HARVEY GOLDSMITH RECEIVED a surprising phone call during late 2008. “I had just literally arrived in New York,” Goldsmith, the U.K.’s best-known concert promoter, recalls via Zoom from a holiday in Portugal, the day after Beck’s death was announced. “She said, ‘I’m sitting here with Jeff Beck.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s nice, send him my best,’ and she said, ‘He wants to talk to you.’”
Beck got on the phone. “‘When are you coming back?’ I said, ‘I’ve only just got here. Why?’” Goldsmith continues. ‘And he said, ‘I feel that I’m kind of underrated and not really being recognized the way I feel I should be. Can you help?’”
That question would kick off a relationship lasting more than five years, during which
