The guitarist who was “the closest thing to Hendrix” according to Jeff Beck
Debating who is the ‘best’ at an art form is, of course, completely redundant as any sort of achieving activity. But that’s also why it is fun. The names Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page never fail to appear in various combinations in the upper region of top guitarist lists.
Such lists are arbitrary, of course, but they also possess two key components when we try to understand music, and especially guitarists. They are competitive, something often forgotten about the nature of rock music. It is a bloodsport of sorts, as players consistently try to one-up one another, and, of course, it is a thing to enjoy. To revel in debate is to enact thevery essence of a dedicated muso.
Broadly speaking, the unsung talents of anonymous session guitarists and jazz virtuosos have often lacked the vital ingredient of creative perception and showmanship crucial to exposure. Guitarists like Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix are revered among the all-time greats because they surfed on a popular wave just before it broke. They took electric blues to its virtuosic pinnacle just before the distracting dawn of punk rock.
Many of the aforementioned electric guitar heroes of the late 1960s became well acquainted in the bustling London rock scene and fuelled progression through friendly rivalry and inspiration. “When I saw Jimi, we knew he was going to be trouble,” Beck recalled in a 2021 interview with Louder Sound. “And by ‘we’, I mean me and Eric [Clapton] because Jimmy [Page] wasn’t in the frame at that point.”
“I saw him at one of his earliest performances in Britain, and it was quite devastating,” he continued, humbly revealing his envy. “He did all the dirty tricks – setting fire to his guitar, doing swoops up and down his neck, all the great showmanship to put the final nail in our coffin. I had the same temperament as Hendrix in terms of ‘I’ll kill you’, but he did in such a good package with beautiful songs.”
“I don’t want to say that I knew him well, I don’t think anybody did, but there was a period in London when I went to visit him quite a few times,” Beck added later. “He invited me down to Olympic studios, and I gave him a bottleneck. That’s what he plays on Axis: Bold As Love. We hooked up in New York and played at Steve Paul’s club, The Scene.”
Beck knew what he was talking about. Though he has dutifully paid Hendrix his dues here, the six-string maestro is often considered one of the very best himself. Routinely pitched as one of the most diverse players around, Beck’s ability to dabble in many different styles and genres was undeniable, and it meant his view on what was and wasn’t worthy of praise in the guitar world acted as an almanack for budding players.
Later in his interview with Louder Sound, Beck singled out Stevie Ray Vaughan as the only guitarist who came close to Hendrix’s blues prowess. “I met him [Vaughan] at a CBS convention in Hawaii in 1981,” Beck remembered. “He was a little worse for wear. He was eating KFC out of a box and then ate the box as well. We went on the road together in ’89. He’d got a beautiful new girlfriend, and he was as straight as a die”.
“We were on the road for about three months. And then the tragic story was when he went in that helicopter he didn’t want to get on it. The people around him talked him into it by saying: ‘Look, Eric [Clapton] has just got on one.’ So off he went and never came back.”
He added: “I think Stevie Ray was the closest thing to Hendrix when it came to playing the blues.”
Watch Jeff Beck and Stevie Ray Vaughan play together in 1989 below.
