The world's greatest (most creative, most adept, most influential) hardest rock guitar player Jeff Beck passed away from bacterial meningitis on Jan 11, 2023. This is the first of a series of obituaries of select persons who meant something in my life, all delayed due to care needed for my better half's extremely serious illness treatments (not Covid.)
Always in the zone as here, giving it his all while thinking up entirely new guitar adventures no one before could have even imagined. In 1968 I wore out three vinyl LP records listening to his first solo venture "Truth" which debuted his ridiculously influential band The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Nicky Hopkins and Micky Waller. Fortunate indeed to see this force of nature in action, I nonetheless don't have photos of that 1968 show, so offered are my pics of Stewart and Wood in Faces, Hollywood Palladium, 1972. And another of mine from the 1990 "dual headliner" (they alternated) show with Stevie Ray Vaughn.
Below, fair
use photo not credited to anyone but The Nicky Hopkins Archives, which,
despite lack of visages, shows exuberant hardest rock chaos of the
original Jeff Beck Group in 1968. (those are Benday printer dots, not
pixels, so pic works best small.
Since both Stevie Ray Vaughn and Jeff Beck are no longer with us, that leaves the indomitable James Williamson as the world's greatest (most creative, most adept, most influential) living hardest rock guitar player now. He is far more influential than other remaining greats: just ask anyone who has played any genre of hardest rock since 1973's Raw Power, Williamson's masterwork with Iggy Pop and the rest of the Stooges. THAT release is the touchstone of them all.
