The “terrible blow” that made Jeff Beck want to quit music: “I was genuinely sick”
There wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that Jeff Beck was going to be one of the greatest guitarists of his generation.
It’s still hard to figure out what the hell he was doing today, and even though there were plenty of artists who took the instrument in different directions, no one seemed to have the same kind of relationship with their guitar the same way that Beck did whenever he played. No matter what he was working with, he could get a tune out of nearly anything, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t get more than a little bit discouraged when things started falling apart.
Then again, it’s almost reassuring knowing that even gods like Beck could manage to have imposter syndrome now and again. It’s a lot easier to think of them as this massive presence in rock and roll that will never be topped, but whenever Beck approached any of his solos, he didn’t take it as an opportunity to grandstand. He played to what the song needed, but every now and again, he could throw in a line that reminded everyone of who they were working with on record.
A lot of his songs ended up sounding like a human voice half the time, but even when he was working on his early records like Truth, he was still showing every single blues guitarist in England how to properly play guitar. No one else could have made the kind of leaps that he did, but even if he had enough chops for five different players, he was never going to have the same kind of flash if he had stayed with The Yardbirds for the rest of his life.
Not that the band was an outright dud or anything, but when you look through a lot of their catalogue, every one of their albums seemed to be limiting to every guitarist who worked with them. Eric Clapton already felt that he needed a better outlet in the late 1960s, and when Beck started working with them alongside Jimmy Page, he felt that he needed to stretch out a lot more than what he was being given.
If you look at what they were making around that time, there was no chance that Beck was going to become the biggest name in music by playing the same pop-style numbers that everyone else was. But when The Yardbirds fired him after he tried to flex his chops one too many times, he felt that he was in danger of never playing music again, after he struggled to find the right band to work with.
The rest of his career was right around the corner, but there was a good chance that Beck could have ended up folding his career after getting the boot, saying, “I kept getting ill all the time. I was genuinely sick. But because I’d swung the lead before, pretending to be ill, when I really did get ill they didn’t believe it. And I got kicked out. That was a terrible blow. I didn’t really want to carry on, but I didn’t have anything else to do. And then with my last-ditch attempt to put my life back together I got Rod. It [The Jeff Beck Group] was a ground-breaking band.”
And while Led Zeppelin did end up stealing a lot of Beck’s thunder when they came out doing the exact same thing, only more popular, it’s not like Beck was going to be discouraged again. He wanted the chance to stretch out, and every single one of his albums felt like a new creative endeavour, whether that was working with production legends like George Martin or eventually making fusion-style licks on Wired.
He still had a long way to go after The Yardbirds, but it’s not like the creative well had run dry yet by any stretch. Beck was going to keep things moving by any means necessary, and no matter what era he found himself in, he was always going to be pushing the boundaries of what the guitar was capable of.
