Jeff Beck’s Journeys to Memphis

One of the top guitarists of his day traveled the world in search of new sounds. He found what he was seeking here in the Bluff City.

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When British guitar wizard Jeff Beck died suddenly of bacterial meningitis this January, the Memphis musical community lit up on social media to lament his loss. Beck’s idiosyncratic and daring style was an inspiration to his fellow guitarists especially, not to mention millions of fans. Local author Tom Graves recalled a 1972 Beck concert at the Mid-South Coliseum as being “one of the great performances of my life,” after which Graves and his brother snuck backstage. “He came over and talked to us,” Graves recalled. “I remember this like it was yesterday. I will never forget how nice he was to us two kids.”

Guitarist David Cousar summed it up when he wrote, “The thing about Jeff Beck was, yes he had incredible chops, yes he had amazing tones and an original voice. But instead of just shredding unrelated ideas, he took motifs and developed them, sometimes into shred land, sometimes into gorgeous melodies, like the best players do. In short, he was musical.”

Beck’s fascination with Memphis music in particular drew him to the city more than once as he strove to incorporate the city’s classic sounds into his own playing. Those journeys culminated when Stax Records giant Steve Cropper produced Beck’s fourth album. The recordings he created here are now considered pivotal moments in his remarkable legacy.

The Train Kept A-Rollin’

1965 was a good year for the Yardbirds, and not just because it saw them visiting the Bluff City. In March, the band replaced guitarist Eric Clapton, a self-styled blues purist, with the decidedly less pure Beck. It fit the British group’s musical evolution, as they began to chafe at their early obsession with the blues. Though their manager, the charismatic and freewheeling Giorgio Gomelsky, had initially brought Clapton into the group, he also saw the limits of playing pure blues in a Top of the Pops world, as became clear when he presented the band with a demo of “For Your Love,” a minor-key pop tune featuring a harpsichord. This didn’t sit well with Clapton, who quit just after the group recorded the new song.

Enter Beck, to whom the manager and the group took an instant liking. In Martin Power’s book Hot Wired Guitar: The Life of Jeff Beck, Beck shares his thoughts on the new job: “They didn’t want to hear me play definitive blues, they wanted this nutter with this guitar doing these weird noises. And that was all right with me.”

Though the fast-climbing single was not recorded with Beck, in live shows he thrived on the new hybrid approach of “For Your Love,” not to mention the hit that followed close on its heels: “Heart Full of Soul,” a recording featuring the raga-like drone of Beck’s guitar processed through a then-experimental “fuzz box” he borrowed from his friend Jimmy Page. Gomelsky hastily booked a U.S. tour for the group to begin that September.

The tour would eventually bring the group to Memphis, even as confusion over their work visas kept them from playing concerts. Stuck in the U.S. but unable to perform, Gomelsky hit upon an inspired Plan B: They would record at the famed studios where their heroes had made records. And so, in September 1965, the Yardbirds shuffled into Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio, the swanky new facility on Madison Avenue that the owner of Sun Records had opened in 1960 (distinct from the old Memphis Recording Service at 706 Union, where Phillips had launched Sun).

It was there that the group would stake their own claim on Memphis music history, covering “The Train Kept A-Rollin’,” a song first released on Cincinnati’s King Records in 1951 but remade entirely by Memphis’ Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio five years later. Though the track was originally recorded in Nashville and released on Cleveland’s Coral Records (Sam Phillips had rejected them), the rockabilly trio of Memphians created one of the most significant records in rock history. Amped up on Paul Burlison’s overdriven guitar and egged on by Burnette’s unhinged howls, the record takes earlier uses of distortion (e.g., Jackie Brenston/Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88,” recorded by Phillips in 1951) up several notches, pioneering the chunky, choppy rhythm guitar that would come to define rock.

Many years later, Beck imagined his 21-year-old self to have been in the original home of Sun Records, “listening to playback from the same speakers that Presley first heard his songs,” as he recalls in Power’s book. Though the band was actually in an entirely different facility, they were nonetheless about to record with the great Sam Phillips, their heads swimming with thoughts of Memphis artists who inspired them. Jeff Beck’s thoughts went immediately to Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio’s recording, “an old Beck teenage favourite that he personally suggested for the session,” Power writes.

And so one of the Yardbirds’ noisiest, rawest performances came to be captured on tape by Sam Phillips, a producer who treasured a unique sound above all else and who, Power writes, “was complimentary of the band’s anarchic take” on the song. In Beck’s hands, the choppiness of Burlison’s 1956 riff becomes a heavy chug, as two out-of-sync voices shout misremembered lyrics in a haze of passion and confusion. Beck’s guitar tone, announced from the start by two train-like wails, led writer Robert Palmer to dub the track a “metallic rave-up,” and his solos presage the psychedelic sounds of Jimi Hendrix by a solid year.

Beck surmised that the young Brits’ performance even rattled the veteran rock-and-roll producer a bit. “Looking back,” Beck tells Power, “what we sounded like must have been frightening [to Phillips], like The Sex Pistols arriving. He hadn’t quite adjusted to ‘Rolling Stones-itis.’”

Indeed, there was something punkishly prescient in the sheer aggressiveness of the track. Perhaps that explains the recording’s lasting mark on rock history. Exhibit A might be a Facebook post by Jack White of the White Stripes upon Beck’s death: “I wrote to him a couple of years ago,” the founder of Third Man Records reminisced, “to show him that I was standing where he once stood inside Sam Phillips studio in Memphis some 50 odd years before. He was amazingly kind and instructional to me over the years.”

The Yardbirds cut one other track with Phillips, the anti-conformist anthem “You’re a Better Man Than I.” And before leaving town to record at Chess Studio in Chicago, they played two semi-clandestine Memphis shows. Local guitar whiz Jim Duckworth, known for his work with The Gun Club, the Panther Burns, and K-9 Arts, recounts that “in September of 1965, they played at Frayser Skateland, and they played at Clearpool, which was at Lamar and Winchester. They didn’t have work permits, so they weren’t gigging officially. [Renowned Memphis drummer] Richard Rosebrough told me about it. He saw them in Frayser. And he said they had the longest hair he had ever seen on a man in his life. And I’m guessing the music, based on that recording of ‘The Train Kept A-Rollin’,’ was pretty frenetic.”

The Orange Album

While recording with Sam Phillips seemed incredible to Jeff Beck, his love of Memphis music went far beyond the golden age of rockabilly. Those sounds were already a decade old by the time he joined the Yardbirds, and he was also tuned in to more diverse sounds coming out of the U.S. at that time. As Power writes, he became enamored with “the crisp, new soul and R&B sounds offered by Irma Thomas, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, and Booker T & The M.G.s.” In particular, Powers quotes Beck as saying, “Steve Cropper’s playing on ‘Green Onions’ was just exquisite.”

“Having become obsessed with hotwiring Motown for his own ends, Jeff now wanted to extend the perimeters of the model even further by adding the snap, crackle, and pop of Memphis’ Stax Records to his own group’s sound,” Power writes. “It was the power of Stax’s own house band, The M.G.s, and their accompanying horn section, The Memphis Horns, that most beguiled Jeff.” His first attempt to meld that R&B backbone with his distinctive exploratory, solo-driven approach was 1971’s self-produced Rough and Ready. But while that album made the U.S. top 50, it fell short of his vision. That’s when he decided to call Steve Cropper.

Cropper did far more at Stax than play guitar. Although his trademark stinging style with the M.G.s was at the heart of the Stax sound, he also co-wrote and/or produced many other artists’ hits on the label, including “In the Midnight Hour,” “Knock on Wood,” and several Otis Redding hits, including “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay.” As Stax entered its tenth year, the M.G.s grew restless to prove themselves individually; their exodus from Stax began with Booker T. Jones in 1969. Cropper followed suit the next year, joining forces with Jerry Williams and former Mar-Key Ronnie Stoots to establish Trans Maximus, Inc. (TMI) Recording Studios in a small, nondescript building next to the Evergreen Theater on Poplar.

Beck was unaware of all this when he headed to Memphis to begin recording in January 1972. “It came at a time when it seemed I could get anything I wanted,” he recalls in Hot Wired Guitar. “I rang Steve Cropper and said we wanted to record with him. Sure enough, days later, we were on the plane and I was really looking forward to recording in Stax Studios, the old movie house. But when we arrived, we found ourselves in a brand-new studio. I was really disappointed.”

For his part, Cropper had only been dimly aware of the Yardbirds in their heyday. “I knew who the Yardbirds were,” he recalls today. “Whatever was played on the radio, I listened to. But I didn’t know Sam worked with them. And I knew Sam pretty well. But I didn’t know about bands.” Still, by the early ’70s, Beck was becoming something of an icon. “I watched a lot of TV shows he was on in England, so I knew what he was capable of. Jeff could reach for anything that was in his head, and get it.”

Cropper didn’t know of Beck’s love of the M.G.s, or that it was Beck’s idea to have him produce the album. “I thought [Epic label owner] Clive Davis was the one who influenced him on that. Because I was real tight with Clive.” In any case, the influence was largely indirect by that time: The Jeff Beck Group sounded nothing like the M.G.s. And as a producer, Cropper was content to simply let the band be what it was. “My comments were mainly about, if it didn’t feel good, it didn’t feel good. I’d tell them that. I never told them the notes to play at all. You don’t tell guys like Max Middleton how to play the piano. So that’s what I did. And Cozy Powell was one of the greatest drummers to ever live, but he played more notes than most guys.”

Still, Cropper felt a shock of recognition when Beck proposed a cover tune he’d learned off a Freddie King record, “Going Down,” built on a long, descending blues riff that feels like it’s existed for all time. The song was credited to Don Nix, a longtime friend of Cropper’s who was producing for Stax’s Enterprise imprint when he brought the tune to local heavy blues rock band Moloch, featuring guitar whiz Lee Baker. Later, he produced the Freddie King album on which it appeared. Donald “Duck” Dunn, bassist for the M.G.s, also worked on the King album.

Cropper continues: “Duck called me when he got back from Chicago, recording with Freddie King, and said, ‘They cut one of your songs. That song we did called ‘Slim Jenkins’ Place.’ Don Nix has added lyrics and titled it ‘Going Down.’ And I listened to it and said, ‘Let’s just keep it that way.’ Don was our baritone sax player in the Mar-Keys, and we had done ‘Last Night’ with him the year before ‘Green Onions.’ And I’m glad I did that. That’s been his livelihood.”

While “Going Down” became a standard part of Beck’s set throughout his career, and has been covered by many others since, not many connect it with the M.G.s classic. It essentially lifts the main riff from “Slim Jenkins’ Place,” while eschewing the M.G.s’ nimble arrangement, which alters the riff to match the chord changes. In Nix’s rewrite, it becomes simply The Riff, now with the lyrics “down, down, down, down, down” sung to it.

In other words, Jeff Beck Groups’ most overt tribute to the M.G.s was inadvertent. For the most part, the group sounds like a tightly wound rock/jazz combo pushing itself far beyond the simplicity of the Stax sound, mostly concerned with creating vehicles for Beck’s solos. Indeed, they seem intent on complicating any of the simplicity of the Memphis artists they admire, as when they dip into Sun Records territory with a bombastic, convoluted interpretation of Carl Perkins’ “Glad All Over.” While clearly intent on making songs their own, they delve into one cover version after another.

A notable exception is the Middleton-penned “Definitely Maybe,” which became a standout showcase for some of Beck’s most nuanced playing, and a crowd favorite over the years. In Power’s book, Middleton remembers it as being “quite complex, with two or three parts and a counter melody. It was very difficult to sort through. Jeff actually wanted to give up on it, but Steve Cropper said, ‘No, this is good, let’s keep going.’”

Overall, Cropper proved to be more of a taskmaster than the group bargained for, albeit one with a growing admiration for Beck. As Middleton recalls in Hot Wired Guitar, “It was take after take, as Steve wanted it to be perfect. But he idolized Jeff. He thought he was a wonderful guitarist.”

When asked if the three originals on the album impressed him at the time, Cropper is blunt. “Uh, no,” he laughs. “That’s why I’ve got one on there. They didn’t have enough for an album, so I wrote ‘Sugar Cane’ to fill it out. And [bassist] Clive couldn’t get it. It was the last day, and he just couldn’t feel it. And I don’t blame him for not feeling it. It was something I just came up with. So I played bass on it, although I’m not credited.”

The final album was simply called Jeff Beck Group, though it’s often called “The Orange Album” due to that fruit’s beguiling inclusion on the cover design. As Power writes, “The album was a much more satisfying experience than its predecessor — its melodies more robust, Beck’s guitar playing more substantial.” It rose to a respectable #19 on the U.S. charts, and Beck later recalled, “Good memories, overall, but in the end, we didn’t really have the material. The good thing was we sounded like a really heavy Motown, Stax-y band. Cozy bashing away ... call it flawed but fun.”

It was to be the swan song of the Jeff Beck Group, with the guitarist disbanding the combo shortly after the album’s release and working mostly under his own name in subsequent years. Yet, like the Yardbirds’ take on “The Train Kept A-Rollin’,” the Memphis-born “Going Down” emerged from the sessions to become a career-defining achievement, one that stayed with him over the decades.

And the album stayed with Steve Cropper as well. Though he never worked with Beck again, he followed the guitarist’s artistic evolution avidly from that point on.

“I’ll say this about Jeff Beck,” he declares today. “We all knew how good he was, but the thing is, he got better and better as time went on. Better and better and better and better. Every time I saw him, I’d go, ‘Oh my God, I used to produce that guy!’”