“With anger”: The Led Zeppelin song that left Jeff Beck in tears
The Yardbirds are a band that can be credited with helping to shape the modern guitarist. Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck all contributed significantly to how we perceive modern guitarists, both in sound and stage presence. While Clapton and Page were influential in merging genres, Beck played with emotion and brought a certain element of flamboyancy to playing infectious guitar.
The three guitarists remained somewhat interlinked despite starting different bands and following different career paths. Their music impacted one another; they went to gigs and enjoyed learning from each other. Jeff Beck was a big fan of how both artists played the guitar and subsequently followed Led Zeppelin’s career closely.
Their closeness was beneficial for much of their career. They could bounce ideas off one another and even help each other get gigs and work. However, a big shift in their friendship came after Led Zeppelin recorded their debut album. At the time, Beck was doing well in his solo career, but when Led Zeppelin took one of his covers, a fan favourite, and put it on their first album, Beck couldn’t hold back the tears.
Led Zeppelin was always happy to take old blues songs and add a modern twist. The band’s ethos was founded on the idea that rock music could be intertwined with blues, acoustic music, and soft rock. This meant contorting old blues songs to sound like a twisted version of rock.
‘Dazed and Confused’ is a good example of this, which Page first heard when he was on tour with The Yardbirds but altered when he started making music with Led Zeppelin. However, the track that brought Jeff Beck to tears was Led Zeppelin’s cover of ‘You Shook Me’. Given that Beck had started performing the song as part of his solo act, the fact that Page had used it with Zeppelin (and made it better) felt like a betrayal.
Beck didn’t have much to say to his fellow guitar player when he heard the song. The tears said more than his words ever could. “I looked at him,” confirmed Beck, “And said, ‘Jim, what?’ And the tears were coming out with anger.”
This is a good example of a lot of the complaints that people have about Led Zeppelin. While people were fans of their music, there were always complaints that they stole too much from other artists. Beck was on the receiving end of this when they improved a cover that he was playing.
Jimi Hendrix also took issue with Led Zeppelin for this same reason. Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice recalled Hendrix speaking to him, saying, “Jimi Hendrix personally told me that he didn’t like Zeppelin because they were like excess baggage and they stole from everybody,” he said, “’You Shook Me’ was on Jeff Beck’s record. ‘Dazed and Confused’ has a bit of Vanilla Fudge on it, and it has parts of ‘Beck’s Bolero’ in it.”
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