The one guitarist Jeff Beck felt “awful” jamming with: “I felt like a peanut”
There should always be a healthy sense of competition between artists whenever they play together. The whole point behind a musical “dual” of sorts is to get the best music out of the other person, but Jeff Beck could understand when someone was far out of his league whenever he attempted to strap on his guitar.
Then again, Beck never was one to back down from a challenge. He liked the idea of working on something that wasn’t as normal by his standards, and listening to everything from Blow By Blow to Wired, it was always about flexing his musical muscles and making music that was outside of everyone’s comfort zone or playing the kind of tunes that would stretch his vocabulary every now and again.
And looking at the new school, it’s not like Beck ever stopped learning what could be done with the instrument. He maybe was a bit jaded when he learned about Jimmy Page using the exact same format he had on Truth for the first Led Zeppelin projects, but there were also people like Stevie Ray Vaughan that appeared afterwards that took the crux of blues rock and took it to greater heights.
Because if there’s one thing that connects all great rock guitarists, it’s a healthy respect for the blues. People like Eric Clapton may have been the most obvious blues acolyte during his prime, but even when Beck was interested in the same pentatonic shapes, he was always trying to screw them up and make the guitar sound slightly strange compared to all of his fellow musicians on the scene.
But for all the attempts that everyone made to sound unique, no one was even in the same ballpark as Jimi Hendrix. The musical wizard practically reinvented the idea of what a guitar could be in a rock context, and while some of his lines might not seem great nowadays, it was like a nuclear bomb going off on the charts when his guitar came roaring in on his first singles like ‘Foxy Lady’ and ‘Hey Joe’.
Even for someone with as many miles on their playing as Beck had, he had to admit that what Hendrix was doing was well beyond anything he could think of when jamming with him, saying, “What was it like? Well, it was awful! The first time, I felt like a peanut, like a fucking hole would have opened up and swallowed me. The thing that puts it right is the fact that there’s a genuine love that Jimi had for my style as well, which I couldn’t believe.”
That was always a core part of Hendrix’s charm, though. He could weave together beautiful musical pieces and seem like nothing could phase him, but he never claimed to be a messiah by any stretch. He was simply a lover of music like every other guitar player, and while that did lead to some mind-melting moments on his records, it was always about him trying to find what he wanted to hear whenever he made a record.
So whereas most guitarists nowadays look at Hendrix like a musical prophet, Beck always viewed him as a friend that was willing to share his gifts with the world. But considering the amount of chops that both of them had together, it’s not out of the question to think that they were touched by some sort of musical God.
