From Touring Australia To His Techno Phase, Jeff Beck Moved To His Own Tune
In his book Shots , Don Walker tells the wonderful story of Jeff Beck playing pinball at the Bondi Lifesaver in the summer of 1977.
A little after midnight, after setting fire to a stage on the other side of town, the English guitar god sneaks into a public bar and begins to drive his car under the monstrous fringe of his trendy 60s haircut.
"He hunts alone, unaccompanied, he doesn't know anyone, and over time he went off alone," notes songwriter Cold Chisel from a respectful distance. These words and images feel like a poetic epitaph as Lone Wolf, the electric guitar maker, embarks on its stunning final tour this week at the age of 78 after the sudden onset of bacterial meningitis.
“I just got kissed on the cheek by a celebrity and that’s it,” Beck told me on his next visit to Australia three decades later. “In fact, I have no other way. Anonymity is good."
Beck has not been anonymous in relation to the history of rock. This meant he avoided the pop joke that burned Yardbird alumni Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page; And guys like Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, with whom he got a head start on those great early Jeff Beck band albums (some of which Led Zeppelin discovered).
The result is a rare, stunning, completely self-contained quality that I expected to see in photographs of that period. Turning on his unlit Gibson in a Los Angeles hotel room as the TV switched to Baron Wollman's classic 1968 version, Beck seemed to glow with pure inspiration, oblivious to the camera or anyone else's gaze. More like a space receiver than a star.
For '70s kids like me, part of his mythology was that he agreed to join up-and-coming fan David Bowie at the final Ziggy Stardust show in 1973, and then insisted that he not be taken out of the movie. “When I saw the pictures, I was so ashamed because I had these white flats and I never wanted to show them to anyone,” she told me. - He says.
Then there was the time in 1989 when Mick Jagger hired him for his solo world tour. "It won't be part of my Jumping Jack Flash ," Jagger warned. “We rehearsed for three whole weeks, then a ladder appeared on the floor, and Jack Flash jumped on it. A puff of smoke appeared, and it was me, gone.
