“He couldn’t do it”: the Jeff Beck licks that annoyed Eric Clapton
Having two guitarists in a band tends to be like playing with fire. Even though some artists might try to enhance their performance by playing off each other, there are only so many times that someone can start throwing different riffs at their partner before it starts becoming a glorified duel between them. While Jeff Beck always had the utmost respect for his fellow Yardbirds guitarists, he remembered being given the business from Eric Clapton for certain riffs that he played.
Then again, the magic of The Yardbirds came from the fact that none of them sounded the same. They all had the bluesy foundation to work with, but even if Beck dabbled in the world of fusion once he left, Jimmy Page was interested in testing the limits of where rock and roll could go once he put Led Zeppelin together.
For Clapton, though, he was always a bit of a blues purist. He still had moments where he went outside his comfort zone by playing ballads or working with psychedelic rock in Cream, but looking through his back catalogue, ‘Slowhand’ seemed to be more interested in making something that would make greats like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters proud than breaking any new ground.
From the minute that Beck joined, though, he was never interested in playing the same blues everyone else had done. There had been pieces of his music that still had the foundation that Clapton could understand, but one of the key pieces of Beck’s playing came from when he started incorporating folk influences into his sound.
You have to remember that the folk revival was right around the corner in the 1960s, and it wasn’t out of the question for people to follow in the footsteps of people with an acoustic guitar and a song in their hearts. Whereas The Beatles were squarely focused on what Bob Dylan was doing, Beck was interested in going the way of Pete Seeger, often throwing in picking patterns that did Clapton’s head in.
It certainly gave the group character, but Beck remembered getting reprimanded by his bandmate for straying too far off the beaten track, saying, “I remember having an insulting criticism from Eric Clapton saying, ‘You gotta get rid of that folk style of country picking.’ Probably because he couldn’t do it. I know it used to annoy him. I’d be out in the middle of some simple groove, and then out would come this claw-hammer picking.”
Considering where Clapton has been since then, though, the fact that he tried to have a go at Beck for making folksy music is almost laughable. While the Cream guitarist never bothered to go too far outside the blues, seeing him work with members of The Band and then release an entire album of acoustic-based material on Unplugged was proof that he at least had some interest in what Beck was doing.
At the same time, maybe that’s why the push and pull of The Yardbirds worked so well. Some people try to have a healthy relationship with everyone they work with, but sometimes that one thing that pisses you off about your bandmate can be the catalyst for a completely different side of your sound.
