The greatest pop rock guitarist, according to Jeff Beck
Becoming one of the most popular guitarists in the world was never a priority for Jeff Beck when he started.
He was content with being one of the most inventive guitarists that the world had ever seen, and by the time that The Yardbirds started flying solo, he wanted to make the kind of music that hadn’t ever been attempted in the rock and roll field. The pop market wasn’t all that appealing to him, but that didn’t mean there weren’t some guitar heroes in that field if you knew where to look for them.
Because, really, being a pop-rock guitarist is actually a lot more difficult than you might realise. All great hits are focused on the hook more than anything, and unless there is a riff that you’re playing that’s the meat of the song to begin with, most guitarists can only hope to get maybe a few licks in and only pray for the day when they can lay down a tasty solo when standing next to a pop star. That might be how it looks today, but the pop field was a lot more sympathetic to guitarists back in the day.
Most of the biggest names in pop usually had a guitar in their hands or were perched behind the piano, but the session scene was already dominated by people who could play anything they got their hands on. Steve Lukather could have worked magic with everyone from Van Halen to Lionel Richie, and even Davey Johnston from Elton John’s band had his moments when he could annihilate a Rolling Stones riff when the time called for it.
That kind of mentality was going all the way up to the days of Backstreet Boys featuring a guitar solo on ‘Larger Than Life’, but there weren’t many groups that self-identified as a pop outfit. The Cars and Cheap Trick may have been the closest thing, but their music fell in that strange dead zone sometimes, where it would be too poppy for the rock stations and not pop enough to be played on mainstream radio.
But no matter what Queen was doing, chances are it could find an audience with anyone. Freddie Mercury wasn’t the kind of frontman that anyone could ignore, and while ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ broke down the door for what rock and roll could do on an operatic scale, Brian May was just as important in Beck’s mind. This was someone bringing all of that harmony work to the mainstream, and anyone willing to put that much effort into their parts was clearly doing something right.
Beck wasn’t exactly going to layer all of his guitar parts the same way that he had done, but he felt that someone like May was helping to carry the torch for rock and roll guitar in the pop sphere, saying, “He’s the best pop-oriented guitar player there is, really. I mean, everybody is trying to play his licks, like they should be playing mine.” But in all fairness, it’s not like Beck exactly started everyone off easy when making his masterpieces.
Blow By Blow was something that a guitarist would have had to work up to being able to play, but it was much easier for them to feel the power in that single chord strike at the end of ‘We Will Rock You’ or the bluesy solo that comes right in the middle of ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. A lot of May’s stuff was a lot more complicated than that, but it at least gave kids a decent bar to clear before they started moving on to the more advanced tracks like ‘I Want It All’ and ‘Good Company’.
And since he has shared the stage with everyone from My Chemical Romance to Benson Boone in recent years, May is still continuing to prove to every generation why those licks mean so much to people. Beck has his own niche when it comes to guitar playing, but if any promising musician starts off playing May’s guitar parts, they will be much more inclined to keep pushing themselves than admitting defeat the first time they hear ‘Scatterbrain’.
