Quote:
Originally Posted by jackhammer
I personally think that Jeff Beck's Beck-Ola blows Zeppelin out of the water. Certainly in terms of guitar work.
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Beck is a technically more accomplished guitar player than Jimmy Page but Page has always had a keen ear for hypnotic guitar riffs. I used to underestimate Page's guitar playing but if you listen to Led Zep's complete body of work, you'll see he was quite prolific at creating perfect guitar hooks. His guitar riffs are among the most sampled by the underground dance culture.
Many of the early British rock groups were notorious for pilfering public domain blues songs--- the Stones and Led Zep were among the worst offenders.
Jeff Beck spent too many years in a self imposed exile and by the mid-Seventies he drifted away from the kind of forward thinking music he played best.
I saw Jeff Beck two years ago live and he's still a great guitarist but his musical vision is this amorphous pastiche of jazz fusion/metal/blues/rockabilly and whatever. Beck's biggest problem is his guitar playing in the Yardbirds and the original Jeff Beck Group set an impossibly high standard of perfection that he just couldn't maintain for the next thirty years. He still does the world's greatest version of Sleepwalk, a song that I love and have heard dozens of versions of.