea of playing opposite the Led Zeppelin guitarist would make any other guitarist tremble with fear, Page was the one who should have been scared.
Because outside of a handful of traditional blues licks, no one could tell where the hell Beck was going to be going from one bar to the next. Compared to other guitar acolytes who tried to put a new twist on the blues, it was as if Beck had his own unique language on the guitar, almost using it as an emotional translator half the time.
Even when he left The Yardbirds, Beck was still only beginning to explore what he could do. While Clapton had his lovelorn album Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, Blow by Blow is the far better guitar record, if only because there are moments where you forget that the song doesn’t have vocals because of how well Beck is making his guitar sound like a human voice.
For a man who had been called the definition of a guitar god back in the 1960s, though, Clapton knew that Beck had a certain type of magic that no other guitarist could really claim to have, saying, “I think he is the most unique guitar player and probably the most devoted. From what I know of Jeff, he’s either fixing his cars or playing the guitar, and there’s no in-between for him. He has never changed, whereas I have been wandering around all the time.”
Then again, I would have to disagree with ‘Slowhand’ on that last comment. The lion’s share of what Beck did in The Yardbirds was in service to the blues, but when listening to what he did as a solo artist, some of his greatest tunes cover everything from easy listening to jazz fusion licks to even traces of avant-garde in the way he decides to use his whammy bar as an instrument by itself.
But out of every guitarist that had come and gone throughout The Yardbirds, each of them spoke to a generation of players in different ways. Clapton may have been the blues purist at heart, and Page was the epitome of what a rock guitar hero should look like, but if any player wanted to really do their homework, they had to listen to what Beck was doing.
