Jeff Beck's Truth

 

They kicked him out of the Yardbirds. They told him he was impossible to put up with. Too much temperament. Too much contained fury.

Outside, something awaited him that few musicians get to touch in an entire lifetime. The press was already calling him the pop genius who was going to devour the planet. The Rolling Stones had invited him. Pink Floyd had too.

The newspapers crowned him as one of the most disruptive minds that had ever plugged in an electric guitar. Beck didn’t want to be the next Eric Clapton. He didn’t want to be the new Syd Barrett. Still less the Brian Jones of the moment.

Two paths opened up in front of him. The first would turn him into the biggest pop star the United Kingdom had ever seen. The second promised to take him into unexplored territory. Rock distorted to the extreme. Sound beyond the imaginable. Beck didn’t hesitate. He chose the second.

His choice was not well received; they wanted a pop star, not a fierce guitarist obsessed with distortion. The band had trouble finding a company to release their first album, Truth.

Truth was impossible to classify in 1968. It wasn’t pop. It wasn’t blues. It wasn’t conventional rock. It wasn’t psychedelia. Beck already had one foot in hard rock. He was breathing the heavy metal that would dominate the following decade.

Beck and his band went beyond the power trios that ruled at the time. Theirs was an athletic, dynamic quartet that looked light years more modern. A decade ahead of Van Halen. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Cactus and Montrose would make this model legendary shortly afterward.

The real risk wasn’t only in Beck’s guitar. The guitarist could have chosen any singer in the world. He could have called on any established voice. Instead he bet everything by putting a completely unknown singer at the front of his band. A guy with a most peculiar hairstyle. His name was Rod Stewart.

Stewart would become the absolute prototype of the hard rock and heavy metal vocalist. He would share that pedestal only with Roger Daltrey of The Who. Stewart didn’t sing the songs. He devoured them. He had a vocal power and a charisma impossible to match. It is said that Stewart was the vocalist Jimmy Page had in mind when he chose Robert Plant for his band, Led Zeppelin, a few months later.

The list of musicians who took part in Truth is a map of the rock that was coming. John Paul Jones. Jimmy Page. Nicky Hopkins. Keith Moon. The elite of Britain’s genuinely heavy musicians gathered in the same studio. And in Beck’s permanent band was already Ronnie Wood. The same one who shortly afterward would become a musician with The Faces and later a Rolling Stone.

Legend has it that when Jimmy Page formed Led Zeppelin he set out to create a hybrid of The Who, the Jeff Beck Group and Vanilla Fudge. When he found Robert Plant what he was really looking for was a vocalist who could capture the same wild electricity that Stewart unleashed on Truth. In John Paul Jones he found his John Entwistle. And in John Bonham he found his Carmine Appice.

The album was a failure in England. Too raw. Too aggressive. Too real for British ears at that moment, which were deeply immersed in psychedelia. In the United States it became an unexpected sensation. It cleared the ground for the English hard rock and heavy metal invasion that would sweep the seventies.

Beck’s impulsive personality once again worked against him. A year later the band had been invited to headline the Woodstock festival. The presence of the Jeff Beck Group would have made them the biggest band in the world.

Beck heard the rumor that his wife was cheating on him with their gardener. He cancelled the U.S. appearance just a couple of days before the festival. He returned to the United Kingdom at once. He left the band stranded. Stewart was furious at Beck’s attitude. He left the group. The chemistry and the essence of the group vanished forever.

Stewart decided to launch his solo career at the same time as he joined The Faces. Stewart would become the great pop star that many believed Beck could have been. Beck swore he would never again surrender the spotlight to another vocalist. For a moment he tried to surpass even the sound of Truth with former members of Vanilla Fudge. The chemistry did not work the same way.

When Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath set out to conjure that high decibel sound they soon reached it. And surpassed it. Beck turned his gaze elsewhere. He abandoned the race for supremacy in heavy rock. He took refuge in fusion rock. There he recorded a couple of brilliant albums with elements of jazz and funk. But the battle to define the hard rock and heavy metal of the seventies he had already lost.