Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck was born on 24th June 1944 in Wallington, England and picked up a guitar at a young age. He briefly attended Wimbledon’s Art College before leaving to devote all of his time to music. Beck worked as a session player, with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Tridents before he replaced Eric Clapton as the Yardbirds’ lead guitarist in 1965.
Beck left the band in 1967 and formed The Jeff Beck Group, which featured Rod Stewart on vocals and Ron Wood on bass. The band released two albums - Truth (1968) and Beck-Ola (1969) - that became musical touchstones for hard rockers in the years to come.
Stewart and Wood left to join the Faces and Beck disbanded the group until 1971 when he formed a new version of the band and recorded two albums - Rough and Ready (1971) and The Jeff Beck Group (1972).
Beck again dissolved the group and formed a power trio with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice, which released Beck, Bogert and Appice (1973). Veering away from hard rock, Beck created two landmark two jazz-fusion albums - Blow By Blow (1975) and Wired (1976). The all-instrumental albums shattered people’s preconceptions of what a rock guitarist was supposed to sound like. They remain two of the top selling guitar instrumental albums of all time.
The live album, Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group – Live followed in 1977. Beck returned in 1980 with There and Back, but he wouldn’t be heard from again until 1985’s Flash, which earned him the Best Rock Instrumental Grammy - his first - for the song Escape.
Beck re-emerged from semi-retirement in 1989 with Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop with Terry Bozzio and Tony Hymas. The album earned him his second Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental. After a co-headlining tour with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Beck gave retirement another try, but it didn’t last.
Beck returned to the studio in 1993 backed by the Big Town Playboys to record Crazy Legs, a tribute to seminal rockabilly artist Gene Vincent and his guitarist Cliff Gallup. Six years passed before the release of Who Else! (1999) but the album opened a relative floodgate of music by Beck standards. It only took two years before You Had It Coming, (2001), which earned Beck his third Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental for the song Dirty Mind.
To support his album Jeff, Beck returned to the road in the summer of 2003 on a coast-to-coast tour with blues legend B.B. King. An official bootleg Live at B.B. King Blues Club was recorded in New York in September 2003, and released via www.jeffbeckmusic.com.
In the summer of 2004, Beck undertook his first UK tour since 1990, fresh from the success of picking up his fourth Grammy award (for Plan B from the album Jeff). The following summer saw him head out on a sell-out tour of Japan. Beck’s albums Beck-Ola and Truth were remastered and re-issued in 2004/2005 by EMI, with Truth picking up an award for best re-issue at the 2005 Classic Rock awards.
Beck kicked off a string of sold-out West Coast USA dates in spring 2006 with a headline slot at Fender’s 60th Anniversary show in Tempe, Arizona. Summer shows in Europe and two nights at the Udo Music Festival in Japan followed. In September 2006, Beck returned to the USA for a further 17 shows. The Official Bootleg ‘USA 06 CD was subsequently released in February 2007 via jeffbeck.com.