by cockroach » Mon May 24, 2010 3:19 pm
Funny thing...back in the '60's, here in Australia, for some reason, I had heard Jeff Beck on records well before I finally heard Clapton, and when Cream came out, I thought "Well, compared with Beck, and Hendrix, who had also just bobbed up, what's all this fuss about 'Clapton is God?"
I always thought that for white chaps playing blues, or something similar, people like Peter Green, Mike Bloomfield and Paul Kossoff did it better for me...(was it a coincidence that these three were all Jewish chaps? Not being offensive here by the way) And why bother with Eric, Stevie Ray Vaughn and other 'blooze' guitarists, when you could hear BB, Albert and Freddie King, Buddy Guy and others from whom the Erics and Stevies pinched a lot of their licks and sounds?
Jeff Beck on the other hand seemed to me to take the blues stuff and hotrodded it up with his own weird sense of fun and style..and imagination. He's still a big fave to me since the Yardbirds. To me, Jimmy Page seemed to try to do what Jeff has done, but not as well...
I also have that DVD of Jeff at Ronnie Scott's, and to me, he absolutely left Eric in the shade.