Jeff Beck - the genius lead guitar player from The Yardbirds, The Jeff Beck Group and decades of solo work - passed away Tuesday, January 10th. A statement from his family read;

“After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday. His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.”

There’s some poetry to the fact that Jeff Beck passed away in the same week as Mike Parks. Beck was Parks’ favorite guitar player of all time, and while Mike preceded Jeff in death by five years I bet Mike’s been waiting to play with him all this time. (It’s been half a decade; I bet Mike could only jam with Jimi Hendrix and Fred “Sonic” Smith for so long before they began to repeat riffs.)

Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds was the first album I bought with my own money. (My previous LP’s - starting with Glad All Over by The Dave Clark Five - were Xmas & birthday presents from my family). I bought it sometime in late 1965 when I was thirteen, with the 50 cents an hour I made working at the Dairy Queen across the street from my house on Sullivant Avenue on the West Side of Columbus, Ohio. I own it, play it and love it to this day.

The Yardbirds all but invented “underground” music in 60’s rock & roll. It’s hard to imagine this L.A. garage-band tune (and a dozen others like it) without the influence of Jeff Beck and The Yardbirds providing the kindling. It’s further hard to imagine the success of Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience without the Yardbirds’ groundwork. And Led Zeppelin? Would they have existed if Jimmy Page hadn’t played with and replaced Jeff Beck in The Yardbirds? I dunno.

By the way, while I’m thinking about it; every one of these songs display the brutal/beautiful brevity demanded of British Invasion singles by 60’s AM radio.

This 1966 American T.V. appearance of the Beck/Page Yardbirds inexplicably cuts off at the 2-minute mark, but I found I still had to include it.

Of course there’s much, much more to Jeff Beck’s career than the 1960’s and The Yardbirds. He kept playing to the very end, most recently on a tour with Johnny Depp. (Huh? What?) This is the period I know the best, though, so that’s what I went with. If any of our other Pencil Storm contributors would like to continue the lineage, please feel free. For now, I just wanna say, R.I.P. Jeff Beck. And play on.

Ricki C. turned 70 years old sometime last summer. His first favorite rock & roll song was Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue” when he was five years old, riding in his sainted Italian father’s Oldsmobile. He figures his last favorite rock & roll song will be by either Elliott Murphy or Ian Hunter, sometime in the future.