Jeff Beck Dies: British Guitar God Was 78

Erik Pedersen
·6 min read
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Jeff Beck, a wildly influential eight-time Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer who went from the Yardbirds to fronting his own group and working with Rod Stewart and is considered among the greats of rock guitar, has died. He was 78. His family said in a statement that Beck died Tuesday of bacterial meningitis.

“On behalf of his family, it is with deep and profound sadness that we share the news of Jeff Beck’s passing,” the statement on social media reads. “After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday. His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.”

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Beck replaced Eric Clapton in the seminal British rock group The Yardbirds in 1965 and remained with the group into the following year, playing on some of the band’s biggest hits including “Heart Full of Soul,” and “Over, Under, Sideways, Down.” His bandmate and eventual replacement in 1966 was Jimmy Page, who later would form Led Zeppelin.

Urgent and in-your-face — and wildly influential — his guitar work flirted with and/or alternated between blues, jazz fusion and straight-ahead hard guitar rock. The tale often is told that members of the young English band Pink Floyd nearly invited Beck to join them in 1967 but were too nervous to approach him.

Beck’s first album after leaving the band was Truth, which reached the Top 15 and went gold in the U.S. It featured “Beck’s Bolero” — with backing by Page, John Paul Jones and the Who’s Keith Moon — and his cover of Willie Dixon’s “I Ain’t Superstitious,” which featured Stewart on lead vocals. The disc also included a cover of Dixon’s “You Shook Me,” a version of which turned up on Zeppelin’s debut album the following year.

“The six stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions,” Page tweeted today. “Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations apparently limitless. Jeff I will miss you along with your millions of fans.”

Page would induct Beck into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2009.

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Beck followed that set up in 1969 with Beck-Ola, the first album credited to The Jeff Beck Group. It also made the U.S. Top 15 and cracked the UK Top 40. Jeff Beck Group, released in 1972, was the group’s swan song and was highlighted by perhaps its most famous song, a stirring cover of Dox Nix’s “Going Down” that remains a staple of classic rock radio.

The Jeff Beck Group’s lineup at various times featured such British rock legends as Stewart, future Rolling Stone Ron Wood, Aynsley Dunbar and Cozy Powell.

Beck would continue to tour and release albums — including the one-off Jeff Beck, Tim Bogert, Carmine Appice — into the mid-1970s, when he had his commercial breakthrough. Released in 1975, Blow by Blow was his second official solo set. The mostly instrumental LP reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and was highlighted by “Freeway Jam,” which would become among his most famous tracks, and. It would be the first of back-to-back platinum discs.

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The 1976 follow-up was the all-instrumental Wired, which also reached the U.S. Top 20 as Beck continued to gain a wider audience.

His albums continued to sell well in the States but were less successful in his native UK. Beck never had a solo hit single, but his 1985 collaboration with Stewart on a cover of the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” was an FM smash and earned airplay on the still-young MTV. The pair had worked together many times before — Beck also played on Stewart’s Top 5 1984 hit “Infatation” and had a cameo in the video — and the juxtaposition of that guitar and that voice was rock magic.

Technically brilliant, always innovative, wildly versatile and often temperamental, Beck was a rock ‘n’ roll iconoclast and a guitar player’s guitar player. “I don’t care about the rules,” he’s quoted as saying. “In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song, then I’m not doing my job properly.”

And he really came alive onstage.

The most avid fans might say they went to hear him play, rather than watch — which made sense in that he never was a big showman, preferring to let his fingers do the talking. But he would show flashes of Rock God onstage, mercilessly deploying the whammy bar or throwing his arms in the air as he let a note hang.

A face-slap of sight and sound, even veteran concertgoers likely would brag about his shows the next day. And the next. He remains among rock’s most revered guitarists, as the myriad tributes that have poured in prove.

Alice Cooper would agree. He once told interviewers: “Eric Clapton is a great blues player. Jimmy Page is a great rock player. Jeff Beck is a great guitar player. … If you get a chance to see Jeff Beck – Jeff Beck’s the guy.” Check out this story about Cooper opening for The Yardbirds and a Beck guitar move that blew him away:

Born on June 22, 1944, in the London suburb of Wallington, Beck played in local bands and did session work before being recruited for the Yardbirds. He was impressed at a young age by Les Paul, a pioneer of the solid-body electric guitar. Beck performed Paul’s “How High the Moon” with singer-songwriter Imelda May for a 2010 Grammy tribute to Paul. Early heroes also included B.B. King and Stax legend Steve Cropper.

Beck later would open for King on a tour billed as the B.B. King Music Festival in 2003.

He wouldn’t score his first Grammy until 1985 — Best Rock Instrumental for “Escape” — but would win the award five more times (watch him accept the 2011 award below). He is a 17-time Grammy nominee, including back-to-back Best Rock Album noms in the early 2010s.

Most recently, Beck collaborated with Johnny Depp for a 2020 lockdown cover of John Lennon’s “Isolation.” And last year, Depp joined Beck onstage for multiple nights of the latter’s European tour — including a stop at London’s Royal Albert Hall — during a break in the Pirates of the Caribbean star’s court case against ex-wife Amber Heard.

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