Jeff Beck Is Back in Action

"Mickie wasn't the slightest bit interested in recording my sort of music and I couldn't say to him, 'Look, you don't know what's going on,' because he had 20,000 gold disks on the wall saying 'I do know what's going on.' So for a couple of years I wasted my career doing junk tunes."

And then the story turns into the pages that everyone knows so well. They followed Cream to America, but were actually fronting a wave that meant something entirely different from Cream. It was a different image, and it could almost be seen as some obvious formula, some ... taste be damned.

"I wasn't ready for Nicky Hopkins' wistful piano behind me. It took away the raucousness, but that's not what I wanted in my band. I just wanted to lay down all the guitar I could put down without being interrupted."

Mickey Waller and Ron Wood were fired in mid-tour. Ron Wood was rehired. Nicky Hopkins began to get feisty about the band's direction. He was allowed to quit.

"I saw other groups, like Sly ... groups that really floored me, and they made me realize that this group was limited, that there was an end to it, and that's the time to get out, finish it."

It was at the Singer Bowl in New York, summer of 1969, that Beck was doing his encore of "Jailhouse Rock" when members of Led Zeppelin came jumping out from backstage, doing an Aztec two-step, having a drunken goodtime on Beck's stage. A raid. The twin Marshall stacks were split and Page was given a guitar and this kid in the audience was bubbling out of control, "Wow! ... it's like ... the two greatest guitarists in the whole world! Right here in the Singer Bowl!"

"It was funny," says Beck, "because that's when they took over."

It's all different now, of course. There's specialist bands. Everyone has their own kind of rock release.

And you'd most likely think that Beck and Zeppelin were always good buddies unless you'd seen those old acrimonious interviews with Beck, stating how Zeppelin stole half his act. He won't say it now. "When Jimmy's demo was playing to me, and I heard "You Shook Me," the number I did on the Truth album, and I heard the arrangement, it just sort of ... I dunno, it wasn't the same, but the choice, the approach, it was in the same bracket ... the category ..."

Strong vocals and a loud guitar? "Yeah, right. I just thought, well ... I'm quite honored, really. I do wish them the best of luck." No matter what the scene is now, Beck is trying to make a comeback. He's never had the urge to see Rod Stewart and the Faces, probably out of an avoidance for anything discouraging. On the other hand, he did go and see Cactus, the band that Tim Bogert and Appice put together without him. "I liked it ... it was couldn't-give-a-shit music. But they didn't have anything to say musically, they were doing old fashioned blues."

By the end of June, Beck wants to do a couple of feeler exercises in Germany, then head for the States. "I had a bad complex, y'know, a while ago, and it quietens you right down ... it gives you a nasty fright ... I began to realize I'd turn into a vegetable if I didn't watch it. A fractured skull can fuck up a lot of things. ... This tour could be a disaster, but then it could be great ... this time I have to make it work. There's no room to fuck about, really."