The album Jeff Beck wanted nothing to do with: “Where could I fit?
Every record label will want to chase the next big thing at all costs. As much as people like the idea of their music coming out naturally and making the kind of songs they want to write, no one can hold onto their credibility and have their label be 100% happy with them when the trends change at every turn. But for someone with as signature a sound as Jeff Beck, he knew there were a few times where he took the bait of the record company and bit too much when rushed back into the studio.
Because, really, there’s nothing really wrong with Beck’s playing, so trying to “fix” it will only cause problems. The guitar legend practically lived and breathed every part of his instrument whenever he played, and as much as he loved to switch things up every now and again, it was always about getting the best sonic quality out of his guitar rather than trying to follow the lead of whatever new kid was in town.
Even by the standards of the music business at the time, Blow By Blow is the kind of album that shouldn’t work on paper but somehow does. He was done trying to play the traditional blues that everyone was working on at the tail end of the 1960s, so the next best thing was to get together with the biggest names in fusion and restructure his sound from the ground up on tunes like ‘Freeway Jam’.
But Beck’s greatest strength also comes at a cost for some of his fans. He never liked to be in the same place for too long, so while that does mean that his music remained fluid throughout his career, that also meant that fans would never hear a sequel to an album like Truth or Wired for as long as they lived. However, if there was one era that Beck wasn’t ready for, it was the 1980s.
He had the potential to be a fine guitar player for other artists, but when listening back to an album like Flash, Beck remembered it being the first time he cowered to label pressure, saying, “That was a record company goof, really. They were a bit over-enthusiastic and a bit too sure of themselves – the Nile Rogers liaison. And he was, shall we say, partaking of some relaxing drugs, and also flying on a huge fucking ego with Madonna, you know. Where the fuck could I fit into that? Nowhere.”
Admittedly, there are worse people to draw from than one of the leading figures in disco music, but that was only half the problem. Everything that Beck was about involved getting people to feel something when they heard his music, so now that he was in a generation that suddenly cared about image over everything else, there was no reason to think that he and Madonna would go head-to-head on the charts.
Then again, it’s not like his licks weren’t welcome on other people’s songs, either. For all of the moments where he didn’t fit in on his own albums, hearing him contribute a solo to Tina Turner’s ‘Private Dancer’ was fantastic, and when he eventually got out of the decade, he breathed new life into what Roger Waters was doing on the album Amused to Death.
Any musician was usually more than happy to shout the praises of everything Beck did, but sometimes the image overpowers the music. Flash might not be even close to the best Jeff Beck project, but for someone who spent half their career reshaping what everyone thinks about the electric guitar, it’s still a welcome addition to his discography.
