The “Mozart” of guitar playing, according to Joe Perry
If MF DOOM is your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper and John Bonham is your favourite drummer’s favourite drummer, then Jeff Beck is almost certainly your favourite guitarist’s favourite guitarist, so it’s little surprise that when Aerosmith’s Joe Perry discussed the players who shaped his musical worldview, Beck’s name was at the top.
Speaking to Q magazine in the early 2000s, Perry explained that his fascination with the late guitarist, who he felt stood head and shoulders above almost everyone else, began with Truth and Beck-Ola, the first two records released under the Jeff Beck Group banner. Alongside Beck’s final recordings with The Yardbirds, they became foundational texts for the young guitarist: “The first two Beck albums and the last Yardbirds records are seminal for me,” Perry said, “Outlandish, experimental stuff”.
The records were one thing, but like so many aspiring guitarists before him, seeing his hero in the flesh was something else entirely. Watching Beck wield a Les Paul was enough to send him searching for one of his own, eventually picking up a 1968 Gold Top that he admitted he still regrets selling decades later: “I wish to God I still had it”.
That influence only deepened as time went on, and by 1974, Aerosmith’s second album, Get Your Wings, featured a version of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, the rhythm and blues staple transformed into a rock classic by The Yardbirds in 1965, which became a lifelong touchstone for Perry, who explained, “People always say there are certain songs that take you back to a certain time, the first time you heard it. People say that to me about ‘Dream On’. And for me, when we play ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, I still feel the way I felt way back when I heard The Yardbirds’ version. It was like a drug, it set me free.”
Years later, Aerosmith would perform the song alongside both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck on separate occasions, something young Perry would surely have never imagined when he stood in a sea of people, gazing longingly at Beck’s Les Paul. “It was back in the ’70s that Jeff got up with us and played Train,” Perry recalled, “That was amazing, but of course I was intimidated; he’s a fucking genius! He’s Mozart, he’s that brilliant!”
Perry’s comparison wasn’t as far-fetched as it might first sound, and while admittedly, Beck never wore a powdered wig, nor did he spend his afternoons composing symphonies for European royalty, like Mozart, he possessed that rare ability to make the impossible seem effortless. Both men treated the rules of their craft less as instructions and more as suggestions, constantly pushing beyond what their contemporaries thought was possible.
Where Mozart expanded the language of classical music, Beck expanded the vocabulary of the electric guitar, wherein he could be technically dazzling when he wanted to be, but what truly set him apart was his imagination. There was always a sense that he was hearing something nobody else could hear yet, and somehow finding a way to pull it from the instrument.
That restless pursuit of individuality is what separated Beck from many of his peers, where his playing often felt like instinct, as though the guitar were responding directly to thought rather than touch, notes bending, swelling and fracturing in ways that seemed impossible to predict, let alone replicate, and during his short time with The Yardbirds, his experimentation with feedback, distortion, and ‘fuzz tone’ pushed the band into directions that would open the door to psychedelic rock.
Even Perry, himself one of rock’s most celebrated guitarists, struggled to explain it. “I’m still astounded that the sound from his amplifier just comes from his hands,” he said, “A lot of guitar players will tell you the same thing: Jeff is head, hands and feet above the others.” Beck wasn’t merely a genius; he was Mozart with a Strat.
