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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
SEASONS
Jeff Beck
Jeff
Epic : 2003
[Buy It]
I'm not much for the guitar gods. I've written before, in this space, about my lukewarm feelings for Jimi Hendrix: appreciation, of course, and occasional awe, but not really a deep emotional connection. That goes double for someone like Eric Clapton, or maybe triple, and I got most of my fill of Joe Satriani in my sophomore year of college. It's not as though I prefer my guitarists mediocre, but I tend to want them to plan in the service of the song, like Richard Thompson or Jimmy Page, and when even those guitarists embark upon noodling expeditions, I'm liable to tune them out.
The one exception to this rule is Jeff Beck. The first time I heard him, I'm pretty sure, was on the Yardbirds' "Over Under Sideways Down," played between two slices of indifferent heavy blues on some classic rock station. It's a showcase for Beck's playing, and particularly the ways in which his playing differed from (and trumped) that of Clapton and even Page, but it's also a relic, hard to separate from its time. Also a relic, though of a different time, is "Blow by Blow," the 1975 album in which he mixed together jazz, funk, rock, and soul, and played the hell out of songs like the Beatles' "She's a Woman" and Stevie Wonder's "Cause We've Ended as Lovers." (The Stevie Wonder connection was significant; Wonder originally wrote "Superstition" for Beck but rushed out his own recording first, and Beck supplied the heartbreaking solo on Wonder's "I Believe (When I Fall In Love With You It Will Be Forever).") As the seventies wound down, though, Beck wound down, too. He recorded infrequently in the eighties, though one of those recordings, a cover of "People Get Ready" with his former bandmate Rod Stewart on vocals, showed up frequently on MTV. Today, it sounds dated thanks to Nile Rodgers' production.
So, that was the work of most of two decades, lots of relics, many inspired. They were entered into the historical record, and Beck decided to keep to himself and worked on his collection of vintage cars. Then, in 1989, he released "Jeff Beck's Guitar Shop." This is the album I associate most with my love for Beck; it came out while I was in college, and we played it constantly for about a month, mostly because it's brilliant, unhinged album of rock instrumentals, sometimes with cut-and-paste vocals (in one, Bozzio reads from a guitar-equipment catalog), sometimes with no vocals at all.
Since the late nineties, Beck has recorded more regularly, showing off both his early-rock roots (he recorded Crazy Legs, a tribute album to Gene Vincent's guitarist Cliff Gallup) and his willingness to experiment further with electronica and world music (especially on his trio of recent records, Who Else!, You Had It Coming, and Jeff). His mercurial playing remains at the center of everything he does; "Seasons," from Jeff, is a phenomenally odd showcase of Beck's brilliance, as he careers from hard-rock riffing to speed jazz. I even like the noodling. Today is Beck's sixty-fifth birthday. Don't sing him "Happy Birthday." Try to play it with some death-defying descending pull-offs.
posted by Ben
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