YEAR
2009
INDUCTED BY
Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin, The Yardbirds)
CATEGORY
Performers
His urgent, in-your-face guitar was so expressive that he didn’t need a singer.
Double-inductee Jeff Beck is a visionary, an innovator and a true virtuoso. He built his first guitar at age 15 and learned the instrument inside and out before mastering everything from heavy metal to jazz.
Jeff Beck
HALL OF FAME
ESSAY
By Rob Bowman
It’s a Sunday evening in the fall of 1983. Jeff Beck is in a studio at WNEW-FM , at the time New York City’s hip ‘n’ cool powerhouse rock-radio beam. He is finishing up his shared hour oh the nationally syndicated call-in show Rockline, with Rod Stewart on the West Coast.
They will meet the following year for a Stewart tour with Beck as special guest, reprising their potent union in the Jeff Beck Group from 1967 to 1969. Lest we forget, it was Beck who emerged from the Yardbirds after leaving his six-string stamp on blues rock, pop, psychedelia, and hard rock with the band to all but burn heavy metal onto the musical map with his eponymous group (contemporaneously with Jimmy Page and the far more widely credited Led Zeppelin).
