R.I.P. legendary guitarist Jeff Beck

Jeff Beck has died. A Grammy winning-guitarist, credited with refining and popularizing the sound of the electric guitar in modern rock music, Beck had early success with British band The Yardbirds in the 1960s before embarking on a long and winding solo career. Although he never reached the mainstream or commercial heights of many of his contemporaries and successors—most of whom acknowledged him as a massive influence on their own work—Beck continued to tour, play, and perform well into the 2020s, with his list of collaborators encompassing a handy Who’s Who of the entire span of modern rock. Beck died on Tuesday, reportedly of bacterial meningitis. Per Variety, he was 78.

Born in England in the 1940s, Beck gravitated toward music early, building his own guitars as a teenager, and beginning to play with bands while in college in the early ’60s. Like many of the budding rock guitarists of the era, Beck was drawn to the sounds of rhythm and blues, transforming and playing with those sounds to create the foundations of rock music. In 1965, after Eric Clapton departed The Yardbirds, Beck signed on to replace him as the band’s lead guitarist.

Beck’s tenure with the band was relatively short—just 20 months, before he quit and/or was fired after bailing on the group in the midst of a U.S. tour—but highly influential. The Yardbirds had many of their biggest hits during that period; meanwhile, Beck’s experimentation with adding fuzzier, more distorted tones to his guitar paved the way to the creation of more psychedelic rock. Beck only made one album with The Yardbirds, 1966's Roger The Engineer, before going solo in 1967.

And although he’d work with other groups intermittently for the next 60 years—The Jeff Beck Group, with the likes of Rod Stewart, Aynsley Dunbar, and Ronnie Wood, from 1967 through 1972, and supergroup Beck, Bogert, and Appice in the mid-’70s—“solo” is, fundamentally, where Jeff Beck would stay for the rest of his career. A noted experimenter and perfectionist, Beck spent the rest of his life pursuing his own ideas about guitar virtuosity. More than one commentator has noted that his indifference to the idea of forming a long-term, stable partnership with other musicians is a major reason he never broke into the mainstream; it’s not for nothing that out of the 8 Grammy wins he racked up across his long career, only one (2010's “Imagine,” with Herbie Hancock) was for a collaborative effort, while the others were all for Best Instrumental Performance.

None of which seemed to necessarily bother Beck, who played constantly, and with just about everybody, for the rest of his life. David Bowie, Phil Collins, Sting, Clapton, Stewart, Bon Jovi, Roger Waters, Kate Bush, Hans Zimmer, Guns ‘N’ Roses, B.B. King, Kelly Clarkson, Brian Wilson, Joss Stone, and more—all tapped Beck, at some point or another, to add his guitar genius to their work. (And also, yes, Johnny Depp; the two men began collaborating in the 2020s; their collaborative album, 18, was released last year shortly after the verdict was delivered in Depp’s defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard, and is the final studio album of Beck’s considerable discography.)

Beck is one of those guys who apparently lived to play, and while he wasn’t above holding a grudge or two—he delivered a cheerful “They kicked me out… Fuck them!” to his former fellow Yardbirds when they were all inducted into the Rock Hall Of Fame together in 1993—he seemed willing to play with just about anybody with a passion for music. (Even when it caused problems; the aforementioned Guns ‘N’ Roses collaboration didn’t actually end up happening, because playing with the band exacerbated the tinnitus that plagued Beck for much of his life.) Numerous rock legends expressed their condolences at his death today, with Jimmy Page—one of those aforementioned Yardbirds, once upon a time—writing on social media that, “The six stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions. Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations apparently limitless.”