Seeing Jeff Beck play live is like witnessing a one-man three-ring circus. There’s first of all the performer himself; then there’s the right hand, and then there’s the left hand, all three working simultaneously. What a spectacle it is to behold.

We should be thankful that his technical road crew sets up a huge video screen to the left of the stage, and 15 to 20 meters above the band. There it is on the screen bigger than life and you can see the left hand at work on his Olympic white Telecaster with a rosewood fingerboard. Rosewood, and not maple like most of his Stratocaster-guitar-playing peers prefer.

Look! The right hand with the thumb and first two fingers picking the strings. No pick. The thumb and index finger turning the volume control knob for a whine and a cry, damn near making his instrument talk The pinky and the palm going at the whammy bar making the note dip or rise, or rise and dip. And then he’s changing the tone knobs, rolling off the treble, rolling the bass up. Also he’s moving the slide lever, changing one of the three pick-ups, and there’s the position in-between the treble and middle pickup. Oh mercy, how does he do all that with one hand.

“With Jeff it’s all in the hands,” Eric Clapton said.

It hasn’t always been that way. In 1971 Jeff Beck was a frustrated musician looking for a new sound that would change the path he was on, as well as the path rock music in general was on. He had recovered from a car accident in which he suffered serious head injuries in 1970 and his band had split for greener pastures.

The first Jeff Beck Group was made up of vocalist Rod Stewart, bass player Ron Wood, and drummer Micky Waller. Rod Stewart had joined Faces, and he had completed a solo record in the spring of 1971 that was hot on the charts. Ron Wood had joined Faces as well, and then the Rolling Stones, who had also approached Beck about the possibility of filling the position of second guitarist for departing member Mick Taylor. Beck was not interested. He wanted to lead a band with a new sound. Music was changing and he wanted to play something far beyond three-to-five chord rock ‘n roll.

Beck went in search of a new band. He heard vocalist Bob Tench singing with the rock band Gass at Ronnie Scott’s. Tench had performed as a back-up singer with many rock artists including Van Morrison, Linda Lewis, and Eric Burdon. Beck hired him as lead vocalist. He had played before with both Cozy Powell on drums and Clive Chapman on bass. They joined up, along with keyboardist Max Middleton, who played long, flowing jazz lines on his Fender Rhodes electric piano. Was this the band that would change Jeff Beck’s music? The second Jeff Beck Group went into the studio with the expectation of doing so.

Epic Records released the group’s first record in London in October 1971 and in the U.S. in February 1992. There were definite soul – Jeff had always been a fan of Motown – R&B, jazz, and hard rock influences. He wrote all the songs on the record except one. As usual the guitarist’s licks were phenomenal, but would the record be the game changer the musicians were looking for?

The album starts with Beck using a wah-wah and a swirling phase-shifting sound for a four-note riff played four times which segues up a fourth four times, then drops back to the original riff in “Got the Feeling.” The sound treatment would have fit right in Issac Hayes’ “Shaft” title film track. “The time is right my friend,” Bob Tench’s voice sings, nearing a falsetto range, sounding out in dire urgency.

A four-note climb ending with a shimmering major-seventh chord begins the chorus with minor sevenths following creating a jazz-like chorus. “It ain’t no good when you’re all alone …” and a little later, “You’ve got the feeling. Feeling the feeling …” then Jeff’s guitar growls in the bass register, and follows with a clear, high, trebly ten-note run, sharp and sweet.

The second track “Situation” is premium Jeff Beck.with an opening riff on the bottom three bass strings in C# minor, ending with a dipping pulled down bend on the G note on the lower E string. There’s a quick flutter of a six-note vamp played four times, two octaves higher and in unison with Max’s electric piano. And then comes Beck’s 12-note statement on the top three strings. This is one of Beck’s all-time best instrumental beginnings to a song. Bravo!

“People fight for the basic right to choose …” Tench sings, and Clive Chapman’s bass is jumping, no thump-thump, thump-thump, first to the fifth note here. Chapman lays down a 12-note pattern over a 13-note range, and Cozy Powell’s crisp snare and cymbal-work synchronizes with Beck’s two-chord rhythm first to the fourth in the verse.

And once again the chorus is slightly jazzy with its use of descending minor seventh chords. “We must make a change from the basic situation.” Bob Tench was made to sing this song, its message akin to Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece “What’s Going On?,” recorded earlier that year.

The first two tracks, easily the best songs with vocals on the album, were released as a single in Brittan in December 1971 with “Got the Feeling” being the A side and “Situation” the B side. The following third track on the record is mediocre and Beck’s guitar work is the strongest element on the cut, calling back to the first Jeff Beck Group.

The fourth track originally titled “Raynes Park Blues,” but was later changed to “Max’s Tune,” embodies the strongest element of change as it sounds more like jazz fusion. The melody, if there is one, is a statement of four sustained, echoing notes from Jeff’s guitar. Max soon joins in with solitary notes played slowly on electric piano. What we hear is quiet, solemn, and even mysterious; at first structured like a piece of music in the vein of Miles Davis’ “In a Silent Way.” Then Max speeds up the tempo and plays a long jazz solo in the middle.

Side two is weak compared to the first side, much of it sounding old hat. The titles are “I’ve Been Used,” “New Ways” segueing into “Train, Train,’ and “Jody,” probably the song lacking the most feeling and intensity on the entire record. The instrumentation of the first three tunes is solid: guitar, bass, drums, and especially the keyboards. Once again it becomes apparent that songwriting is the main problem, and the realization this is the only record in which Beck wrote most of the songs.

Overall, the record was not a hit with fans, its highest chart position on Billboard was #46. The band played well together, but most critics agreed the problem was in the material the band chose to record. Jeff Beck was a remarkable instrumentalist, rarely a vocalist, and questionable as a capable songwriter. The new lineup in the Jeff Beck Group did not satisfy the leader’s goal in finding a new musical direction.

Wait, there’s one change of major proportion. On the British T.V. show “Old Whistle Test” .Beck is playing a Fender Stratocaster on one track.. What? Hasn’t he always been a Les Paul man, right up to the painted-portrait cover of 1975’s Blow by Blow? Is this a foreshadowing of the Stratocaster that would become his main instrument from 1976’s Wired right up to the present day? Intriguing indeed, like the man himself.

The second Jeff Beck Group released a second record in which five of the tunes were covers. One song Bob Dylan’s “Tonight I’ll be Staying Here with You” from Nashville Skyline is one of the mismatches between the choice of material and the talents of the band. The album was released in June 1972 and the group disbanded the following month.

In 1973 Beck recorded and toured with Beck, Bogart, and Appice in a power-rock trio. A live album followed. Power rock - is this the change Beck was looking for? It’s doubtful.

In 1975 Jeff Beck comes closer to getting what he was looking for in 1971 when he pairs up with producer George Martin and makes a record consensually agreed on by critics as brilliant - the classic “Blow by Blow.” There is no Jeff Beck Group, only Jeff Beck choosing musicians for each individual track. Max Middleton is one of the musicians, the lone member of the second Jeff Beck group on this record.

Beck’s biggest influence on Blow by Blow he said was the guitarist Roy Buchanan, who utilizes his tone and volume knobs to achieve a unique whine and cry sound from his Telecaster. Beck employs some of those techniques of string bending and volume and tone knob “rolling” in his interpretation of the Stevie Wonder song “Cause We Ended as Lovers.” Euphonious. I’ve often wondered if he used a Fender guitar to achieve the tones on this masterfully executed track.

Jeff Beck’s changes in his musical style have been subtle, and he has come to use techniques that are subtle as well. For years after the Yardbirds he appeared to be a frustrated musician. This brought back recollections of the Yardbirds in Antoniono’s 1966 movie Blow Up where Beck’s Vox amp keeps feeding back, so he slams the head of his guitar against it, again and again, and then throw the guitar to the stage and destroys it with his hands and feet.

By the time he records and releases Wired, he is playing his own brand of jazz fusion, and claiming the influence of jazz-fusion guitarist John McLaughlin. He does a version of Charles Mingus’ Goodbye Pork Pie Hat on Wired, as McLaughlin did in his acoustic My Goals Beyond. A version of “You Know You Know” from McLaughlin’s Inner Mounting Flame in 1970 will later be performed by Beck’s band more han 40 years later. Beck says the instrumental allows his band “to show what we can do.” 

Now, fifty years since the release of Rough and Ready, Jeff Beck is one of the world’s premiere guitarist’s guitarist, and his tonal palette has grown immensely.

“He’s the best guitar player on the goddamn planet,” Brian Wilson said, after finishing a tour with Jeff Beck.“The man is an orchestra.”

Play on Jeff Beck, play on. Fifty years later we’re still listening for yet another change.

Kenneth Parsons was born in Ashland, Kentucky. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of Kentucky, a Master’s in Journalism from Marshall University, and a MATESL degree from the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign’s Division of English as an International Language program. Since 1990 he has taught English, ESL, and EFL in the U.S., China, Japan, and South Korea. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines including Wind, Silk Road, White Pelican, and Shi Kan (China’s official monthly poetry magazine). He is the author of a chapbook titled Window, Shadow, Mirror (Pudding House Press, 2007). His novel Our Mad Brother Villon was released by Little Feather Books (New York City) in 2015. A short story, Sharks, appeared in the anthology The Boom Project: Voices of a Generation, featuring select writers of the Ohio River Valley from Pittsburg to Cairo, Illinois, by Butler Books, Louisville, KY, in 2019. He lives in Goyang City, South Korea, with his wife Song Seon Sook and retired in 2019 as a professor of EFL in Seoul.