A Series Of Uninteresting Events

This week I read Blow By Blow: The Jeff Beck Story, by Brad Tolinski and Chris Gill.

I am not a huge Beck fan. (I do like Jeff Beck significantly more than Beck, for whatever that’s worth.) Truth is a pretty good heavy blues-rock record with Rod Stewart on vocals — just make sure you listen to the mono mix (you can find it on YouTube); Blow By Blow and Wired have their moments; and I like the short-lived power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice more than I probably should. But to get much out of this book, you pretty much have to be an obsessive fanboy, with the emphasis on “boy.”

The problems with the book are many, beginning with its subject. Jeff Beck was a British rock guitarist, born in 1944 and part of the immediate post-Beatles wave of players that also included Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. (All three were members of the Yardbirds: Clapton first, then Beck, then Page, with the latter two overlapping.) He attempted a solo career in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, with intermittent success. But he was mercurial and self-critical to the point of professional self-sabotage. The number of cancelled tours, abandoned albums, and fractured personal and professional relationships in this book is astonishing. By the end I had lost count of how many sentences began with “Unfortunately.”

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Because Beck’s career consisted of a decade and a half of relatively constant activity, followed by four decades of more intermittent activity, the book is necessarily front-loaded. Its first 215 pages take the reader from a 13-year-old Beck discovering rock ’n’ roll via the movie The Girl Can’t Help It to the recording of Blow By Blow, his fifth solo album and commercial breakthrough. The 13 albums that followed get approximately 130 pages. I was reminded of Paul Steinbeck’s Message To Our Folks, a collective biography of the Art Ensemble Of Chicago that devoted its entire first half to the members’ childhoods and education, the group’s formation and their two-year sojourn to Paris, then hopped and skipped through everything from 1971 to the present day.

The prose is unimaginative, written in the bland style of music magazine profiles, and at times, the obstinate focus on music (and particularly gear) rather than Jeff Beck the apparently quite flawed human being can be darkly hilarious. The following two-sentence paragraph is reproduced verbatim:

Before heading to the United States for the ARMS tour, he ended his fifteen-year relationship with Celia Hammond and took up with Julia Smith, who was just eighteen years old and twenty-one years his junior. He also set aside his beloved Stratocaster in favor of a de rigueur hot-rodded Jackson Soloist super Strat with a flashy pink finish, high-output Seymour Duncan pickups, and double-locking Kahler vibrato.

Ultimately, Beck’s unpleasant personality provides the book’s narrative through-line. It’s amazing how many times the authors tell a story that goes like this: Beck has an idea. He gathers the musicians he wants, embarks on the project/makes the record, then goes on tour to support it. Halfway through, he cancels the tour and immediately shit-talks the band and the album to the press. Rinse and repeat. And those are just the cases where the record actually gets completed. There are just as many stories of abortive sessions where a few tracks were recorded before Beck disappears in a fit of pique.

If you’re enough of a Jeff Beck fan to need what amounts to a narrativized sessionography (plus an appendix breaking down many of his best-known guitars), this book may be for you. It was not for me.

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