There’s an old joke in music circles: If you want to drive a Jeff Beck fan crazy, ask him to name a good Jeff Beck album. There’s a soupçon of truth in that joke but, in fact, it’s easy to name a good Jeff Beck album. Or even a great one. It’s just as easy to name an album that is loaded with unbelievably great guitar playing but that still falls far short of the mark. Beck is nothing if not maddening.

Martin Power’s 2014 biography of the now late guitarist borders on hagiography at times, though it never quite succumbs. What is crystal clear is that Power considers Beck the greatest guitar player who ever lived, with the possible exception of Jimi Hendrix. And who’s to say that he’s wrong? Far more inventive than Clapton, Page, Allman, Vaughan and so many others, Beck has been lighting up the ears of guitar freaks and, maybe more importantly, other guitar players since he first burst onto the scene with the Yardbirds in 1965. His early experiments with feedback pre-dated Hendrix’s mastery over it while his lightning runs and otherworldly tremolo use set him up as a breed apart from his predecessor in the Yardbirds (Clapton) and his friend/successor (Page). The Yardbirds are known as the band that served as the minor leagues for Cream and Led Zeppelin, but the band’s best material, by far, was when Beck shook the strings. It’s really not even close. With Clapton the band was a fairly standard white blues band out of London, albeit one with a fiery guitar player. With Page the band was a spent force creatively until they broke up and the guitarist recruited three new players to fill the void. With Beck the band was frenetic and wild, incorporating sounds (like feedback) and tone (like Beck’s imitation of a sitar on “Heart Full of Soul”) that existed outside of the main music scene of the day.

Hot Wired Guitar focuses strongly on Beck’s career from his teenage years with The Tridents through the Yardbirds, the Jeff Beck Group, his brief dalliance with Vanilla Fudge’s Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice, and his solo career. It’s a well-written, excellent resource for the guitar player’s work, including the million and one guest spots he’s done with everyone from Stevie Wonder to Kelly Clarkson. A discography in the back of the book is a nice summary of Beck’s travels over a fifty-year career, and very handy if you want to stream his many guest appearances (who knew it was Jeff Beck providing the lead guitar work on Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”? Not me).

Martin Power has clear favorites from the Beck discography, as his album by album reviews attest, and they’re the usual suspects: the Yardbirds’ Roger the Engineer, the Jeff Beck Group’s masterpiece Truth, the all-instrumental jazz fusion of Blow By Blow. The only album that Power criticizes as an album is 1985’s Flash, an attempt to get a hit record by pairing Beck up with a singer for the first time since 1972. Glossy, overproduced, and light on songs, Flash was a definite misfire despite a few good songs (an an excellent pairing, and near hit single, with his former lead singer Rod Stewart on “People Get Ready”). But other than Flash, Power focuses on Beck’s playing rather than the albums as a whole. So while Wired and There And Back, two more jazz fusion albums that are far less interesting than Blow By Blow, get criticized as being somewhat lacking, Power focuses on riffs and solos within the songs and in this area Beck could do no wrong. It is actually true that those albums, and most of his post-Blow By Blow efforts, do not measure up to what came before but the guitar playing is never less than brilliant. Long after Eric Clapton started playing it safe and Jimmy Page had all but retired, Beck was as playful, inventive, and incendiary as he ever was. Unique among musicians from that generation, Beck never rested on his laurels or settled into complacency. There is no sense of “heard it before” when discussing Jeff Beck.

Where Power fails in the book is the scant treatment he gives to the man himself. There is some talk about Beck’s prowess among the groupies in his time with the Yardbirds, but otherwise there’s no exploration of the man’s actual existence outside of his playing (and, later, his love of working on vintage cars). There’s no mention of drug use for example, and I don’t know whether that’s because Beck didn’t partake or because the author chose not to present him in a bad light. There’s a little bit of drinking, but not much and it seems never to have been a problem for the guitarist. One can write a book about a straight arrow, but there needs to be something in his life that’s of interest other than being a musician and a mechanic. Power discusses how mercurial Beck could be, dropping out of tours a few days into them, changing his mind about albums, recording, shows, and band members, but never really gets into what that meant for the people who surrounded him. The book is more about the life of a musician than that of a flesh-and-blood human being, and that’s a missed opportunity. Jeff Beck has always been an enigma. After reading Hot Wired Guitar, he’s still an enigma.