I only had one meaningful encounter with Jeff Beck, but it was a memorable one — and it involved Stevie Ray Vaughan as well.

In 1990, Matt Resnicoff and I were assigned a Guitar Player cover story on the Jeff Beck/Stevie Ray Vaughan tour. We were the two young guys on staff, eager to prove ourselves. Hard to believe, but music magazines had actual budgets in those days — enough to send me to NYC, where Matt lived, to interview the duo while they were in town for their two Madison Square Garden shows.

Despite promises from the record label and management, the pair basically just blew us off. Matt was far more aggressive than I about pursuing unauthorized interviews. (Once, after being declined an Eddie Van Halen face-to-face, he pursued Ed into the mens room and hurled questions while Ed stood at the urinal.) So we hung out in the lobby of the guitarists’ Midtown hotel. We saw Beck walk by with an attractive young woman at his side, but there was no interviewing to be done that day. Or the next one.

The label, Epic, offered to send us to the next show in Worcester, MA. Even better, we could hitch a ride back to NYC afterwards on Stevie Ray’s tour bus!

Alas, blown off again — and there was no one from the label or management to secure our ride. We’d returned our rental car, so we were pretty much stranded. We somehow forced our way to SRV’s bus and explained our situation to the road manager, who of course knew nothing about the supposed arrangement. But he kindly let us ride with Stevie Ray and the band overnight. Our interactions with SRV were minimal. Everyone was watching some mediocre western on TV, and one by one folks slipped off to their bunks. As the last person in the main lounge, I flicked off the TV. An irate Stevie Ray poked his head out the star lounge, asking who the hell had turned off his movie, which he was watching on a second screen.

“Sorry!” I squeaked.

The Epic publicist then offered to send us to the Cincinnati show. By now Matt and I were rather stressed out. We’d heard rumors that Beck could be an ornery interview, and Matt was spinning fantasies about potential disasters to come.

“I can’t believe anyone would be so stupid as to ask that idiotic question,” Matt said, imagining one possible scenario.

“Come on,” I said. “He’s probably not going to say that, and he’s definitely not going to talk in that Nigel Tufnel accent you’re using.”

The upside of all this was getting to watch the show up close — four times! Don’t hate me, but I confess that the SRV performances got old for me. The show varied little from night to night. And while I have vast respect for his musical skill and ability to touch so many hearts, I’ve always had limited patience for by-the-book blues licks.

Beck was different. This won’t be news to anyone fortunate enough to have seen him in concert, but he was no mere virtuoso. His playing was positively supernatural. He seemed to pull each note down from somewhere on high, each one requiring a mighty effort. (I hope it’s obvious that I’m not talking about any technical shortcomings on his part.) I’m not a woo woo-type person, but I swear, it was like watching Sisyphus push his rock, or Prometheus stealing fire, or some such mythological shit. He was the least complacent and most suspenseful guitarist I’ve ever witnessed. And for me, nothing on his records comes close to capturing that live energy.

At the time, his latest record was Guitar Shop, and the highlight of each set was his rendition of the album’s “Where Were You,” inspired by the La Mystère des Voix Bulgares, a 1975 album of Bulgarian folk singing. Each performance was unique, and each time he’d summon different versions of those impossibly high harmonics and that improbable sustain. His body coiled with the effort, as if he were in constant danger of falling to his death from a high wire. It was otherworldly. We often say virtuosos make difficult tasks look easy, but Beck made impossible tasks look really fucking hard. (And no — watching up close up didn’t demystify his technique in the slightest.)

Finally, Beck, Vaughan, Matt and I met in a nondescript Cincinnati hotel room. They were both perfectly nice, and Matt’s interview predictions were happily unfounded — sort of. Beck, fit and youthful-looking, pretty much WAS Nigel. If Christopher Guest didn’t derive his Nigel character directly from Beck, well, that performance was an uncanny coincidence.

You can find the interview online by googling “Beck Vaughan Guitar Player Interview 1990,” though GP has split the interview into irritating little sections. I have a difficult time revisiting my work, be it words or music, so I haven’t looked at it in 33 years. I remember feeling that the story was a bit flat simply because the two players seemed to have genuine respect for each other, and there was a lot of sincere but unexciting “No, you’re the man!” energy.

I was struck by Beck’s humility. He said that the experience of jamming with Hendrix was “awful” because it made him feel “like a peanut.” Jeff professed astonishment that Jimi seemed to admire his playing in return. He sorely regretted never having spoken to his hero Cliff Gallup. He said he’d have been satisfied just to hear his voice, even if he only said “fuck off.”

Beck reiterated what he said in so many interviews: He just wasn’t that into guitar. He compared himself negatively to Jimi, Steve Ray, and Buddy Guy, players who, he felt, lived and breathed the instrument. He said he merely “picked it up and played sometimes,” and that he felt guilty about that. Beck’s true passions were his hot rods. But perversely, the facts that he wasn’t obsessed with guitar and that he seldom, if ever, practiced only add to his mystique.

The best obit I’ve read since getting the sad news yesterday appeared in the Guardian. It quotes what was probably the most significant passage from our interview: Beck’s statement that “I shouldn’t have done Blow by Blow.” The Guardian quotes make it sound as if he was uncomfortable in that jazz-fusion format, even though the album was his greatest commercial success. True, no doubt! But I got the impression that he was mostly mortified about being immortalized in a cover image wearing those flared trousers.

We kibitzed for a few minutes after the interview. For some reason, Jamie Lee Curtis’s name came up. (Maybe someone had seen the then-recent A Fish Called Wanda.) I’d read somewhere that Curtis had pursued future husband Christopher Guest after falling in love with his Nigel character. Beck hadn’t heard this. “Oh my god,” he moaned. “That exquisite creature! And to think that she could have had the real thing!” (So yeah, he was indirectly acknowledging the Nigel/Jeff parallels.)

One grim aspect of working in music journalism for decades is the sheer number of encounters with artists who are no longer with us. I sometimes think of all the departed greats I had a chance to speak with: Ray Charles, Ennio Morricone, Bowie, Dr. John, Sonny Sharrock, Leon Russell, and on and on. Recalling my brief encounters with Beck and Vaughan evokes sadness and gratitude in equal measure.

I’ve been wanting to try this A/B test for ages. I recorded my lipstick-tube “parts” Strat/ Then I replaced the MIM Fender neck with an aluminum neck from Alef Guitars before playing the same music through the same signal chain. The sound contrast is dramatic, consistent, and repeatable.

Is an aluminum neck for you? That’s a subjective call. It makes tones tighter and brighter, possibly at the expense of some midrange warmth. Since the EQ curve produced by the aluminum neck looks an awful lot like EQ adjustments I commonly make while mixing, I love the results.

The feel is equally subjective, but I love that as well. It’s almost surreally smooth and consistent.

What are your impressions?

A bright moment in a dark year was being asked to join Another Night on Earth, an international collective of electric guitarists performing classical music.

They say you’re a lucky musician if you get to work with players who are better than you. If this is true, I’m really frickin’ lucky.

Another Night on Earth (ANOE) is the brainchild of Heiko Ossig, a renowned concert guitarist who teaches of the University of Music and Theater in Hamburg, Germany. There he created the innovative Guitar Lab, where students meld traditional classical guitar approaches with modern technology. Ossig invited American composer/guitarist and Princeton University music professor Steven Mackey as a guest lecturer. (Mackey is almost certainly the world’s leading exponent of employing electric guitar in modern classical composition.) When the pandemic made that visit impossible, Ossig launched this project as an alternative.

In addition to Ossig and Mackey, the group includes six distinguished musicians: 

• David Robertson is one of America’s leading orchestral conductors. After a long tenure as music director of the St. Louis Symphony and appearances with many of the world’s leading orchestras, he now serves as the director of conducting studies at New York’s Julliard School of Music. He also wields a mean Telecaster. 

• Gretchen Menn is a California guitarist known for her virtuosity, musicality, and sheer stylistic range. A classic rock specialist, she performs with Zepparella, one of the leading Led Zeppelin tribute bands. But she also boasts a formidable classical pedigree, and she combines her influences in exciting and distinctive ways, often in ambitious extended-form compositions. 

• Italian virtuoso Daniele Gottardo boasts drop-dead technique and a phenomenally broad stylistic range. His rock shredding is second to none, but his repertoire also embraces classical music and jazz. Guitar icon Steve Vai has cited Daniele as his favorite contemporary player. 

• Korean-born classical guitarist Jiji is an assistant professor of music at Arizona State University. A tireless advocate for new music, she has premiered many works by emerging composers, often employing electric guitar. She has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and other premier classical music venues. 

• The New York Times rightly described composer/guitarist James Moore as “model new music citizen.” His career highlights include performing the music of John Zorn, George Crumb, and Steve Reich at such venues at BAM and the Barbican. He’s currently pursuing a PhD in music composition at Princeton. 

• Sometime last century Joe Gore dropped out of the PhD music composition program at UC Berkeley to play in rock bands. He went on to record and tour with Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Courtney Love, John Cale, and many other artists. He’s also a music journalist who has edited for the magazines Guitar Player and Premier Guitar.

Assembling all this was a complicated but gratifying process. I talk about it in this video chat with conductor David Robertson, who may well be the heaviest musician I’ve ever collaborated with.

Hi folks! I created this video during my initial COVID quarantine, but I cleverly forgot to post it here at tonefiend.com.

When COVID struck, I was in Mexico City, working on a MTV Unplugged special with one of my all-time favorite bands. (I can’t share the details yet.) But the project was postponed when the scope of the disaster became clear, and I rushed home. I quarantined in the studio for two weeks and recorded this.

For decades Claudio Monteverdi has always been one of my three favorite composers, along with Claude Debussy and Duke Ellington. He’s one of the most fascinating figures in music history. It’s an exaggeration to say that he invented opera, but only a slight one. Over the course of his long career, opera transformed from an avant-garde experiment among court intellectuals to a grand popular entertainment. He also composed many books of madrigals and some of the most gorgeous liturgical music ever created. He pushed the period’s musical limits on all fronts: dissonance, drama, instrumentation, structure, and psychological depth. Do yourself a favor and read up on this radical visionary!

This piece, Zefiro Torna, was originally a vocal piece, based on a poem celebrating the return of spring. (This video includes a lovely traditional performance, with a scrolling view of the score.)

When the piece was published in 1623, there wasn’t much to celebrate. Europe was decimated after the ravages of the insane international power grab known as the 30 Years War. Venice, the composer’s adopted home, had lost a third of its population to the plagues that accompanied the incessant violence. Yet it’s exceedingly upbeat music, celebrating the seasons rebirth — until toward the end, when the mood turns dismal as the poet/narrator mourns that he alone is miserable, tortured by unrequited love.

For my video I performed the vocal lines mostly on overdubbed Veillette Gryphon. It’s a small 12-string tuned an a minor 7th above standard. (That is, when I finger the piece in its original key of G, it comes out in F.) Most of the other instruments perform the continuo — that is, the bass line and chords, as indicated in ubiquitous Baroque-era shorthand.

As I write now, many months later, COVID rages worse than ever. In the intervening time I’ve returned again and again to medieval, Renaissance, and early Baroque music from times of plague. There’s something soothing about beauty born of cataclysm. It’s a tribute to the better angels of our artist nature at a time when good angels are scarce.

P.S.: That postponed Mexican project returned to life last month. It’s a fun story that I’ll share soon.