The gig Jeff Beck said he completely sabotaged for himself: “Why did I do it?”
We assume that all artists are always striving for more and more and more. It’s believed that their default setting is always to be working towards the next thing, and working for that thing to be bigger than the last. But in reality, for some of them, that’s a nightmare.
In fact, Jeff Beck spent a solid amount of time actually trying to ensure that didn’t happen.
Beck is revered as one of the most talented guitar players in history, and that label seemed to hit him in an instant and stick. Imagine that. One day, you’re basically a kid playing in a band with some new friends, then suddenly, you’ve caught attention and are being put up on a pedestal, heralded as a new hero.
That’s basically what happened to Beck as he instantly gained attention as the public wondered who on earth could possibly replace Eric Clapton as the Yardbirds’ guitarist. Then, when he proved himself to be potentially even more powerful on his instrument than his predecessor, the fans were quick to obsess.
Maybe obsession isn’t the right word. What Beck was hit with was more like hero worship as music fans and music makers swarmed around him. When he launched his own band, The Jeff Beck Group, people begged to join, and it became a kind of rite of passage honour for people to play in his troupe on their own journey to the top.
All of this is to say that Jeff Beck was famous, very famous. He felt the weight of that on his shoulders, especially as that fame all came down to his ability as an artist, packing on the pressure to always be great.
Some might harness that and keep pushing things to bigger places – bigger venues, more fans, larger scales. Beck did the opposite, as even he admitted that he self-sabotaged as a kind of escape plan.
“I think I’ve sabotaged myself. Why did I do it? I don’t know,” he said once, questioning, “Why did I knock out Woodstock?”
That one gig stuck in his mind as a key one that he purposefully ruined. He ruined it by not showing up as the guitarist turned down his offer to play the iconic 1969 festival. The reason? He genuinely did not want things to get any bigger. He wanted out, and he knew that a performance at Woodstock would only bring more eyes to him.
“I deliberately broke the group up before Woodstock,” Beck admitted, “I didn’t want it to be preserved.” Aware that Woodstock was legacy making stuff before the event had even happened, he abandoned it, sabotaging his own chance for a step up.
However, he had no regrets. “I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you now,” he said in 2001, truly believing that if things had got any bigger or more overwhelming, he wouldn’t have endured into the decades to come.
