The rock legend Jeff Beck refused to tour with: “No, I’m not doing this”
Anyone who came within the general vicinity of Jeff Beck usually had to be on their musical A-game. This is the guy who could make any guitar sound like a human voice every time he strapped one on, so you had better have done your homework if you’re even hoping to share the stage with him. Beck did have his limits when it came to personnel, and when he had the chance to jam with Mick Jagger, he figured that he had much better things to do.
Granted, Beck could have used almost any vocalist before him, but he still got off clean. Not many people can manage to have someone like Rod Stewart singing for them and still manage to make the voice behind ‘Maggie May’ look tame by comparison.
Then again, Beck never really bothered having a ton of singers on his own songs. When looking through his catalogue, his fingers did the singing for him, and the melodies were often so good that it didn’t matter one bit if a song didn’t have an actual singer on it, like the beautiful touch on a song like ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’.
Jagger and Beck were both fans of the blues, so it wasn’t the worst idea in the world to have them team up. After all, Jagger had just started up a solo tour, having been freed from The Rolling Stones for a while, and given the choice, Jeff Beck was probably one of the few guitarists in the world who could outdo Keith Richards at his own game.
When working out who would be a part of Jagger’s touring outfit, Beck baulked the second that he heard that another guitar player was coming onboard, with drummer Simon Phillips telling VRP Rocks, “Mick wanted two guitar players, and Jeff didn’t want to play with another guitar player. And it was fascinating, the rehearsals, actually. So, Jeff just eventually bailed. He said, ‘No, I’m not doing this.’ So, we took a break, and then eventually, in 1988, we started touring with Mick”.
Before Beck bailed, it’s easy to see this working as long as they had the right player in charge. Beck would obviously be a shoo-in for the guitar hero of the group, but if they got someone like Ronnie Wood playing behind him, it would have worked like a charm. Considering Wood had already worked with Stewart, it would practically look like two old friends coming together to have a jam session.
Above all else, Wood would know enough not to step on Beck’s toes that often. He already knew to stay the hell out of the way whenever Richards took the stage in The Stones, so moving over to let the guitar legend bare his soul in front of a crowd would have been far from the hardest thing in the world to do.
Hell, that wasn’t even the first time that Beck walked out on a fellow rocker, eventually turning up at Wings’ studio to work with Paul McCartney on the song ‘Rockestra Theme’ before getting bored and walking out halfway through the day. Jeff Beck certainly has the pedigree to walk out on someone who wasn’t playing properly, but this isn’t the case of him being a diva. He was an artist, and having another guitarist getting in the way of his soloing was never going to happen.
