Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart – People Get Ready

It started with a guitar so badly out of tune that only one chord worked, and ended with Rod Stewart hugging Jeff Beck on camera for the first time in sixteen years.

The guitar was terrible. Jeff Beck found it lying around at the house of Duane Hitchings, the keyboard player who had co-written some of Rod Stewart’s recent hits, and he picked it up while Hitchings showed off his recording console. As Beck later told Guitar Player, it was so poorly made that “the only chord in intonation was D.” So he played in D. Hitchings dialed in a breathy sound, Beck found a little four-note figure, and it turned into the opening of Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready. They took it up to Stewart that night.

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The two had not made a record together since 1969. Beck had hired an unknown Stewart for the Jeff Beck Group in 1967, and the band cut two albums, Truth and Beck-Ola, before it fell apart. Stewart’s memoir is fond about the music and blunt about the leader: a brilliant player, in his telling, who would climb into his limousine and leave the singer and Ronnie Wood to find a taxi. Stewart went on to Faces and a solo career that made him one of the biggest stars in the world. Beck went his own way. In 1983 they ran into each other in Los Angeles, where Beck was playing shows with Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton, and agreed to spend a day in the studio, more or less for the fun of it.

Beck had nothing ready for Stewart’s voice. Mayfield’s song, a gospel-rooted call to get on board that the Impressions took to No.14 on the Hot 100 in 1965, gave him something worthy of it. Stewart sang it and thought it had come out rather nicely. Then he asked a favor in return, a guitar solo on a song of his own called Infatuation, which became a Top 10 hit for him in 1984. And he asked for something bigger: Beck in his touring band for 74 dates. Beck lasted three shows. Stewart’s recollection is that he walked out complaining that the crowds were full of housewives.

Out of the Vault

The Mayfield recording sat unreleased while all that played out. When Beck finally made a deliberately commercial album, Flash, with Nile Rodgers producing most of it, Epic pulled the track out of storage. Beck produced this one himself, playing a Jackson Soloist instead of his usual Stratocaster. Epic released Flash on July 8, 1985, and put the duet out as a single. Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart ranked it at No.5. The Hot 100 stopped it at No.48, and in Britain it did not chart at all, though it reached No.23 in Australia. Beck later dismissed the album as a record-company mistake, while making an exception for what this track did for the two of them.

The video carried the reconciliation further than the record did. Shot in sepia, it follows Stewart and Beck separately as they hop freight trains across open country, cut together with firemen, field hands and diner regulars, until the two finally meet. In the last minute Stewart throws his arms around Beck while he plays the solo. Beck said afterward that he was glad they had done it, because people could see the two of them did not hate each other.

They never managed the album everyone kept proposing. Stewart joined Beck onstage in Los Angeles in 2009 and again at the Hollywood Bowl in 2019, singing this song both times. When Beck died in January 2023, Stewart wrote that his old partner was “on another planet.” The record they left is the best case for why the partnership kept being tried and kept failing. Two men who could barely share a tour bus could share four minutes of a song about a train bound for somewhere better, and on record they sound as if they have always been on it together.