As Trodden on by Jeff Beck
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Amongst the online tributes to the legendary and now sadly late Jeff Beck, there's one appearance that probably won't be in pole position, despite being a very rare occurrence of both Beck and Jimmy Page caught on film in the 1966 lineup of the Yardbirds.
Beck wasn't a showoff on stage: check any photograph of him playing live, and you'll almost certainly notice that rather than flinging his guitar around in the histrionic style of Townshend or Hendrix, he'll be looking at his fingering, thinking about what he's doing instead of simply showing off. However, when it came to the Yardbirds' appearance in Michaelangelo Antonioni's cult 1966 movie Blow-Up, something different was called for. Antonioni had conceived a bizarre sequence in a night club where the audience remains catatonic until galvanized into action by Beck smashing his guitar and throwing the neck off the stage.
Beck was too respectful of his instrument to smash it up just for the sake of an art movie, and told the story when interviewed for the BBC radio series The Guitar Greats: 'They wanted me to break a vintage Les Paul '54 gold top, and I said "On your bike! Can't you use another guitar?" and he [Antonioni] eventually said that would be OK, provided it was exactly identical [...] Finally we agreed, and I said I'd do it provided I could smash up someone else's guitar, and all the time I was feeling that they should have got Townshend to do it.' [the Who had in fact been Antonioni's first choice, and the guitar-smashing idea clearly came from his having seen them in London]. Beck was eventually provided with a cheap and easily smashable instrument which is why, in the film, we see him playing neither of his signature instruments – Les Paul or Fender Esquire – but a flimsy Hofner Senator hollowbody, exactly like the one pictured above. Having first slammed it into a Vox amplifier, Beck then flings the poor old Hofner onto the stage, causing its neck to break off. Just for good measure, he stamps on the body, reducing it to splinters. 'It was great,' Beck continued in the BBC interview, 'they had this representative from Vox or Hofner down, and he brought this bloody great tea chest full of crappy guitars all wrapped up in cellophane, ready for the shop window display, and after we had a take that was accepted, he said "Great, eh?"and I said "Well, I'm smashing your guitars up", and he said "Yeah, but it sounds great." He was all for it – only a British guy could be over the moon about their guitars being smashed instead of played.'
Anyone who has ever plugged in a Hofner Senator thinline (in sorrow or in anger) will realise at once that this is definitely not the kind of guitar suited to a blues and feedback merchant like Beck. It can certainly do feedback, but it's hard to imagine Beck creating his signature 60s overdrive tone on a lightweight hollowbody aimed at budget-conscious beginners or impoverished jazzers. And although Beck was a consummate player, whose technique would advance way beyond the abilities of mere mortals, I still enjoy some of his early work with the Yardbirds: his sitar-influenced riff on Heart Full of Soul was committed to disc several months before the Beatles went Indian on Rubber Soul, and a similarly exotic riff graces the group's 1966 single Over, Under, Sideways, Down. I can't claim to play like Jeff Beck at his peak, but I can find my way around either of these classic riffs.... just not on a Hofner Senator.
Jeff Beck, 1944-2023. RIP
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