Trivia / Jeff Beck

• Black Sheep Hit: For his debut single as a solo artist in 1967, rather than the Hard Rock or Psychedelic Rock Beck was known for with The Yardbirds, producer Mickie Most chose "Hi Ho Silver Lining", a bouncy social commentary number in the vein of The Kinks circa "A Well-Respected Man", with some slight Beatlesque touches like a backwards piano and a string quartet. And he decided to have Beck sing it himself, even though Beck was aware he didn't have a great singing voice and had already hired Rod Stewart to be his band's vocalist (Stewart can be heard among the backing vocals on the song's chorus). They did manage to squeeze a heavy guitar solo into the song's bridge. It got to #14 on the UK Chart (and recharted twice in later years, reaching the Top 20 again in 1972). With his career eventually becoming album-oriented, it ended up as his highest-charting single, which became an Old Shame for Beck, who compared it to "having a pink toilet seat hung around your neck for the rest of your fucking life", though the eventual popularity of the song as a chant among football fans (particularly Wolverhampton Wanderers fans) made Beck come around a bit to it, and he added it to his live set in later years.
• Breakup Breakout: After the original Jeff Beck Group split, Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood would join the Faces, and would subsequently break out from that group, with Stewart having a successful solo career and Wood joining The Rolling Stones.
• Referenced by...:
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has a few nods to Beck.
    • Battle Tendency features a very minor antagonist named Wired Beck, whose name is a portmanteau of Jeff Beck and his album, Wired.
    • In Diamond is Unbreakable, aspiring guitarist Akira Otoishi claims that he wants to, "be like Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck, who live hard and vicariously."
    • In Steel Ball Run, Pork Pie Hat Kid's stand, Wired, is named after the Jeff Beck album. His own name is itself a reference to the Charles Mingus song, a cover version of which appears on Wired.
  • Nigel Tufnel looks quite a bit like Beck, and speaks in a similar voice.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Nick Mason stated that in 1967, Pink Floyd wanted to recruit Beck to be their guitarist but, "none of us had the nerve to ask him." It's hard to quibble with David Gilmour's playing and songwriting, but still... Beck eventually did provide guitar for Roger Waters' solo album Amused to Death, which gives us something of an idea of what Pink Floyd with Jeff Beck might have sounded like.
  • In 1969, The Rolling Stones asked him to join them, but he turned them down. Can you imagine what Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. would have been like with Beck's guitar heroics all up and down them? (They tried again in 1975, inviting him to the sessions for Black and Blue, but he once again demurred, later saying that "In two hours I got to play three chords. I need a little more energy than that.")
  • The Jeff Beck Group were actually signed on to play Woodstock... but they broke up a week before the festival was held.

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