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At this point things get rather quirky. 

Peter Grant, a road manager who'd worked in the States with the Animals and The New Vaudeville Band and reckoned he'd spotted an alternative career path for an up and coming act booked a short U.S. tour for the Beck Group and tried to buy Beck's contract from Mickie Most, figuring that live work and the new FM radio format meant that you could break a new act in the States without a hit single.

When things didn't quite work out as planned with Mr Beck and friends, Grant turned his attention to Page's New Yardbirds who'd borrowed the monicker suggested by Keith Moon for the Beck's Bolero lineup.

Led Zeppelin.

The initial Jeff Beck Group tour of the States started with four shows at Fillmore East, opening for and apparently upstaging The Grateful Dead and finished on the other side of the continent at the Fillmore West, by which time Grant had negotiated them an album contract with Epic.

An album contract, of course, means that you need to record an album, and the basic tracks for Truth were recorded over two weeks, with overdubs going over the top in more ways than one the following month. 

Mickie Most was more concerned with other projects at the time (and probably hadn't appreciated what Grant was aiming for) so production duties were largely left to Ken Scott who set about recording Beck, Stewart & Co. playing their live set in the studio.

Looking at the album's track listing, it's fairly obvious Beck's live set had been cobbled together from a variety of sources.

The album opens with a cover of the old Yardbirds number Shapes of Things, but where the original version was a fairly polite inquiry as to whether time would make men more wise Beck's version, launched off a thunderous riff, has Stewart demanding an answer. If the Yardbirds original was a group of folkies linking hands and singing Kumbaya, the rendition on Truth is standing on the barricades, fist raised and demanding action. 

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© Ian Hughes 2015