Incredibly, it has been eight years since I last published a blog post to this thing (I do see I have some drafts from more recent days that I just never bothered to publish, oh well).
However, the passing of Jeff Beck seems like an appropriate occasion to revisit it. I frankly have way more to say about this than twitter or a facebook post could contain.
Let me acknowledge the obvious. Those of you on my facebook friends list might be getting weirded out by the amount of Beck posts and shares from me. I fully admit this is odd to the normies out there, and I don't mean that in a stupid elitist way. I never met this man in person. At most I breathed the same air in the same building during concerts. Many of my friends and family have artists they like, but the loss of those artists wouldn't affect them other than a simple "oh darn, that sucks." This is understandable and sensible.
I never like to assume anyone actually cares about my thoughts, especially on music ("sigh there goes that music snob going on again!"), but please indulge me as I try to explain why I feel the way I do.
Well. How do I feel? On the day I learned he passed (Wednesday January 11th, as I was sitting in my office- just scrolling facebook, and I see the post by his family), I was emotional. I definitely teared up as I thought about his music, especially his more emotional material like "Where Were You" which seemed especially poignant.
Note: by no means is this post meant to be *any* type of pity party because his actual family and friends are no doubt struggling with powerful grief, just be crystal clear on that.
Second Note: My family has been so sweet and kind to me. Again: this doesn't affect their life at all-, yet they've been so nice. Erica was very kind and Helena randomly came up to me simply to say "I'm sorry that guitarist you liked died." Its appreciated.
But after that day, the actual sadness was gone. It was replaced by melancholy- not the overpowering, "I can't do anything" type, more just a weird pall that gently hung over everything. I'll admit here that for the past few months I've been struggling with my place in the musical world (once again, not in an overpowering "everything sucks" way, it's just been something I've been thinking about a lot). Ironically this was triggered by seeing this very artist Jeff Beck in concert in Chicago in October (sure glad I did that!). When I witness high level artistry, it kicks me in the butt. What am I doing with the guitar and music? Anything? That sort of thing.
I've been processing this mostly in a healthy way: by playing a *ton* more guitar. Guitar doesn't put food on the table for me (at best a handful of private lessons keep it from being a drain), so it's easy for me to minimize it. From about Spring 2021 until last November my playing had been pretty minimal: playing in church and doing my few private lessons. Since seeing Beck I had been in guitar overdrive, playing as much as I can. Also, admittedly, I do what *all* guitarists do when they feel musically depressed but aren't gigging: buy gear. In my case, nothing astronomical: an inexpensive Epiphone 335 copy (one of the last body styles I wanted in my arsenal), and a pedal board mostly filled with cheap pedals.
Random aside: since I don't normally follow celebrity news at all, I am aghast at the industry that is apparently devoted to cranking out click bait content the very moment a famous person dies. My social feeds are awash in the stuff: "Jeff Beck's devastating final interview" and "his LAST moments" as well as just "read the wikipedia page" style phony documentaries. Ugly stuff.
Second random aside: My playing in the church band is a very meaningful experience that I am blessed to be able to do, which I want to make clear just in case! If all God wants me to do musically is blow off steam at home and play church music on Sundays, His will be done!
I also ran off to the local record store in hopes of snagging the Beckology box set, mainly because it's a beautiful package and includes Jeff's early work with the Tridents, a rhythm n' blues band that played Eel Pie Island. There are a few more pre-Yardbirds artifacts out there: I think he did some stuff with Screamin' Lord Sutch and there was a band called The Nightshift. In the Lafayette area there are some awesome used record stores and sure enough, I found it, cheaper than the eBay scalpers were selling them for.
Mostly, however, I've been thinking about his music a lot. Like, all the time, almost a constant loop. The melancholy remains, though I feel it slowly evolving into appreciation.
Appreciation for what, exactly? It's time for an enumerated list!
1. Jeff Beck was the bridge to jazz music and instrumental music for me. When I listened to Blow by Blow as a teenager, I was initially put off by it. I was listening to a steady diet of AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple then (which was what made me initially pick up the guitar). Blow by Blow sounded so weird at first: funky chords, no vocals, the songs weren't just the blues played really loud! I had never heard electric piano before on a recording (I now absolutely love the 1970s Fender Rhodes piano sound).
Funny thing though: sometimes when you listen to something you think you don't like, something sticks. I can't remember which one stuck first: the solo break in Scatterbrain or this lick from Cause We've Ended as Lovers, but they were both moments that didn't leave my brain once they entered. And of course Freeway Jam is a whole bop as the kids say. From there, the rest of the album opened up and suddenly it became an obsession. It was all I listened to for months. Better yet, I began the process of exploring the influences that Jeff had: John McLaughlin, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Billy Cobham's Spectrum album. These were the first jazz records that weren't Django Reinhardt or the odd Wes Montgomery thing that I actually loved.
Eventually this led to listening to Jim Hall's Concierto album, the first "straight ahead" jazz album I loved, and I was off to the races then, listening to Miles, Coltrane, Monk, etc.
2. Seeing Jeff live. I saw him in Grand Rapids Michigan in 1999 with my good friend Tony. Holy crap, that was a concert. He was touring with Jennifer Batten, Randy Hope-Taylor and Steve Alexander. It was a great band. Seeing Jeff live is an experience that fails words. The best I can do is this: you just can't believe the sounds he makes. The music is astounding. The purity of tone, the adventurism, the pure emotional power of his playing is transformative.
I didn't see him as much as I would have liked, but I can't complain on this score. I saw him again in Detroit, Milwaukee, and finally in Chicago last October. Each time was awesome.
3. The Jeff Beck community. Jeff was never mega popular: popular enough to pack mid-sized venues, certainly. But not so popular that you felt his community as out of reach due to the sheer numbers of it. The center of Jeff Beck fandom was a website that was and remains delightfully "web 1.0." It has undergone a few host name changes over the years, but is now at YellowDeuce.com. It looks *exactly* like it did in 1998, complete with scrolling text.
Reading the latest "what's new" posting was always so much fun: not only did it have news of tours and music releases, but the site authors Bill Armstrong and the late Dick Wyzanski were true Beckologists, finding all kinds of rare artifacts and even interviewing musicians that played with Jeff on various side-projects and unreleased attempts at albums. Even now, it remains a treasure trove of material.
The community then moved to an old yahoo email group, which lasted until Yahoo got rid of those, and is currently manifested in Sheila Melms' wonderful facebook page. To be a Jeff Beck fan is to be hardcore, and knowledgeable. As you might guess, probably most of us actually play guitar ourselves.
4. Sharing Beck's music with others. Admittedly, Jeff Beck isn't going to be the type of music that you can hook lots of your friends and family on. At least, the music he did outside of the most popular stuff, the Rod Stewart Jeff Beck Group records, The Yardbirds, and *possibly* Blow by Blow. I remember my late grandmother being particularly disgusted with a concert from the Who Else! tour that I use to watch all the time at my parent's house. "That isn't music, it's just noise!" she said. Of course, happily, when Jeff launched into Angel Footsteps she did voice her approval. Beck's ballads have universal appeal.
I had a lot of fun watching Jeff Beck videos and listening to records with my first guitar teacher, John. I'd go to his house, we'd smoke some cigars, and just *listen to Jeff's music.* Btw, when is the last time you simply listened to music as the primary activity in your home. Not a live concert, but actually sat in a comfortable chair and really listened to just music. This, to me, is a lost art. Even I don't do much of this anymore. I'm trying to do it more, because a lot of Beck's music isn't great for jogging or for just "background work noise."
The other group I shared his music with was, of course, other musicians! The first time I attempted to play Jeff's music was my sophomore year of college, playing Cause We've Ended as Lovers in the college jazz ensembles. We kinda sucked, although part of that suckitude was being nervous at the firing squad atmosphere of jazz education. I remember getting berated for playing in a seated position: "You can't play rock music sitting down!" (That was probably a merited criticism).
A little later on I would play Definitely Maybe as a regular tune in the fusion band I had in our live set. Shortly after graduating, I was invited to a rehearsal at the house of a trombone player who was trying to create an RnB showband type thing. I cooked up an arrangement of AIR Blower from Blow by Blow (saxophone, guitar, bass, drums, trombone). The group never got going, but one glorious rehearsal the trombonist, Mike, arranged for a ringer- a working pro drummer he paid to sit in with us- so we could have a rehearsal. He was a motown influenced player who sounded, well, utterly perfect, just like the record. For one glorious random evening in a Toledo area house, I played AIR Blower with fantastic musicians with an absolutely powerhouse rhythm section. That was special.
5. Absorbing Jeff's musical ideas and musical ethics.
This is a tricky one. As famous YouTube guitar influencer Rick Beato put it, he is uncopyable. This isn't hyperbole. Jeff's playing style is such a marvelously odd amalgamation of things that are just about impossible to imitate well.
What you can do, however, is imitate the attitude and what I'll call "musical ethics." What are those? Probably its own blog post, but in short, to be daring and improvisational, to be lyrical, to be technical but never, ever for its own sake. It is to keep getting better and better no matter how old you are. Jeff Beck at 78 was better than Jeff Beck at 50 who was better than Jeff Beck at 30 or 20.
Because I use a pick and do not have the rockabilly influence, there is going to be a limit to how much "Beck" is in my own guitar art. However, I did record one track (around 2015, released in 2019) in which I can detect a strong Beck influence in both the playing and the musical content. The music is free-form and overly long, so I'll send you to a time-stamped version here:
https://youtu.be/9dmRaANNYtY?t=120
I was particularly proud of this track for that reason. The lead lines are playful yet melancholy, which is definitely Jeff Beck's influence at work (and or course I used a strat-style guitar for this!). While not dedicated to Beck, the title, "Goodbye for Now," might as well be.
So where do we go from here? I wonder if Jeff Beck will inspire "Jeff Beck Societies" in the way truly great classical composers have, or the way Django Reinhardt inspired things have inspired bands like the "Hot Club of San Francisco" and "The Hot Club of Detroit." If such things happened, I'd love to be a part of them. I think in the immediate short term, it's just a time to dive ever-deeper into the legacy. Strangely, I haven't actually transcribed a lot of Beck solos, so that is something I'll remedy (I've already assigned a guitar student a Beck solo, which means I'll be learning it first to show him).
I have dreams of owning an Oxblood Les Paul, like on the cover of Blow by Blow. Alas, Gibson makes it impossible as these guitars are now selling for INSANE prices. I have designs on perhaps trying to build one myself from a cheap guitar kit (you can get oxblood guitar finish).
But more broadly, and more importantly, the main thing here is to continue to express myself on the guitar and musically. I've doing OK with that, but I can do a whole lot more. I need to find the courage to play out in public, at least in the limited sense my life allows for. Most of all, I need to continue to get better and better and better at my own guitar playing. That lifelong dedication to craft: that is so vital.
Finally, let me say something spiritual. Jeff never talked about that much, but as for myself, I am a Christian (another reason why I love "People Get Ready" so much, his one gospel tune!), so as I stated on my facebook page, I have faith that God collects all culture of the world and uses it in the New Creation (Heaven), so I do expect to hear Jeff Beck music there! And it will be glorious.
Rest in Peace, Jeff. Thanks for the music.
