Jeff Beck and Special Guest Johnny Depp – The Elusive Collision of Guitar Doctrine and Hollywood Glamour in Pordenone (2022)
Venue: Pordenone / Parco San Valentino / Italy
Concert date: Wednesday, 20 July 2022
Unbelievable, but true. Jeff Beck, the ace of aces — the man many generously crown as the rock guitarist’s rock guitarist — sharing a stage with special guest and Hollywood film star Johnny Depp. Same stage, same night, at the same time. Their joint album “18” is what set this particular conceptual crime in motion. But the rock and roll entertainment world is hungry and thirsty for new, out-of-the-ordinary, and exciting moves and maneuvers.
The Pordenone concert was interesting from many angles, and you could philosophize about that night for days on end. Let’s just focus on the crowd. Old, old on one side; young, young on the other. The first fifteen rows were packed solid with Johnny Depp devotees, most of whom had probably never heard of Jeff Beck in their lives. Far, far back in the packed venue, a crowd that had earned its grey hair over the decades had come to feed their curiosity — first and foremost, above all else, for one and one person only: Jeff Beck. The contrast in the crowd foreshadowed the very contrast we’d witness that evening on the Pordenone stage. And that contrast turned out to be even more intense than expected. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The clock struck a quarter past nine in the evening. The concert was sold out. So 5,000 people at a venue that can comfortably hold up to 8,000 — but the restrictions of ‘new normal scenarios’ don’t allow for that anymore. That 8,000 figure. That was then. And not that long ago either. Even a few ‘masks’ in the crowd didn’t go unnoticed. Stifling. Claustrophobic. An unwelcome observation, but a fact that stings. And then the one and only steps out on stage. The incomparable Jeff Beck with his white Fender Stratocaster. Jeff is king. His touch, his grip. Magnificent. Unique. That feeling you get when Blackmore picks up his Stratocaster for five minutes during his Blackmore’s Night concerts. Of course, the experience of seeing Beck live is something else entirely, but equally unique. Just in a different way. With Blackmore, that lasts all of five minutes. Here, though, was this singular figure of jazz rock fusion, blues rock, hard rock, pop rock — an artist who has tested and woven together so many milestones, leading him to blend seemingly insurmountable genre boundaries into something uniquely his own. Jeff Beck does everything his own way. He’s self-taught, a natural. For anyone picking up a guitar for the first time, Jeff — beyond all the scholastic ‘baggage’ you still need to get through — can be an endless wellspring of inspired fascination, the kind that shows a young guitarist what else is possible on the instrument, things no music school can ever show you. Beck can be a guide into the deepest dreams of anyone entering the world of learning guitar. That’s the universe. The universe of the individual. The universe of every musician. And Jeff Beck has taken his self-grown pursuit of feeling, inner instincts, and sense all the way to the absolute maximum on an individual artistic level. He evolved naturally. Unpretentiously. Authentically. You could even say instinctively, or more beautifully put: sensually and passionately. That’s why Beck is elusive. One of a kind. For half an hour we basked in his brilliance. At that point he was still performing without Depp on stage. Backed by the extraordinary bassist Rhonda Smith and drummer Anika Nilles, who at moments offered him unconditional and seductive funk kinetics, he of course immediately took command with his own arrangement of the Mahavishnu Orchestra piece You Know You Know, followed by a reworking of Billy Cobham’s Stratus, and so on, right through to the exceptional blues number Brush With The Blues, which instantly confirmed why The Yardbirds were too small a stage for him. Indescribable. So many forms, so many emotions. So many feelings. But for Jeff at 79, however you spin it — routine. Pure hypnosis, in short. The sound filling the air was the sound called Jeff Beck. Tremolo, control. Tricks upon tricks. Finesse upon finesse. Even Gilmour could learn a thing or two. The same note, played multiple times, but always with a completely different accent, a different emotion, a different idea, a different melody. Natural, completely natural. The magic and energy of the universe. When those two find a free path through the right transformer, the goal is achieved. That’s Jeff Beck. Goosebumps! Shivers down your spine. One of a kind. Jeff Beck.
Of course, all good things must come to an end. All good things? Depends on your perspective. At least half the crowd were eagerly waiting for that first half hour to be over as quickly as possible. But those of us who know how to find something more in music knew that Johnny Depp’s arrival on stage was more or less show theater. Beck got his money’s worth — he essentially sold out yet another of his current shows — while the debatable album “18”, the fruit of their joint collaboration, is an album that received considerably more public discussion and coverage than any Beck album since, say, “Wired” (1976). It’s no revelation, and you don’t need to be Einstein to figure out that this man could swallow Page and Clapton whole in one bite — and yet the irony remains that he’s a man for whom a commercial breakthrough on the level of either of those two was simply never in the cards.
And here enters our Johnny. Depp is Depp. His reputation as a Hollywood star is untouchable. On top of that, he’d recently handed Amber the final slap. In court. Nobody threw eggs or anything else at the stage, which means there were no supporters of his former partner Amber Heard in the crowd. The crowd erupts. Screaming teenagers. No different from the days of The Beatles. Johnny brought to the stage an extraordinary, and in every sense fascinating, contrast. Again, there are multiple angles to look at this from. But let’s stay positive. It’s no surprise that the spoiled connoisseurs who’d come to Pordenone that evening primarily for Beck were kept afloat throughout the rest of the concert by Beck himself, who filled the available space within the repertoire with the organically grown art culture of his six-string guitar bible. Jazz structures and all. To that part of the crowd, Johnny was superfluous and forgettable. But that’s the older, remarkably good-natured crowd, who took the whole thing as entertainment and the theater of grand spectacle. Reserved, but at peace with it. Johnny turned out to be a not particularly convincing singer. Not only was he off-key more than once, but his vocal power also wavered considerably. With a vocal character like that, the average musician would be miles away from success. But luckily we’re talking about a guy named Johnny Depp. And equally lucky, he received occasional vocal support from Beck’s backing band keyboardist Robert Adam Stevenson, who still couldn’t mask everything. He also swapped out quite a few guitars during the show (Beck only two, and those only for a different tuning — for Hendrix’s Little Wing he played in the style of Albert King, on an ‘upside-down’ Stratocaster (reversed neck) with the strings mirrored, meaning he didn’t recount them). Anyway, back to Johnny. Glamour. Glitz. Eyeliner, a heap of jangling jewelry up and down his arms, a mass of tattoos. And multiple guitar changes throughout the show. On the other side, ‘humble’ Jeff Beck, who did everything and more on stage with six ‘stretched’ strings. With one, or rather two, guitars. In his trademark look of beat-up military trousers, a waistcoat, a debatable hairstyle (natural at nearly 79 or not?) and sunglasses.
The swift ending came as a surprise, though. The concert clocked in at just an hour and fifteen minutes. Encore included. Depp and Beck made a very quick exit. No special ceremony, despite the shouting and screaming from the fired-up crowd continuing long after the concert, refusing to die down. The legend and Johnny Depp were simply nowhere to be seen anymore. The crowd, for consolation, surged toward the barriers separating the masses from the tour bus. Hope they had better luck there. We were by then already well on our way back to our car.
Everyone got what they came for. The irony is that everyone would agree, hypothetically speaking, that part of the crowd could have happily done without Johnny, and another part without Beck. But that’s how it goes. From generation to generation. There’s something to it, though. Both (fascinatingly) divided halves of the crowd got what they came for. Those who came to absorb the unique magic that only Jeff Beck can conjure on stage, and those who follow Hollywood stars for their persona as much as their work. The latter weren’t bothered by Depp’s sloppiness (he does play the twelve-string guitar beautifully, mind you) or his occasional ‘hiding behind effects.’ They weren’t even aware of how cleverly and cunningly Beck and the backing band were covering for him and filling in around him. Depp’s reputation as a Hollywood star covers everything. Hides everything. Dominates. Everyone knows it. Beck’s management included. But Beck’s legend remains a legend. And the partnership with Depp, like it or not, brings nothing but profit in every sense of the word. When all is added up and subtracted, there’s one conclusion. The deal holds, the show rolls on, and Jeff Beck — regardless of everything — remains extraordinarily vivid, potent, inspired, and mischievous. And that’s what we want, isn’t it? His age is nowhere near suggesting that Beck’s restless, exploratory spirit has any intention of slowing down or calling it a day.
Authors: Aleš Podbrežnik & Edita Klemen
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist:
1. Star Cycle
2. You Know You Know (orig. Mahavishnu Orchestra)
3. Stratus (orig. Billy Cobham)
4. Midnight Walker (orig. Davy Spillane)
5. Big Block
6. Caroline, No (orig. Brian Wilson)
7. Brush With the Blues
8. Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers (orig. Syreeta)
9. You Never Know
10. Rumble (orig. Link Wray & His Raymen)
—Johnny Depp joins the stage—
11. This Is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr
12. Let It Be Me (orig. Gilbert Bécaud)
13. Isolation (orig. John Lennon)
14. Time (orig. Dennis Wilson)
15. Venus in Furs (orig. The Velvet Underground)
16. Little Wing (orig. The Jimi Hendrix Experience)
17. A Day in the Life (orig. The Beatles)
—encore—
18. Corpus Christi Carol (orig. Benjamin Britten)
19. The Death and Resurrection Show (orig. Killing Joke)
