The Tridents never issued any official recordings, but they were one of the top R&B/blues outfits working in area around Chiswick during the early 1960s, and managed to achieve a kind of posthumous immortality as the band that Jeff Beck belonged to prior to his joining the Yardbirds. They were formed in the early '60s, and even before Beck joined, they were known for playing some of the more authentic-sounding R&B and blues on their local club circuit. The group was comprised of two brothers, John Lucas on rhythm guitar and vocals, and Paul Lucas on bass and vocals, with Ray Cook -- a diminutive fellow with immensely long hair that would fall over his kit, according to Beck -- on the drums. Beck joined the band in the summer of 1963 and, over the next 18 months, built up his jaw-dropping pyrotechnic guitar vocabulary, which reportedly astounded those engineers who tried to record the Tridents.

The group reached the pinnacle of its success as a club band, attaining a residency at the Eel Pie Island in Twickenham and eventually attracting as many as 1000 patrons at one time to their shows. It was at these shows that Beck regularly astounded audiences with his playing, particularly his controlled use of feedback. Ironically, he'd begun to work with these effects to overcome the limitations of the amplifiers his band was using, particularly as they started playing to ever-larger audiences and bigger rooms, and it became his trademark. The Tridents left behind a large handful of demo recordings, primarily intended to earn them the credibility they needed to get bigger gigs at better clubs -- three of those tracks surfaced in the '90s on the Beckology triple-CD set, and they reveal a band with a grasp of R&B that matches its reach. The Lucas brothers were more than fair players and singers, and Ray Cook was a very powerful drummer, fast and busy.

The band might have made it, but for the fact that they were a little late getting noticed on the early British blues scene -- groups like the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds had already moved into a slightly more pop-oriented direction to get noticed and sell records. Had the Tridents held on, based on the evidence of songs like Nursery Rhyme or Wanderin' Man Blues, they might've been rivals to the Pretty Things or even gone head-to-head with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, but it wasn't to be. In early 1965, Eric Clapton elected to leave the Yardbirds, over their decision to move in more of a pop/rock direction and away from blues. After turning down the spot himself, guitarist Jimmy Page directed the inquiries toward Beck, who left the Tridents in March of 1965 to join the Yardbirds. That marked the end of the Tridents' relevant history, though Cook later played on the Beck-Ola album by the Jeff Beck Group. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi