When Jeff Beck takes the stage for his induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame this month, he will be making his third appearance on that stage.

The first, back in 1988, saw him become part of an all-star band (the Stones, Dylan, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, George Harrison and more) that jammed somewhat discordantly through a clutch of sainted oldies. It was, Beck later shuddered, “horrendous.”

The second time came when The Yardbirds were inducted in 1992, but when the remainder of the decade passed by without a third knock on the door, Beck — and his fans — could be excused for thinking that the boat had sailed. If he wasn’t going to be honored then, with so many magnificent albums already behind him, he was hardly likely to come to the nominating committee’s attention now.

Nobody could have guessed that he was about to launch his most astonishing sequence of albums since his mid-1970s peak; nor that, a full 17 years later, Beck would again be preparing to make the journey to Cleveland.

Beck will finally receive that long overdue induction April 4, but he does so not as some fossilized relic of the audience’s misbegotten youth. He does so as an artist who, not content with having cast such a foreboding shadow over the last third of the 20th century, then extended that into the 21st as well. And there really are not many other artists of his — shall we say — vintage (he is 64) of whom the same can be said.

It was not the first time, of course, that Beck so dismantled everybody else’s predictions.

In the late 1960s, while he and Rod Stewart led the first, and greatest, incarnation of the Jeff Beck Group to proto-metal bluesbreaking glory, Beck alone doubled as a teenybop pop idol, taking the likes of “Hi Ho Silver Lining” and “Love Is Blue” to the toppermost of the British chart poppermost.

Through the 1970s, when the world was crying out for the raw rock electrics which he, alone, was capable of wringing out of a guitar, he meandered off into jazz-fusion territory.

And in 1999, while peers as venerable as Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton foundered toothlessly in the comforting armchairs of their reputations, Beck emerged with a new album that made The Prodigy sound like they were queuing for their pensions, and left Underworld in the undergrowth. He called it Who Else! and, being as there was probably nobody else who could have pulled it off so well, it was very aptly named. Who else, indeed?

“I wanted to make an album that would salute everything that I’d absorbed from people like Bjork and the Prodigy,” Beck admits. “That was the starting point. There was a lot going on in the techno field, a lot of great stuff, but a lot of it … I was hearing some fantastic rhythm tracks, but that’s all a lot of it was, great rhythm tracks with nothing on top. So I decided to do something about it.”

Recorded with keyboard player and longtime sideman Tony Hymas, guitarist  Jennifer Batten (best known at that time for her onstage stint with Michael Jackson), bassist Randy Hope-Taylor and sometime Duran Duran drummer Steve Alexander, Who Else! was born out of a single question that has haunted Beck for most of the previous 20 years, and that still underlines many of his more bizarre career moves as well. 

“What the hell do you do to impress anybody these days? That’s what kept Tony and I going in a way, trying to come up with something fresh and exciting, which would make people go ‘wow,’ but which wouldn’t just appeal because it was clever, or because no one had done it before.  It had to be alive,” explains Beck.

Who Else! was certainly that. Filmmaker Peter Richardson heard it, then told Beck that he thought it was precisely the kind of record that Jimi Hendrix would be making, if he were alive today.  And an overjoyed Beck admits, “I thought that was the ultimate compliment, because when Hendrix first came along …”

When Hendrix first came along, in London in 1966, Beck was the king of the hill.  Up there with Clapton, his predecessor in The Yardbirds, and Jimmy Page, his successor, Beck was the proverbial cat’s pajamas, the fastest, the flashiest, the greatest thing on six strings in the country. In fact, one night at the Saville Theatre in London, he came onstage with 12 strings, a Telecaster tuned to the unplumbed depths of D, “ … and afterwards, Pete Townshend came back and said, ‘the best thing about tonight was the sound of your 12-string Tele.’ No one had ever done that, it was very low and gritty, a real f**k-off sound.  It was like a bloody 10-piece orchestra; it was so powerful, and so absolutely happening. Townshend was watching, and he was wetting himself!” says Beck.

But when Hendrix turned up, “for someone like me, he was a bloody disaster, for no other reason than he took over the guitar, lock, stock and barrel, and ‘you lot can all piss off, I’m doing this gig now,’” recalls Beck. “And for me, it was my gig he took away! I couldn’t do any fancy stuff on guitar, for fear of being called a rip-off of him, and that had to be considered big time.

“But when he and I became sort of drinking partners in New York, and playing together a lot, I realized that if he could say he enjoyed what I did, that was enough for me. So it was kind of with his blessing that I carried on. Which is why when Peter [Richardson] said that about the album, it meant so much.”

Who Else! broke what had been an absurdly fallow time for Beck fans. All three of the albums he released during the previous decade were either soundtrack (1993’s Frankie’s House), tribute (the same year’s Gene Vincent-inspired Crazy Legs) or odd cooperatives (1989’s Guitar Shop). And Beck was among the first to admit that was a fairly shoddy return for 10 years.

“I get recognized, infrequently, when I’m out in London … I go ‘oh yeah, I’m Jeff Beck. I’d better go home and do something about it.’ There were many reasons for doing Who Else!, and it was no mean feat to get it done, I can tell you that. But I think the main thing was, I realized that if I didn’t do something soon, it would be too late. They say it’s never too late to play, but in this game, once you lose your grip, you lose it. I don’t think you can scrabble back.”

 At the same time, though, he acknowledges that sometimes, the very motivation to play is away on vacation.

“I do get fed up with playing, sometimes, although I try not to let it get me down, because if that goes, I’ve got nothing,” says Beck. “I can’t make money doing anything else! And I do get depressed when I see hundreds of guitar magazines, and I’m not in them. The office has a habit of leaving them lying around when I’m there, and I’ll flick through them and … ‘this bastard’s got no right to be on the front cover!’ It’s just one of those funny things.”

 Work on Who Else! was completed, fittingly enough, on Christmas Eve, 1998. “Unbelievable! What a Christmas present! I actually got the first pressing back on Christmas Eve.” But Beck actually began thinking about it, in some form at least, long before that.

“If you want to take it all the way back,” Beck explains. “I started — restarted — the momentum in 1989 with Terry Bozzio, and the Guitar Shop album, which got a lot of response. But we missed the boat with the album a little bit, and even more sinful was not following through with another one sooner, which meant that we had to go out in 1995, 1996, without a bloody album, on a monstrous long tour with Santana.”

That tour, across America through the summer of 1995, was generally regarded as an absolute triumph. The New York Daily News review, which Beck’s record company probably still has pinned to the wall, insisted that Beck’s solos, “at one moment glistening and sweet, at another ruthless and fleet … communicated the fullness of a human voice.” Beck, however, has less than fond memories of the excursion.

“It went down really well, but if it hadn’t have gone great, I think I’d probably have packed it all in then. From my point of view, it was very pedestrian, the whole thing. We were double headlining — I was headlining one night and opening the next — and in all of those 46 gigs, no one came across with a single new riff. And then, after the tour finished, everybody disappeared into the woods. Tony [Hymas] was so sick of hearing me belly-aching about new material that he went off and did some jazz thing, and when I nailed him about two years after that, I said, ‘come on, let’s have some tunes.’ He wrote some fantastic things and some junk, but there was not an album there. I just couldn’t see going into the studio on day one with a game plan, so we still have a load of stuff lying on the floor that will never be used.

“The other thing was, my tastes were changing rapidly.” Speaking shortly after the album’s release, he explained, “In the last year even, they’ve changed a lot; they focus more on what I could get away with in outrage. I’m fed up with mediocrity. I don’t care if I use great chunks of grooves from some other records in samples, if it drives me to play more, in a different way or in a special way, then that’s the way it’s done.”

In fact, there was only one outside sample to be found anywhere on Who Else!, a snatch of dialogue from the “It’s A Mad Mad, Mad, Mad World” movie, incorporated into the opening “What Mama Said.” But the overall feel of the album was indeed of electronics gone mad, a driving techno frenzy smashing itself against the walls of Steve Alexander’s live drumming and Beck’s paint-blistering guitar.

“Technology is the gauntlet which the last few years have thrown down to musicians,” Beck believes. “But really, it’s the same as it’s always been. Get past the gimmicks, get past the funny noises which everyone knows you can make, and find the core sound. Once you’ve got that, you can do anything.”

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That, of course, is the theory behind all of Beck’s greatest albums, from the jazz-rock virtuosity of Blow By Blow and Wired in the mid-1970s, through the below-the-belt rock ’n’ roll assault of Crazy Legs, and all the way back to the savage blues busting of Truth, the Jeff Beck Group’s 1968 debut, and the blueprint for every hard-rock album of the next five years, from Led Zeppelin I on down.

“The thing with Truth was, it was never really developed,” Beck agrees. “We had a sound, and it turned out to be a colossally influential one, but we weren’t interested in just making the same record again and again. Which means I’ve had to sit back here for the past [40] years, watching people perfect it.

“When Led Zeppelin started doing huge concerts, I was sitting in my garage listening to the radio, and going ‘What’s going on? I started this shit, and look at me!’” And he laughs aloud, because though he knows that without Truth, a lot of great music might never have happened, he also knows that a lot of really ghastly stuff might never have been perpetrated, either. 

“If I’m in any way responsible for heavy metal,” he winces, “then I apologize. But I get vibes from people like Joe Perry and Slash, the really great rockers, the people I like to believe when they tell me things. I know they must have been impressed by that album because I can hear it in their performances. It seems to me, that record played a very large part in what’s going on today. And that’s fine, because I would never have stayed playing that same stuff over anyway.”

That, too, is a creed which Beck has, for the most part, remained true to throughout his career. If Truth was a fiery blues beast, its successor, Cosa Nostra Beck Ola, launched itself unerringly into the heart of the rock ’n’ roll revival which was sweeping the scene in the late 1960s. The Who was out there playing old Eddie Cochran songs, Lennon was jamming “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes” at the Toronto Peace Festival, the Stones had rediscovered Chuck Berry … and the Jeff Beck Group resurrected Elvis Presley, to stunningly effective ends.

 That incarnation of the Beck Group, fronted by vocalist Rod Stewart, with Ronnie Wood a less-than-willing bassist alongside him, imploded just two weeks before it was scheduled to appear at the Woodstock Festival. Had they stayed together to play the show, popular history insists, the Jeff Beck Group would probably have stolen the show. But Beck himself doubts it.

“It just wouldn’t have worked,” says Beck. “Things in the band had deteriorated to the point of almost disappearing up their own bum. There was such a bad vibe, and I knew that if we played Woodstock and it failed, then I’d never be able to live with myself. But if we didn’t do it, we could always just guess.”

The other thing that persuaded him, he continues, was the presence of the film cameras. 

“I did not want to be preserved on film,” says Beck. “If that thing hadn’t been filmed, I’d probably have said, ‘Okay let’s do it.’ But I knew it was going to be a big-time film, and if we f**ked up and we were on film, forget it. I wasn’t strong enough to do it at that time.”

Beck broke up the band, and while a car accident kept him out of commission for the next couple of years, by 1971 he was back fronting a new Jeff Beck Group, built around drummer Cozy Powell and vocalist Bob Tench. Less supercharged than its predecessor, more prone to locking into lumpish rock/soul grooves, this lineup, too, cut two albums (1971’s Rough And Ready and 1972’s Jeff Beck Group), before shattering when Beck went off to form a group he’d first talked about three years earlier, with Vanilla Fudge mainstays Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice.

Beck, Bogert & Appice survived one album (and a fairly excruciating live set, available only on Japanese import); then, in 1975, Beck finally got to work on the album which his supporters had been demanding all along, an instrumental set that would showcase his abilities, and his alone. Produced by George Martin, Blow By Blow arrived in March 1975, and it ripped the formbook to shreds.

Nobody was as surprised as Beck. 

“I had no idea I was going to be a solo guitarist,” he confesses. “I always thought I had to have a singer, a frontman, and many people over the years have asked me where was the new Rod Stewart. After Rod left, [people said] ‘why didn’t you replace him?’ Well, it was simply because there ain’t another Rod Stewart, and to be seen to be looking for one by choosing somebody similar was just silly. Had there been someone else with their own thing going, in the way that Rod had, that would have been different. 

“But once I got on the stage and started to play lots of instrumental stuff, I found I really enjoyed it. To have people clapping me — in the past, well, were they clapping Rod or Bob [Tench] or Timmy [Bogert]?  Or were they clapping me? When you have a lead singer, you don’t know that. Unless you get a roar of approval during a guitar solo, you really don’t know who they’re clapping for.  And of course, we all wanted to be Billy Big Bananas back then.”

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The tours which followed through the mid-1970s did more than feed Beck’s ego, however.

They also pinpointed a musical direction he had never seriously considered, one in which the instrumentation was the star, and the instrumentalists were simply the vehicles which carried it to the stage. And once he was joined by Dutch percussion genius Jan Hammer, early into the Wired sessions, suddenly the sky was the limit.

Credited to Jeff Beck with the Jan Hammer Group, a 1977 live album (the adventurously titled Live) remains one of those albums which one either loves with scientific passion … or loathes with the hatred normally reserved for watching a couple of computer geeks discussing the best way to upgrade their operating system. Technically it’s brilliant. But it ain’t rock ’n’ roll.

Beck acknowledges this, but only gently. 

“The ’70s were the perfectionist times, where everybody did spend months and months of time doing ridiculous amounts of tweaking and preening the record, and it didn’t really appeal to me, that stuff,” says Beck. “We made Truth in two weeks, Beck-Ola in four days, and I do miss that kind of schedule now. I loved it, because the hysterical pressure is what’s lacking nowadays.

Everybody’s in slippers and pipes, and they can take five years over one guitar solo, and that’s not my cup of tea at all. If Little Richard had done that with ‘Lucille,’ ‘Lucille’ wouldn’t have existed. Or ‘Hound Dog.’ I know Elvis used to do 25 takes, but it was 25 takes all in one day, not spread out over six months. I like the danger and excitement elements, and that’s very hard to get.”

Three new albums over the next 10 years saw him inching back toward that kind of ideal, and the Gene Vincent tribute, Crazy Legs, at least gave the impression of manic spontaneity. But Beck is convinced that Who Else! — despite its decade-long gestation — was the album that truly returned him to basics.

“There’s more of me on Who Else! than on any other album I’d ever made,” he insists. “There was more decision making, more packing and slicing, more saying yes and no than I’ve ever done before. In the past, you see, I was playing with great players, and …” and with the specter of the Jan Hammer era again looming over his shoulder … “I was letting them have the run of the show. There’s a certain code within me; I can’t just turn around and tell them to shut up and do what I want them to.” 

But now, he could. “This time around,” he says, “it’s my turn to run things, and I’m making the most of it.” It was Beck who thought of adding a vacuum cleaner to the intro of “Psycho Sam”; Beck who came up with the 7/8 time signature which powered “Blast From The East.” But his incentives were not wholly musical. 

In an unguarded moment, he admits that money isn’t quite as plentiful as it might be; that a succession of dodgy contracts during his youth have ensured he sees very little from the succession of hits (and subsequent hit compilations) he enjoyed with The Yardbirds and in the first flush of solo success. Indeed, one early contract was so lopsided that Led Zeppelin manager Peter Grant actually had it hanging on his office wall, “framed as a joke … he’s dead now, but it’s probably still lurking around somewhere, as a warning to other aspiring young musicians.”

Peter Frampton, one of Beck’s ’60s/’70s superstar contemporaries, once explained, “When you’re young, someone wants to give you money to make music — of course you’re going to say yes. You’re not thinking of this as a career; you’re not thinking, ‘Ooh, will I get paid for these records when I’m old and gray?’ And neither were the people you were signing with. It was something which was happening at the time, in the moment; nobody knew that in 30, 40 years time, people would be reissuing all those records on CD, and if you’d told them, they wouldn’t have believed you.  Now, of course, it’s happening, and people are making money off those records, and it can be galling. But you have to put it behind you, and get on with what you’re doing now, making money in the present, rather than trying to live off your past.”

Wise words, and — peering out from behind a mountain of Yardbirds compilations, repackaging and recycling three years worth of devastating creativity, with very little reward for its builders — Beck not only agrees with them, he’s living them. 

“A lot of people think of me as being something from the ’60s,” he explained, and he hasn’t played with The Yardbirds since 1966. “I doubt I’d even remember how to, anymore. I’ve moved on so many times since then.” Who Else! was the sound of him moving on even further.

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