Raz is not going to be happy this morning. Jeff Beck is dead at 78.
I posted it on the banter last night. Spent the evening blasting "Truth," "Blow By Blow", and "Emotion and Commotion."
I am NOT happy. This one hurts more than others. All my guitarist friends express the same sentiment, and we don't really know why it hurts more.
Maybe it's because after an uneven career and a deserved reputation as a perfectionist dick in the first half of his career, he'd settled down and found focus and humor in the second half.
Maybe it's just that we aren't inundated with the weight of catalog like we are with Page or Clapton.
Maybe it's because despite being the earliest of the British guitar heroes, he never achieved the fame that the others did, and that speaks to devoted plodders like me.
Or maybe it's this: among devoted students of the electric guitar, there's a suspicion, even a cognitive dissonance around the idea that Jeff Beck might be the best. Better than Hendrix, better than Van Halen. Hendrix, Page, Clapton, Townshend, and Van Halen all established a certain sound and style and then pretty much stuck to that thing.
But with each album, Beck was different. He kept evolving, building on what he was discovering, until by the early 90s he had developed this utterly unique voice on the guitar that was all in his empty hands. It was unmistakable, and to really get the majesty of it, you have to be a guitarist. Non-players don't get the complexity of the mechanical and cognitive process of playing like Beck. There are millions of hacks who can play like EVH, but the very most expert guitarists will tell you that imitating Beck is nearly impossible to do.
And no one is doing anything remotely compareable. It isn't about speed, or two-handed tapping, or expert wielding of a slide. It's about texture, how the notes emerge from the speaker. With Beck, each note had its own texture, and he did that with just this hands. No pick, no big pedalboard, no fancy effects processors, just his hands, especially his right hand, simultaneously plucking the notes, controlling the volume knob, and working the vibrato bar. It's a miraculous display of dexterity and brains. And Beck made the guitar sound like it was human.
Maybe it is the loss of this that hurts so much.
