(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 11 April 2025 19:30, UK
Every artist is going to hold their music close to the chest in many respects. No one wants to find themselves handing things over to someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, so it’s important to make sure to have the right team behind you before everything ends up in shambles later down the line. Although Jeff Beck usually kept everything in-house or used the best of the best, he was aware when some tunes didn’t work out the way that he thought they should have.
Then again, Beck’s entire musical focus was based on evolution. He never wanted to spend his time playing the same old blues cliches that The Yardbirds had started with, and even when he found his own voice playing rock and roll, he always subtle hints of everything from funk to fusion jazz sprinkled into the mix when making some of his tracks. It was always rock, but ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers’ always had a slightly refined edge to it.
Granted, anything was going to sound a bit more slick in George Martin’s hands. Beck knew that he needed to work with someone who could truly bring his tunes to life, and while Martin may have been given every red flag from people in the business not to work with Beck, a lot of his tunes did end up turning out great. It sounded nothing like traditional hard rock, but Beck ha a bigger axe to grind since his other sound was stolen from under his nose.
While the original incarnation of his band with Rod Stewart produced some phenomenal work on Truth, it didn’t help when Jimmy Page came in to steal everything from right under his nose. Everything about Zeppelin’s debut felt like a more refined version of what Beck was already doing, from the way the guitars were mixed to the heavy emphasis on blues covers. And to add insult to injury, Beck already had a bit of a falling-out with another member of Zeppelin.
“He’s never spoken to me since. It was ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining.’ I did the arrangement for it and I played bass.”
John Paul Jones
Before he had properly left The Yardbirds, Beck was working on different arrangements of tunes, and commissioned Jones to make something for ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’. It sounded easy enough, but for a song that should have been the musical equivalent of the Avengers coming together, Jonesy remembered that a fracture happened between him and Beck for years afterwards.
Despite this being the time when everyone was on good terms, Jones said that he lost contact with Beck for years, saying in 1977, “I did one Jeff Beck single, and he’s never spoken to me since. It was ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining.’ I did the arrangement for it and I played bass.” Then again, when someone takes a large piece of your sound and starts noodling around with it, they won’t welcome their friends back with open arms.
If there was one silver lining to all of this, though, it’s that Beck was forced to think outside the box a bit more. No one should have been put in his position, but by branching out, he was able to create some new magic that no one imagined was there, like the strange sounds that turned up on records like Wired.
While that friction eventually became water under the bridge, it’s hard to think of ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ as both the beginning and the end for Beck and the members of Zeppelin. You can hear them all eager to branch out into different territory, but it had to hurt when the guitar genius found out his friends were copying his homework.
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