A COMPOSITE SOLID-BODY ELECTRIC GUITAR, STRATOCASTER

This guitar was another gift to Jeff Beck from old friend and pickup guru Seymour W. Duncan in around 1984, put together from ‘the best bits he had lying about’. With a body and neck of around the same vintage and Seymour Duncan pickups, this ‘Frankie’ – as longtime Beck road manager Al Dutton referred to many of Seymour’s creations – did not faze Beck from the point of view of originality. Andy Roberts, Beck’s then guitar tech, told journalist Douglas Noble in 1993 that they often experimented with different necks. 'Jeff's got a lovely old 1960 mustard yellow Strat but it's not the original neck,' says Andy. 'He'll change necks from one guitar to another to see if it performs any better - he usually does it to put on a thicker neck.’ Duncan confirmed to us that he remembered putting the guitar together for Jeff and even that he re-painted it in his garage. The nitro paint (which had been phased out of use by then) was mixed specially for him and had not been easy to procure, so he remembered it well.

The guitar proved to be a hit with Beck and was taken to Japan in 1986 for a series of shows played with Carlos Santana and Steve Lukather, along with a Graffiti Yellow Strat and his ‘workhorse’, a 1957 Telecaster with dirty white finish, also put together by Duncan and which Jeff had owned since the ARMS tour some three years earlier (see lot 31). A shot of Jeff playing the mustard yellow / caramel Strat slung from a lightning motif strap appeared on the cover of a bootleg album entitled 'Thank The Lord', a live recording of the shows Beck played at Nippon Budokan Hall, Tokyo, Japan, on 10 and 11 June 1986.

In early 1989 Beck guested on Lenny Henry's solo comedy tour at the Hackney Empire (Lenny Henry: Live & Unleashed). The short appearance saw him playing 12-bar blues on this Strat in a skit alongside Henry performing as ‘Lowdown Fingerlickin' Dirty Houndog Smith’ singing 'The Blues Ya'All'. At around the same time, Beck teamed up with drummer Terry Bozzio and keyboard player Tony Hymas to work on a new solo album – his first since Flash. Recorded at Jimmy Page’s residential Sol Studios in Cookham, Surrey, the album took eight months to write – reportedly because Hymas brought a chessboard with him – and was finally released in October 1989. The album – Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop – was a critical success, with many viewing it as a return to form and originality drawing from all his past influences and some new ones. The album’s stand-out final track ‘Where Were You’, which saw Beck reaching new heights of sonic beauty achieved through a combination of harmonics, skilful manipulation of the volume control knob and tremolo bar, was singled out for particular praise. With no singer in the line-up, Beck effectively transformed his guitar into a voice, producing emotional and hauntingly ethereal sounds unlike anything ever heard before from a guitar. Reviewing the album for Guitar Player, Joe Gore gushed that it was "The work of a player who has integrated technique, emotion, spontaneity and attitude so completely that you can't begin to separate them. It's a superb rock instrumental record, one of the best ever. This album will remind you of everything that's soulful, cool and honest about our instrument."

In an interview with Steve Rosen in 1989, following the release of Guitar Shop, Beck told him that ‘90% of the album was done on a Strat, but there was one track with a vintage Tele on it. But that's about it. There may be a few snippets of a Jackson to get some high tones. I think the tail-out guitar solo on Guitar Shop was done with a Jackson. The Strat is a Seymour, which he gave me; one of his concoctions. He put it together out of the best bits he had lying about. It had Seymour pickups on it, but that's about all I know.’

Beck’s ability to create such miraculous sounds from a vintage Strat were met with astonishment. Interviewed by Scott Isler for Musician shortly after the album’s release, Beck touched up on the change in his technique and the challenges that creating ‘Where Were You’ had entailed: ‘That's quite revolutionary for me: to play the tune using the arm. You've just gotta make sure that you've got just the right amount of up motion so that it bottoms out before you go too far. It's all in the wrist… It sings. It's like whistling, singing. But it was difficult doing that. On the unaccompanied first sequence of melodies we had to get rid of [whistles melody followed by the sound of amplifier static]. It was heartbreaking. The soul was there, the performance was there, but we couldn't use it; the guitar was saying another song underneath it! We used gates and all kinds of tricks to try to get rid of that. I tried swelling every note with the volume control, which would get rid of it, but none of the lads liked it; they wanted the full-bodied note which sounded much more majestic.

Later talking to Douglas Noble, responding to a question about how he got the guitar sound on ‘Where Were You’, Beck replied ‘Umm, that's just false harmonics, as I mentioned earlier. And uhh, I started fooling around with them and on a certain echo plate they sound incredible - a really, like, 'holly' sound... And uhh... That... I could hear something special coming and Tony is obviously a world class classical pianist... And he hears chords that I would never have dreamt of... Once I see the thing taking shape you've got this two man kind of thing happening. And Terry would join in and say, 'That's a better note - hit that one!' So it was a three-way thing but nevertheless I had to come up with all the phrasing because I'm actually responsible for what the harmonics will do, you know, and there's no limit to what you can do because what note doesn't exist naturally you can bend it with the arm and that ain't easy because you've got to anticipate how much to bend before you hit the harmonic. Beck continued that it was an extremely difficult track to capture and ‘Now it's done it's easy to copy but when we were writing it all the different phrases were driving me mad because... 'Where did I bend that? Did I flat that first before hitting it?' And so the tape would be running and we got about four or five reels of tape, multitrack, somewhere, somehow.’