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Q&A with Jeff Beck - Music Connection Magazine  Some of the Q&A from this interview in their current issue... Music Connection: There's an interesting film clip shown at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of a younger you commenting that he doesn't know anything about music yet. Where are you on that path now? Jeff Beck: I don't know anything yet. (laughs) Ignorance is bliss as far as musical terminology and musical theory go. If I don't hear what I want, that's the yardstick by which I measure goodness or suitability. I know when it's wrong, and I am not really bound by any shackles of music. I just go. I really love that. Of course I'd like to know what's going on, but I think by feel is good, sometimes by ear. MC: Given what you know now as a musician, is there anything you'd like to go back to? JB: No, not really. There was BBA (Beck, Bogert & Appice), who I thought ws fantastic. They were really rare, but unfortunately they didn't have the material to stay, to keep the boat afloat. They just needed great songs. The playing was all there, and a three-piece to die for; it was like Cream, a bit more bold, but less of a quality of songs, and that wasn't a good recipe to continue. Plus there was an Anglo-American management which was tearing the money apart; one manager wouldn't have this and the other manager didn't want that, and it just came to a financial dead end, really. MC: What led you to do music in the first place? JB: Kind of to escape a proper job, I think, like many of the others. I don't know if it was a calling. I was utterly completely smitten with rock & roll. When your older sister comes over and buys a record player and puts Elvis Presley on and you've never heard anything like it on the radio, it's an amazing thing. It's the best toy ever, and then it ceases to be a toy and it becomes an obsesssion, listening, and then more records arrive and more influences arrive and that's how my career was born, really. My playing style arrived through listening to records-in the '50s, Elvis, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, everything that was in the charts in America we'd try to get ahold of, and it was almost like an under-the-counter job in the local record shop, because they were selling Pat Boone's version of "Rip It Up" and didn't have the Little Richard version. That, of course is a challenge to a choolboy; he wants to hear the real deal, like rap records today. They don't want copy versions, they want the real thing. MC: You've played both Les Paul and Fender Stratocaster guitars during your career. How do they compare and contrast? JB: It's a totally different animal. One is for very subtle and, I would say, more musical things that you can distract and abuse. You can't do it with a Les Paul. It's too delicate. It's got a very delicate tone; most people don't ever realize that because they are plugged into monstrous amplifiers which completely, instantaneoudly covers up the unique sound quality it has. All those years of development go straight out the window when you overload the amp. It could be a $500 piece of junk if you don't know how to set it up. MC: How do you look back on the Yardbirds from this vantage point? JB: I think they treated me like shit. They paid me 20 pounds a week, and they depended on me just like they depended on Eric. That was something I only realized after they kicked me out, that, "Okay, they've got Jimmy, they don't need me." That wasn't a very nice thing for them to do, so I was always a bit bitter about that. They wouldn't wait for me to recover from a horrible illness, which I thought was really nasty, and they found that Jimmy could hold the fort and they went to Australia and that was the end of it. I found Rod Stewart, and we went on from there. It's just a ragged way of going about it. MC: What was the initial vision of Jeff Beck Group? JB: I loved Rod's voice, I gotta tell you. He still has that rare horseness that everybody lkoves, that black sound almost like laryngitis-but a good laryngitis, and I just wanted to go further with that. We had done all the groundwork in '68 and '69, and I had a car crash and that finished it. I was in hospital for a while and had a head injury; I couldn't really stand loud noises at all. So Rod wasn't going to wait around for me to get better. Neither was Ronnie, so they all went off and joined the Faces. But I would have loved to have seen that go three or four albums further on. Then maybe they wouldn't have had to go out with the Faces. Full article here: www.musicconnection.com Music for adventurous listeners tA  Tribal Records"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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A couple of other interesting answers.
MC: "A Day in the Life" is a challenging son to interpret-and a pretty ballsy choice. How did that happen? JB: It was George Martin, bless him. He asked me to perform on his last album before he quit being a producer (In My Life,1998), which had a bizarre mix of Jim Carrey and Goldie Hawn on it. I wasn't prepared, as usual; I got to the studio on a 110 degree day not knowing what I was going to do, and I thought, 'How about "A Day in the Life,"' thinking he would turn around and go, 'Oh, everybody wants to do that.' And he said, 'What an amazing idea!' We frameworked it with his arrangement, and it came out nicely. And then when we were ftouring, Jennifer Batten, when she was in my band, she said, 'Why don't we try that?' She had an interface with a string sound, so we played it, and I thought, 'Oh God, they're gonna roast me alive,' but they loved it, so we kept it in the set. Then we supercharged it by adding a riff here and a riff there, and it became part of my show. People remember it, and it's a profoundly powerful song, so I'm very grateful for that. And it works without the lyrics, which is amazing. MC: Do you think people are ready for the orchestra- and opera-covering Jeff Beck on Emotion & Commotion? JB: It's a hell of a risk. (laughs) It's as close as I can get to playing things people understand, I think. Maybe I'll lose some people. Maybe I'll gain some. But all I can tell you is I've seen grown men, after "Nessun Dorma" and "Corpus Christi Carol" with the orchestra, just lose it. You could tell in their eyes, they were gone. It seems to work from an emotional level. I'm quite pleased with the way it's going. MC: How is the musical vocabulary here idfferent from playing blues or rock or jazz? JB: The emotion of playing, say, "Elegy For Dunkirk" (from the film Atonement), is in some ways more intense and more gut-wrenching than playing the blues, 'cause those composers knew how to get you-and more explicitly in some ways than the blues. I don't want to sound like I'm putting the blues down, 'cause that is the building block of all music that we love. But when you get the sophisticated alignment of notes or arrangement of notes in a certain order in the way that they're performed in [orchestral music], there's another thing going on. It's still getting to you, and hopefully you're translating it to the listener. The simplicity and just pouring yourself into those phrasings is not dissimilar from blues at all. I'm sure people like Mahler and Holst and all the people who wrote such amazing music would agree with that. They want to get you to react. =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Music for adventurous listeners tA Tribal Records"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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...
Music Connection: There's an interesting film clip shown at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of a younger you commenting that he doesn't know anything about music yet. Where are you on that path now? Jeff Beck: I don't know anything yet. (laughs) Ignorance is bliss as far as musical terminology and musical theory go. If I don't hear what I want, that's the yardstick by which I measure goodness or suitability. I know when it's wrong, and I am not really bound by any shackles of music. I just go....  I love that about Jeff--he's got the talent and big ears to try anything, so there are no musical boundaries....
Thanks, tA! ... " I've got six things on my mind --you're no longer one of them." - Paddy McAloon, Prefab Sprout | |
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paligap said: ...
Music Connection: There's an interesting film clip shown at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame of a younger you commenting that he doesn't know anything about music yet. Where are you on that path now? Jeff Beck: I don't know anything yet. (laughs) Ignorance is bliss as far as musical terminology and musical theory go. If I don't hear what I want, that's the yardstick by which I measure goodness or suitability. I know when it's wrong, and I am not really bound by any shackles of music. I just go.... I love that about Jeff--he's got the talent and big ears to try anything, so there are no musical boundaries....
Thanks, tA! ... No problem. 
Yeah, JB's pretty much done things his own way, thank goodness. Music for adventurous listeners tA Tribal Records"Ya see, we're not interested in what you know...but what you are willing to learn. C'mon y'all." | |
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