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Jeff Beck had no interest in writing a memoir. Despite being one of the greatest guitarists to ever wield an axe, famous for his time in bands including the Yardbirds and the Jeff Beck Group, he was uninterested in commercial success and considered dwelling on the past a waste of time. And his life, though wild, failed to follow the typical rock-star arc – meteoric rise, epic fall, wholesome redemption – that makes for easy copy.
Asked by Rolling Stone magazine in 2018 why he’d decided against putting pen to paper – he had the famous friends and some epic stories, after all – Beck replied, “I started writing it, and then I thought ‘No, let them dig around when I’m dead’.” Beck died of bacterial meningitis in 2023, aged 78, and so the task has fallen to music journalists Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill to tell the life story of the “guitarist’s guitarist”.
Blow by Blow, despite the title bringing to mind snowy lines of cocaine, is not a book filled with tawdry tales of drug-taking, heavy drinking and sex. (Beck mostly eschewed the hard-partying tendencies of his friends; he was too busy with his guitar.) Instead, Tolinski and Gill have woven together more than 30 hours of interviews, conducted over multiple years, with Beck and his closest friends and collaborators, including Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy and Johnny Depp, about his music and motivations. This is a music book for music geeks.
Beck was born in 1944 in Wallington, Surrey (now Greater London), to Arnold, a stoic man who worked in a bottle factory, and Ethel, a housewife and keen pianist. When his parents refused to buy their musical son a guitar, a miffed but resourceful teenage Beck made one himself – fashioning an instrument by stretching rubber bands over a tobacco tin, then one with a cigar box for the body and a fence post for the neck. It was evident to anyone who saw him live – in decrepit pubs and basement clubs – that he had extraordinary talent.
But talent wasn’t always enough. Beck had a lifelong battle with feeling inadequate, and his rivalries – Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix in particular – are explored here in microscopic detail. His clash with one-time fellow Yardbird Clapton was the fiercest: Beck was the messy, dirty interloper; Clapton the “self-important” blues traditionalist. Beck’s bandmates in his early group, The Tridents, annoyed him with their constant praise of Clapton’s work with the Yardbirds – until Beck took his place in that band in March 1965, quickly winning over their fans, who “worshipped Eric, but wanted to be Jeff”.
Hendrix was behind more of an existential crisis. After Beck saw Hendrix live for the first time at the cramped Blaises Club in West London in 1966, he was left “reeling, his confidence shaken to the core. In the days that followed, the fear of obsolescence gnawed at him. Had Jimi stolen his thunder? Was there any room left for someone like Jeff Beck?” The two later became fast friends, and Beck found in his American peer a warmth and kinship that was often lacking from the cut-throat British scene.
His relationship with Jimmy Page was yet more complicated. They had been friends since they were teenagers; it had been Page who recommended Beck for a spot in the Yardbirds, then on the cusp of becoming one of Britain’s biggest bands, in 1965. When management of the Yardbirds changed hands in the spring of 1966, securing the band a £25,000 advance from EMI (around half a million pounds today), Beck immediately thanked Page for his role, gifting him his beloved 1959 Telecaster. (Page, who founded Led Zeppelin in 1968, would go on to use the guitar in many of the band’s most enduring hits, including Stairway to Heaven.)
But then came a grave betrayal. In 1968, when Beck listened to an early pressing of Zeppelin’s debut (released the following year) he was outraged at the inclusion of You Shook Me – the same Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon song that his own recently formed band, The Jeff Beck Group, had recorded on that year’s album Truth. He considered it “outright theft of his band’s heavy blues style and their specific material”. Page quickly went on the defensive, saying he was unaware of Beck’s version; Beck, scared of falling out with his friend for good, let it slide.
I’ve read upwards of 20 music books so far this year, and Blow by Blow is by far the best: staggering in its breadth and detail, even-handed in its assessments. It lays bare the soul of a man burdened with both natural musicality and crippling anxiety (as well as health issues including tonsillitis, chronic headaches and tinnitus) who was responsible for few chart hits (he despised 1967’s saccharine Hi Ho Silver Lining, likening its legacy to “wearing a pink toilet seat” around his neck) and was endlessly influential.
He wasn’t easy to be around. Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, who played with the Jeff Beck Group for two years between 1967 and 1969, have both acknowledged his shortcomings as a friend and band leader. Stewart has said: “he never really looked after me” while the group was touring. Poor pay forced them to rely on Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend Kathy Etchingham to “take us to lunch because we were flat broke”.
However, Beck did find a friend in later life who he felt understood him. He met Johnny Depp in Tokyo in 2016, having been introduced by the rock photographer Ross Halfin – and the septuagenarian rock god and A-list actor quickly bonded over a shared appreciation for the blues, classic cars and vintage guitars. Depp has said that, during his toxic divorce from (and consequent legal battle with) Amber Heard, Beck and his wife, Sandra, helped to keep him “alive and sane and happy”. When Beck died, Depp was the only confidant Sandra invited to the private burial at Riverhall, Beck’s country estate in East Sussex where he lived for 48 years.
The downside of reading classic rock biographies is that they often remind you of what has ceased to exist. Stars like Beck, who refused to be put in a box and cared more about jamming and experimenting than making money, are few and far between today. And nor does serendipity exist any more. A description of the Jeff Beck Group’s five-night run at The Scene nightclub in New York City in June 1968 almost made me convulse with envy: Hendrix jamming onstage with Beck and Clapton, the latter in the middle of Cream’s final tour, with Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr watching on.
It’s a small consolation that this superb book allows you to dive into history’s greatest rock and roll era. Beck, who played such a pivotal role in defining it, deserves nothing less.
Blow by Blow is published by Michael Joseph at £30. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
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