Why did Jeff Beck turn down playing Woodstock?
In the world of rock and roll, playing a gig like Woodstock may as well be considered a musical version of a knighthood.
It was far from the most lucrative festival that has ever been put on, but those few days of peace and love in 1969 was proof enough that the new generation of kids had something more to say about the world than the party music that their parents thought they were listening to. Everyone from Santana to Jimi Hendrix to The Who already had phenomenal performances, so what made Jeff Beck be the one holdout?
After all, Beck wasn’t averse to playing major festivals. He had already gone through some of the greatest gigs that an up-and-coming guitarist could have in The Yardbirds, but once Truth came out, he could have started to gain more traction as a solo artist, now that he had Rod Stewart in front of him.
And considering the talent onstage that day, Beck could have led a massive guitar duet with some of the people onstage that day. There was no reason to think that anyone would eclipse what Hendrix did when playing his version of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, but had Beck been able to learn a thing or two by watching Hendrix play, perhaps his career could have gone in a much different direction than what he ultimately did on albums like Blow By Blow.
But when looking at the circumstances of that day, Beck was already going through tension in his band. It wasn’t clear whether Stewart was going to stick around for the long haul, and by the time that he fled back to England, citing potential marriage infidelity, the guitarist had to come to the one conclusion that no musician wants to hear: his band was breaking up.
So, why didn’t the Jeff Beck Group play Woodstock?
The band were already lined up to have a slot that day, but all the tension over the past few months had grown too much for Stewart, ultimately disappearing on a plane and flying back to England. Then again, Stewart’s reasoning of “[If you’ve] seen one outdoor festival, you’ve seen ‘em all” may have come back to bite him in the ass when it became one of the most glorious days in rock and roll history.
What makes the whole thing even more bittersweet is knowing how big an opportunity Beck had here to wow the crowd. He already had to deal with Jimmy Page taking a lot of his ideas for a solo joint for Led Zeppelin’s first album, but had he been able to share a stage with Townshend and Hendrix, perhaps he could have had a lot more eyes on his music than Page had at that point.
If anything, this marks a turning point in what Beck was working on. He had the experience of working in a band dynamic, but if he wanted to become one of the greatest of all time, he was going to do it on his terms from now on, and when he finally substituted Stewart for his own guitar as the lead melody on his tunes, everything sounded perfect when records like Blow By Blow came out.
So while it must sting having to worry about not getting a chance to play at Woodstock, Beck didn’t need to worry about whether his legacy was intact or not. He was going to do whatever he could to make sure he went down as one of the greats, and if that meant having to skip out on one chapter of rock and roll history, his only solution would be to make a chapter for himself.
