Artist: Beck, Jeff
Label: EMI Records
Released: 1968
Runtime: 40:57
Rating: 4.2/5
After wrapping up his stint with the Yardbirds, where in a year and a half after Clapton’s departure he’d earned worldwide fame as a guitar hero, Jeff Beck decided to take a bold step in 1968 and form his own band. Mind you, Beck was anything but an unknown at the time, since he already had a few smaller solo hits behind him, like Tallyman and Hi, ho silver lining, a song he later sarcastically described as a pink toilet seat that would probably hang around his neck for the rest of his life. On top of that, he got plenty of exposure from Michelangelo Antonioni’s cult film Blow up, which hit cinemas at the end of 1966 and in which Beck (still a Yardbirds member while it was being shot) ruthlessly mangled his guitar on stage in Pete Townshend style. The totally unknown ones, on the other hand, were vocalist Rod Stewart and bassist Ron Wood, with whom Jeff recorded his first two records, which matter today mainly because they kick off the first chapter of hard rock and, with it, all music with slightly tougher roots. Not long ago Beck summed up the albums with this comment: “I’m proud that we sounded that heavy, because that was my main aim – to blow every fucker off the stage.”
The proto-hard-rock masterpiece Truth, which most of the weightier sounds of the seventies were built around, came out the same year as Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland and Cream’s Wheels of fire, and only a few months before Zeppelin’s debut. But despite the superb lineup and sonic superiority, the Jeff beck group lagged behind those bands because of a lack of original material. The album has only three originals; Let me love you, Blues deluxe and Rock my plimsoul, which Rod and Jeff put their names to (and even that only conditionally). But let’s take it from the top. The album opens with the well-known Shapes of things, which the Yardbirds made their name with two years before the record came out, and which Rod liked so much that the band made a rather unusual move and started its first album with a cover. Jeff kept most of the original chords, but tweaked the beat and tempo a bit and turned the whole thing into a kind of heavy funk, spiced up with enviable solo bits and bizarre psychedelic sounds. Although Let me love you is supposedly an original, it strongly reminds you of a Buddy Guy classic with a similar title. Beck himself admitted they really did take Guy’s song as a model, slowed it down a little, added a Motown-style tambourine courtesy of Micky Waller, and deftly topped it all off with Rod’s lyrics. Among the covers, it’s worth mentioning Dobson’s Morning dew and Dixon’s I ain’t superstitious (probably the most-covered song in rock history), plus You shook me, which is also known for causing a rift between Beck and Jimmy Page, Jeff’s former comrade-in-arms from the Yardbirds. Just half a year after Truth came out, Page put this very Dixon classic on Zeppelin’s debut and made Jeff so angry that he didn’t speak to him for years. The two guitarists also fell out over the authorship of the famous Beck’s bolero, a composition inspired by Ravel, which was first printed on the B-side of Beck’s Hi ho silver lining single, before Truth. And of course the experimental post-Yardbirds “session” that gave birth to the famous instrumental isn’t interesting only because of the authorship dispute, but also for its legendary lineup, in which, besides Page and John Paul Jones, The who’s drummer Keith Moon was the one who really shone. In the liner notes of the remastered edition of his first album, Beck fondly recalls Moon’s animal screams (which you can’t miss if you listen closely to Bolero) and the broken cymbals and microphones, adding that Keith showed up at the studio that day hidden under a hat and huge sunglasses. The who had threatened to fire him if they ever caught him playing for another band.
Could the Beck – Stewart duo have become as famous as that Page – Plant pair with a bit more luck and effort? Truth certainly had huge potential, and the album’s success promised the band a bright future. What would have happened if Beck hadn’t broken up the band the day before their Woodstock slot, and if Stewart hadn’t left for the Faces shortly after? Those questions are of course moot today, but it’s certain that Zeppelin would have had serious competition if the first incarnation of the Jeff Beck band had stayed together for at least another year, and if, after the excellent Beck-ola, the follow-up to Truth, they had written some music of their own. But Beck’s weakness was precisely that, unlike Page, he had no solid band and management behind him, and with the solo albums he began putting out in the second half of the seventies, despite plenty of acclaim and awards, he couldn’t compete with the heavy-rhythm giants of the day. Instrumental rock was still in its infancy, and by the time it finally took off in the eighties with the guitar revival, Beck was already too old to learn new tricks, which is why the mainstream of the music industry largely passed him by.
But even though Beck, Stewart and Wood ended their shared musical journey after barely two years together, on that fateful day before the biggest concert event of the sixties, time has shown that with their debut they left behind one of the cornerstones of modern rock and one of the more important milestones in the history of recent music. And that’s the truth about Truth.
Lineup
Jeff Beck – guitar
Rod Stewart – vocals
Ron Wood – bass
Mick Waller – drums
Production
Mickie Most
Track list
1. Shapes of things
2. Let me love you
3. Morning dew
4. You shook me
5. Ol’ man river
6. Greensleeves
7. Rock my plimsoul
8. Beck’s bolero
9. Blues deluxe
10. I ain’t superstitious
