Jeff Beck Is Back in Action

He's a hotrodder, after all. "He's been down there in Eggerton fucking around with his cars for the last two years," grumbles manager Grant.

At his Kent estate, Beck is working on a custom '32 Ford Coupe, with a 350 Chevy engine and a Powerglide. A Little Deuce Coupe. And everybody's already heard about his Model T, the one with the 327 and the B&M Hydroshift, the one that he crashed most violently on the very same weekend he was to join Tim Dogert and Carmine Appice in that much waited for super charged supergroup from the ashes of Vanilla Fudge that never got moving because Beck was lying in a hospital bed with a concussion.

They've moved the rehearsals up to a dingy, dusty old dancehall in far north London, behind a pub called?honest — the Fishmongers Arms. This place is even more hysterical than the last. The last time the Fishmongers Arms saw this kind of action ... was when Gene Vincent and his Houseshakers had a rave last year.

The band cooks. It's "heavy," sure, but it's not glue-sniffing heavy, it's mostly thudding Romilar action. Cozy Powell is one of a few drummers who can use twin bass drums and not get lost in them. Max Middleton was a classical pianist student for 18 years and this is his first venture into pop. And he doesn't use all the old stock riffs. And Jeff tapes his feet as he plays, a rare sight for guitarists; it's up-beat, crystal-clear chording, then it's all a slide back into Motown Heavy.

Beck has been out of action for two years, and in that time he's not heard too many new groups. After the crash, he lost a lot of interest in guitar. This band is conceivably not a progression, as such, and its, roots are in an established energy happening. Then again, London Town, all your bands have progressed so much, progressed on to such other meaningful, things, that raw funk stands ... isolated, usually.

Beck used to play in the Tridents in 1965, a semi-pro rhythm and blues band, one of the many but for Beck's echo chamber and his teenage guitar freak-outs during Bo Diddley's "Nursery Rhymes" down at the Hundred Club. "A big old African riff, y'know, where you could play the wrong notes and times and it would still sound great. On the echo, I used to have a half-second, quarter-second and eighth-second delays built in, and I could let it build and build and build. I'd play another note and on-and-on-and-on.

"One night we'd just done a great set when this chap comes out of the audience, smoking a cigar, and asked me if I wanted to join this group. And I said, 'Naah. Fuck off, man.' And then I thought that if I had some more money, I could do more things. Then I found out that the group was the Yardbirds.

"I didn't like them when I first met them. They didn't say Hi or anything. They were pissed off the Eric had left, they had thought that the whole Yardbirds sound had gone. That was the impression I had got. They said, 'Can you play blues?' I said, 'Wot, slow blues? Chi-ca-go blues?' They said anything. So I honked around. They said to get rid of the echo ... you don't use an echo in Chi-ca-go blues ... yeah, that's just what they said!"

It was about that time that blues started coming down on Beck personally. As he admits, "I wasn't ready to go from the semi-pro, straight to the glamor." He missed gigs, he started fussing with the sound. He also recorded some very novel tracks with them, including "Heart Full of Soul," "Shape of Things," and "Better Man Than I" In short, he breathed a second life into the band. They were solid avant-garde for the adolescents.

His exit from the Yardbirds was less than graceful. "I had a nervous break down, y'know," he philosophizes. "I don't know if you know what a nervous breakdown really is, but I had one. It was in St. Tropez for his concert, and I had fainted and fell down about three flights of stone stairs, couldn't even speak to the doctor, and after he gives me about 3000 prescriptions, he tells me I'll be alright. I just have meningitis. And I thought. 'Hoowah, my mother told me meningitis was a bad disease.'