Rod: The Autobiography (12 page)

All that, though, lay ahead as we walked around the museum that afternoon, among the siege engines and examples of early blunderbusses, and Jeff set out these visionary ideas he had about creating a new kind of rock group, pushing it all in another direction, away from pop – Chicago blues but harder and heavier. ‘Grungy, Motown rock’ was another expression he had for it – white rock with a black soul feel to it. The job as vocalist was mine, if I fancied it. Being intrigued by the prospect – and also jobless – I very much did.

First of all, though, Jeff had a solo single to record. His manager, Mickie Most, a wheeler-dealer who was never known
to spurn a commercial opportunity and clearly had his own notion of where Jeff’s musical future lay, had found him a song called ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. Most once told Jeff, ‘All that wangy-yangy Hendrix stuff is history.’ Because Most was one of the day’s more powerful music business forces, he could say that kind of thing to Jeff without getting thumped. Anyway, ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ was at the opposite end of the spectrum from wangy-yangy: a thumpingly obvious pop song, with stupid lyrics and a big idiotic stomp-along chorus – almost the exact opposite of everything that Jeff was interested in. He hated it, and so did I. It has some of the most diabolical and cheesy lyrics you are ever likely to come across.

And, of course, on its release in March 1967, it proved to be a monster hit, just as Most knew it would be – not so much in terms of getting into the singles chart, where it only reached number fourteen, but in terms of seeping into the culture for ever afterwards. For the next forty years it would be virtually enshrined in British law that ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ had to be played at all student dances, village hops, weddings and bar mitzvahs on pain of arrest, and also to be sung at football grounds. For Jeff, who, more than anyone I knew, genuinely couldn’t have given a toss about commercial success, releasing that song was like shooting the world’s biggest albatross. It was, as he used to say, as though someone had hung a pink toilet seat around his neck for the rest of his life.

He had done his best to get out of singing it. Jeff took me along to the recording session, which Most was producing, and suggested to Most that, as I was the singer in the new band that Jeff was getting together, and as I had a more characterful voice than he did, maybe it would be a good idea if I recorded the lead vocal on ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. But Most, who I don’t think ever quite liked the cut of my jib, wasn’t having any of that and I ended up singing backing vocals on the chorus while Jeff did the lead. The same thing happened with the next single Jeff recorded, ‘Tallyman’ – a Graham Gouldman song, and again more commercial than anything Jeff would have chosen for
himself. Jeff thought I should sing it, and again Most said no and gave the vocal to Jeff. I thought Jeff maybe could have stood up to him, but he seemed in thrall to Most and this was something we argued about.

Against this backdrop of commercial indecision, the Jeff Beck Group came into being. Jeff’s first idea was to invite Jet Harris, once of the Shadows, to play bass, and Viv Prince, formerly of the Pretty Things, to be the drummer. This was an ambitious plan – or, you might even say, raving mad. Harris looked great – he had a big peroxide hairdo – but he was still in recovery from a terrible car accident and was known to be having some struggles with alcohol. Prince’s drumming style, meanwhile, made Keith Moon look conservative. Jeff had spoken of wanting to find ‘a hooligan’ to be the drummer, and Prince certainly fitted the description – perhaps a little too closely, though. After about half an hour of flailing away at a twelve-bar blues in a rented room above the Prince of Wales pub in Warren Street, Jeff decided that neither of those players had the feel he was looking for and promptly disinvited them.

I think it may have been me who suggested bringing in my mate of more than two years, Ronnie Wood, who started off as the guitarist but then switched to bass, having thieved one from a West End instrument shop for the purpose. (Apparently he went back and paid for it as soon as he could afford to, bless him.) Woody was a good player but he was also an incredibly easy person to have around and it’s possible I sensed his charm might come in handy in a band shaped by Jeff’s volatility. Jeff, however, was an exacting employer and was constantly changing the band. Even Woody found himself handed his P45 on at least two occasions that I can remember, for sundry musical misdemeanours in the workplace. And Jeff got through drummers at an alarming rate. For a while the job was Micky Waller’s, my old pal from Steampacket, and for another, relatively stable phase the job was Aynsley Dunbar’s, but you never really knew, from show to show, who would be sitting behind you when you turned round.

Is Jeff the main basis for the character of Nigel Tufnel, the guitarist in the spoof documentary
This Is Spinal Tap
? I can’t say for sure, beyond noting that Jeff, too, has an extensive guitar collection which no one is allowed to touch or even look at. But the writers must surely have got the idea of the ever-changing drummer from the Jeff Beck Group.

The band’s first gig, at Finsbury Astoria in London on 3 March 1967, gave no indication that the Jeff Beck Group would ever amount to much. Indeed, it was pretty much your textbook example of a 24-carat disaster. We had been booked, far too soon, onto a package tour, supporting the Small Faces and Roy Orbison, both of whom had had big hits by this time and could pull a sizeable audience. One number into our badly under-rehearsed show, some unseen hand pulled out a plug backstage and silenced us. An act of mercy, probably, although Beck (in a way which was very Jeff) always suspected sabotage by the Small Faces, and in particular Ian McLagan, the keyboard player, because it was exactly the kind of thing he would have taken enormous delight in doing. Mac claims he wasn’t even in the venue at the time. Whatever, the power outage caused the stage manager to drop the curtain – much to the surprise of Ronnie Wood, who was standing directly underneath it at the time and was almost killed by about half a ton of falling velvet (because, let me tell you, in those days a curtain was a curtain). It was while we were backstage, getting the power restored, that I noticed I had spent the entire opening number with my flies undone.

We went out again, this time with my trousers on properly, but it didn’t get any less shambolic and, as a review in the
Melody Maker
rather gently put it, we ‘created a very poor impression’. The audience was there to see Orbison and the Small Faces, and our false start pretty effectively killed off any interest they may have mustered. Jeff’s response – as so often in a moment of doubt – was to sack the drummer, Roger Cook, which was a bit of a shame because his dad had bought him a new kit especially. Jeff’s second response was to pull the
band off the tour and stick us all back in a rehearsal room until we could make a noise that was publicly acceptable. He also began inviting me and Ronnie to his flat in Surrey for long listening sessions, where, doing our best to ignore Jeff’s big, old, smelly Afghan hound called Pudding, we would spend hours just listening to music for inspiration and courage – anything from original electric bluesmen like Jimmy Reed through to Motown pop acts like the Four Tops. The idea of finding an outlet in which I could combine my love of Muddy Waters with my love of soul vocalists like Sam Cooke and Otis Redding and Levi Stubbs was inspiring to me and seemed genuinely innovative.

In due course we emerged again, re-emboldened, and set off round Britain and the usual haunts. We were guaranteed to attract a high level of public interest by the presence of Jeff – though that interest was quite often initially suspicious of me. Jeff had his fans, guitar-worshippers who would come to the shows to stand and study his fingers, and they were highly protective of Jeff and given to wondering why he was hanging out with this relatively unknown high-voiced singer. Fair play to Jeff, though: he stood up for me. Confronted in an interview with the suggestion that I was ‘too camp’ to be working with a serious rock guitarist, Beck issued the following resounding denial: ‘He’s not camp. Campish, maybe.’

For me, though, this was a massive learning curve. By contrast with the tight, instrumentally dense club bands I had played with so far, there was so much air in this group; a lot of room for me as a singer, space in which I could spread my wings. And there was a guitar player that would listen to me – and I’d listen to him and we would bounce off each other, which was what made it special. It was call and response between voice and guitar; none of it worked out in advance, just done by feel. Jeff never once played over me; he always sensed when I was going to come in, sensed when I was going to extend a vocal a little bit, knew when to step back and get out of the way, and then come in blasting. And I can’t think of another
band that was doing that kind of thing at the time. It felt like something new and tremendously exciting.

However, it was obvious that, in order to progress, this band needed some distinctive, original material – and not just ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’, which, being Jeff’s big hit, we were obliged to play, though we took to distancing ourselves from it by performing it with silly hand gestures, dumb smiles and overenthusiastic vocals. (Woody and I were especially lackadaisical about it. Sabotage, you might call it.) Without original material, we would surely be doomed to burn out fast (which is exactly what happened). The right kind of music for this band was hard to find, though. There was nobody out there writing made-to-fit material for a rock guitar virtuoso teamed up with a would-be soul singer. Jeff wasn’t creative in the writing area. Woody and I, drawn on by the lure of cracking the code and coming up with a massive hit, had started to compose a few things together, mostly round at his mum’s tiny council house in Orpington, in the sitting room in front of the electric fire. (Money was tight: we were allowed to switch on one bar only.) But the songs Woody and I came up with in those early times tended to owe more to simple folk music than to futuristic heavy blues.

Our creative partnership got off to an inauspicious start. The first time we tried songwriting, Ronnie and I simply sat there one afternoon, with the fire on, each of us with a pad of yellow foolscap paper and a pencil, and waited. For some reason it didn’t occur to us to get a guitar out. We just sat and hoped for words. An hour later: nothing. Not a syllable. Ronnie opened a bottle of wine, and over the next hour we gradually drained it. Still nothing. Blank sheets in front of us. After about two and a half hours, Ronnie’s mum came in and found us both lying on our backs on the carpet in silence, next to an empty bottle, still waiting for inspiration to come. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you two aren’t going to be much of a threat to the Beatles, are you?’

Hence, when the Jeff Beck Group album
Truth
came out, in
the summer of 1968, it was basically a record of cover versions: Willie Dixon’s ‘You Shook Me’, Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘I Ain’t Superstitious’ – even Jerome Kern’s ‘Ol’ Man River’, which was my very cheeky suggestion and on the recording of which Keith Moon bashed a timpani. Otherwise, we took old blues songs – Buddy Guy’s ‘Let Me Love You Baby’, BB King’s ‘Gambler’s Blues’ – twisted them around, musically and lyrically, made them our own and credited them to ‘Jeffrey Rod’.

Virtually the whole thing was recorded at Abbey Road in two two-day sessions in May 1968. You didn’t hang about in those days. You went in at eleven in the morning and worked through to midnight. It was the first LP-length collection of songs that I had been involved in. I still rate that record really highly. There’s some great singing and playing on it, and it had an influence on a lot of stuff that came shortly after – particularly if you listen to Led Zeppelin. John Bonham and Jimmy Page came to see us play all the time in those early days, when they were getting the New Yardbirds together. They were trying to do the same thing that we were doing – and they managed it, and then some. Jeff retains a grudge, I think, because they took the nucleus of what we had and made it more commercial. The Jeff Beck Group could in due course have been Led Zeppelin, frankly, except for the crucial detail that they were a step ahead of us in coming up with original material.

At the time, though, I merely noted that
Truth
was credited, simply, to ‘Jeff Beck’, with no mention of the ‘Group’ – for which I cursed Mickie Most, rather than Jeff. It felt odd to be the singer in a band and not even be pictured anywhere on the sleeve, but that was the situation and I just had to try and be grown up about it.

In June 1968, we climbed aboard a BOAC plane at Heathrow and set off to tour America. At last: the promised land. Beck had been there numerous times by then, and as the star of the show was casually ensconced in luxury in the first-class cabin. But it was all new to me and Woody as we squeezed into economy and taxied creakily down the runway in the direction,
finally, of the country that we had read about and talked about and thought about and dreamed about since childhood. Plus there was a trolley! And it served drinks! Free drinks! An awful lot of cheering and shouting ensued. We thought life couldn’t get much better.

No one ever forgets their first view of Manhattan, rising into the sky ahead of them, nor their first drive up its concrete canyons. Woody and I were in ecstasy – possibly even silenced momentarily, gawping at the scale of it all. In terms of architectural grandeur, it didn’t have much in common with Orpington.

We had been planning all along that, as soon as we had checked into the hotel, which was at around lunchtime, we would make a pilgrimage to the Apollo Theater in Harlem: the home of the musicians that we had worshipped for so long from so far away. We were pretty naïve about it. We didn’t even think it might be a dangerous place for a couple of unaccompanied white boys to go. One taxi driver ran his eye up and down us, in our swinging London finery, with our combed-up hair and highly visible jet lag, and blankly refused to take us. But another drove us up there, and probably
because
of the way we looked – because we were unmistakably musicians or performers of some kind – nobody was bothered about us. In fact, we felt welcome. We walked under the marquee that spread the width of the pavement, paid our entrance fees and saw an afternoon session, with Martha and the Vandellas on the top of the bill, after which we left in a state of enchantment.