"Jeff Beck, one of the most skilled, admired and influential guitarists in rock history, died on Tuesday in a hospital near his home at Riverhall..."

"... a rural estate in southern England. He was 78. The cause was bacterial meningitis... During the 1960s and ’70s, as either a member of the Yardbirds or as leader of his own bands, Mr. Beck brought a sense of adventure to his playing that helped make the recordings by those groups groundbreaking. In 1965, when he joined the Yardbirds to replace another guitar hero, Eric Clapton, the group was already one of the defining acts in Britain’s growing electric blues movement. But his stinging licks and darting leads on songs like 'Shapes of Things' and 'Over Under Sideways Down' added an expansive element to the music that helped signal the emerging psychedelic rock revolution...."

From the NYT obituary.

My son John, on his blog Music Is Happiness, goes into detail about Beck's musicianship.

"Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down” — I had these as 45s when I was 15.  And this album... I played it endlessly when I was 14:

"'We’re afraid of everyone. Afraid of the sun!’ – seemed to Jeff and me especially profound right now, this song about isolation, fear, and existential risks to our world."

Said Johnny Depp. ("Jeff" is Jeff Beck.) Here's their cover of John Lennon's song, "Isolation," recorded last year, presented now, to "make sense of the moment or... pass the time as we endure isolation together."



The lyrics appear on screen — or you can read them here. And if you prefer to hear John, listen here. The song is from 1970, when (Wikipedia tells us), John was "disillusioned with fame" and suffering from the effects of drug use. That is, he was talking about his personal situation and his psychological woes, which are nothing like the social distancing undertaken to fight the spread of the virus. How does this song affect you now? Does it help you endure the isolation or does it make you feel the urgency to reconnect with society?

Nice paraphrase.

I like the way Instapundit paraphrased something I wrote yesterday. Really kicked it up a notch.

Kicked it up a notch. I believe in taking out clichés like that. Didn't like that I'd written "turns on a dime" in that post Instapundit paraphrases. I need to preparaphrase. I need to ask myself: What if Instapundit were lifting this and paraphrasing? Do that yourself. Be funnier, pithier, crueler. And replace all the damned clichés.

And let me take one more opportunity to reprint what George Orwell said about dying metaphors:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.

Yes, what is "kick it up a notch" even about? What's getting kicked? And what is the notch? I tend to picture a volume control knob on an amplifier — as in turn it up to 11 —  but volume control knobs don't have notches and you wouldn't kick them. I can picture beating the amplifier with one's guitar...



... but kicking, not so much. Especially kicking the volume control, which, again, has no notches.

So... help me out on this subject of what "kicking it up a notch" even means. "Turning on a dime" —  I know what that is. It's an exaggeration of the tightness of a vehicle's turning circle that takes advantage of our familiarity with dimes — circles of a particular and very small size.

Or do you think kids used to put dimes down in the street and ride their bikes and see if they could turn on them?

50 years ago this month: the first time Pete Townshend destroyed his guitar as part of an on-stage performance.

"Pete Townshend said it was an accident the first time he smashed his guitar. He was playing with The Who in a small cramped room at the Railway Hotel in Harrow, west London. The ceiling was damp with condensation, the room smoky, a smell of sweat and stale beer. The Who were playing 'Smokestack Lightning,' 'I’m a Man,' and 'Road Runner' when..."

I don't think the precise day is known, so I can't say "50 years ago today" as I normally do, and it wasn't a planned action, so this is an ambiguous milestone. Later, Townsend would do it on purpose. But even if it was intentional, it was long after the first planned performance of instrument destruction. I don't know what was the first, but Wikipedia has an article titled "Instrument destruction," which gives the honor to a performance that took place in 1956, amazingly enough, on the Lawrence Welk TV show. It was Rocky Rockwell, doing an Elvis Presley impersonation, and it looked a little something like this:



Maybe because that was comical, it shouldn't count. Rockwell wasn't sincere in his Elvisosity, so the destruction expressed only a rejection of the music he was inviting us to laugh at and reject. And they say Jerry Lee Lewis set his piano on fire in the 1950s. Charles Mingus famously got mad at someone and broke his $20,000 bass.

But there's some restriction of the definition of the feat that puts Pete Townsend first. Here's Jeff Beck aping Pete's routine in the 1966 movie "Blowup":

"Save the world! Save the world! But first … let's crush someone's dreams!"

"And whose dreams were crushed tonight? All those teen girls who dig Tim Urban, that's who."

***

Did you watch the show last night, the "American Idol Gives Back" charity night? They had a lot of big stars performing, and too bad we don't get to vote them out. They were all awful. I didn't enjoy one of them. Not Alicia Keys, not Elton John, not the Black Eyed Peas, not Jeff Beck w/ Joss Stone... not anybody. Why are they all so bad? At least the regular contestants have a reason for being as bad as they are. And, as noted, you do get to see them — all but one — rejected in the end.

"Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy, Rush, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Iron Maiden, Motorhead."

Metallica's James Hetfield, celebrating his band's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, names the artists he thinks belong there too.

Also: Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page played "Immigrant Song." Ron Wood, presenting Bobby Womack, told about the time "he and Womack hid as some Hells Angels gang members were roughing up Wilson Pickett." And Rosanne Cash said that Wanda Jackson "could really rock and still kept her femininity intact."