Latest news with #JeffBeck
Business Journals
13-05-2025
- Business
- Business Journals
Richmond telehealth company AnswersNow wins big industry award
Richmond virtual behavioral therapy company AnswersNow Inc. was recently named the world's best telehealth platform at the MedTech Breakthrough Awards. The Los Angeles group annually hands out awards to companies, products and people in the medical tech, digital health and fitness spaces, including those working in medical devices, internet of things, electronic health records and more. The group of 141 winners for 2025 was judged from a pool of more than 4,500 nominations. AnswersNow pairs families with behavioral health clinicians specializing in autism on its proprietary platform. The clinicians provide applied behavior analysis, which is often used to teach new behaviors or diminish behaviors associated with autism. It is also used in the treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other developmental disabilities. The company utilizes telehealth technology to meet patients where they are and at more convenient times. That, it says, makes care more accessible and affordable. 'Traditional autism care in America is past its breaking point and families deserve better,' AnswersNow CEO Jeff Beck said in a statement. 'This recognition is an important validation of our team's collective effort and the undeniable evidence that virtual ABA therapy helps learners everywhere lead more fulfilling lives.' AnswersNow recently made a series of executive hires with an eye on expansion in 2025. Beck told me March the company would likely go to market in the third or fourth quarter to raise more money. AnswersNow has raised roughly $12.5 million to since its founding in 2017, according to Crunchbase, including an $11 million Series A round in 2023 led by New York's Left Lane Capital. Beck told me the company, which employs a total of 154, has tripled revenue each year since 2022. He declined to give exact figures. Today, AnswersNow is serving Medicaid and commercial clients in Virginia, Texas and Georgia.
Wall Street Journal
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Yardbirds' Review: The Reign of the Guitar Gods
'It's a shame the Yardbirds have no image,' opined Herman's Hermits' Peter Noone bluntly in 1966, 'because they would be the Number One group in England.' It's true that the Yardbirds—whose 'magnificent reverberations' are chronicled in Peter Stanfield's 'The Yardbirds: The Most Blueswailing Futuristic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound'—remain a difficult band to peg among their peers. They were tricky to market, too, stiff and uncomfortable in publicity photos. Despite the powerful, affectless voice of their singer Keith Relf, the Yardbirds frontman offered no Mick Jagger-like threat to the female populace. One British magazine described him as 'frail like a sparrow,' more likely to engender maternal feelings in its teen readership. In any case it was its succession of genius guitarists to whom the rest of the band was in thrall. The sequence began with Eric Clapton, who left in 1965 over a mix of personality clashes and his own blues orthodoxy. He was followed by sonic adventurer Jeff Beck, who moved front and center with his arsenal of fuzz, distortion and feedback, and, finally, Jimmy Page, who arrived in 1966 as a bassist but graduated to guitar, violin bow in hand, foot rocking on the wah-wah pedal. Their classic mid-'60s lineup included Chris Dreja on rhythm guitar, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty on drums (the sole original member in the current iteration of the band). The London rhythm-and-blues scene—including the Crawdaddy Club, where the Rolling Stones were launched—gave the Yardbirds their start. Their signature was the 'blueswailing' rave-up, the instrumental interlude that could stretch any three-minute number into a sweaty epic jam, feeding off the proximity of an audience moving, in the words of one contemporary journalist, 'like a crazy caterpillar on pep pills.' Their debut album, 'Five Live Yardbirds,' recorded at the Marquee Club in 1964, would later be tagged by All Music Guide as 'the best such live record of the entire middle of the decade.' After Mr. Clapton's departure, the Yardbirds gravitated toward commercial pop ('For Your Love,' 1965), then pioneered psychedelia ('Shapes of Things,' 1966) before unexpectedly and ill-advisedly joining forces with Mickie Most, the producer of acts such as Herman's Hermits and Donovan. When Relf and Mr. McCarty left in 1968, Mr. Page, in pursuit of a 'heavy beat sound,' recruited new members into an act that briefly toured as the New Yardbirds. They re-formed as Led Zeppelin, inheriting some Yardbirds tunes including the staple 'Dazed and Confused.'
The Guardian
05-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Brian May nearly choked on his goats cheese: my adventures with the cosmic dads of rock'n'roll
Young musicians have so little to say. Give me a rocker in his later years any day. Ask him about his childhood, his relationship with his mum, his painful lifelong love affair with his lead guitarist. Many belong to a specific anthropological group: born after the war, they got their first guitars on hire purchase and went on to date the aristocracy. They became my specialist subject as a journalist: it was impossible to resist the combination of vulnerability, extreme oddness and sharp business nous I found in so many, while others were living in strangely compromised circumstances despite years of deathless hits. I was particularly drawn to those who had continued a career under the radar, or who had slipped under it but hadn't quite noticed. It was a strange subject to pursue, but always a labour of love – because on some level, I felt a strange identification with these 'cosmic dads' of rock'n'roll. The obsession has culminated in a book, Men of a Certain Age. Here are 10 things I learned in the course of writing it. According to guitarist Jeff Beck, the rock star's distinctive 'egg-timer' face (sunken cheeks, faintly simian) was the result of bad 1960s dentistry and a teenage lust for sweets. A man on a flying horse would be hard-pressed to pull Beck out of a lineup with Ronnie Wood, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He was the inspiration for Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap and his stage gear was designed by Hilary Wili, who did the costumes for Downton Abbey. ('She still finds time to stitch me something.') With their little legs, narrow hips and mysterious 'proceeding' hairlines, rockers often look like pickled versions of the boys they were when they first picked up a guitar. Greg Lake, talking about Emerson, Lake & Palmer's biggest gigs, once told me: 'I've never seen so many people together in one place, apart from in a war.' Paul O'Neill, of the US prog outfit Trans-Siberian Orchestra, claimed to have walked in disguise among his audience before a show in Germany like Henry V before Agincourt. There he met two Sunni Muslims from Iraq and, 90ft away, two Shia Muslims from Iran: 'God forbid, two years from now, they end up in two different militias and recognise each other,' he told me. 'They would unchamber their weapons and say, 'Hey, weren't we at a TSO concert together?'' Many US rockers see themselves as quasi-political figures, ambassadors of western might. This is why Sting is beloved in America. He grew up in the shadow of a 10,000-tonne ship in the docks of Wallsend. One was built and launched every year, a constant cycle of constraint and departure. The Queen Mother attended one of the launches and waved at him from her car. He told himself: 'One day, I'll be on the inside of a car like that.' His father was a milkman, and Sting and his brother would be at the dairy at 4am. The class divide between him and his bandmate Stewart Copeland, son of a CIA diplomat, fuelled much press in the early days. 'I developed no accent,' he told me. 'Now I only speak Geordie when I'm angry – and I can speak it well.' Rock wives correct mistakes, monitor manners and oversee the business side of things. Gene Simmons claims to have slept with 4,600 women. By the time I met him in Moscow, he was married to Shannon Tweed, a former erotic-thriller actor known for her work in Meatballs III. She was there at the table, flicking through Time magazine. Gene talked about the postwar British diet, citing faggots (lowgrade meatballs) in gravy. Tweed read a definition of faggots from her phone in a slow, Beverly Hills voice: 'A bundle of pieces of iron or steel to be welded, rolled or hammered together at high temperature.' 'It's a question of semantics,' said Gene. 'Though I'm not anti-semantic.' She told him to finish his porridge. 'You're burping while talking,' she added. 'I was?' he said. 'At least I didn't fart.' 'You find the truth by ridiculing yourself,' Johnny Rotten told me. Punk is the most exhausted story in pop music but Rotten speaks in strange, fresh phrases, as though he's found a way to keep himself interested. 'Vivienne's clothes were always awful,' he volunteered of Westwood. 'All those zips – she had no concept of men's dangly bits.' Shaun Ryder was similar, spectacularly engaged for someone so blasted by drugs, and strangely amused by the interview and portrait process. His hair had recently fallen out after testosterone injections for an underactive thyroid – head, eyebrows, chest and nethers. He could have been self-conscious, but he made it part of the act as he peered at the photographs and said: 'I look like Uncle Fester.' Rock stars are from another age, when journalists and musicians hooked up on sheepskin rugs and wrote features together in blissful, claret-fuelled symbiosis. After four days with the Soft Machine exile Kevin Ayers in Carcassonne, he made a little bed up for me in his large, empty house. Later, as his manager explained that no romance was to take place, I heard a brief crashing of pots and pans. It's a shame this all sounds a bit #MeToo in hindsight. It really wasn't. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Rock journalism is the only place where writers are obsessive fans – though usually pretending not to be. From the late 1960s on, it was a male domain, and male journalists were often at pains to compete with them and disguise their admiration, making statements such as: 'Let me tell you why your second album tanked.' Time and again, I have seen relief on the face of a rocker as I enter the room, a loosening of the shoulders. He would then tell me things he wouldn't tell a man, probably thinking: 'Ah, it's just a girl!' Bruce Hornsby had a big hit in 1986, The Way It Is, and found a way to live well off it by allowing lucrative cover versions by various rappers, most notably Tupac Shakur. These helped finance his life of bluegrass, jazz and atonal pointillism in the concert halls of middle America. 'Look, if you really hate it, don't come back,' he said of this new material. 'You should not come back, because I am not going to be a vehicle for your stroll down memory lane.' I love these figures who found a way to play only the music they wanted. Jeff Beck was asked to join the Stones once, but told me: 'I wouldn't have been my own master – and that would be my whole being truncated.' The artist formerly known as Terence Trent D'Arby, now Sananda Maitreya, made plenty of records but struggled to listen to them. His exit from the industry, after his second album flopped, was too painful to recall. Yet like all the best rock stars, he knew the value of his story and exaggerated his musical rivalries. Claiming that Lenny Kravitz was a 'cheaper model' of himself, he announced: 'Record companies say, 'Hey, if you like this asshole, you're going to like this asshole, plus we're making a higher margin on this asshole!'' I even found a poem on his website to his old nemesis. It was called Lenny K and read: 'Fear not / Your girls are safe! / I've got an Italian girlfriend now / And my leash is pretty short.' Queen were always suspicious of journalists, ever since the NME ran a piece about Freddie Mercury with the headline: 'Is this man a prat?' I chose a clumsy moment to ask Brian May why the press hated Queen: he was trying to swallow a piece of goat's cheese. 'I don't know,' he winced. 'Why don't you ask them what their problem was?' Sitting in his dressing room, Paul Stanley of Kiss put it like this: 'The press's dislike of Kiss was so out of whack, so out of proportion, you almost have to look at someone and go, 'Who beat you as a child?'' Kate Mossman is senior writer for the New Statesman. Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty is published by Bonnier (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
BBC News
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
'Very rare' multi-neck guitars fail to sell at Wiltshire auction
Three "very rare" multi-neck guitars have failed to sell at a specialist guitar auction in two five-neck guitars and one six-neck guitar, known as "The Beast", failed to find a buyer in the sale, despite numerous other lots being auction, run by Gardiner Houlgate in Corsham, saw more than 460 lots up for sale on the first day, including guitars formerly owned by Jeff Beck, Scott Gorham of Thin Lizzy and Steve Diggle of on offer were a number of smaller items including a telephone signed by Kate Bush and a Michael Jackson tour programmes. Among the biggest sellers of the day were a prototype Ibanez guitar owned by Beck and a 1959 Gibson ES-5 Switchmaster guitar, both of which sold for more than £12, telephone that was autographed by Bush sold for £240, while a Squier Adeson Strat prototype electric guitar previously used by Brian May sold for £380, well within its pre-auction associated with Status Quo and the Stranglers also found new homes, but "The Beast" failed to sell, despite connections with the comedian Bill Bailey and the spoof rock band Spinal Tap. The item, created by the guitar designer Gary Hutchins, faired no better than its two lesser-necked counterparts from the same designer, which also failed to sale runs for a further three days, with further lots up for auction until the close on Friday.
