5.Guitarist’s Guitarist, Jeff Beck
After leaving the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck recruited vocalist Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood (who would later join the Stones) and started the Jeff Beck Group. The band released albums in 1968 and 1969, which took Beck’s psychedelic sound in a harder and heavier direction. His 1968 album Truth, specifically, has been called a seminal work in heavy metal. It kicks off with a harder version of the Yardbirds tune “Shape of Things”.
Truth
The Jeff Beck Group’s debut album features bluesy, hard rock takes on blues and folk songs, and introduced audiences to Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood.
After two albums, tensions between Beck and Stewart led to the Jeff Beck Group disbanding. In the mid 70s, Beck would release solo instrumental albums and experiment with jazz fusion. 1975’s Blow by Blow is one of his most commercially successful albums.
Blow by Blow
This instrumental album reached the #4 position on the Billboard charts. Beck was inspired to explore jazz fusion by jazz guitarist John McLaughlin and his band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Highlights include the Beatles cover “She’s a Woman", and the Stevie Wonder-penned “Cause We've Ended As Lovers".
While Blow by Blow sold well, Jeff Beck has never established the kind of commercial success enjoyed by his peers, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. Instead, he has been content to forge his own path as a guitarist’s guitarist. Beck is known as a perfectionist, which is perhaps why none of his bands—including the Yardbirds—stayed together for more than a few years.
While Clapton could sing and Page had Led Zeppelin, Beck, in his capacity as a solo performer, had to make his guitar sing, and had to expand the possibilities of his instrument. To date, he was received the Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance six times, and the Best Pop Instrumental Performance award once.
6.Jimmy Page and the World’s Biggest Hard Rock Band, Led Zeppelin
After Jeff Beck left the Yardbirds, Page became the sole lead guitarist, and the band continued on for another couple of years before breaking up. However, the group had concert commitments in Scandinavia that it needed to fulfill; Page would get together a new group that he called the New Yardbirds to fulfill the commitments, and afterwards that band would become Led Zeppelin.
Their first album, Led Zeppelin I, grew out of their setlist for those concert dates in Scandinavia. The band’s sound blended psychedelic blues with elements of traditional folk music, and the album became one of the seminal works of hard rock.
Led Zeppelin I
Led Zeppelin’s debut album is a towering pillar of hard rock. However, at the time of release, Rolling Stone magazine compared it unfavorably to the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth, and called Jimmy Page’s talents as a producer “limited”. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 29th on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
From the beginning, Led Zeppelin had its sights on the U.S. It went on its first tour of the U.K. in October 1968, and then on its first North American tour at the end of the year. As its popularity grew, it graduated from small live music venues to large auditoriums. By the time it released Led Zeppelin IV in 1971, it had become the biggest rock band in the world. While “Stairway to Heaven" was never released as a single, it became the definitive staple of 70s rock radio in America, and I doubt there’s ever been a day since when the song hasn’t been on the radio waves.
Led Zeppelin IV
The band’s fourth album sold over 23 million copies, and according to the Recording Industry Association of America it is the sixth best-selling album ever in America. It was ranked 69th by Rolling Stone magazine in their list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All
Time”.
Also on the album is the band’s acoustic tribute to hippie culture, “Going to California”. The lyrics evoke the Summer of Love anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair”.
Spent my days with a woman unkind
Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine
Made up my mind to make a new start
Going to California with an aching in my heart
Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair
Jimmy Page is also known for his interest in exotic, Eastern sounds, and nowhere is that more clear than on the song “Kashmir" on the band’s 1975 album Physical Graffiti. “Kashmir" is generally considered the band’s most overtly progressive epic.
Physical Graffiti
Led Zeppelin’s sixth album spans hard rock, blues, folk, and progressive rock. It was ranked 73rd on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
Page got his start as a session musician, which allowed him to cultivate an interest in a wide range of music genres, as well as develop the skills in the recording studio that would make him a great record producer. If Clapton was the bluesman, and Beck was the most experimental, then Page was the most versatile of the three.
It goes without saying that Page was responsible for many of the defining riffs of the 70s. But Led Zeppelin’s global success and its contributions to defining the genre of hard rock were just as much a result of Page’s talent as a producer as they were a product of his skills as a guitarist.
While Jeff Beck’s perfectionism made him unsuited to a long-term band dynamic, Page’s obsession with results made him a formidable producer who turned Led Zeppelin into the biggest band of the 70s, on par with the Beatles in the 60s.
7.Eric Clapton and the Dark Side of Drugs
The hippie movement and psychedelic rock would reach its peak in 1969 at Woodstock, and begin its decline with the Altamont Speedway Free Festival in December the same year.
While the influence of hippies and psychedelic rock would fade, the influence of drugs would only become harder and heavier. While hippies in the 60s enjoyed marijuana and LSD, the drugs of the 70s and 80s were heroin and cocaine. And while hippies had taken their drugs out in the open, drugs were now something you had to do in the shadows, where no one could see you.
The musician that comes to mind when I think of these two hard drugs is none other than Eric Clapton. Clapton would spend the bulk of the 70s in the darkness. First, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs, the album released by his new group, Derek and the Dominos, was a disappointment in terms of sales (today it is considered one of Clapton’s best works). And the title track failed to chart when it was released as a single. (The title track was a song Clapton had written about his unrequited love for George Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd. Boyd would divorce Harrison in ’77, and marry Clapton in ’79. In between, Clapton would write another song about Boyd—1977’s “Wonderful Tonight”.) Clapton would subsequently fall into a deep heroin addiction.
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
While this album did not receive much critical love when it was originally released, it is now generally considered one of Clapton’s best works. It was ranked 117th in Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
Harrison and The Who guitarist Pete Townshend would intervene, and Clapton would finally break his heroin addiction in 1974. After four years without a release, he made his comeback with 461 Ocean Boulevard.
461 Ocean Boulevard
This album has a laid-back feel, perhaps owing to the fact that Clapton had just kicked his heroin habit. Highlights include the cover of the Bob Marley song “I Shot the Sheriff”. Rolling Stone magazine ranked this album 411th on its list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time”.
In 1977, Clapton recorded “Cocaine", a song written by J. J. Cale. (At the time, Clapton was using cocaine regularly.) The question with this song is, is it pro-drug, or anti-drug? Here is an excerpt of the lyrics:
If you want to hang out,
You’ve got to take her out, cocaine
If you want to get down,
Get down on the ground, cocaine
She don’t lie,
She don’t lie,
She don’t lie, cocaine
Clapton likens cocaine addiction to a girl you’re really into, and the lyrics can be taken a number of ways. It’s important to note here that at the time, cocaine was a favorite drug of Wall Street types and other well-to-do yuppies; for a man of working-class origins like Clapton, the fact that he had made it as a musician and could afford to take “her" out feels like some twisted version of the American Dream.
“Take her out" could mean to take her out on a date, but it could also mean to kill someone or something—specifically, his drug addiction. Then there’s “get down", which could mean to party or to boogie, or to have sex, but could also mean to feel down and depressed. “She don’t lie" could mean she shows you the truth, but it could also mean she brings out the weakest in you.
8.What the Guitar Rock Gods Desired
As I’ve mentioned before in this series of columns, the psychedelic rock that came out of California—much like the hippie movement itself—was largely the music of whites—the ruling class of America. Musicians in California incorporated elements of genres like folk music, country music, Latin music, and jazz into rock, and were driven by the British Invasion to pursue greater ambitions and let their creativity blossom.
But what about the U.K.? In the U.K., the upper class enjoyed the long tradition of European classical music; meanwhile, the working classes only had their indigenous folk music. In the 50's, there was such thing as a British rock sound, and the music scene at that time was centered on imitations of American rockabilly singers like Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly.
In the 1960s, a growing number of working-class youths began to aspire to the rebellious image of American rock and roll. Having grown up in a conservative society with a rigid class structure that could not be navigated by individual effort alone, they—like the individualist Baby Boomer generation in the U.S.—wanted to shake off the values and beliefs of their parents’ generation.
It’s also worth considering that Britain is an island country on the outer edge of Europe. Music records were the way that working class lads traveled beyond borders and across the pond to the English-speaking U.S. Many of those records were blues records, brought into the U.K. by GIs and merchant seamen. (Many U.S. troops stationed in the U.K. at the time were black.) Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page were three such working class lads.
The arrival of the firecracker that was Jimi Hendrix would change their lives forever. No doubt it was a complicated situation for them: fascinated by the arrival of this exotic creature on the one hand, but at the same time upstaged by the sheer power of this musician from America, where the blues, R&B, and rock had all been born. If they were going to stay relevant, they needed a breakthrough in the American market—and so they kept fine-tuning their chops. The psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix would be the catalyst that would lead to the development of British hard rock.
Hendrix, as a black hippie, sought to show that the power of music could help people overcome racial barriers and solve other various problems in the world. That was the message behind the band name “Jimi Hendrix Experience"—he wanted his audience to experience the dreams of love and peace he had seen in the purple haze. Unfortunately, Hendrix had a habit of mixing alcohol and drugs, and in September 1970, he died of asphyxiation caused by choking on his own vomit after he had taken a combination of wine and barbiturates.
As for the young working-class musicians coming up in Britain, they were painfully aware of the insurmountable barrier of class that towered before them. With a limited market at home, they knew they had to make inroads in America to be truly successful. Rock music was their way of rebelling against rigid class structure, and across the pond they were able to enjoy the fruits of being part of the white ruling class of America.
9.Epilogue
I’d like to end with another story about Eric Clapton.
Clapton kicked his heroin habit in 1974, but around the same time he began drinking heavily. He would be drunk in the studio, drunk on stage, and one time it was so bad that he played a concert while lying down on the stage.
In 1976, during a concert in Birmingham, a drunk Clapton took to the mic to give the audience a racially-charged rant—part of that speech is was as follows:
Do we have any foreigners in the audience tonight?
If so, please put up your hands. ...
So, where are you? Well wherever you are, I think you should all just leave.
Not just leave the hall—leave our country. ...
I think we should vote for Enoch Powell. Enoch’s our man.
I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back.
Stop Britain from becoming a black colony.
Get the foreigners out.
Enoch Powell was an ultra-conservative right-wing British politician who wanted to pass a bill that would stop immigrants from coming into the U.K. and send them back to their home countries. This all reflects a certain duality harbored by the British: while they are drawn to the exotic on the one hand, they are also repulsed by the alien. By aliens, I’m referring to immigrants—specifically those belonging to churches other than the Church of England (such as the Orthodox Church or Islam).
Taking this into account, Clapton’s line in “Cocaine", “She don’t lie", takes on new meaning. While Clapton is a true fan of black music and a blues purist, too much liquor had brought out the racial fears and grievances he was harboring deep down inside.
The whole Brexit fiasco and the Megxit kerfuffle are both a result of similar national sentiment. The people who voted for the U.K. to leave the E.U. were mostly working-class Britons who were having a hard time dealing with the influx of aliens. It’s much the same in the U.S., where ruling-class whites are afraid of having their jobs taken by Latinos and Asians and other immigrants.
As for Meghan Markle, who has African-American heritage, it initially seemed like the general public of the U.K. were rejoicing at the arrival of an exotic addition to the Royal Family. Many believed that the British crown was finally changing with the times. But in the end, Meghan was attempting to scale the walls of social class inherent to British society—and she would learn the hard way that things didn’t work that way on that side of the pond.
As the high from the most recent royal wedding quickly dissipates, it seems the haze of Brexit is just starting to settle in.
