Jeff Beck Remembers George Martin: ‘He Gave Me a Career’
Settling into Martin’s AIR Studio in London, Beck picked up on Martin’s personality and quirks. Martin dressed “immaculately” and didn’t like distorted guitars. Even though he was raised in a working-class family — his father a carpenter, his mother a nurse — Martin had a civil, cultivated (but never condescending) air about him. “It’s weird, but I always thought he was a member of the Royal Family,” Beck laughs. “He was the first person in rock & roll who spoke Queen’s English. He had this very diamond-cut voice. I said to [keyboardist] Max [Middleton] one night, ‘Why don’t we follow him and see if he turns in to Buckingham Palace?'”
Yet as other musicians learned, Martin didn’t look down at rock & roll, especially when it dared to venture where it hadn’t before. The songs that took shape — the scrappy “You Know What I Mean,” the pumping “Freeway Jam” — were rooted in funk, jazz and fusion, and were unlike any that Beck had ever recorded. His new band — keyboardist Max Middleton, bassist Phil Chen and drummer Richard Bailey — was flexible enough to roll with those genres.
“George took to Richard right away, and Max was a great jazz player,” Beck recalls. “George could see where I was heading, the jazz overtones. It was another avenue he took to very well.” (Stevie Wonder can be heard, uncredited, playing Clavinet on the album’s other Wonder cover, “Thelonious,” but Beck says that track was an outtake from Wonder’s Talking Book, on which Beck guested, so, alas, Beck, Martin and Wonder were never in the studio together.)
Beck says the reggae talk-box-driven version of “She’s a Woman” was inspired not by Martin — who produced the original Fab Four version — but by a rendition he heard by R&B singer Linda Lewis. “George loved that,” Beck says of his own version. “He was the hippest guy in London.” Beck has particularly vivid memories of the album’s last track, the gorgeously orchestrated “Diamond Dust.” When they first cut the song, Beck thought his band’s version “sounded a bit lame.” But Martin suggested adding a string section to emphasize the drama in the melody. “When he finished it, he came wafting in and said, ‘This reminds me of a French love movie!'” Beck laughs. “I said, ‘You’ve just spoiled the whole effect! I might not put it on the album!’ He didn’t realize it was the worst thing he could have said to me. But I thought it was beautiful. George lit a fire under it.”
Beck and Martin regrouped for a follow-up album, 1976’s Wired, although Beck says those sessions were more complicated due to the involvement of keyboardist Jan Hammer, who was even deeper into fusion (and produced, on his own, the album’s hammering “Blue Wind”). Beck once played Martin a Graham Central Station record — “and George said, ‘I’m sorry, but that’s the worst-sounding record I ever heard.’ But he said, ‘I think I know where you’re headed.’ I was very smitten with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Jan Hammer.”