The Moment When Jeff Beck’s Dreams Appeared to Be Over: Book Excerpt

Steve Rosen's latest book is called 'The Original Punk – Jeff Beck Stories: From Yardbird to the Guitar Shop.' Author of 'Tonechaser - Understanding Edward: My 26-Year Journey With Edward Van Halen,' Rosen originally wrote a book on Jeff Beck back in 1978. 'The Beck Book' was the first biography ever published but was only printed in Japan. Rosen has now revisited that book and completely revised and updated it, with many new and rare interviews.

Included in 'The Original Punk – Jeff Beck Stories: From Yardbird to the Guitar Shop' are archival conversations with key figures in Beck's life including Jimmy Page, Stevie Wonder, Ritchie Blackmore, Donovan, Pete Townshend, Frank Zappa and many more. More than a few of the artists interviewed here have sadly passed away, which makes this collection of conversations all the more rare and valuable. For more details and purchasing information, visit Rosen's site.

The title, 'From Yardbird to the Guitar Shop,' indicates what's inside. Rosen initially interviewed Beck in 1973 and would speak with him three more times through their last conversation in the late '80s. So, the new book focuses on Beck's very early pre-Yardbirds days and ends around the release of 1989's 'Guitar Shop.' Here's a sneak peek at Chapter 2 from 'The Original Punk – Jeff Beck Stories: From Yardbird to the Guitar Shop':

Chapter 2: Picking Up Broken Pieces

Though [Jeff Beck's father] Arnold [Beck] had instilled a love of music in his son, he did not measure Jeff’s interminable plucking and plonking on his homemade guitar as anything more than squawks and squeals solely meant to irritate him. Seemingly, he supported his son’s endeavors, encouraging him to indulge in music and arts while at school, but that may have simply been his way of tolerating the noise.

Even his mother, who had tried to push him into church choirs and taking up piano, cello and violin, could recognize the burgeoning talent streaming from her son’s fingertips. But she too had grown weary and weathered by having to endure barely tolerable sounds emanating from the instrument.

In a landslide of pent-up rage, Papa Beck destroyed Jeff’s most important thing in the world. Demoralized and demeaned, the young bright-eyed boy was not defeated but only grew more determined than ever. “My old man threw it out in the garden because I had a row with him. He busted it and that was the thing I wanted to do so much.”

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Looking at the splintered scraps of the guitar lying there on the ground was a slap in the face. Humiliated and heartbroken, all he could think about was putting the pieces of his dream back together.

“I’d go down to the local music shop and wait ’til the place was pretty packed out and I whipped one of these pickups right out of the shop. It sold for about two pounds, this pickup, which was about six dollars. Oh, boy, I couldn’t have cared if I’d got thrown in jail for six months. I had my pickup and there was a little hole waiting for that pickup for about eight months and it fitted perfectly because I had already got the dimensions from a plan and it just slipped in there with two screws and boy, I was the king!

“I used to deliberately carry my guitar around without a case so everyone could see what it looked like. I used to ride a bike with it, stick it on my back and ride a bicycle. I could see then it just wasn’t a fly-by-night thing because the expressions on people’s face when they saw this weird guitar … that was something boring like a violin or a sax in a very stock-looking case. It was bright yellow with these wires and knobs on it. People just freaked out.”

And there Jeff began the journey, the great exploration, in tracking down sounds, cataloging them, making sense of them, giving them shape and substance inside his own head. The irresistible urge to cradle an instrument in his own hands, to caress the strings and fondle the smooth and refulgent veneer, overwhelmed him. Like a hunter stalking prey, Beck’s senses were heightened as he set out to discover the great woody mammoth.

The pursuit wasn’t always in the service of artistry. The response, from friends and strangers alike, buoyed the young man’s self-image. His devotion to the instrument, that attraction to and awe of the sounds the strings created, and the important sense of stature and self-confidence instilled in him by the very idea of the guitar, pushed him on the road to achieving greater musical realization.

Guitar as anodyne, a tool that both calmed and comforted him, and at the same time, revved him up. If at home, his hunger to hear words of encouragement was never satisfied, all he needed to fill the yearning was strumming a few chords. Prodded by his own common sense, and maybe gentle parental guidance, he sought out someone possessed of greater knowledge, a more complete musical vision: a teacher. A grand mentor who, with the benefit of years of playing and accumulated wisdom, might inculcate within him all the secrets the fretboard had to offer. Alas, the quest yielded nothing but a wasted afternoon.

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“I went for one lesson on a Spanish guitar but not the one my friend loaned me. Because there were rumors going around my school that you couldn’t possibly play any guitar, any electric guitar, unless you had proper classical training. I was a bit thick then and I said, ‘Right, okay, where do we start?’ And I went straight up to the guy who gave lessons and he knew less than I did.

“I said, ‘Now listen here, if I’m gonna get on, I just better leave and go home,’ because he didn’t even have the barre chords right. I’d read up before my first lesson, and I learned a few shapes and stuff, and I was expecting this man to teach me everything in a couple of minutes. And he said, ‘Right, now practice this, no playing, just practice putting your finger across the neck.’ And I went like that [as I am conducting this interview, Jeff is holding my Fender Stratocaster and places a finger on the neck] and I said, ‘Right, where do we go now?’ He said, ‘Well, that’s it. I want you to go home and practice that for a week.’ I said, ‘Well, I at least want to hit the strings once’ – and he said, ‘No way.’”