The first time I worked with Jeff Beck was at the Rainforest Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall in 2002. Once again, I was the talent manager; this meant I was responsible for delivering the talent to the stage, ready to perform. My responsibilities might include me hiring an army of talent wranglers, making travel arrangements and dressing room assignments, renting gear and rehearsal spaces, lining up catering, hair and make-up, and whatever else the artists needed to be ready to do what they are known for doing (and, yes, that “whatever else” sometimes included things that people do not like to see written about themselves, but I don’t give those stories away. You’re going to have to ply me with bourbon to hear some of them).
That year at the Rainforest Benefit, we were paying tribute to George Harrison; Jeff Beck was brought in as the “stunt guitarist.” It was actually Eric Clapton who played the legendary guitar solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (come to think of it, why wasn’t Clapton brought in to play it? Now I’m wondering if they even asked him) but, for my money, Jeff Beck was a much better choice. Clapton had been the big sensation first in London and emerged as the greater celebrity but I always thought Jeff Beck was a more interesting musician. He was always going down roads that no one expected him to take. He was always true to the musician he started out as but he made new things a part of that. I had been a superfan since I started playing my sister’s “Rough And Ready” and “Wired” LPs on my parents’ Garrard turntable in the Seventies. Clapton was a genuine 1966 badass (not Jimi, but a badass nonetheless) but Jeff Beck was looking beyond. That was always what I dug.
So, my routine for major events like the Rainforest Benefit was to show up around 10:00 am while the stage was still being set, several hours before any rehearsals or soundchecks would be taking place. I did this for a few reasons. First of all, I needed to make sure that everything we had planned was actually taking shape: all of the vendors were showing up, and they were able to load in and set up as I had planned.
But at Carnegie Hall, there was another reason to be nice and early: that place is a maze backstage! In the movie Spinal Tap, there’s a scene where the guys wander endlessly around the bowels of a theater, trying to find the stage (“Hello Cleveland!”). Well, that place was nothing compared to Carnegie Hall; there are doors that lock behind you, elevators that are comically slow, and if you need to get to the stage from the 6th-floor rehearsal room while they’re moving a piano? Let’s just say you’re not getting to the stage. No matter how many times I have worked there (and it was quite a few by this time), before I am leading star talent ANYWHERE, I am going to walk it 15 times in every possible direction and know in my bones exactly where I am and where I am going and how to get there.
I walk in the stage door and the first thing I do is go see what’s doing backstage. There before me is what we call “guitar world.” The guitar techs always set up an area offstage with their workbench, tools, and all of the guitars that are going to be played that night, neatly arranged in sequence in elegant racks. There’s Sting’s guy, Danny, and talking to him is… Jeff Beck! What the hell is HE doing here? His call time isn’t for hours.
“Mitch, you’re here! You wanna take Jeff up to his dressing room?”
Now, I am used to dealing with people whom I see on magazine covers; that is what I do for a living. There is no room in it for being starstruck and, quite honestly, I am so accustomed to doing this job that that almost never happens. It “almost” never happens but it’s happening right now: that’s Jeff Beck! And you know who Jeff Beck looks like? That guy looks JUST LIKE JEFF BECK! I mean, that’s really him! And he practically looks like a cartoon drawing of himself. He is the perfect walking, talking caricature of a rok star, standing there right before me. And you know who else he looks exactly like? I mean “exactly?” Speaking of Spinal Tap, Jeff Beck is a dead ringer for Nigel Tufnel, Christopher Guest’s character in that movie. Jeff Beck IS Nigel Tufnel! I mean, there he is! “It goes to eleven.” That is HIM! (This cannot be a coincidence).
“Huh? Yeah, of course. Come with me, Jeff. I don’t know if hospitality is set up yet but if you want a bite…” Jeff Beck and I walk around the corner to the stairs but there are no stairs there. There’s a cinderblock wall. I practically bump into it, nose first. I turn around, scrambling in my mind for some semblance of an explanation for why I just walked our star talent into a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. Before I can even speak, Jeff Beck says to me,
“Oh, we ARE having a Spinal Tap moment!”
And he roars a mighty larf, and, of course, so do I. And at that point, I really didn’t need to explain anything. My new pal Jeff had just dispelled any shred of work anxiety or hierarchy. We were in this together and he had no concern that I wasn’t going to get us out of it in short order; he is perfectly happy to follow me and is glad to have had that laugh. And I wonder to myself, “Did he just pull that Spinal Tap thing out of my brain? Or is Jeff Beck permanently in ‘a Spinal Tap Moment’? Or is this just, as Sun Ra would say, ‘Fate in a pleasant mood’?” No time to stop to find out.
We head up to the dressing room but there’s no one else around. I think he just wanted to see where it was and put his stuff down because 5 minutes later he is back in guitar world, geeking out with JD and Danny and the other stage techs who were just as happy to hang out with him as he was to be with them.
Jeff Beck hung out with us all day, just one of the fellers, eating the crew meals (a vegetarian, as I recall), and talking about the things musicians talk about backstage. One subject that he loved talking about was cars. Jeff Beck was a serious gearhead! I mean, very serious. He rebuilt his own American roadsters in his own garage in the English countryside. To hear him talk about it, it didn’t sound as if he was very good at it but he sure did love it. Maybe the cars he had were simply difficult to maintain but, as he described it, he spent a lot of time at it and the cars still spent more time in his garage than they ever did on the road. There was one particular car that was really vexing him at the moment.
I am realizing that backstage is his happy place. Here he is in Midtown Manhattan—the whole world at his feet—and he doesn’t want to be anywhere other than in this dimly lit chamber full of guitar strings and tuners with guys wearing black. He is wearing the same black t-shirt and camouflage pants now that he will wear on stage 12 hours from now. Who does that? Who shows up at Carnegie Hall as a featured performer in their stage clothes? It’s like an NFL player going to the stadium in his team uniform. No one does that!
The guitar he is tuning is, per his contract rider, a Jeff Beck signature model Fender Stratocaster in Surf Green that we had brought over, right off the shelf (yes, the guitar you can buy today at Sam Ash is pretty much the exact one that he played in concert, complete with the thin rosewood neck and tremolo bar). Who does that? Who shows up at Carnegie Hall as a featured performer without their own instrument? No one does that! Any rok star worth his salt is going to have a road case with half a dozen custom instruments and a technician to prepare them. Jeff Beck just walked in, by himself: no instrument, no wardrobe, no tech, no tour manager no security staff (Elton John, are you listening?). No one does that!
So what does Jeff Beck know that they don’t know? He knows that he can play circles around all of them. He knows that the sound (for all the claims the manufacturers may make in their expensive advertisements) is not in the instrument; it’s in his fingers, and wherever he goes, he brings THEM with him. You just cannot be any more real or direct or forthright about who you are than this man is.
As far as all that responsibility I had as talent manager, Jeff Beck practically did my job for me. When I needed him, he was standing there in the wings, ready to go. And he had been there all day long. In all the years and the dozens and dozens of shows and hundreds of artists for whom I have done that job, he might be the only one that I never had to think about for one second.
Jeff Beck went out on stage twice that night, once to play “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” and once to play “Purple Haze.” What I heard in those moments was that all of that backstage blather fell away and he poured all of himself completely into what he was doing in the music. Those few moments were why he had come all this way from his quiet garage in Blighty. It was well worth it. It was just about the only thing that was.