You Shook Me - Jeff Beck Group
Here's why the guys in the playground were being beaten up (see last post). They had bought Jeff Beck's first post-Yardbirds album, "Truth" as well as his following LP "Beckola". The first was credited to Jeff Beck as a solo album, but the second was labelled as recorded by the Jeff Beck Group. As the personnel was the same for both, and as they operated very much as an actual rock band rather than a bunch of session musicians backing Beck, it is only right that nowadays the record is usually credited to the group rather than considered a solo album. The line-up was retrospectively stellar: Beck - lead guitar, Rod Stewart - lead vocals, Ronnie Wood - bass and assorted guitars, Nicky Hopkins - piano, and Micky Waller - drums.
The people doing the beating up just didn't know and wouldn't listen. They didn't know that Stewart and Wood, by then idolised as members of the Faces, had been in the group; they didn't know that "Truth" and "Beckola" had effectively laid the template for "heavy" rock; they didn't know that Beck's hard guitar / vocal bounce-off technique and interplay with Stewart's vocals had found its way into the Page/Plant combo, nor did they know that on these two discs Beck had pushed the limits of what the electric guitar could do further than anyone apart from Jimi Hendrix. In fact they didn't know a lot. and probably still don't.
"Truth" was released in 1968, "Beckola" in '69, followed in 1970 by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath's first albums as well as Deep Purple's "In Rock".
Here's track 4, side one from "Truth", a Muddy Waters cover, heavy, dirty and grungy as they come, with loads of defining wah wah, feedback and use of the fuzzbox from Beck. There's exquisite piano from Nicky Hopkins along with some scorching organ from John Paul Jones, keyboardist and bass player for Led Zeppelin who, significantly, were to cover the same track on their eponymous first album a few months later. Beck at his early best.
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