it's 1959 and rock'n'roll is dead

Jeff Beck

The 1950’s are thought of as the rise of rock’n’roll.  The decade when the battle between Rock and Jazz for the ear of American youth was over.  Rock won.  Elvis is king.  And many a young wanna-be rock rebel was born with a guitar in his hands.  Not the least of which was Jeff Beck.

American Jazz and Rock had been seeping into the British youth culture for some time.  The presence of so many American soldiers on British soil from the late 40’s on only accelerated the influence.  This confluence of international cultural events would create a vortex on a small area near London that was so powerful it spit out three of the greatest guitar players in Rock history.  All three would launch their careers in the band The Yardbirds.

I need to digress a moment here to mention that The Yardbirds are a major part of the story I am writing about in The Gomelsky Recordings.  The band’s impact on Rock music has long been known, but I knew little about the details.  Even much of the music was unfamiliar to me.  I was a bit too young when they were a big thing, which wasn’t for very long.  And they faded into obscurity pretty quickly after that.  But let’s get back to Jeff Beck.

If you know anything at all about Jeff Beck it’s that he’s a great guitar player and he loves to work on hot rods.  Like many successful people he pursued these passions with a focus and drive that would end up in many stories about him showing up for gigs in his mechanics clothing covered in grease.  Jeff was a rebel with a cause and he wasn’t interested in anyone else's fashion sense slowing him down.  

Many of his guitar playing contemporaries were being drawn into the delta blues style that was taking off in the small R&B clubs that were popping up all over London (i.e. Gomelsky would start his Crawdaddy Club in the Richmond District at this time).  Jeff would pay attention to this, but it was not his main interest.  He liked rock’n’roll.  His close friend at the time was Jimmy Page.  They played often together and listened to records.  Page was becoming an in-demand session guitarist.  His career was advancing slightly ahead of Jeff’s, and Page was happy and eager to recommend his friend for gigs, both in sessions and with bands.  But, I’m getting ahead of myself here.  Before their guitar playing careers started taking off, there was the death of rock’n’roll.

Jeff Beck was about 15 years old in 1959 and had been playing the guitar for a few years already.  And this is where the story gets really interesting to me because it gives me a whole new perspective on what the music culture was like in this transitional time of rock’n’roll.  There was NOT a steady rise of Rock from Elvis to The Beatles.  Here’s what was going on in the eyes of the young rock’n’roll rebel Jeff Beck.  “The lights went out” he said about the rapid decline in Rock culture, which just five years prior seemed to dominate the musical landscape.  Here are some of the events that Jeff witnessed leading to this decline.  In 1957 Little Richard found god and renounced his evil ways to become a preacher.  That same year Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year-old cousin which did not go down well in the British press (nor most of the American press I would imagine).  Needless to say Lewis’s career tanked.  Then in 1959 one of the worst days in Beck’s life happened when Buddy Holly died in a plane crash along with Richie Valens, both Rock icons to Jeff at the time.  Of the remaining icons, Elvis would be taken by the army in 1958 for a two year stint out of rebel rock action.  Then in late 1959 Chuck Berry would be arrested for taking a 14 year-old girl across state lines.  And to stamp insult on top of injury, the new dance step that swept international borders to stop the hips of youth from rockin and rollin was The Twist.  By 1960 Doris Day and Frank Sinatra were the icons that youth were instructed to follow.  For Jeff Beck rock’n’roll was dying,  “... all that kind of ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ stuff just wasn’t worth pursuing.”**

Instead Jeff would pursue his own version of rock’n’roll in a series of bands before his friend Jimmy Page would recommend him to replace Eric Clapton in The Yardbirds (Jimmy having turned down the position himself preferring the better paying session gigs).  And the rest, as they say, is history ….  THAT YOU CAN READ ABOUT IN MY UPCOMING BLOCKBUSTER BOOK:  THE GOMELSKY RECORDINGS!!!!!!!

** My primary source for these quotes is the book ‘Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck’ by Martin Power.