Jeff Beck’s career-long bid to capture the sound of Motown: “I couldn’t ignore it”
People often think of Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder when talking about the very best of Motown, but really, its most prized asset was a man who delivered his finest bassline after a heavy night on the booze.
The enigmatic bassist James Jamerson was once lifted from the floor by Marvin Gaye, who desperately needed the musician’s magic on his track ‘What’s Going On’. The story goes that after Gaye snatched him from the club, he laid him down on the studio floor, where he stayed, delivering the bass line for a song that would live on in history.
He was the quiet backbone of this prolific record label and, in turn, influenced a generation of musicians outside of it. In fact, it was said that between 1963 and 1968, Jamerson was believed to have performed on every single Motown release, which of course covered a wide spread of colossal hits.
But the brilliance of his performance didn’t just lie in the timekeeping of a steady bass player. No, he was incredibly melodic in his approach while effortlessly stretching the imagination of songs by working up and down the fretboard with relative ease.
Naturally, he became somewhat of a north star for bassists. Paul McCartney, Jaco Pastorius, Jack Bruce, Flea, John Entwistle, Geddy Lee and Bootsy Collins are just some of the legends who have cited Jamerson as their influence. But such was his brilliance that burgeoning guitarists from the rock and roll era also looked to Jameson for inspiration, desperately trying to understand how he approached a stringed instrument.
While Jeff Beck was creating a league of his own when it came to guitar playing, he was quick to avert critics’ attention back to Jameson, labelling him the man who showed him the way. He began expressing his love for the world, “I loved Motown. I loved the musicality and the sound. There were great songs with nuances on every record. And there was the inevitable sound of the drums and James Jamerson. I couldn’t ignore it.”
But then he dug a little deeper into Jamerson and what exactly it was that made his sound so distinctive. That sound that blended melody and rhythm, in such a deep and funky tone, was what Beck described as his fatback sound.
He explained, “I was trying to apply a little piece of the James Jamerson [sound], that lovely fatback sound he had with the drums, to the group with [Jeff Beck drummer] Micky Waller. We had a little Motown feel going on, but it was harder-edged. If you could get the Motown players slightly out of control, that was what I was after, the heavy blues influence, but with maybe a few more twists in the chord changes.”
That was the aim of Beck’s 1968 album Truth, which took the standard 12-bar blues he was mastering and elevated it with something more. While many critics lauded Beck’s virtuoso style of guitar playing as the key to that innovation, maybe it was the enigmatic bassist we really had to thank.
