{"id":184031,"date":"2023-01-11T23:25:14","date_gmt":"2023-01-11T23:25:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/jeff-beck-guitar-virtuoso-and-blues-rock-innovator-dead-at-78-rolling-stone\/"},"modified":"2023-01-11T23:25:14","modified_gmt":"2023-01-11T23:25:14","slug":"jeff-beck-guitar-virtuoso-and-blues-rock-innovator-dead-at-78-rolling-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/jeff-beck-guitar-virtuoso-and-blues-rock-innovator-dead-at-78-rolling-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Beck, Guitar Virtuoso and Blues-Rock Innovator, Dead at 78 \u2013 Rolling Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tJeff Beck, the<\/span> blues-rock innovator and two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee who revolutionized how the guitar is played, has died at the age of 78.<\/p>\n

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\tBeck’s family confirmed the former Yardbirds guitarist’s death Wednesday, a day after Beck’s death. \u201cOn behalf of his family, it is with deep and profound sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck’s passing,\u201d Beck’s family said in a statement. \u201cAfter suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday. His family asks for privacy while they process this tremendous loss. \u201d<\/p>\n

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\tBeck, an eight-time Grammy nominee, was twice inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, both as a member of the Yardbirds as well as for his work with his own Jeff Beck Group. <\/p>\n

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\tLed Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, Beck’s Yardbirds band mate who inducted the guitarist into the Rock Hall in 2009, wrote on social media Wednesday, \u201cThe six stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the he could weave around our mortal spell emotions. Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations are apparently limitless. Jeff I will miss you along with your millions of fans. Jeff Beck Rest in Peace.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\u201cJeff Beck has the combination of brilliant technique with personality,\u201d the Heartbreakers’ Mike Campbell wrote when Beck placed Number Five on Rolling Stone<\/em>e’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists. \u201cIt’s like he’s saying, ‘I’m Jeff Beck. I’m right here. And you can’t ignore me.’ Even in the Yardbirds, he had a tone that was melodic but in-your-face \u2013 bright, urgent, and edgy, but sweet at the same time. You could tell he was a serious player, and he was going for it. He was not holding back.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\tBefore Beck discovered guitar, his mother had wanted him to play the piano. But once his parents saw how Jeff, who was born in Surrey, England on June 24, 1944, took to the guitar, they allowed it. \u201c[My parents] complained [about the guitar]but they didn’t stop me,\u201d he told Rolling Stone <\/em>in 2018. \u201cI suppose they thought, ‘If he’s got the guitar, he’s not going out stealing.’ The only friends I had were pretty low-life; most of them were one step away from jail.\u201d Eventually, Beck bonded with another boy who was a budding guitarist in his neighborhood, Jimmy Page. The two musicians shared a passion for rockabilly music and would try to impress each other with their skills.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor’s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

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\tHe attended London’s Wimbledon Art College, where he played with Lord Sutch before auditioning for the Yardbirds at the encouragement of Page, who had become a successful session guitarist, in 1965 after Eric Clapton quit the group for becoming too poppy. Nevertheless, Beck remembered frontman Keith Relf as being something of a blues purist. \u201cI thought, ‘You can be a purist and you can be poor; I’m gonna do what I think is best,\u201d he said. Beck had a national penchant for psychedelia, experimentalism, and jazz (two of his favorite musicians in the Sixties were Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk) and his avant-garde side fit perfectly with the pop scene in the Sixties. The Yardbirds soon recorded the hits \u201cHeart Full of Soul\u201d and \u201cEvil Hearted You,\u201d both of which charted in the UK, which they followed up with \u201cShapes of Things\u201d and \u201cOver Under Sideways Down,\u201d their first US chart hits .<\/p>\n

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\tBeck’s childhood friend Jimmy Page joined the band in 1966, first on bass and then eventually as a co-lead guitarist. The Yardbirds performed \u201cStroll On\u201d (a version of Jimmy Burnette’s \u201cTrain Kept a-Rollin’\u201d) for a sequence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up<\/em>, in which she smashed a guitar a la Pete Townshend. \u201cWell, clearly the Who was asked to do it and they said no,\u201d Beck recalled. \u201cI wasn’t in the position to argue when they paid us a lot of money. \u2026 [Antonioni] just said, ‘You’ll smash your guitar.’ And I said, ‘No, I won’t.’ It was a sunburst Les Paul. He said, ‘We’ll buy you another one.’ He didn’t grasp that you don’t do that to most guitars. So they rented six beginner guitars, and they were so cheap they came in a clear plastic bag. \u2026 I thought I’d get some stick from Pete, but I never did.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

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\tBut Beck would no longer be in the band by the time the movie came out. He quit in November ’66 after an illness and suffering a breakdown. In 1967, he recorded the pop single \u201cHi Ho Silver Lining,\u201d a track on which he sang lead vocals, that became a hit, while its B side, \u201cBeck’s Bolero,\u201d foreshadowed Led Zeppelin as it featured Page and bassist John Paul Jones accompanying Beck alongside the Who’s Keith Moon and pianist Nicky Hopkins. That same year he founded the heavy-blues focused Jeff Beck Group, which featured singer Rod Stewart and future Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood on bass. The group issued two albums \u2014 ’68’s truth <\/em>and ’69’s Beck-Ola <\/em>\u2014 and turned down an appearance at Woodstock before Beck disbanded the ensemble, leading Stewart and Wood to join Faces.<\/p>\n

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\tBeck next hoped to form a group with Vanilla Fudge’s Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice but a car crash, in which he fractured his skull, delayed the group coming together for a year and a half. In that time, Beck decided to explore his interest in Motown and sat in on some of Stevie Wonder’s sessions for Talking Book<\/em>. At one point, Beck started playing the drums and when Wonder walked in, he liked the groove and wrote \u201cSuperstition\u201d around it. With Bogert and Appice in another group at the time, Beck formed another Jeff Beck Group, which put out two more albums with a funkier sound to them, before finally assembling the power trio Beck, Bogert, and Appice in 1972. They lasted only about two years, though Beck remembered BBA’s version of \u201cSuperstition\u201d as \u201ca great heavy metal song.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\tWhen Beck reemerged, he had moved on from blues rock to instrumental jazz-fusion. His 1975 album, Blow by Blow<\/em>, was a surprise hit, reaching Number Four in the US and going platinum. Beatles producer George Martin helmed the album, and Beck later credited him with salvaging his career. \u201cI thought, ‘This sounds like we’re playing in the room \u2014 it’s clear and fabulous,’\u201d Beck later said of the sound of Blow by Blow<\/em>. \u201cThat first album was a joy.\u201d He supported the record by touring with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in 1975 and releasing wired<\/em>, a collaboration with Mahavishnu keyboardist Jan Hammer, in ’76. He took a few years off and came back with another Hammer collaboration, There and Back<\/em>in 1980.<\/p>\n

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\tPerhaps worried he’d become doomed to guitar-nerd oblivion, he teamed with Stewart again on 1985’s flash <\/em>album for a cover of \u201cPeople Get Ready,\u201d which became a hit. That album’s \u201cEscape,\u201d an instrumental, won him the Best Rock Instrumental Performance Grammy the following year. He’d earn another Grammy four years later with Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop With Terry Bozzio and Tony Hymas<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\t\u201cI was glad on the one hand that guitar was still king,\u201d Beck once said of the Eighties. \u201c[Guitarists] were flying a great flag for the guitar. \u2026 I had every respect for Vai and Eddie Van Halen. great. Let them have that. As long as it doesn’t encroach on my style \u2013 and it didn’t \u2013 I was happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\tHe spent the rest of the Eighties working as a guest musician, adding solos to albums by Tina Turner, Mick Jagger and Jon Bon Jovi. But he had trouble replicating his success as a solo artist for decades. The Nineties found him bouncing from rockabilly on ’93’s Crazy Legs<\/em> to techno, on ’99’s Who Else! <\/em><\/p>\n

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\tAs Slash told Rolling Stone<\/em> in a feature where guitarists discussed their favorite guitarists, \u201cIt’s a lot easier to appreciate Beck’s guitar playing if you’re a guitar player. He just has such a natural control over the instrument. It’s the ability to make it do something that you’ve never heard anybody else do. Blow by Blow<\/em> is the album I had when I was a kid. He would go from love songs to a really blistering, hard-rock, heavy-sounding guitar without ever going over the top.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\tSoundgarden’s Kim Thayil added, \u201cJeff Beck always comes to mind. He’s an incredibly proficient guitarist, but he isn’t Mr. pedant The late Seventies to late Eighties were full of guitarists who were preoccupied with technique, like the guitar wasn’t a voice but a tool to be mastered. Jeff Beck wasn’t that way \u2013 he used it as a microphone. He was confident.\u201d (In that same feature, Beck credited Django Reinhardt as his chief inspiration.)<\/p>\n

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\tIn 2009, 17 years after Beck was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Yardbirds \u2014 where he delivered on the greatest induction speeches of all time: \u201cSomeone told me I should be proud tonight. But I’m not, because they kicked me out. They did. Fuck them, \u201dhe quipped at the 1992 ceremony \u2014 he reentered the Rock Hall for his solo work. \u201cI couldn’t believe I was even nominated,\u201d Beck told Rolling Stone<\/em> at the time. \u201cI thought the Yardbirds was as close as I’d get to getting in. I’ve gone on long after that and gone through different musical changes. It’s very nice to hear that people have been listening.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\tAlthough Beck made his initial mark in the British Invasion and pioneering blues-rock, the virtuosic guitarist continued to push his musicianship into other genres, from jazz fusion to trance (\u201cRollin’ and Tumblin’\u201d with Imogen Heap) to orchestral rock (2010’s Emotion and Commotion<\/em>) to heavy metal; in 2022, he appeared on the title track of Ozzy Osbourne’s Patient Number 9<\/em>. \u201cHaving someone like Jeff Beck play on my album is just incredible, a total honor. There’s no other guitar player that plays like him and his solo on ‘Patient Number 9’ is just jaw-dropping, \u201dOsbourne said at the time.<\/p>\n

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\tOver the past 30 years, Beck also served as an all-star collaborator for artists ranging from Seal and Kate Bush to Roger Waters, Morrissey and ZZ Top. (\u201cWho’s gonna say no when I got the call? I’d be proud that someone remembered I was even alive,\u201d Beck joked to Rolling Stone<\/em> about his guest appearances.) In what was his final album during his lifetime, Beck and actor Johnny Depp, a longtime friend, released the album 18<\/em>a largely covers LP featuring the duo’s interpretations of songs by the Beach Boys, the Velvet Underground, Marvin Gaye and John Lennon.<\/p>\n

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\tAs a solo artist, Beck also remained prolific and vital: He won seven of his eight career Grammy Awards from 1989 onward, including a dominating streak of wins and nominations in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance over the first decade of the 2000s.<\/p>\n

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\t\ttrending<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

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\t\u201cYou didn’t miss the singer, because the guitar was so lyrical,\u201d Mike Campbell wrote of Beck’s playing. \u201cThere is a spirituality and confidence in him, a commitment to being great. After I saw [his] show, I went home and started practicing. Maybe that’s what I took from him: If you want to be Jeff Beck, do your homework.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThis story is developing<\/em>\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n