Jeff Beck

Musician

1944-06-24

Quotes by Jeff Beck

• My first wife said, 'It's either thatguitar or me,' you know -- and I giveyou three guesses which one went.

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• My first wife said, 'It's either thatguitar or me,' you know -- and I giveyou three guesses which one went.

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• I was really small when jazz broke through in England and I can still remember sneaking off to the living room to listen to it on the radio - much to my parent's disapproval.

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• Sometimes when I do an overdub solo, they'll keep four or five of my attempts and then mix the bits that they like to make a solo up out of them. It's not against the rules, really - I can learn my own solos, then. But that's the whole beauty of multi-track recording, isn't it?

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• I don't care about the rules. In fact, if I don't break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I'm not doing my job properly.

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• Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn't do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos - Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn't a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.

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• If you were to plot my success or failure, it goes, it very seldom stays on a high plateau.

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• I do a very poor man's pedal steel on the Stratocaster.

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• I have to have people around who are of a certain strain of humour. I can't deal with people who have no humour.

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• The fun that I've had needs to be seen on the screen. I like the thought of a bunch of people laughing at what I laughed at - because my life is surreal, completely wacko.

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• The only way you can get Scotty Moore's tone is with a big hollowbody guitar.

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• I try to become a singer. The guitar has always been abused with distortion units and funny sorts of effects, but when you don't do that and just let the genuine sound come through, there's a whole magic there.

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• It's easy to hurl abuse at those awards ceremonies like the Oscars and all that, which we tend to do. We tend to vent our anger at things which we feel are unjust or undeserving. But when you're the recipient, it makes it a lot different.

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• The Les Paul was more challenging because of the weight of it, but the tone was there that the Fender will never have and vice versa. So you have to make a decision as to what you're going to have as your main instrument. After seeing Hendrix, I thought, 'I'll stick with the 'Strat.'

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• If I'm on form and I'm not being bothered too much by mental problems or whatever, I can whip out something good. That's why I've done quite a few overdubs for Tina Turner and things like that, because even before she made this comeback I said yes to her, just because I love Tina Turner.

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• I like the wildness of Buddy Guy.

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• I cherish my privacy, and woe betide anyone who tries to interfere with that.

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• When they said there was gonna be about 100,000 people at Woodstock, and it went up to 200,000, I just blanked off and thought, 'I don't want to do this.' If they're filming it, it's too nerve-racking.

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