Which famous musicians play on Jeff Beck’s ‘Bolero’?
For two days at London’s IBC Studios, virtuoso guitarist Jeff Beck gathered together arguably the greatest backing band in rock and roll history to record something new. Beck was still a member of the Yardbirds at the time but was becoming increasingly frustrated with the limitations he felt were placed on him as a guitar player in the group.
Yardbirds manager Simon Napier-Bell encouraged Beck to take some time away from his band and record something solo, backed by musicians who were able to keep up with his playing but also willing to let him shine. Beck knew a young session musician who he trusted to go toe-to-toe with him on guitar and approached him to work on some ideas for instrumental music.
The musician was Jimmy Page, who brought a Fender Electric XII twelve-string guitar with him to the songwriting session. He was interested in using the guitar to create harmonic patterns while strumming in the rhythm of Maurice Ravel’s classical music piece ‘Boléro’. Once Page had worked out the basic chord structures with this rhythm, Beck came up with a melodic line to play over the top.
Their piece was just about ready to take into the studio. They just needed to get a band together. Given the prominent role that drums play in Ravel’s ‘Boléro’, Beck reckoned he needed the best drummer in the business for his own version. He called up The Who’s Keith Moon accordingly, who jumped at the chance to do something outside of the controlling influence of Pete Townshend and manager Kit Lambert.
Moon, in turn, got The Who’s bassist John Entwistle on board, and Beck thought his all-star backing band was complete. When he entered the studio, however, he found he was missing a bass player. He and Page managed to work out the rest of the song, but they couldn’t record it until their band was complete.
So, who else joined in the end?
Entwhistle hadn’t turned up to the sessions, even though Moon had, to Beck’s complete surprise. “He was so scatty,” Beck recalled to Classic Rock in 2016. “You never knew if he was going to show. But once he was in there, we started it off.”
Napier-Bell scrambled to fill in the gaps, hiring a session bassist Page knew called John Paul Jones and the best young session keyboardist in town at the time, Nicky Hopkins. He would go on to work extensively with The Rolling Stones along with a host of other artists, while Page and Jones would get to know each other better in a little band they initially planned to call Lead Balloon.
Hopkins’ double-quick piano trills proved to be an essential part of the final recording of ‘Beck’s Bolero’, particularly the guitar breakdown in the second half of the song. Moon’s drums and Jones’ bass are scarcely audible in the mix, but Beck was delighted they were there all the same. He later said he felt he’d struck the “motherlode” in assembling such a distinguished group of rock musicians.
Beck and Page might have disagreed over which of them was the song’s primary composer in later years. But regardless of who wrote it, ‘Beck’s Bolero’ was ahead of its time in assembling the kind of supergroup that would become more commonplace later in the 1960s. Eric Clapton, eat your heart out.
