The guitarist who put a nail in Jeff Beck’s coffin: “We knew he was going to be trouble”
For a long while, the best musicians enjoyed sharing the road less travelled. Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, and later Johnny Depp shared a mutual bubble of understanding, embellishing their unique position as some of the world’s most coveted musicians. It was a club no one else could infiltrate, largely because not many matched their excellence. Eventually, however, their longstanding flame began to be threatened by another, much scarier fume.
The Yardbirds joined an unstoppable whirlwind of musical creativity in the mid-1960s, not just shifting the mould alongside The Beatles and The Rolling Stones but adopting a traditional American blues-infused approach that dipped its toes in the forthcoming psychedelic revolution. Beck, in particular, exceeded expectations with his use of new guitar techniques, including his use of distortion and feedback.
Though his work helped to redefine the guitar’s role in the musical landscape as part of The Yardbirds, his venture into the Jeff Beck Group took this a step further, blending blues with rock and setting the building blocks for what would later blossom into the metal movement. Most of the time, it was his speed and precision that drew people in, but the longer they observed, the more they realised the array of emotions he could convey was unlike anything else.
Though Beck quickly transitioned from an exciting industry newbie to a coveted maestro, his emergence was impacted by another exceptional player who moved to England after playing with the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and Sam Cooke over in America. Jimi Hendrix had enjoyed modest success within the States’ growing group of future-gazers, but, for some reason, English audiences took to a solo Hendrix like a moth to a flame.
Suddenly, Beck and the rest of the arena’s leaders had a new force to contend with, and instead of experiencing excitement, they grew fearful. Beck had accrued an unspoken title as the ultimate guitar hero since he emerged onto the scene, so having to abruptly contend with a new player, one that was as unfathomably talented as Hendrix was frightening.
Beck first witnessed Hendrix in action during one of his first shows in the UK, and he came equipped with more showbusiness and pyrotechnics than Beck could imagine: he played solos behind his head, fired off riffs with his mouth, and lit his guitar on fire at the end. The entire experience was a reckoning of sorts, and not the kind that made him immediately jump with joy at sharing his godlike persona with another divine entity.
“When I saw Jimi, we knew he was going to be trouble,” Beck later recalled. “And by ‘we,’ I mean me and Eric [Clapton], because Jimmy [Page] wasn’t in the frame at that point.”
Recalling the show in England, he described it as “devastating” because he “did all the dirty tricks” to “put the final nail in our coffin”. Rehashing his frustrations while praising the guitarist, he added: “I had the same temperament as Hendrix in terms of ‘I’ll kill you,’ but he did it in such a good package with beautiful songs.”
Needless to say, Beck’s trepidation soon turned into longstanding admiration, and they even became acquainted with one another via various jamming sessions and occasionally shared stages. On paper, they might have presented as rivals, but the pair soon learned they had a great deal of wisdom to extract from one another.
