Despite building his early reputation on Gibson Les Pauls, Jeff Beck became one of the most celebrated Stratocaster players from the 1970s onward. But his affinity for Fender’s flagship model didn’t always translate into gentle treatment.
Dweezil Zappa learned that firsthand when he attended a costume party at the virtuoso’s house and saw a priceless vintage Strat damaged before his eyes.
As the son of Frank Zappa, and a fine guitarist in his own right, Dweezil has had many memorable meetings with guitar greats, from Eddie giving Eddie Van Halen a guitar lesson, to tapping up a ridiculous cast of shredders for his still unreleased track, “What The Hell Was I Thinking?”. This is another pearler, and it shows that, while to others, electric guitars can be near-mythic artefacts of great import to Beck, they’re simply tools of the trade.
“I was at Jeff Beck’s house for a costume party, of all things,” Dweezil Zappa says while guesting on the No Cover Charge podcast. “I went there dressed as King Arthur, in real chainmail, so it weighed [a lot]. It was heavy!
“I get to the door, he opens the door, and he’s also like King Arthur, but he has a sword, and he knights me at the door!”
They say that great minds think alike, so perhaps Beck respected the fact that they went to the same place when deciding on their costumes. Either way, the Blow by Blow riffsmith proved an accommodating host.
“Later in the party, he’s like, ‘Oh, let me show you this guitar,’” Zappa goes on. “And he had this Stratocaster. He’s like, ‘It’s a really early Stratocaster. I don’t remember exactly what number.’
“As he picks it up, he hits the corner of a stone table and puts a huge ding in it. He looks at it, and then he hands it to me, ‘cause he just didn’t care. And the serial number was #000001. He said, ‘I got this from Steve Marriott.’ And it was a crazy early version. It had some Jeff Beck grease at that point.”
As Guitar World points out, the guitar was unlikely to have had that exact serial number, given that the first serial-numbered Strat bore 0100 on its neckplate. But the point remains; Beck had dinged one of the oldest Stratocasters in the world, and was nonplussed by the incident. Indeed, as his time in the Yardbirds attests, he wasn’t against smashing six-strings to smithereens from time to time, either.
The onetime Yardbirds guitarist had an interesting history with the Fender Stratocaster. Speaking to Guitar Player in 1973, he slammed the guitar for being “cheap in feel” among other complaints.
A year later, he released his breakthrough album, Blow by Blow, which was predominantly tracked using his “cobbled together” Oxblood Les Paul, which sold for a record amount last year. Not long after, he ditched Les Pauls for the Strat. When asked why he loved the model so much during a 2013 interview, his answer hinted at a former naivety about what the instrument could do.
Elsewhere, Beck drummer Narada Michael Walden says the guitarist left behind a treasure trove of tracks they recorded together, and that he hopes to release them.
