R.I.P: Jeff Beck, Iconic Rock Guitarist

Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday at a hospital near his home at Riverhall, a rural estate in southern England. He was 78, reports the NY Times.

The cause was bacterial meningitis, Melissa Dragich, his publicist, said.

During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking.

In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds, to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution.

Three years later, when he formed his own band, later known as the Jeff Beck Group — along with a then little-known singer, Rod Stewart, and the equally obscure Ron Wood on bass — the weight of the music created an early template for heavy metal. Specifically, the band’s 1968 debut, “Truth,” provided a blueprint that another former guitar colleague from the Yardbirds, Jimmy Page, drew on to devise Led Zeppelin several months later.

In 1974, when Beck began his solo career with the “Blow by Blow” album, he refigured the essential formula of that era’s fusion movement, tipping the balance of its influences from jazz to rock and funk and in the process creating a sound that was both startlingly new and highly successful. “Blow by Blow” became a Billboard Top Five, a platinum hit and his most popular work.

Along the way, Beck helped either pioneer, or amplify, some important technical innovations on his instrument. He elaborated the use of distortion and feedback effects, earlier explored by Pete Townshend; intensified the effect of bending notes on the guitar; and widened the range of expression that could be coaxed from devices amended to the guitar like the whammy bar.

Drawing on such techniques, Beck could weaponize his strings to hit like a stun gun, or caress them to express what felt like a kiss. His work had humor too, with licks that could cackle and leads that could tease.