A youthful Duane Eddy poses with one of his Gretsch 6120s in this early career promotional photo.
For the next 66 years, Eddy and his 6120 were inseparable, and he remained the undisputed “King of Twang,” releasing 21 albums over the next nine years that influenced the sound of guitar, from the Shadows and the Beatles to John Fogerty and Bruce Springsteen to the composer Ennio Morricone, whose famed spaghetti Western soundtracks often employed a 6-string approach—big tones, big melody—plucked from the Eddy handbook.
The master of twang died on Tuesday, April 30, of complications from cancer at a hospital near his home in Franklin, Tennessee. He was 86 years old and is survived by his wife, Deed, and daughter, Jenni Eddy. At his passing, there was an outpouring of tributes from members of the guitar community. Springsteen posted a video remembering Eddy on Instagram, noting “without Duane, there’s no this,” before playing the riff from “Born to Run” on a Gretsch hollowbody. And Fogerty called Eddy “the first rock ’n’ roll guitar god.”
Eddy was born in Corning, New York, on April 26, 1938, and was playing guitar by age 5. After his family moved to Coolidge, Arizona, he formed his first band with high school friend Jimmy Delbridge, called Jimmy and Duane. They were discovered by local disc jockey Lee Hazelwood, who would become a famed singer-songwriter and producer. Hazelwood produced Eddy’s first single, 1955’s “I Want Some Lovin’,” and continued to work with Eddy into 1960.
Eddy wanted a Gretsch, in part, because of its Bigsby whammy bar. As he suspected, the device became an important part of his twangy sound.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
By ’55, 16-year-old Eddy had already begun to formulate his own style, picking out melodies on his guitar’s bass strings. Soon he would acquire his first 6120. Eddy used the instrument’s Bigsby vibrato and his low tone, saturated with reverb and tremolo, and picked the strings about four inches above the bridge to complete his distinctive sonic profile. Another element was his choice of 2x12 Magnatone amps, which he had hot-rodded to 1x15s with the output power goosed up from 65 to 100 watts. As legend has it, Eddy became so devoted to reverb that he once acquired a 2,000-gallon water tank to use as an echo chamber and placed an amp inside it during a recording session.
In 2018, when journalist Michael Ross profiled Eddy for Premier Guitar, Eddy told Ross the story of how he acquired the first of his beloved Gretsch models: “After we moved to Arizona, I bought a goldtop Les Paul for $75 in a hardware store in a little town south of Phoenix in about 1954. A guy in town made these orange-crate amps with a 12" speaker and chicken wire in the front. I used that for the first couple of years. Then, around 1957, I was at Ziggie’s Music in Phoenix looking at guitars. I looked at a White Falcon, but it was too expensive and didn’t play that great. They brought out an orange 6120 and handed it to me. It sat in there just so beautifully and the neck was a dream. I thought I would come back with my father to cosign for me. I picked up my Gibson and started out. Ziggie [Zardis] said, ‘Where you going?’ I replied, ‘I’ve got to get some dinner and go to work.’ ‘Don’t you want to take this with ya?’ he said. I said, ‘We haven’t signed anything.’ He told me, ‘It’s your guitar, take it. When your dad gets back, have him come by and sign the paperwork.’ I left there a happy camper. My dad didn’t get there for about three months.” [laughs]
“A guy in town made these orange-crate amps with a 12" speaker and chicken wire in the front. I used that for the first couple of years.”
Between 1958 and 1962, Eddy and his 6120 sound became embedded in American popular culture. On radio, “Rebel Rouser,” “Ramrod,” “Cannonball,” “Forty Miles of Bad Road,” and “Because They’re Young” became staples. And on TV, he contributed the theme to the hit show Have Gun — Will Travel (the song is 1957’s “The Ballad of Paladin,” with vocalist Johnny Western), then covered the instrumental title number Henry Mancini composed for the detective series Peter Gunn, which reached No. 27 on the charts. When Eddy revisited “Peter Gunn” with the British avant-pop band Art of Noise in 1986, it once again returned to the charts with his eminently twangy guitar in the lead. The recording was awarded a best instrumental rock Grammy the next year.
Although Eddy is mostly remembered with the 6120 in his hands, Guild made him a signature model in 1961, based on their T-500 model, and he became the first rock guitarist with an instrument bearing his name. The company made both a DE-400 and a DE-500, the latter with fancier appointments. These guitars are quite rare today, and priced between $4,000 and $6,000 on the vintage market. In later years, however, he returned to the 6120 both live and in the studio.
By 1967, when he cut the albums Tokyo Hits and The Roaring Twangies, Eddy’s musical approach had fallen from favor. But his reverberating guitar sound and tough picking was not entirely out of step with what was happening in evolutionary rock at the time. Replace Eddy’s quieter melodicism with angularity and distortion, and there’s a sonic correlation with Syd Barrett’s playing on Pink Floyd’s debut album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Jefferson Airplane’s Surrealistic Pillow, and Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love.
Duane Eddy was among the historic American music makers who played at the Ponderosa Stomp in New Orleans in 2014.
Photo by Joseph A. Rosen
“They brought out an orange 6120 and handed it to me. It sat in there just so beautifully and the neck was a dream.”
But at that point, Eddy took a 20-year break from recording as a leader. He returned after the success of his collaboration with Art of Noise, with an album called Duane Eddy. Despite being produced by Paul McCartney, Jeff Lynne, and Ry Cooder, and featuring George Harrison, McCartney, Cooder, David Lindley, James Burton, and Steve Cropper, the disc slipped into obscurity. Eddy also moved to Franklin, Tennessee, at about the same time, and played on the album Thirteen, by the legendary country singer Emmylou Harris. His final album was 2011’s Road Trip, where Eddy paid tribute to Django Reinhardt, Chet Atkins, and other influences. It also failed to catch fire.
During the past decade, Eddy also did some recordings with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, performing on the 2016 Auerbach-produced solo album by the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, Alone, and adding guitar to “Livin’ in Sin” on Auerbach’s 2017 solo album, Waiting on a Song. Coincidentally, one of the more interesting contemporary purveyors of the Eddy-influenced twangy, reverberant approach is another Auerbach-produced band, Hermanos Gutiérrez.
Today, Eddy’s sound continues to literally reverberate in guitar-based music. So do the words he shared, reflecting on his technique, with U.K-based music journalist Matt Parker in 2018: “You have to have your own sound, do it with authority, and let it all hang out. If you do that, you communicate with your guitar.”
Duane Eddy "Rebel Rouser"
Duane Eddy and his band mime a play-through of their hit “Rebel Rouser” for TV cameras in 1958.
Together with his younger brother, drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Fams created and established much of the hypnotic pulse and infectious vibe that characterizes reggae rhythms.
It’s hard to think of any player who embodied this idea of bass as connection more than Aston “Family Man” Barrett. Though (like most bass players) he’s not exactly a household name, he truly should be: As the long-time bassist, arranger, and coproducer of Bob Marley and the Wailers, his musical innovations and memorable lines are exceedingly familiar to anyone who has ever heard reggae music. “Fams,” as he was known, died in February of this year at 77, leaving a long legacy of reggae mastery.
Indeed, as Family Man was one of reggae’s original creators, he helped birth the bass-heavy Jamaican genre into existence from its stylistic precursors, ska and rocksteady. Together with his younger brother, drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett, Fams created and established much of the hypnotic pulse and infectious vibe that characterizes reggae rhythms. Family Man’s feel was firm yet relaxed, his tone deep, dark, and plush. It was with these bottom-heavy colors, coaxed from a Höfner “Beatle” bass in his early years, then from his flatwound-strung Fender Jazz bass, that Aston Barrett crafted snaky, syncopated hooks and short melodic phrases that bolstered the vocal melodies while playing against the bouncing backbeats of the rhythm guitar and organ.
Before building his first bass from plywood and a length of 2“x4”, Barrett’s first musical love was singing along to American soul artists on Jamaican radio. “When I’m playing the bass, it’s like I’m singing,” Fams told music journalist Bill Murphy in a 2007 Bass Player magazine interview. “I compose a melodic line and see myself like I’m singing baritone.” You can hear his vocal-like bass stylings in songs like “Is This Love” and “Waiting in Vain.” These and many other Barrett bass lines serve as countermelodies, animated motifs that play against each song’s main vocal melody. Family Man’s parts are often easy to sing along to, so it’s easy to imagine Fams singing them in his head.
“Fams not only kept that intragroup connection strong, but he also went beyond the bass, creating and composing many of the intricate, interconnecting parts you can hear in any Bob Marley and the Wailers recording.”
The Barrett brothers played in several early reggae bands before joining the Wailers full-time in 1972, including famed producer Lee “Scratch” Perry’s house band, the Upsetters. In 1969, when the original Upsetters lineup couldn’t make a U.K. tour due to a scheduling conflict, Aston and Carlton’s band the Hippy Boys became the new Upsetters. In this group, they backed a pantheon of early reggae artists, including the Wailers, a vocal trio with Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer. The Upsetters eventually became the core of the Wailers’ rhythm section. Tosh and Bunny Wailer left the band in 1974.
It was years before, though, well before he had children (and he had a lot of children) that Aston Barrett began calling himself “Family Man.” This reflected how he saw it as his role to keep the band together. As the Wailers’ bandleader, arranger, and co-producer, Fams not only kept that intragroup connection strong, but he also went beyond the bass, creating and composing many of the intricate, interconnecting parts you can hear in any Bob Marley and the Wailers recording. But his primary musical connection was with his brother, Carly. Among other reggae conventions, the Barrett brothers pioneered the “one drop” rhythmic style, in which the bass and drums skip the downbeat—dropping the one—as you can hear in the bass and drum parts of songs like “Trenchtown Rock” and “One Drop.”
I met Family Man at the photo shoot for that 2007 Bass Player cover story, and again in 2012 when Phil Chen and I interviewed him onstage during the weekend he received his Bass Player Lifetime Achievement Award. During the photo shoot, we also shot a short video interview, which you can find on YouTube, where he demonstrates the “One Drop” bass line, plucking with his thumb between the end of the neck and the neck pickup. Even barely amplified, you can feel the depth that comes from Family Man’s bass approach. In the Marley years, that huge “earth sound” came from two Acoustic 18" speaker cabinets and two 4x15 cabinets. “You need them that big to get that sound,” Barrett told Murphy, “because reggae music is the heartbeat of the people. It’s the universal language what carry that heavy message of roots, culture, and reality. So the bass have to be heavy and the drums have to be steady.”Aston "Family Man" Barrett, Bob Marley & the Wailers bassist - 2007 Bass Player mag. interview 1/2
Here's the first part of Bill Leigh’s 2007 interview with Bob Marley & the Wailers' bassist Aston "Family Man" Barrett.
The maestro with his nearly omnipresent whammy bar, onstage at the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor in 2015.
To call Beck a giant of the instrument nearly diminishes his monumental and singular accomplishments. He established his own supremely influential language of the guitar and spoke it fluently for more than six decades. Although he never sang on his recordings, in his hands the 6-string was vocal—fluid, melismatic, melodic, and most important, full of heart. Attending a Jeff Beck concert was to witness inspiration at its most wild and relentless. And to bask in a tone so large and purposeful that it could seemingly be heard around the planet.
Which it was. Beck was known and revered across the globe—an instrumentalist who made albums for the first two decades of his career, (starting with the Jeff Beck Group’s still stunning and innovative 1968 debut, Truth) that routinely made the top 20. Those include his groundbreaking duo of mid-’70s recordings, Blow by Blow and Wired, that transformed fusion into part of the soundtrack of popular culture. But Beck was not a jazz or rock guitarist. He was an omnivore, who digested every style—country, rockabilly, swing, Tin Pan Alley, punk, skronk—to both put his seal on them and twist them to his own ends, turning the Beatles’ “She’s a Woman” into a reggae playground and transforming an idea taken from a theme by composer Maurice Ravel and turning it into the epic, soaring, and harmonically supercharged “Beck’s Bolero.”
“Whenever I pick up a guitar, it will always be heavily blues influenced, but I try to push it further, because you have to expand your scales and melodic thinking.” —Jeff Beck
When I asked Beck about his approach, during the ’80s, he replied, “Whenever I pick up a guitar, it will always be heavily blues influenced, but I try to push it further, because you have to expand your scales and melodic thinking. But I’ll play a blues solo on a non-blues song, bending the notes into whatever the song takes. That’s my whole thing: trying to explore the blues to the maximum, really. It’s in the blood.”
Note that Beck said, “whatever a song takes,” not whatever it needs. The courage and will of his playing were consistent, impulsive, and limitless. Listen to “Morning Dew” from Truth. His guitar toys with themes, playing fragments of melodies, dropping patches of wah wah, howling, rather than weaving a defined rhythm or tune through the song. Then hear “Pull It,” from 2016’s Loud Hailer, an album cut with vocalist Rosie Bones and guitarist Carmen Vandenberg of the English punk outfit Bones UK. Made nearly 50 years after Truth, that song is also telegraphy as music—dots, dashes, fuzzy blots of tone. And yet both performances not only work—they’re riveting.
Beck considered blues to be the core of his music but saw its opportunities for expansion as limitless.
Photo by Ross Halfin
Beck was born in Wallington, Surrey, England, on June 24, 1944. Les Paul was his first guitar hero, followed by Cliff Gallup, B.B. King, and Steve Cropper. He became friends with Jimmy Page when they were both teenagers, and, while attending Wimbledon College of Art, he fell in with David “Screaming Lord” Sutch, with whom he first recorded in 1962. But Beck really began his 60-years-plus of breaking rules in 1965, when he replaced Eric Clapton in the Yardbirds. There, he pushed the group’s blues envelope with his inflammatory guitar on “Shape of Things” and the demented “Over Under Sideways Down,” where his hammer-ons, slides, and bends created the number’s sitar-influenced riff. Although Beck was unhappy in the Yardbirds, his 18-month membership earned him his first induction into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, followed by a second induction for his work as a leader and solo artist in 2009.
The inevitable formation of his own band, the Jeff Beck Group, featuring Rod Stewart and future Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, occurred in 1967, and with the next year’s Truth, he presaged Led Zeppelin’s recasting of blues as psychedelic manifesto. Beck’s playing on that album remains practically avant-garde at its least restrained, yet still directly speaks a dialect of the blues. But with the notable addition of pianist Nicky Hopkins, the Group tilted further into rock with its next release, 1969’s Beck-Ola. Two more albums, Rough and Ready and Jeff Beck Group, followed, with the latter including “Going Down.” Beck’s version of the Don Nix tune that Freddie King had made famous became an instant FM radio staple.
“I saw Beck use the whammy bar alone to play a slow, lovely feedback melody through his array of amps, and then point the guitar’s headstock straight down into the stage and push himself into the air by placing his hands on the rounded back end of the body. When he touched down, he tossed the guitar—still feeding back—into his arms, hit two notes that revealed where the tuning had drifted, and flawlessly picked up the melody he’d been playing before his acrobatic stunt.”
That band was followed by the short-lived Beck, Bogert & Appice, who released an album of the same name in 1973. The group was a trio, with vocalist/bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice, from the Vanilla Fudge and Cactus. All along Beck had continued to maintain a studio career (which continued almost to the present) and had played on Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book the year before. Beck, Bogert & Appice’s rendition of Wonder’s “Superstition” was one of their album’s highlights, along with a beautiful slide-guitar-dappled reading of Curtis Mayfield’s “I’m So Proud.”
After this soul-music-influenced outing, Beck experienced a kind of rebirth. He was already a Gibson Les Paul player, but while recording in 1972 in Memphis he found a 1954 goldtop that was refinished in oxblood by its previous owner. That guitar is depicted in Beck’s hands on the cover of 1975’s all-instrumental Blow by Blow, which sold a million copies in the U.S. and reached number four on Billboard’s Hot 100 album chart. The epochal Blow by Blow alone is enough to ensure that Beck’s legendary status will endure. It’s full of monumental performances, including his emotional tribute to Roy Buchanan, “’Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” perhaps the greatest blues-inspired instrumental ever recorded.
Longtime friends Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton share the stage at the 2010 Crossroads Guitar Festival.
Photo by Chris Kies
And the die was cast. Although he went on to make albums and cut singles with exceptional vocalists—perhaps most notably a soulful 1985 version of the Mayfield gospel song “People Get Ready,” with Rod Stewart, that’s become a classic—from that point on Beck dedicated himself primarily to instrumental music.
The next year’s follow-up, Wired, built upon Blow by Blow’s success with performances of Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” and Jan Hammer’s “Blue Wind” that also set radio afire. More important, though, was the arrival of the Fender Stratocaster on its cover. For the rest of his life, Beck and Stratocasters were mostly inseparable onstage and in the studio. And by using banks of amps and unsparing volume, he crafted a unique sound on the single-coil instrument, huge and compelling, with a horn-like fluidity and endless, sustained tone.
His technique on the Strat’s vibrato arm was extraordinary. It was as if it was grafted to his hand, or, at least, seemingly never left it. His subtle—and often radical—bending and pulling of notes with the bar made his playing even more voice-like, able to carefully craft and negotiate micro- or macro-tonal changes effortlessly. His intimacy with the Strat made for some truly uncanny performances.
In a ’90s concert at the Great Woods Amphitheater in Mansfield, Massachusetts, I saw Beck use the whammy bar alone to play a slow, lovely feedback melody through his array of amps, and then point the guitar’s headstock straight down into the stage and push himself into the air by placing his hands on the rounded back end of the body. When he touched down, he tossed the guitar—still feeding back—into his arms, hit two notes that revealed where the tuning had drifted, and flawlessly picked up the melody he’d been playing before his acrobatic stunt.
Beck’s romance with the Stratocaster caught fire during the recording of 1976’s Wired album.
Photo by Ken Settle
Beck continued to make excellent studio albums—most notably There and Back, Jeff Beck’s Guitar Shop, Jeff, Emotion & Commotion, and Loud Hailer. He also racked up high-level session credits, recording with Roger Waters, Jon Bon Jovi, Kate Bush, and Tina Turner. And he accumulated eight Grammy Awards—seven for Best Rock Instrumental Performance. His most recent album was 18, a 2022 collaboration with Johnny Depp. Beck’s final public performance was touring behind that release, on November 12, in Reno, Nevada.
After Beck’s family announced his death on January 11, fellow guitar virtuoso Eric Johnson shared his thoughts on social media: “Hearing about Jeff Beck is a shock. He was one of the most original guitarists I ever heard. He never conformed to status quo guitar or conventional playing, always reaching for a new dimension, which he achieved multiple times. He was the most expressive lyrical storytelling guitarist there ever was and that’s why non-musicians loved him. He garnered more affection from audiences than other guitar heroes because he had such a musical poetry to his playing.
“I believe that he and Jimi Hendrix were the most inventive and original rock guitarists there ever was. I had the gift of being able to visit with Jeff a few times and that is a treasured memory in my life. The guitar world will go on, but it won’t be the same without the most inventive 6-string visionary we have been graced with on this planet. Joyous wishes to you, Jeff, as you soar on to your next magnificent adventure. Thank you for teaching me and inspiring me to want to play guitar.”
JEFF BECK LIVE Cause We've Ended As Lovers
Jeff Beck plays his tribute to Roy Buchanan, “’Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers,” at Ronnie Scott’s club in London in 2007 with what is arguably his most notable band of the past 20 years, featuring bassist Tal Wilkenfeld, drummer Vinnie Colaiuta, and keyboardist Jason Rebello.