HI HO, Silver Lining

Jeff Beck had been soundly defeated in his attempts at blues-rock success. With nothing to lose, he turned to jazz-rock fusion. The result was his biggest commercial success: Blow by Blow.

- CHRIS GILL

AFTER BEING BOOTED from the Yardbirds in late November 1966, Beck formed three different bands — two iterations of the JeffBeck Group, and the power trio Beck, Bogert & Appice — that enjoyed moderate popularity primarily as touring acts. But no matter how much Beck varied his approach with the three bands, the outcome was always the same. Each managed to release two albums (in BBA’s instance a studio and a live album), but none of those records delivered any hits, and commercial success remained elusive. All three groups lasted only a few years before Beck became frustrated or disinterested in the projects and moved on.

Work on the second Beck, Bogert & Appice studio album began in January 1974, but that May, Beck pulled the plug before it was completed and disbanded the group. The guitarist had grown tired of recycling the same old blues-rock riffs and licks he’d been playing for most of his career, and realized that he needed to make a radical shift in direction, if only to preserve his own sanity. The music that excited him the most during this period came from the burgeoning jazz-rock fusion movement, and he soon found himself pulled in that direction.

Following his fusion muse, Beck recorded Blow by Blow, his first entirely instrumental solo album, which was released in March 1975. To Beck, his journey into jazz-rock fusion made perfect sense as he considered it a logical progression of rock music. “A handful of tapes knock me out,” he said in the November 1975 issue of