The legendary drummer Jeff Beck couldn’t get enough of: “Just complete lunacy”

Posted On February 10, 2025February 10, 2025

Boasting the most impressive revolving door of guitarists in rock, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck all spent foundational years in the UK psychedelic group The Yardbirds before embarking on greater band and solo success.

Beck was no exception. As Clapton joined Cream and Page started dreaming up the Led Zeppelin stadium monster, The Jeff Beck Group began cutting a series of influential hard blues, its first incarnation featuring a pre-spandex Rod Stewart and future Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood.

Beck’s Yardbird tenure was brief but successful, recording most of their Top 40 hits during his 20-month role as lead guitar. This creative energy drew in a winning ensemble of collaborators for the instrumental ‘Beck’s Bolero’, the B-side to 1967’s ‘Hi Ho Silver Lining’ and later featured on Truth, Page on 12-string guitar, John Paul Jones on bass, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and, uncredited due to contractual reasons, The Who’s powerhouse drummer and legendary hedonist Keith Moon, arriving to the studio disguised in sunglasses and a Russian cossack hat.

While rating Mick Waller’s Truth drum work highly, in particular the heavy roll of the album’s opener ‘Shapes of Things’, Beck was envious of the sheer charisma Moon contributed to The Who’s live shows. The pair became close friends, meeting at London’s Speakeasy Club around the corner from Carnaby Street’s swinging zenith, and further bonding was had driving Moon’s lipstick pink ’62 Rolls-Royce around the city til 7.00 in the morning, yelling at policeman via his inbuilt microphone and 12-volt amplifier, seriously expensive gear at the time for such frivolous hijinks.

“Yeah. I couldn’t get enough of him,” Beck told Guitar World in 2009. “A day would go by in half an hour when you were with ‘Moonie’. Just complete lunacy and genuine organic humour. Your jaw would ache from laughing. How (The Who) put up with him for as long as they did, I’ll never know.”

Moon’s dallying with Beck around the recording of ‘Beck’s Bolero’ came at a time of internal fracture that nearly threatened The Who’s demise. Not only was their drummer surreptitiously lending his percussion prowess to other projects without the courtesy of Who approval, but the instrumental’s raucous swagger strutted a little too close to Pete Townsened‘s well-honed hard rock territory he’d keenly cultivated.

Sniffily referring to Beck and Page as “flashy little guitarists of very little brain”, Moon’s orbiting of Beck’s studio ensemble was perceived by Townsend as a slight ‘fuck you’ to The Who, a tease to his day job band illustrating clearly his disgruntlement.

Bygones became bygones, Moon jumped back into The Who’s fold and dropped a string of highly successful albums across the next decade til dying three weeks after the release of 1978’s Who Are You. Moon’s feral mania and wild card energy were immortalised on ‘Beck’s Bolero’, responsible for the number’s memorable shriek before it speeds up: “…he swiped one of the snare mics, and you don’t hear the snare from that point on,” Beck told Rolling Stone in 2018. “I just remember this monstrous gargoyle scream, thinking, ‘That’s what we want. That’s exactly it.’ It was just two takes, and we had it.”

Related Topics