Truth
TSF · № 01
The crash cymbal overwhelms everything. Halfway through “Beck’s Bolero,” Keith Moon screams and smashes the microphone, and from that moment forward you hear only the wash of metal, the decibels building. The drums disappear into their own debris. What remains is Beck’s locomotive riff, Page’s twelve-string, the bass, piano, and a kind of chaos that nobody planned—which is to say, exactly what happened.
This is the MoFi release: a hybrid SACD with a Red Book layer for standard CD players, and a 180-gram vinyl edition spread across two discs at 45 RPM. Both mastered from the original quarter-inch tapes. The vinyl was limited to 5,000 numbered copies; the SACD to 2,500. Both sold out on release in 2021, but copies surface—Music Direct, MoFi’s retail arm, currently has new vinyl stock at $175. On Discogs, clean copies of either format run $60–80.
If you find one, you should buy it.
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Truth (1968) is the album that invented Led Zeppelin before Led Zeppelin existed. The core band was Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood on bass, and Mick Waller on drums. But “Beck’s Bolero”—recorded two years earlier in London—brought a different lineup: Jimmy Page on twelve-string, John Paul Jones on bass, Keith Moon on drums (credited only as “You Know Who”), and Nicky Hopkins on piano. Two future founders of Led Zeppelin, the drummer from the Who in disguise, and a session pianist who’d play on everything. It was pure fire.
The “Beck’s Bolero” session happened in May 1966 at IBC Studios. Moon arrived in sunglasses and a Russian cossack hat—disguised, because he was technically still a member of the Who, and Pete Townshend would have wanted a word. John Entwistle was supposed to play bass but never showed. John Paul Jones got the call at the last minute.
They planned to record an entire album. Contractual obligations prevented it. They planned to form a band. They couldn’t find a singer—tried to pry Steve Marriott from Small Faces, failed. Moon joked the group would go over like a lead balloon. Entwistle replied: a lead zeppelin.
Page filed the name away. Two years later he used it.
The original liner notes credit Moon only as “Timpani by ‘You Know Who’”—the disguise holding even in print. Glyn Johns engineered the “Beck’s Bolero” session; Ken Scott engineered the album. Johns would go on to the Rolling Stones, the Who, and Led Zeppelin’s debut. Scott to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Beatles’ White Album. The cover photograph is by Stephen Goldblatt, then a young photographer, later an Oscar-nominated cinematographer.
Everyone on this record was at the beginning of something.
What Beck aimed for, and what the MoFi pressing reveals, is that Truth was never about precision. It was about feel—the particular weight of a Les Paul through a Vox AC30 covered in beer, which Beck claimed gave the amp its sound. The album opens with “Shapes of Things,” a Yardbirds song arriving from another dimension as a heavier, sharper thing. Beck claimed he wrote the first heavy metal riff ever recorded. It closes with “I Ain’t Superstitious,” Beck pushing the guitar into caterwaul while the drums and vocal call back.
In between: a seven-and-a-half-minute “Blues Deluxe” that sounds like cigarette smoke and a stage—holding its own. A reverb-drenched “Greensleeves” that should be ridiculous and isn’t. “Morning Dew” opens in a swirl of bagpipes. Stewart is flawless, and Beck paints the scene with wah-wah and attitude. A Willie Dixon cover, “You Shook Me,” that became the subject of a decades-long argument when Page recorded the same song on Led Zeppelin’s debut months later. Beck accused him of stealing the idea. Page didn’t deny it.
The irony is that Beck walked away from all of it. In August 1969, on the eve of Woodstock, he disbanded the Jeff Beck Group rather than let them perform at the festival. His reasoning: the band wasn’t ready. A preserved Woodstock performance, he said later, would have left them “dated, frozen with that image, with the music not being quite right.”
Years later Rod Stewart admitted: “I’m glad we didn’t play there.”
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Beck died suddenly on January 10, 2023, at seventy-eight. I miss him every day.
The MoFi pressing, released two years before his death, is the best Truth has ever sounded to my ears—though “best” isn’t quite the word. What this mastering has is space: Mick Waller’s drums are open and huge, Stewart’s voice separates from the guitars, and Beck’s playing is dangerous, with an immediacy no other pressing fully captures. It’s one of my favorite records. You can hear the air in the studio.
Beck was his own color. Restless—never uncertain, but unsatisfied with yesterday’s version of the possible. His playing was among the most vocal of any guitarist’s, but the voice was entirely his own. Sound over fame: he turned down the Rolling Stones in 1969. He built his first instrument from a cigar box and string from a radio-controlled airplane. Listening to him means not knowing what will happen next.
In the original liner notes, Beck described “Shapes of Things” as “the same Yardbirds hit. This must be played at maximum volume whatever phonograph you use. Makes very appropriate background music if you have Vicar over for tea.” He signed off: “Well that’s it Honeys, here’s our first LP, called Truth.”
“Shapes of Things” hits as hard this afternoon as it did in 1968. It still sounds like the beginning of something amazing.
The Find: Jeff Beck Truth · Mobile Fidelity · SACD or 180g 45 RPM 2xLP. The right pressing of the right record, don’t miss it.
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