(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 22 October 2025 18:53, UK
For any rockstar like Jon Bon Jovi, the guitar is about so much more than a bunch of wires on a piece of wood.
It’s one’s salvation, and it could be what gets you out of your nowhere town if you know how to play it right. But as anyone who’s heard ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ would know, Jon knew that the guitar could be as dangerous as an outlaw’s rifle if you had the right set of hands behind the fretboard.
And it’s not like Jon didn’t surround himself with the right people in Bon Jovi, either. Richie Sambora might have been in and out of the group on more than a few occasions, but even if he wasn’t the biggest shredder in the world, it was always better to have a guitarist who played what was right for the song than having the same Eddie Van Halen impersonator playing a bunch of random notes.
That’s half the reason why Bon Jovi stuck out from the rest of the music world circa 1984, anyway. They had all the trappings of what the LA rock scene was doing, but they dared to ask one important question: what if the songs that everyone was writing weren’t only odes to partying, booze and sexual escapades? They were students of songwriters, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t shred when they wanted to.
A lot of Slippery When Wet sounds absolutely pristine, but a lot of the tunes are a lot trickier than people realise. ‘Livin’ On a Prayer’ starts off like a pretty easy anthemic rock tune, but when you get to the end of Sambora’s solo with that sweep picking part, it would take anyone a good few years to get those under their fingers. But when listening it came to the best guitarist he could have asked for, Jon knew that there was no one better than Jeff Beck.
When talking to Howard Stern, Jon said that there was no one else that he saw that even came close to Beck when asked to name the greatest guitarist of all time, saying, “Jimi Hendrix would be in the starting lineup, but I was in the room with Jeff Beck when he took a guitar out of a cardboard box with a rented amplifier and no pedals and created that sound when we did the Young Guns record. I sat there flabbergasted. Jeff Beck did things with his finger and his thumb that would blow your mind.”
And it’s hard to really argue with this kind of call. The go-to answer for this question is usually anyone from Hendrix to Eddie Van Halen, but when looking at the amount of ground that Beck covered throughout his career, there’s no way that anyone has ever transformed their sound as drastically as he did throughout their career.
I mean, take a look at what he did on Jon’s tune, ‘Blaze of Glory’. Absolutely jaw-dropping stuff, but if you listen to that compared to what he did in The Yardbirds to the Truth record all the way up to working with other legends like Tina Turner, it was always about exploring the versatility of what could be done on the guitar neck. He wasn’t an inventor in the same way that Eddie was, but he knew that when he had a decent amplifier at his disposal, he could dial in whatever he needed to sound like the most impressive guitarist in the room.
So it’s no surprise that whichever way you look at guitar, Beck is the one that’s held in reverence by the artist who truly knows their shit. Hendrix looked like a musical angel when he played, Jimmy Page was a man possessed whenever he brought out his guitar, and Eddie Van Halen was the musical prodigy among them all, but Beck was always there meticulously chipping away at his sound, trying to find the one thing that hadn’t been discovered yet.
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