The friendship between Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck was enduring and genuine, and it is perhaps best summed up in the tale of a very special Fender Telecaster – one that saw use in the hands of both players and ran all the way from the Yardbirds through to Led Zeppelin. (Guitarworld)
The two players’ relationship was rooted from the beginning in the guitar. Beck’s sister was at art school in Epsom, London with Jimmy Page and saw the same burgeoning obsession in Page that she had noted in her brother.
“She came to my room one day. And said: ‘There’s a weirdo at school, he’s got a weird guitar like yours,’ and then slammed the door,” Beck told Louder(opens in new tab) in 2019. “I ran after her saying: ‘Where is he?’”
Fortunately for the fate of rock ‘n’ roll, Beck’s sister relented and took him to meet Page. “We both had homemade guitars [then], so we go back that far,” Page told Guitarist in 2014 (via MusicRadar(opens in new tab)). “When we’re seeing who’s got the closest version of My Babe by James Burton. Just two kids really enthusiastic and passionate about music and guitar playing.”
They soon became firm friends and during their teens would regularly meet to swap tips, share licks and record using a tape machine Page had been given by his mother.
In later years, Page found his way into the London studio scene and became a go-to gun-for-hire, learning much about production and arrangement in the process. In doing so, he also made a lot of connections, not least Giorgio Gomelsky, the manager of the Yardbirds – who repeatedly approached Page about joining the group.
However, the guitarist turned it down repeatedly – initially for fear of offending the band’s existing guitarist, Eric Clapton. When he was approached for a second time – in 1965, when Clapton had left the group – he recommended Gomelsky give Beck a call and, in doing so, made music history.
“[Beck] didn’t just replace Clapton,” wrote Alexis Petridis in The Guardian(opens in new tab), following Beck’s passing. “He transformed the Yardbirds, from blues purists… to a band at the vanguard of British pop’s relentless forward progress. The first single he recorded with them, Heart Full of Soul… [saw] Beck mimicking the sound of sitar – some months before the Beatles first deployed the instrument on Norwegian Wood – with a guitar played through a distortion pedal called a Tone Bender.”
For his Yardbirds material, Jeff Beck initially used a red 1963 Fender Telecaster that was owned by Gomelsky and previously played by Clapton in the band – “a terrible guitar”, as he remarked to Tony Bacon in 2005 (via Reverb(opens in new tab)) for the book Six Decades of the Fender Telecaster. Instead, he soon acquired a 1959 Blonde Telecaster with a rosewood neck from a friend called John Owen.
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