I apologize to everyone in advance; I seem to be on a sixties-pop kick. At work, one of the rare privileges of a small office set back from the rest a ways, I can play music a bit louder on my stereo than other scenarios might allow. Playing Jeff Beck's Truth this morning, as the cool fog that's plagued us in Minneapolis for nigh a week began to lift, I fell for the album all over again. I pushed the volume up two more notches. Yes, Jeff Beck's material is spotty as hell and some of his later seventies material was pop-schlock; yes, he is the other Yardbird; yes, he seemed incapable of simple focus on the blues. But here, on his first solo album, he's recruited a young, still shellshocked Rod Stewart and a plucky Ron Wood, both of whom would later use what they learned from this album to change the face of the Small Faces (yes, here's where we come full circle from my last outing). Rough, outraged and demented, they saw away at blues standards from "You Shook Me" to "I ain't Superstitious." Beck gives the blues a criminal voice, as Cream and Jimi were slipping the genre acid. This is not psychedelic blues; it's bloodied and tattered with the bruises of ole Robert Johnson's pledge and it teeters along on Stewart's stripped vocal chords for some of his best performances. At the album's midpoint, as you stumble around looking for your glasses, Beck slips into mid-album reverie, backing "Ol' Man River" with the folk classic "Greensleeves." For those looking to depart from A Quick One, Between the Buttons, or Disraeli Gears, for example, I can think of no better stepping off point. . .