Jeff Beck Was That Good

Emerging from the British art school scene of the early 1960s, Beck first joined the Yardbirds, instantly transforming them from slightly earnest suburban mimics of American blues into a band with a progressive edge that included otherworldly, sitar-like guitar solos, among a host of other weirdly insinuating effects that ran the gamut from the sound of the factory bench-press to Gregorian chanting. Beck did all that. With him in their ranks, the Yardbirds achieved the seemingly impossible and actually became cool. That led Michelangelo Antonioni to cast them as the house band in his sardonic salute to Swinging London, 1966’s Blow Up.