When Jeff Beck passed away at 78 in early 2023, his wife, Sandra, was left to take charge of his extensive guitar collection.
She’s since spoken about her late husband’s desire for her to share his love of music, which is why John Mayer was afforded the chance to play his 2014 Custom Strat during Dead & Co.’s event-filled Sphere residency last year.
Now, with that spirit in her heart and mind, she’s made the difficult decision to part with them: “These guitars were his great love and after almost two years of his passing it’s time to part with them as Jeff wished," she says. "They need to be shared, played, and loved again.”
Impressively, most of his assembled collection of electric guitars has stood the test of time. Sure, there have been casualties throughout Beck’s distinguished life — he famously swapped his Yardbirds-era 1954 Esquire with Seymour Duncan in 1973 — but the collection that was handed over to Christie’s auction house in London is vast and full of remarkable stories.
There's a ‘54 Stratocaster with a tonal identity “parallel to a Telecaster,” and the pink Jackson gifted to him by Grover Jackson that toured heavily in the ‘80s. Then there is his other Yardbirds workhorse, the Yardburst, which tells a story in itself. “You can kind of see him making decisions of what he wanted to change, step by step through his very early career,” Amelia Walker, specialist head of Private & Iconic Collections at Christie's, tells Guitar World.
Yet few guitars are as strongly connected to Beck as his Oxblood Les Paul, which came into his hands in 1972 and is immortalized on his Blow by Blow album cover.
“He was on tour with Beck, Bogert & Appice in late 1972, and I think his search for a new Les Paul coincided with the ‘Yardburst’ getting damaged again — because it has had a few fair breaks,” Walker explains. “So he was really looking for a guitar that could replicate that fat Les Paul sound. BBA was a loud band and that was their signature [style] — a power trio with a lot of volume.”
He soon found what he was looking for. When passing through Memphis, Beck called his friend Buddy Davis, who had previously shown him a number of guitars.
“The way Buddy has told the story is that Buddy drove Jeff around various hot-rod shops in Memphis, where he bought things for cars, but in his car he also had his guitar, the ‘Oxblood’, which Buddy had acquired from Strings & Things,” Walker says. “It was on sale because it’d been unwanted by its previous owner.
As the story goes, the owner had asked the shop to respray the goldtop to match his shoes, to swap its P90s for humbuckers and to shave the neck down for a slimmer profile.
"So they did all the modifications that we see now," Walker says.. "When he went back to pick it up, he decided he didn’t like it anymore. And then Buddy Davis walks in and says, ‘I love it.’”
Davis paid about $300 for the guitar via a finance deal, and took the guitar home. At the time that Beck fell in love with the Les Paul and purchased it from him, Davis reportedly hadn't even made a single payment on it.
“That’s the legend,” Walker says. “It’s a legend that has changed over the years.”
While the guitar became Blow by Blow's cover star, a Fender Stratocaster and Beck's Tele-Gib — a somewhat crude hybrid of a Tele and a Les Paul — were used far more frequently during the album's sessions. But the Oxblood Les Paul's prominence would soon grow.
Today, “it’s still in the condition that he left it,” says Caitlin Graham, a consultant and expert in entertainment memorabilia. “We haven’t cleaned it, which is lovely. It has definitely got an aura to it.”
It’s certainly cobbled together. But at the end of the day, it’s a great-playing axe, no doubt about it
Kerry Keane
Yet, for a guitar so revered, it's been modified almost as many times as its origin story over the years. According to Kerry Keane, Christie's international consultant and specialist for musical instruments, the guitar is nearly as crudely put together as Beck's Tele-Gib. "The bridge humbucking pickup is sort of jammed right up next to the wraparound bridge," Keane says. "There’s not even room there for the [pickup] surround. Even the surround is bent so it can fit there.
“It was late ’53 when you first started to see these wraparound bridges. When you look inside this guitar, I don’t fully embrace the potentiometers as original, yet the ‘speed’ knobs appear from the period,” she continues. “The capacitors have certainly been changed, and there has been quite a bit of rewiring.”
Its neck is much thinner than a ‘54 Les Paul should be, too, possibly because of the original owner's alterations or because the neck was swapped out at a later date. "It’s certainly cobbled together," Keane says. "But at the end of the day, it’s a great-playing axe, no doubt about it.”
In truth, this Frankenstein-ed guitar best typifies Beck’s legacy. Here was a man who played guitar like no other, so it’s only right so many of his go-to instruments were like no other, either.
Whoever takes this guitar under their wing is sure of having two things: deep pockets, and a one-of-a-kind guitar with a rich history. Let’s hope it has plenty more stories to tell.
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