IN MID FEBRUARY OF 1999 I FLEW FROM SAN FRANCISCO to London to interview Jeff Beck. I had interviewed Jeff several times before, starting in December 1992 with a wonderful experience at his home in Sussex where we talked at length about his Crazy Legs album and his hero, guitarist Cliff Gallup of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps. Over the years I interviewed him about various projects he was involved in and saw and shot photos of him on tour numerous times. But the one thing I really wanted to do was an in-depth interview with Beck about one of his solo albums.
It took almost 10 years after Beck’s previous solo outing, Guitar Shop, was released, but I finally got the opportunity I was waiting for — Player magazine in Japan flew me to London to interview Jeff about his forthcoming album, Who Else!, and Jeff and I met up on February 19, 1999, at London’s Royal Garden Hotel, near the British royal residence, Kensington Palace. In the afternoon, I shot photos of him in the private confines of a basement lobby surrounded by meeting rooms, where occasionally a bewildered businessman or two would walk by and give us a confused glare. That evening we met up again at the bar on the hotel’s top floor to do the interview.
When I showed up, Jeff was waiting at the bar and drinking a beer (it was a Beck’s, of course — what else!). We talked about the album’s background, including its beginnings in 1996 with sessions he had done in Los Angeles produced by Steve Lukather, as well as the smoking-hot band consisting of guitarist Jennifer Batten, bassist Randy Hope-Taylor and drummer Steve Alexander, that he formed in 1998 to road test new material. During the course of the interview, Jeff was extremely and unusually candid, honest and forthcoming about the struggles he went through to bring the album to fruition. My biggest and only regret was that this interview would be published only in Japan and in Japanese.
After Jeff passed away, I revisited this interview for the first time in more than 20 years. The section where he talked about having only a limited time left on this earth choked me to tears. Here he was
