The musician David Gilmour called his guitar hero: “He’s consistently exciting”
The concept of a guitar hero feels increasingly like a dying breed nowadays. Most musicians with the six-string still see it as a huge part of their success, but there’s hardly going to be a major solo on a mainstream hit that makes the audience gawk in amazement. There will always be people willing to push the envelope, and even though David Gilmour pushed it further than anyone thought, he still considered Jeff Beck head and shoulders above everybody else.
Looking at where Gilmour ended up, it’s no surprise that he took inspiration from the blues legend. Many of the first licks that he put on a Pink Floyd project were the trademark pentatonic phrases everyone starts with, and even on their later projects like The Wall, he could throw in something tasty that would make any professional musician swoon.
Beck was the same way in The Yardbirds, but it’s no good trying to play one genre all the time. Everyone normally gets bored attempting to make lightning strike twice, so it’s in their best interest to start exploring once they establish their core sound. George Harrison had done it, and Eddie Van Halen would do it later, but no one really matched what Beck could do when he had the instrument in his hands.
Compared to every other virtuoso of his time, Beck had one of the most unorthodox approaches to his instrument. There was still a healthy amount of tasty licks, but everything from the way he held it to how he used his whammy bar to get just the right emotion out of every bend didn’t sound like human hands were playing it.
No, this was the biggest case of a guitar-playing alien that we had seen since Jimi Hendrix, and Gilmour was still amazed at what he could do decades after he heard him, saying, “Jeff Beck is still my sort of guitar hero, really, I suppose. He’s the one that I think pushes the boundaries. He’s consistently exciting. Jeff can play damn fast, he can do speed, but he chooses not to most of the time, and that’s what impresses me. It’s what he chooses to leave out rather than what he chooses to stick in.”
In fact, a handful of projects Beck made could qualify as progressive if you’re willing to stretch the definition. He most certainly wasn’t thinking in those terms at the time, but when looking at how he combined different genres like jazz and blues on Wired, he was more interested in bridging the gap between various styles instead of trying to deliberately push boundaries.
And whereas other fretboard gods like Eric Clapton found that sweet spot where they couldn’t do anything wrong, Beck managed to keep getting better over time as well. He never got to lend his talents to Pink Floyd, but working alongside Roger Waters on Amused to Death is probably the best replacement for David Gilmour that anyone could have asked for. The phrase “guitar hero” might be slightly outdated now, but in terms of what it meant when the instrument was just beginning to find its feet, it’s hard to improve on what Beck did. It can be easy to get a few of his licks under your fingers, but there’s no way anyone could play them as well as he does.
