“A major trainwreck”: The show Jeff Beck refused to play with Rod Stewart
Every artist is entitled to a certain set of standards when performing live. While any musician would be grateful for paying customers in the early days, there comes a point when things get big enough that an itinerary is needed before a single note is played. Although Jeff Beck usually had the final say in every show he worked on, he had the foresight to recognise when things were starting to go south.
Then again, that foresight only comes through trial and error, and Beck had a lifetime of gigs to learn from. When he first began in The Yardbirds, he already had to get used to filling in the shoes of someone like Eric Clapton, but even with someone like Jimmy Page in the band, Beck was focused squarely on what he could squeeze out of his guitar, whether that was pulling from old blues acts or taking things into different areas.
And even when working with Rod Stewart in the first incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group, it’s easy to see him woodshedding his style. There are pieces that were left over from The Yardbirds, but since Page would take that as his entire model when putting together Led Zeppelin, Beck knew that the best way for him to approach the stage show was to give the public what they didn’t know they needed.
Although any band have a hard time selling their audience on an entirely instrumental performance, Beck was more than up to the challenge half the time, often throwing in different licks that would leave every guitarist scratching their head. Even if Wired and Blow By Blow saw him stepping into the world of fusion guitar playing, absence makes the heart grow fonder, and bringing him and Stewart back together would have been a match made in heaven later on in their career.
After all, Stewart had become one of the biggest artists in the rock realm and had even managed to survive genre switches that would have killed most other frontmen, so there wasn’t anything that he couldn’t go through. When Beck was asked to sit in with Stewart during one of his shows, though, he felt that there was no way to slide back into the same mindset he had in the late 1960s.
There had already been mixed signals, but Beck said that the moment he realised things were going wrong was when going through a test run of the song ‘People Get Ready’, saying, “We rehearsed, and I could clearly see that it was going to be a major train wreck. For one thing he wanted to sing ‘People Get Ready,’ which is in the key of D. I’d worked out this fantastic intro, but he couldn’t sing it in D, it was in C. So that intro went out the window.”
It may have seemed easy to simply change the key of the song, but that’s not how Beck operated. A lot of his best material involves making the most of open strings and working out every piece of the fretboard, so trying to learn something on the fly would have made a lot of people wonder whether their favourite guitar hero had lost his touch.
But Beck didn’t need to spend time mulling over whether he should relive his glory days. He had already carved out his place in rock history, and while playing with his best mates again would have certainly been fun, he knew he had a reputation to think about before going up onstage and potentially fumbling it.
