the guitarist’s guitarist.
Sad news that another rock icon, Jeff Beck, has passed aged 78, one of the big names of the British blues-rock guitarists to come out of the 1960s.
Those guys that came out of the 60s with their Marshalls and Les Pauls – Clapton, Green, Page, Beck, Taylor – set the model for so many guitar players that followed.
Beck was regarded as the “guitarist’s guitarist”, not being as main stream as Clapton or Page – the former being the man he replaced in the Yardbirds, at the recommendation of the latter, who joined him later in the band as you can see playing “Stroll On” – basically a renamed “Train Kept A-Rollin’” – from the 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni film “Blowup”, in the video above.
The one Yardbird album he recorded was followed up by some solo singles, after he was fired, and then two ground breaking albums as the Jeff Beck Group, with Rod Stewart on vocals, Ronnie Wood – later of the Faces and The Rolling Stones – on bass.
Their two albums, Truth and Beck-OLa, were two classic blueprints for blues/heavy rock that would follow. How the Jeff Beck Group made rock’s Holy Grail, Truth.
As I’m not really one for the old jazz or any of it’s associated fusions, I mainly stick with those two albums and the Yardbirds output.