“He might not be able to play anymore”: The one band that almost destroyed Jeff Beck
For any musician, the most important part of playing is hearing what’s coming out of every instrument. While it’s easy to get swept up in the world of music, it’s hard to get a handle on what everything sounds like when there are millions of moving parts throughout a show trying to bring everything to life. Jeff Beck usually didn’t need to worry about those kinds of pyrotechnics whenever he played, but he did manage to give one band an earful when they almost forced him out of a job.
Because looking at what Beck was able to do, it all came from shaping his guitar into whatever he wanted it to be. Even though some people would have rather seen Eric Clapton play different guitar fireworks every time he got onstage, Beck was interested in seeing what he could get out of the instrument rather than worrying about specific scales or whether or not everything came back to the same riff.
And it’s not like people like Slash weren’t taking notes, either. When the Guns N’ Roses guitarist first started playing his first chords, a lot of the guitar players he admired came from that same bluesy tradition, whether that was the country-leaning sounds of Joe Walsh or seeing what Mick Taylor could do during his stint with The Rolling Stones.
Then again, by the early 1990s, Slash had become a much bigger guitar presence than anyone else could have imagined. He had taken all of the lessons that those guitarists had to teach and applied them, and while Use Your Illusion is much more bloated for it, hearing him go on a tear of classic riffs like ‘Right Next Door to Hell’ and then play the lead in ‘November Rain’ is a feat of genius.
So, for someone like Slash, having Beck want to jam with them was the equivalent of Jesus coming down and blessing the stage they stood on. While Slash and Gilby Clarke managed to hold their own next to Beck during a handful of shows during the band’s worldwide tour, Slash remembered his hero calling him the next day and being absolutely furious with what he heard that night.
Although Slash’s playing was fine, Beck said that his career was almost destroyed after the band played so loud, with the Guns guitarist remembering, “We blew his ears out–literally! That night, he woke up with this insane screaming in his ears; he had to go to the hospital and everything. [Later] he called me up. He was calling to say he was pissed and that he might not be able to play live anymore because my amp gave him tinnitus.”
While Slash may have been used to that kind of setup, it’s a different story with Beck most of the time. He has made his entire career out of squeezing every note of his guitar, and while that means being dialled in, having everything blown out of proportion in his ear monitors could have meant that his playing days were over.
Despite Beck making a recovery and still managing to play at his best throughout the rest of his career, chances are he was going to think twice before going back onstage with them again. Guns may have been known as the ‘World’s Most Dangerous Band’, but there was a difference between a group that left that dangerousness offstage and those that brought it to their shows.
