Jeff Beck's Fusion Period

There's a short list in Rock & Roll Heaven of musicians whose influence far outshone their popularity. Jeff Beck has got to be near the top of that list, just before or after the Velvet Underground.

Jeff Beck was the chronological middle of the Holy Trinity of Yardbirds guitarists in the '60s; the fact that the other two (Clapton, Page) are rarely thought of as "Yardbirds guitarists" attests to their own massive fame. The epithet "experimental" is most often attached to Beck's early playing.

When Beck started his own group in the late '60s, he was mining the same territory as Led Zeppelin: heavy rock takes on the blues. The first Jeff Beck Group's debut album, Truth, predated Zep's debut by five months. It featured Rod Stewart on vocals and included a version of Willie Dixon's "I Ain't Superstitous" that hasn't lost its hair-raising, menacing quality. The second Beck band, with Bobby Tench singing, was a strange mixture of Beck's dive-bombing guitar style with R&B.

Blow by Blow (1975) featured Beck's third band, not counting the short-lived power trio BBA (Beck, Bogert and Appice). It's generally referred to as Beck's first "fusion" album and as a "landmark." But is it?

Well, it was the first all-instrumental album by a rock guitarist, at least since Duane Eddy. The pacing and programming of the album are tasteful, as are the arrangements by legendary Beatles producer George Martin. But besides that, if we look at what we have come to expect from fusion guitar albums, it falls short.

His next album was Wired, from 1976, which rock critics described using phrases like "jumped in at the deep end" with respect to jazz-rock fusion. It's true that the album featured two alumni of John McLaughlin's Mahavishnu Orchestra, keyboard player Jan Hammer and drummer Narada Michael Walden, both excellent players. But it doesn't really compare to "real" fusion guitarists like McLaughlin, Larry Coryell, Allan Holdsworth, or even early Al DiMeola. Many of the tracks tantalize with propulsive grooves, and Beck's guitar melds raw power with thoughtfulness in a way that few others could match; but too often the solos and tunes come to an end just as soon as they are starting to catch fire.

Tracks from Wired like the wonderful "Blue Wind" ought to have been doubly exciting live, with such constraints absent. Unfortunately, Beck's next album, Jeff Beck With the Jan Hammer Group Live, shatters that possibility; it's a mess. It sounds like Beck barely rehearsed with Hammer and his band; they gamely keep up with him on his tunes, while he sounds like he could hardly be bothered playing on Hammer's numbers, and both musicians try to get over on gimmickry.

Beck's final "fusion" album was 1980's There and Back. It was a more consistent, less varied effort than the previous two, featuring the sensitive playing of keyboardist Tony Hymas and the well-traveled drummer Simon Philips. This album moved even further away from jazz -- if the previous albums were even close to jazz (beyond the the Mingus cover on Wired) -- and towards the instrumental guitar rock genre that is Beck's true legacy.

Legions of rock guitarists, from Mick Ronson to Todd Rundgren, claim Jeff Beck's original rock sound as their inspiration. But the progeny of Jeff Beck's so-called fusion period are instrumental rock fretboard-shredders like Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson. In terms of pure technique, they and others can play rings around Jeff Beck, but their eventual sublimation of technique to restraint and soul is the true legacy of Beck albums like Blow by Blow, Wired, and There and Back.