When the music world lost Jeff Beck on January 10, 2023, fans all over the globe mourned the passing of one of the great blues rock guitar players.
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The British-born Beck, who rose to fame with the band The Yardbirds, has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame not once, but twice. He seemingly could fit in anywhere but especially shined on dark blues songs where his thick riffs could wail.
[RELATED: 5 Electrifying Live Moments in Honor of the Late Jeff Beck]
Beck, who was 78 years old when he passed, was a craftsman on the instrument. Eric Clapton once said of him, “With Jeff, it’s all in his hands.” But given all this musical talent and his many years in the business, one may wonder: what were Beck’s thoughts outside of songs?
What did he have to say about life and love, his work, and the world at large? Here, without further ado, are the 20 best Jeff Beck quotes.
1. “I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.”
2. “I try to become a singer. The guitar has always been abused with distortion units and funny sorts of effects, but when you don’t do that and just let the genuine sound come through, there’s a whole magic there.”
3. “The right time to record is when you’re not quite ahead of yourself.”
4. “I’m a very emotional person. If I’ve got something on my mind, that would stop me from giving my best.”
5. “The Les Paul was more challenging because of the weight of it, but the tone was there that the Fender will never have and vice versa. So you have to make a decision as to what you’re going to have as your main instrument. After seeing Hendrix, I thought, ‘I’ll stick with the ‘Strat.'”
6. “I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio—much to my parent’s disapproval.”
7. “I like the wildness of Buddy Guy.”
8. “You stop anybody on any street, around the world, and they know who Eric Clapton is. They don’t know who I am!”
9. “Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn’t do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos—Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn’t a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.”
10. “It’s a diabolical business. I can’t imagine how hellish it must be to be hounded like Amy Winehouse and people like that. I have a little peripheral place on the outskirts of celebrity, when I go to premieres and that sort of stuff, which is as close as I want to get.”
11. “Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they’ll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It’s not against the rules, really—I can learn my own solos, then. But that’s the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn’t it?”
12. “I don’t care about the rules. In fact, if I don’t break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I’m not doing my job properly.”
13. “I don’t understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.”
14. “I’ve become very conscious of how easy it is for people to lie.”
15. “I play purely from the heart and so if it doesn’t work the first couple of hours, forget it.”
16. “I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever, as long as you don’t have too much of it.”
17. “I have to have people around who are of a certain strain of humor. I can’t deal with people who have no humor.”
18. “I was going to write an autobiography once. I started writing it, and then I thought, ‘No, let them dig around when I’m dead.'”
19. “It’s easy to hurl abuse at those awards ceremonies like the Oscars and all that, which we tend to do. We tend to vent our anger at things that we feel are unjust or undeserving. But when you’re the recipient, it makes it a lot different.”
20. “I don’t organize myself sufficiently to get an album of material together, book the studio, and go. I need to be kicked; I need to be forced physically to go in. That’s how it works for me. I’ll get a great idea in the house, and it’ll stay there unless somebody comes and drags it out of me!”
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