The guitarist Rick Rubin called the greatest: “He found a new language”
The biggest superpower that Rick Rubin ever learned in the music industry was the ability to listen.
The fact that so many people still are after him to find the secret to success all comes from him looking through the best material that he can find and seeing what speaks to him in everything from punk to hip-hop to country music. But if we take genre out of the equation, Rubin always knew that the best way to listen out for beautiful music is to focus on the players behind everything.
Because as much as people claim that it takes a small army to make a great song, that’s not exactly true. All that you need to make a great track is to have the heart and the passion to push it over the line. That’s what makes Bruce Springsteen engage with a guitar in his hands rather than having the entire E Street Band come storming in behind him every time he makes a record.
But when looking at Rubin’s track record, a lot of his best moments come from coaching the talent whenever they start making music. He knows how to strip everything back to basics, and while not everything was going to be a slam dunk when he walked out of the studio, he was satisfied knowing that he had something that he could look back on in 30 years and still be proud of.
Even if he didn’t want things like guitar solos to get in the way of what he was trying to do, Rubin did have an appreciation for when someone brought in the right musical passage. Tom Petty and Johnny Cash may have been more concerned with the lyrics behind the song, but Jeff Beck managed to do a lot more talking with his guitar than most people are able to do with three pages of lyrics.
From the minute he left The Yardbirds, Beck always wanted to have music that touched people in a different way than traditional blues. He needed to hook them in through the pure beauty of his music, and while Truth did start things off well, it wasn’t until Blow by Blow that people really started paying attention to what he could do every time he sat down to jam with his mates.
Compared to some of the artists he’s worked with, like John Frusciante and Tony Iommi, Rubin stood by the fact that Jeff Beck was up there with the true icons of the instrument, saying, “I think he’s one of the greatest guitar players of all time, maybe the greatest. What I love about him is that he plays the guitar as if it’s a different instrument than the instrument that everyone else who plays guitar plays. He plays it in a completely original way. He found a new language of guitar playing that’s only his, and that only he can do, or that I know of that only he could do.”
And while there are people who took the instrument further, no one ever had the voice that Beck had on guitar, either. There are many opportunities for him to play traditional solos whenever he gets behind the fretboard, but the reason why you know it’s him even when he guested on records by Tina Turner and Roger Waters is because of how much his guitar sounds like a separate voice whenever he plays.
When people eventually bring out the Big Book of Best Guitarists, Beck might not eclipse the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen in the court of public opinion, but his natural voice on the guitar is still miles above anything his contemporaries ever did. He had been a natural blues musician throughout his career, but after leaving The Yardbirds, Beck never seemed to play an unoriginal note for the rest of his life.
