JEFF BECK'S TRUTH

Truth was one of the first albums I bought as a very early teenager. I can’t quite remember where I heard it but suspect that it was associated with friends at high school. What I do strongly recall, however, was how good it sounded and the almost other universe platform it operated from. Even the yin and yang features of Truth’s record sleeve with the woman’s image on black background coupled with the bare- yet eccentric- liner notes on the back left me curious and engaged. What’s more, none of my interest has waned over the fifty years since its release.

In the quick research for this posting, one thing hit me straight away. There are very little primary or secondary sources regarding the background to, or making of, Truth. In what I’ve read, Jeff Beck references it infrequently and offers little in terms of its production or intent. Other music primers either bundle Truth with Beck-Ola or hog-tie it to Led Zeppelin I to form a type of tag team release. Both strategies for description fall short due to obvious reasons.

In early 1968, Beck was forming a band that would allow him to perform and record the music that reflected his range marking. The nucleus of this band was Beck himself, Ronnie Wood, Mick Waller and Rod Stewart. Beck was already well known following his stint in The Yardbirds and a short series of ‘pretty boy’ singles heavily driven by his then producer Mickie Most. Wood, Waller and Stewart were basically newbies and not recognisable outside of London music circles.

There are differing reports on how good the band was in ‘live’ mode. They did quite a few shows around London in early 1968 followed by a quick tour of the States mid-year. Al Kooper wrote……… It was an unnerving experience to hear the Beck group. I had to leave after three numbers. The band was blowing changes, the bass player was losing time, Beck was uncomfortably and bitingly over-volumed, the singer was doing deep knee-bends holding the mike stand like a dumbbell (original, but so what.) It didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to me. (Rolling Stone; 28 September 1968). However, there are other takes that tag the ‘performance’ band as primed for world domination prior to Truth so, I guess, it’s who you listen to that counts.

One real issue was that there were no composers in the band. Unlike their contemporaries of Led Zeppelin and Cream, the Jeff Beck group couldn’t rely on inventive song writing or composition to forge a recorded identity. Jeff Beck saw himself- and still does- as more an interpreter and collaborator than a composer and, I believe, this is one of the keys to Truth and, ironically, one of the album’s greatest strengths.

The album was recorded very quickly over two two-day sessions in May 1968. The content for the album lay largely in stuff that they had played live and, with the exceptions of ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Beck’s Bolero’, it was blues-based. In fact, while song writing ‘credits’ drifted between Stewart and Beck, the real composers were B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters. I don’t mention this as a criticism but rather as a guide to the foundations of Truth.

‘Shape of Things’ is, in my opinion, the definitive version of the Yardbirds’ hit and Stewart’s basement-pitched vocals add a layer that only reinforces my assertion. ‘Let Me Love You’, ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘Blues De Luxe’ (despite the fake crowd sounds) all deliver cracker performances that take electric blues and its derivations to unfamiliar postcodes. However, there are two places on Truth that launch it towards Mars. The first is the linking of ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Rock My Plimsoul’ that opens Side 2. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a better ‘comparing’ and ‘contrasting’ of sound in music than in the deliberate sequencing of those tracks. The second instance is ‘I Ain’t Superstitious’. If you’ve never experienced it, you can’t understand what I’m talking about. It’s as gripping to listen to in 2018 as when I first heard it in late 1968.

Some pundits claim that Truth served as a prototype for heavy metal but I stand firmly in Bill Hart’s queue……. It’s blues, cranked up, distorted and filtered through a hard rock/ psychedelic lens. (The Vinyl Press; 2016) Likewise, Steve Hoffman’s assessment that while production standards may have been wanting, the album’s …..raw nature gives it attitude and identity (Jeff Beck: Album by Album; 2013) points to much greater significance.

Like most people my age, I’ve listened to thousands of albums over the decades and I reckon that there are a couple of hundred titles that are truly great. But there are a mere handful that have not only defined a genre but have explored music’s margins. Truth is one of those.