Profile of Jeff Beck on Famous Like Me

The electric guitarist Jeff Beck (born June 24, 1944) is a British rock musician who played in a number of influential bands in the 1960s.

Beck was born Geoffrey Arnold Beck in Wallington, London. Like many rock musicians in the early 1960s, he began his career working as a session guitarist. In 1965, Beck joined the Yardbirds (after Eric Clapton left the group for John Mayall's Bluesbreakers). It was during Jeff's tenure with the Yardbirds that they recorded most of their hits. In 1966, Jeff shared the dual-lead guitar role with Jimmy Page. Beck's tenure in the Yardbirds was a short one; he left after 18 months, partly for health reasons.

The following year, Beck formed a new band, Jeff Beck Group, which featured him on lead guitar, Rod Stewart on vocals, Ron Wood on bass, Mick Waller on drums, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. The group produced two albums, Truth in 1968 and Cosa Nostra Beck-Ola the following year. Owing to friction within the band, Stewart and Wood left the group in 1969 to form The Faces. Wood later joined The Rolling Stones.

After the failure of the second Jeff Beck Group (it disbanded in 1972), Beck formed the power trio Beck, Bogert, and Appice, with Carmine Appice on drums and Tim Bogert on bass. This group, too, failed to attract much critical attention and soon split up, although they did have a minor hit with a version of Stevie Wonder's Superstition (Beck later played lead guitar on Wonder's Talking Book album). In 1975, Beck did a solo, all-instrumental jazz fusion album entitled Blow by Blow which received unexpectedly positive critical reviews and substantial sales, reaching number 4 in the U.S. charts. It was followed up by a collaborative effort with keyboardist Jan Hammer on the 1976 Wired album, which also received critical acclaim.

During the 1980s and 1990s, Jeff Beck recorded sporadically: Flash (1985, including performances with Rod Stewart and Jan Hammer), Guitar Shop (1989), Crazy Legs (1993), Who Else (1999), and You Had It Coming (2001). Jeff Beck won his third Grammy Award, this one for 'Best Rock Instrumental Performance' for the track Dirty Mind from You Had It Coming. The 2003 release of Jeff showed that the new electro-guitar style he used for the two earlier albums would continue to dominate. The song Plan B from this release earned him his fourth Grammy Award, again, for 'Best Rock Instrumental Performance'.

Beck was one of the first electric guitarists in the 1960s to experiment with electronic distortion (most notably in the Yardbirds 1966 album, Roger The Engineer), redefining the sound and role of the electric guitar in rock music and anticipating what Jimi Hendrix shortly thereafter took further. Beck's work with the Yardbirds and the Jeff Beck Group's 1968 album Truth were seminal influences on heavy metal music, which emerged in full force in the early 1970s.

Discography

Albums

See Also

• Rolling Stone's List of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time

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