A Guitar Hero Won’t Play the Game
By Blogger - Friday, February 19, 2010
But the most illuminating moment of the visit may have been supplied by Stephen Colbert in the monologue that opened the Grammy show. “Honey, do you know who Jeff Beck is?” he asked his daughter, sitting in the audience. When she shook her head no and looked baffled, Mr. Colbert explained: “Well, you know the game ‘Guitar Hero?’ He has the all-time high score — and he’s never played it.”
That, in a nutshell, defines Mr. Beck’s peculiar situation. At 65, with a distinguished career that dates back to the earliest days of the British Invasion, he remains the greatest guitarist that millions of people have never heard of. But the master instrumentalist in him has resisted making the concessions that would allow him to be heard more widely in an era in which his craft has been reduced to a video game with colored buttons.
The creators of “Guitar Hero” invited Mr. Beck to be an avatar in the game, but he declined. “Who wants to be in a kid’s game, like a toy shop?” he asked dismissively during an interview the day before the Grammys. “There’s just this mad avalanche of material that’s available, so it’s so hard for aspiring young players to find where they should go” and “not be enslaved to yet another tool or device.”
With a new manager and a forthcoming record on a new label, Mr. Beck is instead trying to resolve his dilemma the old-fashioned way. He spent a large part of 2009 on the road, and in April was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist, the second time that body had honored him. In late October he dazzled at the 25th Anniversary Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Concert at Madison Square Garden, performing, among other numbers, “Superstition,” a song that Stevie Wonder originally wrote for him, alongside Mr. Wonder, a friend of 40 years’ standing.
This year the pace is accelerating. On Thursday and Friday Mr. Beck and his pal Eric Clapton will be performing together at Madison Square Garden, the second stop on a four-city mini-tour. Mr. Beck and his new band will then head off to Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea before returning to the United States in April, when his first studio recording in seven years, “Emotion & Commotion,” is scheduled to be released by Atco.
“I was almost a recluse, and now you can’t get rid of me,” he said. “It just seems like I’ve picked the right moment to move. There’s a commitment I’ve made over the last year really,” prodded by his new manager and musicians he respects, “and now you’re seeing the results of that.” Originally Mr. Beck was one of what Jan Hammer, the jazz and fusion pianist and drummer who is a friend and longtime collaborator, calls “the holy trinity” of British guitar players to emerge from the 1960s. Like Mr. Clapton and Jimmy Page, the founder of Led Zeppelin, Mr. Beck first came to prominence as a member of the Yardbirds, playing blues-inflected rock ’n’ roll, and then went out on his own.
As a solo artist for the last 43 years Mr. Beck has built a reputation as the guitar player’s guitar player. Though notoriously self-effacing, even insecure, about his own talent, he has regularly topped reader polls in guitar magazines and has become a major influence on three generations of players, particularly through his use of harmonics and the whammy bar on the Fender Stratocaster he prefers to play.
“Jeff Beck is the best guitar player on the planet,” said Joe Perry, the lead guitarist of Aerosmith and a Beck admirer since his teenage years. “He is head, hands and feet above all the rest of us, with the kind of talent that appears only once every generation or two.”
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