Jeff Beck Quotes

#1. I wanted to be in Rolling Stone number two with a tomorrow feel to it, like an experimental Rolling Stones with Jagger singing.

#2. I play the way I do because it allows me to come up with the sickest sounds possible. That's the point now isn't it?

#3. By far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt ... Django was quite superhuman, There's nothing normal about him as a person or a player.

#4. 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.

#5. There was mass hysteria in the Chess Recording Studio when I did the "Shapes of Things" solo ... they weren't expecting it, and it was just some weird mist coming from the East out of an amp.

#6. London is a dead duck, as far as innovative new music is concerned, unless you want to have your head blown off with some outrageous, rubbish, pounding dance music.

#7. My first wife said, 'It's either that
guitar or me,' you know
and I give
you three guesses which one went.

#8. 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.

#9. At the end of the day, there are a hell of a lot of notes being played out there and I defy the average middle-American or the average punter to differentiate between them.

#10. Can't stand it. Too many amps, too much volume, it's just flat-out ear assault. Speedy guitars leave me not feeling detached but physically upset. When you think of all the subtleties that were built into the guitar and amps for you to discover they completely cover the whole lot with a rack of effects. The guitar doesn't need that.

#11. I play purely from the heart, y'know, and so if it doesn't work the first couple of hours, forget it.

#12. It's a diabolical business. I can't imagine how hellish it must be to be hounded like Amy Winehouse and people like that. I have a little peripheral place on the outskirts of celebrity, when I go to premieres and that sort of stuff, which is as close as I want to get.

#13. The Strat covers the complete spectrum of human emotion .. the tremolo enables you to do anything - you can hit any note known to mankind

#14. Nowadays music is as disposable as a McDonald's wrapper.

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

#16. 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.

#17. I've never stuck around long enough to know if anyone would miss me. That's rock 'n' roll, though. Here today, gone tomorrow.

#18. A lot of solos I hear sound so incredible, but they sound like somebody practicing. They sound a bit soulless - fiery, but at the same time, lacking in spirit and soul.

#19. 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.

#20. Things turn out better by accident sometimes. But you can't organize accidents.

#21. I don't understand why some people will only accept a guitar if it has an instantly recognizable guitar sound. Finding ways to use the same guitar people have been using for 50 years to make sounds that no one has heard before is truly what gets me off.

#22. 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?

#23. I do hear snippets on the radio. I do hear a little bit of me, sometimes great chunks of me. But I have to take that as a compliment; there's no way you can get sour grapes about that. But if somebody starts taking your whole new thing lock, stock, and barrel, and do their own version of it before you do it, that's not on.

#24. As long as there's something original going on, that's all that matters.