Jeff Beck 1/2023 (78) Geoffrey Arnold “Jeff” Beck was born on 24 June 1944 in Wallington, South London to Arnold and Ethel Beck. Before Beck discovered guitar, his mother had wanted him to play the piano. But once his parents saw how Beck took to the guitar, they allowed it.  They probably thought, ‘If he’s got the guitar, he’s not going out stealing.’ The only friends he had were pretty low-life; most of them were one step away from jail.
Beck said that he first heard an electric guitar when he was six-years-old and heard Les Paul playing “How High the Moon” on the radio. He asked his mother what it was. After she replied it was an electric guitar and was all tricks, he said, “That’s for me”. As a ten-year-old, Beck sang in a church choir and his original musical direction was essential formed by the music his older sister, Annetta, brought home.  As a pre-teenager he learned to play on a borrowed guitar and made several attempts to build his own instrument, first by gluing and bolting together cigar boxes for the body and an un-sanded fence post for the neck with model aircraft control lines as strings and frets simply painted on it.
“The guy next door said, ‘I’ll build you a solid body guitar for five pounds’,” he later told Rock Cellar Magazine. “Five pounds, which to me was 500 back then so I went ahead and did it myself.
“The first one I built was in 1956, because Elvis was out, and everything that you heard about pop music was guitar. And then I got fascinated. I’m sure the same goes for lots of people.”
Beck’s sister Annetta introduced him to Jimmy Page when both were teenagers. Eventually, Beck bonded with another boy who was a budding guitarist in his neighborhood, Jimmy Page. The two musicians shared a passion for rockabilly music (Beck credited his older sister with buying the records that shaped his taste) and would try to impress each other with their skills. After leaving school, he attended Wimbledon College of Art. Then he was briefly employed as a painter and decorator, a groundsman on a golf course, and a car paint sprayer. In his early years he spent time in bands such as The Nightshift, the Tridents and then the Yardbirds, which he joined in 1965 to replace Eric Clapton.
The legacy of The Yardbirds three iconic guitar heroes Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page is a little bit convoluted, but Page did his best in later years to explain it in a video for Fender taped in connection to his signature Fender Telecaster, which is based on the guitar Jeff had gifted him and he used in the Yardbirds and in the early days of Led Zeppelin.
Page says he and Jeff initially connected due to their mutual interest in the guitar. Electric guitarists were a rare breed in rock and roll’s early days, he noted. “There weren’t many guitarists in the area at that point,” Page recalled. “You’d hear of other guitarists, you’d meet other guitarists, but nobody was in really close proximity to me. There was an art college at Epsom that Jeff Beck’s sister Annetta was attending.”
 Somehow Annetta heard about Page and got the idea that she should introduce her brother to the other local guitarist Page. One day, Jeff and Annetta just showed up at Page’s house. “There was a knock on the door, and there was Jeff’s sister, and there was Jeff holding his homemade guitar,” Page recalled. “We just bonded immediately.” Jeff eventually upgraded from his homemade guitar to a 1959 Fender Telecaster. Page came to possess the Tele after scoring Jeff a big break playing for the Yardbirds.
Page says he was a studio musician, working his way up to being a record producer, when he was approached about joining the Yardbirds. But he wasn’t ready to give up working in the studio, and he suspected Clapton was unaware of the conversation, so he recommended Jeff for the job. Jeff got the gig and soon bought himself a new guitar. But rather than keep his Tele as a backup, he gifted it to Page as a thank you. The Yardbirds were one of the U.K.’s biggest blues bands at that point.
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