On the death of Jeff Beck: six strings of uncertainty

Lots of forest, a lake, a stream where two billy goats are grazing, and right next to it a couple of old car seats for the landlord – since the mid-1970s, the stubborn guitar berserker had considered a four-hundred-year-old Tudor house as a stronghold.

Located on the Kent border, in the middle of the so-called Rockbroker Belt with the great country estates of British rock celebrities, Jeff Beck had acquired an eighty-acre estate from the royalties from his jazz-rock promise "Blow By Blow" (1975): the guitar god as country gentleman!

When I was able to visit him in his hermitage for a long interview in the mid-1990s, he proudly showed me his huge garage, in which he liked to pimp old Ford T models and often injured his hands in the process - a rather suboptimal hobby for a guitarist.

Here in seclusion, some eighty miles from the rock capital of London, "Becko", as he was known to his fans, hatched all the ideas that would make him the most important rock guitarist of his time.

Friend and former rival Eric Clapton never tires of pointing out that Jeff Beck deserves the real credit.

An ax murderer with pyrotechnic finesse

How does someone who was part of rock guitar's holy trinity in the '60s - Beck replaced Clapton in the Yardbirds and then passed the torch to Jimmy Page - but went on to release an album at most every six years, come to such a conclusion persistent reputation?

It was probably due to the uncompromising nature and consistency with which the so-called

used his instrumental skills.

No other guitarist has been able to cross borders so riskily.

Whenever his pyrotechnic finesse threatened to be forgotten, Beck was there with an outrageous heckling.

Whether as a feedback artist with the Yardbirds (1965/66), as a blues arsonist in the groundbreaking Jeff Beck Group, which is prototypical for hard rock, with Rod Stewart's grater organ (1967 to 1969), as a jazz rock virtuoso with Jan Hammer, as Propagandist of a power trio or as a fusion and world music visionary - Beck was always a step, or rather a run on the fretboard, ahead of his colleagues.

As a sworn perfectionist, he needed the long periods of time to fill the quiver before he drew the bow again.

The secret of his legendary status lay in the risk-taking nature of his game.

It suddenly jumps out at the listener like an ambush squad, confusing it with its virtuoso distortions and noise melodies.

One moment Beck was using his white Fender Signature Stratocaster like a six-string blowtorch, the next moment he was turning it into a cream machine.

Sweet and viscous, the melody lines of his ballads then soothed the hungry listener.

Despite the brutality of his power chords, Jeff Beck was a romantic.