The artist Jeff Beck said was “too good” to retire
It’s every musician’s right to know when it’s time for them to hang it up.
No one can manage to be on the same level as they were in their prime every time they sit down to make a record, so it’s sometimes better for people to get off the musical roller coaster before the track gets a little too bumpy.
But Jeff Beck knew that if people decided to call it a day, they would be leaving a lot of unfulfilled potential on the table by staying at home and playing when they felt like it.
Then again, Beck was always different from most other guitarists of his generation. He certainly liked the idea of performing his traditional blues and rock and roll songs from time to time, but he was never going to be satisfied playing in one genre. He knew he could be more eclectic than that, and he made it his personal mission to make sure that he got new sounds out of his guitar that no one had ever heard before.
Throughout his career, Beck always fashioned himself as a musical scientist in many ways. Nothing that he played on the guitar was the conventional method, but whether that was working his whammy bar in a certain way or playing with his fingers, his way of making the guitar cry whenever he performed was the kind of tone that even had people like Eric Clapton scratching their heads, wondering how the hell he got it.
But for all of his background in blues and rock and roll, Beck was always interested in what fusion players had been doing. After all, a genre all about blending genres was bound to fit him like a glove, and when he started working with Jan Hammer, he knew that something strange was going on that he hadn’t heard before out of his records. It was like Hammer was making the keyboard speak in the same way Beck did on his instrument, so when he decided enough was enough, Beck was the first one to bring him back into the world.
When talking about Hammer, Beck said it would have been a tragedy if his talent was wasted on staying at home, saying, “He was just adamant that he didn’t want to play on the road anymore. His wife was not too well, and plus he’d made a lot of money from, I guess, Miami Vice, so the underlying desire was not there to go out on the road. But he’s too good to sit around, I’ll tell you that.”
But listening to Beck’s rendition of his song ‘Even Odds’ on the album Who Else!, Hammer’s vocabulary on his instrument was much different from anyone else’s. He certainly knew the traditional scales and the makings of harmony, but there are pieces of his sound that don’t seem to have any clear inspiration, almost like the melodies are being channelled from the other side of the world.
It’s impossible to find someone who plays like him, but for a guitarist who already had no equals, that fit like a glove. No one could figure out how Beck came up with some of his greatest ideas, so it would make sense that he would take inspiration from someone else whose music couldn’t really be categorised.
Is it the most commercial-friendly music? No, not by any stretch of the imagination. But for anyone who was interested in seeing the limits of music and how far someone can be pushed to hear the sounds in their head, both Hammer and Beck are the ones who did their homework on how to create raw emotion out of only a few notes.
