JEFF BECK TECHNICAL MAGICIAN

If you want proof that Jeff Beck is a notch above the rest, ask a guitarist. Run down with any player the list of guitar heroes in the rock pantheon —Page, Clapton, Townshend, Hendrix...then Beck... Measure the awe each name inspires.

Ask a couple of guitarists, and suddenly a consensus appears. Everybody may have been inspired by a Hendrix, a Clapton or a Page, but all of them, no matter what the style, have been touched by Beck, and can’t help but hold him in reverence.

A quick review of Beck’s history tells you why. No other actively working (ahem...at his own pace) guitarist has mastered and altered so many formats and styles. From virtual obscurity, tutored on self-built guitars and amplifiers, Jeff Beck jumped to the forefront with the Yardbirds to make some of the most shattering guitar statements in rock, developing creative feedback and sustain to unheard of ends, and acting as a progenitor of heavy metal and blues-rock. His solo singles upon his departure from the Yardbirds all but defined the future ranges of rock guitar: "Beck’s Bolero,” the original conceptualization of Led Zeppelin in sound and line-up, featuring Keith Moon backing Beck, who were both to have joined up with John Entwistle and Jimmy Page in the original, but never consummated, rock supergroup; “Love Is Blue,” an orchestrated classic that Beck adorned with the melodic adventurousness of a jazz master. From the heaviest hitting rock to soaring, gorgeous lines of beauty, Beck could handle it all.

From there he’s never really stopped moving, even though two serious auto accidents (hazards of his favorite hobby) and a reticence to market his talent like Tupperware from house to house made Beck seem reclusive compared with more visible figures. The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart was certainly Mr.-Do-YaThink-I’m-Sexy’s best moment, followed by a second edition Beck Group that paved Beck’s way into a firmer R&B/jazz territory. Beck, Bogert and Appice may have been an ill-fated power trio, but their best moments proved that Beck could hold his own in those heavy leagues.

Blow By Blow suddenly put Beck’s experiments into context, an album of stunning power and subtle majesty that encompassed hard rock, jazz and much more. From the most pounding riffs to ethereal lines of beauty, Beck once again mastered the spectrum, putting the words jazz and rock together with a certainty unequaled by any other guitarist. Wired furthered Beck’s singular style of fusion, and even if his latest LP, There And Back, doesn’t ignite like the other two, Beck’s most recent New York show was a reaffirmation of why Jeff Beck is the guitarist’s guitarist.

Even Jimmy Page has admitted that “when he’s on, Jeff Beck is the best there is.”

Standing at mid-stage, back cocked so that his body resembled a slight S, Beck looked the role of pure and total guitarist. Lean as a rail, his rooster hair hung with the same lazy authority as Keith Richards’, his grip on his Fender Stratocaster as assured as Hendrix at his peak. Backed by keyboardist Tony Hymas, drummer Simon Phillips, and bassist Mo Foster, Beck ran through material from Wired, Blow By Blow and There And Back, investing the latest album with all the passion it needed in his live renditions, and even singing a zesty blues in a raw but exuberant voice. A smile on his angular face, Beck winced, then beamed when he hit that magic note or run that tore down the spine. With the pure power of his guitar, the night was Beck’s.

Yet it is the kind of music Jeff Beck plays—-lyric-less, melodically adventurous, rhythmically tricky—that allows him the freedom to deliver the kind of guitar playing the normal rock strictures simply don’t allow. Those who insist Beck deserves greater fame may have a point, but aside from the fact that he’s carved out a niche where he can play music pure and simple, the truth is simply that Jeff Beck doesn’t want to be famous, at least in the classic sense.

“1 don’t wanna break,” said Beck in a recent interview with writer John Swenson in Guitar World. “When you say ‘break’ you mean getting to the AM market and becoming a widespread name with household acceptance? No way.”

No wonder the L.A. Times dubbed Beck “the Clint Eastwood of guitarists: silent, mysterious, deadly...indeed, the baddest." Even Jimmy Page has admitted that “when he’s on, he’s the best there is.”

From the heaviest hitting rock to soaring gorgeous lines of beauty, Jeff Beck could handle it all.

And rather than burden his fans with what he feels are lesser moments, Beck tries to confine his playing to when he is on. As he told one reporter last year, “It’s difficult to have fun with it all the time, and that’s the best time to play, when you’re really enjoying it. I can’t see the sense in just rushing it.

“There’s certain problems with me, at this time in my life, with the lead guitar. I mean, what do you do with the electric guitar? I have to play to the max or not at all.”

That overwhelming passion to play guitar—solely play guitar to the max— seems to be the thread through Beck’s various ventures. Born in Surrey, England, 37 years ago, Beck was a private school and art school student with childhood piano lessons in his back pocket. Hearing Les Paul on the radio fueled his desire to play guitar; unable to buy an electric guitar, Beck nicked a pick-up from a music store and built his own. He also built a series of homemade amplifiers, with a tendency to automatically squeal when he hit certain frequencies, no doubt aiding the birth of feedback guitar.

Beck played with a little-known band in the greater-London area known as the Tridents, obviously garnering enough of a name to be recommended to fill Eric Clapton’s slot after E C. quit the Yardbirds in 1964. (Page turned down the job because he was making more money as a session guitarist.). Beck’s Eastern-flavored guitar riff on “Heart Full Of Soul” proved early on that a true talent had been discovered, and later moments like “I’m A Man” and “Train Kept A Rollin’ ” are landmark pieces of playing.

By 1966, Page had also signed with the Yardbirds, first on bass, later switching to lead guitar so that he could double-team with Beck, a short-lived line-up that left blazing evidence like “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” and “Stroll On.” When the band was featured in the film Blow-Up playing the latter cut, Beck smashed his guitar into his speakers (a high point of the movie) indelibly carving out the guitar„ destruction legend on celluloid.

During a late 1966 tour of America z opening for the Rolling Stones, Beck 2 abruptly left the Yardbirds after suffering a | reported nervous breakdown and destroy§ ing his favorite guitar onstage (life imitates ^ art). For six months he lay dormant, 1 returning with the “Beck’s Bolero” and •S “Love Is Blue” singles amidst rumors of the 5 “supergroup” formulating on the Yardbirds £ -Who axis that never came to pass.

Evidence remains on vinyl, with Moon, John Paul Jones, Nicky Hopkins and Page putting their talents into “Bolero;” but it was on the flip side of “Love Is Blue,” a slow blues called “Drinking Again,” that Beck revealed his own supergroup.

All that stopped the Jeff Beck Group from being one of the commercial success of the late 60’s was that the amazing line-up exploded before the Woodstock phenomenon could have carried them to the top. Rod Stewart was still singing like a young, brash Scot old enough to know the blues, Ron Wood (now, of course, a Rolling Stone) laying down a guitar player’s bass behind Beck, Mick Waller on drums, one of the more unheralded great players of the day, and Nicky Hopkins on keyboards. It was a perfect act, as evidenced on their two albums, Truth and Beck-Ola.

Truth opened with a move both ballsy in its conception and approach in execution: a reprise of the Yardbirds’ “Shapes Of Things,” a bold new statement of the music that would follow by many other artists. In case you wondered just where Led Zeppelin came up with “their sound,” check out Truth's “You Shook Me.” It’s not just the blueprint for Zep’s sound—it’s the whole damn thing, all in one song that equals anything Zept has done.

It was after a gig with Vanilla Fudge in New York’s Singer Bowl (where the Beck group’s smoking set was followed by a Page-Beck jam) that Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge first entered the picture, and if the collaboration of the two players with Beck had happened at that point in time, rock history may well have been written quite differently. But an auto accident where Beck sustained serious head injuries delayed the project, so Bogart and Appice went on to form Cactus.

Beck’s return with the second Jeff Beck Group is still a misunderstood move. It followed some abortive sessions at Motown studios in Detroit, in an effort to assemble an R&B band with Cozy Powell on drums, Max Middleton on piano, and Bobby Tench on lead vocals. A radical departure from the past, Rough And Ready and the Steve Cropper-produced Jeff Beck Group do present a subtler side of the guitarist’s mastery, but one no less stunning. If perhaps the band members weren’t quite sufficient to drive Beck to the top, he always seemed to be throwing in a little wrench just to keep them on their toes.

Beck’s Motown fascination also led to a session with Stevie Wonder, where the two hit it off so well that Wonder penned “Superstition” for the British Brother. As Beck went off to finally assemble the BeckBogert-Appice band a few years later, the story is that Motown heard “Superstition” and considered it far too good to be wasted on Beck. Wonder cut it and had the hit, which is for the best, one supposes, since Beck, Bogert & Appice rendered the song with less than total justice.

The line-up did have their moments on their one album (such as “Why Should I Care”; they also cut a live album, issued in Japan), but was doomed by a number of factors, ill-timing among the more crucial ones.

But by 1975 and Blow By Blow, any ill memories of Beck’s less than stellar moments were erased by a five-star album that is not only one of Beck’s best moments, but also a masterpiece for producer George Martin. With Beck’s guitar playing and Martin’s almost subconscious strings, fusion took on a new meaning.

Soon after, Beck teamed up with keyboardist Jan Hammer from the Mahavishnu Orchestra, a mating with faults more glaring than its good points. In Hammer’s favor, he contributed some fine material to Wired and There And Back, and indulged Beck’s fascination with synthesizers. Hammer also indulged his own less captivating sense of stardom, parading onstage at a New York Beck gig like he was Elton Jazz.

“He really wanted to muscle in...” was Beck’s blunt assessment of Hammer in one interview. “I still like the way he writes, and he’s a superb musician. I can’t not listen to something as good as ‘Star Cycle,’ which is on the album [There And Back].”

Beck’s working unit after There And Back—drummer Phillips, keyboardist Hymas and bassist Mo Foster—still allows Hymas a little more room that might better be filled by Beck’s guitar, a situation that will probably change in the future. Moving back to a direct style of playing, Beck even finds it humorous that he was voted “Best Jazz Guitarist” in the 1979 Playboy Jazz Poll.

“If I were going to pursue jazz, I’d have to have a lot more understanding of it under my belt,” Beck told one interviewer recently. “It’s too late for me to start delving back to old, great jazz records, Ornette Coleman and stuff like that. It’s just beyond my own grasp now, so it’s natural to go back to the way I’ve always played, which is from the gut, or spur-ofthe-moment type stuff.”

When not recording or touring, Beck resides at his 80-acre estate in Surrey, outside London, where he keeps a collection of 1932 Fords, and practices a few hours every day. His instrumentation and amplification is also decidedly simple these days—a 1954 Fender Stratocaster with tuning problems, the same Marshall amplifier head he used when Rod Stewart sang with him, and a minimum of little gadget boxes. Favoring no particular brand of strings and a type of pick he admits is lousy (he plays a lot solely with his calloused fingers), Beck achieves his effect through innate communication with his instrument. Watching him play is thoroughly hypnotic.

Beck’s straightforward approach isn’t inspired by new wave, although he’s observed the breaking trends. “Every time I see a punk group going up and down and thumping their guitar, and doing strange things,” he said last year, “I just think of the Yardbirds.

“It makes me think, ‘Wow, is that really how the Yardbirds must sound to them? Is that how come they sound so bad, because they listen to the Yardbirds?’ ”

But despite his wry assessment, Beck does feel the energy of those bands as a stimulus.

“‘But don’t worry about it,” he concludes. “When the time c’omes, I’ll start moving about a bit. When the scene is right for me, I’ll start jumping around.”

Defining the “Shapes Of Things” for what will soon be almost two decades of rock, Beck offers many reasons for his listeners to keep jumping around. There And Back’s surprise appearance proved him alive and well; the tour that followed displayed the awesome inspiration that keeps Beck in that mystical circle of premier guitarists.

. Talent like Beck’s is a rare commodity, and he’s well within his rights to guard it with a certain fierce spirit. By continuing to dig his own furrow, Beck renews guitar playing as an art for its own sake, and in doing so raises the electric rock guitar to a level where art is the only description possible.