Jeff Beck Is Back in Action

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 taps his feet as he plays, a rare sight for guitarists; it’s upbeat, 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 that 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 breakdown, 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 this 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 3,000 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.

“It was when I was convalescing that Jimmy Page joined the Yardbirds. He was the one that got me in the band in the first place as they approached him before me. He said no, but recommended me. Anyway, I really wanted Jim Page on lead guitar with me because I knew it would sound sensational. We had fun. I remember doing some really nice jobs with Page. It lasted about four or five months, then I had this throat thing come on, inflamed tonsils, and what with inflamed brain, inflamed tonsils and an inflamed cock and everything else …”

Just before the final split, Beck vented his revenge in Antonioni’s Blow-Up. “When Antonioni said that he wanted me to break my guitar I had a fit. I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s Townshend’s thing.’ I didn’t mind playing a very wild number with lots of violence in it, lots of chords smashing away, but I didn’t actually want to destroy the guitar. What a cheat, the first part shows me playing a Les Paul and in the second part I’m smashing up a cheap old $35 Japanese model.”

So what did he think when he saw the flick? “I was thoroughly embarrassed. I had a fucking hard-on in the picture, man! This chick I was going out with at the time said, ‘Oh my god, don’t go see that film, it’s so embarrassing, I didn’t know what to do, I took my mother to see it and there you were … this horrible, sinister thing hanging down the side of the screen.’ It gets hot under them lights, after all, rupturing myself with those tight trousers.”

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A rock & roll star is what Mickie Most wanted to be. “I was like the Elvis of South Africa,” he acknowledges. “I had 11 Number One records down there.”

Understandably, the kind of rock-flame neo-Buddy Holly act he was doing that transports you to the top down there didn’t work in Beatles-struck London, and in 1964, after a series of bill-bottoming debacles, he began producing. His first assignment, lucky enough, was that half-hour session in which the Animals turned out “House of the Rising Sun.” The luck began, the hits began, the Product began.