An Introduction to the Yardbirds

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Roger The Engineer / Over Under Sideways Down

The Yardbirds

2009 | The Yardbirds / Cadiz

There were many British bands that swiveled rock’s glorious adolescence, but for my nascent psychedelia and guitar drool, the Yardbirds have long held the most resonance. The wonder of first hearing the extended rave-up of “I’m A Man;” the Gregorian chants of “Still I’m Sad;” the eastern swami of “Over Under Sideways Down;” the clarion clang of the harpsichord in “For Your Love” forever changed for me how I would hear rock music.

I sometimes think of the Yardbirds as the most science-fictional of the ’60s bands, all alien soundscapes and – not unlike Charlie Parker, whom they named themselves for – possessed of the ability to open the celestial frontiers of harmony and rhythm and tone. Like that be-bop master, the Yardbirds had three guitar maestros whose peerages formed a divine trinity in rock and roll: Eric of Clapton, Jeff of Beck, Jimmy of Page. Guitar Heroes all, each virtuosic in technique, imagination and emotion.

And they were each very different from one another, so much so that one can follow their lineage through many subsequent generations of six string-a-longs. Clapton was the most tied to Earth – and yet in many ways, he was also the one most tempted by stratospherics. If he was a purist, shown in the basic blues (“Smokestack Lightnin’,” You Can’t Judge A Book By Lookin ‘At The Cover,”) that delineate London 1963: The First Recordings, he had an odd way of showing it. “Here ‘Tis,” a live recording from London’s Marquee Club in 1964 and featured on Shapes of Things – The Very Best Of, demonstrates a classic blast-furnace Yardbirds “rave-up,” the group disintegrating the song into an overdrive of scratching onrushing noise. Though he famously quit the band in the wake of “For Your Love”‘s pure pop production, the group was moving in more adventurous directions anyway.

That direction would be spearheaded by Jeff Beck. His model was Cliff Gallup of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, an otherworldy echo-ridden and jazz-chorded rockabilly that, coupled with Jeff’s love of fast cars and internal combustion engines, produced some of rock’s most attention-grabbing licks. When manager (and producer, though bassist Paul Samwell-Smith handled their musical “direction”) Giorgio Gomelsky brought in a sitar and tabla player for “Heart Full of Soul,” it was Beck who ultimately took out his fuzztone and ladled on the vindaloo. Not to mention giving multitudes of guitarists a work-out lesson in “Jeff’s Boogie” – dig those chiming harmonics! – and a template for laying track in “The Train Kept A-Rollin’,” a reworked version of the Johnny Burnette Trio classic, which itself originated with Tiny Bradshaw and would go on to become Joe Perry’s showcase in Aerosmith. A history lesson in one song.

The Yardbirds ‘narrative would achieve epic proportions when Jimmy Page left session playing in 1966 to join the group following Samwell-Smith’s departure to become a record producer. Page and Beck can be seen together in Blow-Up, where director Antonioni filmed Jeff smashing his guitar (he couldn’t get the Who); they can be heard in the nuclear fission of “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” which exemplifies the volatility of two guitar titans coexisting in the same combo. When Jeff left to go solo, Page spent his time planting (hmmm…) the seeds of his New Yardbirds, which would eventually become Led Zeppelin.

But the Yardbirds as a group were more than the sum of their guitarists. Even in the sessions that make up Roger the Engineer, the group’s official second album (though the slapdash way their stateside record company released them in America made it their third), what comes across is their sense of unity and song. Most cuts were studio-crafted (as opposed to their earlier work, which was in the main transferred from their live act), with the band – Chris Dreja on rhythm guitar, Jim McCarty on drums, Samwell-Smith on bass, and singer Keith Relf – laying down the track and then inviting Beck to decorate it.

They had a week to make the record at Advision Studios in London in that pregnant spring of ’66. In its current form, adding on the post-SS single “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” and its b-side “Psychodaises” (where Pagey plays the main lick and Beck responses him), along with Keith Relf solo outings and a couple of alternate takes, the album was a call-to-arms for every wannabe garage-rocker on the planet. Very few could wanna-Beatle, despite that group’s inviolable inspiration, for even then, the Beatles ‘grasp of pop form was singular; and the Stones, notwithstanding “Satisfaction,” were still transitioning from trad R&B. The Yardbirds ‘adventurism opened the sonic gates and all manner of mayhem erupted.

Take, at random, the winding pathways curling through the decades from the Mods ‘organasmic sixties ‘cover of “Evil Hearted You” on Fort Worth Teen Scene Vol. II through such contempo ‘Bird-nestings as the Black Keys ‘”Just Couldn’t Tie Me Down,” the Von Bondies ‘”She’s Dead To Me,” or King Khan and BBQ Show‘s “Treat Me Like A Dog.”

Even the divergent paths of the Yardbirds post ’68 break-up shows the widely splayed musical streams the band embodied. Relf and McCarty joined forces with Keith’s sister Jane in a soft-rock classical and folk group called Renaissance which, after a few permutations, became – sans any ex-Yardbirds – a vehicle for the beautifully expressive voice of Annie Haslam. Dreja seemed content with becoming a photographer until he found himself in 1983 a part of the oddly-named A Box of Frogs with McCarty, Samwell-Smith and a guesting appearance by Jeff Beck.

Of the Yardbirds ‘lead guitarists, the concept of hefty metallica might be far different without their triumviral quest for ultimate sustain and hammer-on. Clapton stretched guitar improvisation to improbable lengths with Cream, to heartbreaking agonistes with Derek and the Dominos and then, having stepped to the edge of narcotic despair, found his way home with a tasteful, song-oriented music where his guitar played ever an accompanist’s role. After the Jeff Beck Group, which took British blues-rock to its most baroque, Beck would follow his own trail of jazzy, mostly instrumental fusions, angular, complex and nimble-fingered, becoming the guitarista’s guitarist – a Nigel Tufnel for everyone who ever grabbed a tremolo bar and held on for dear life. And Page would define “heavy,” with the lead-into-gold alchemy that is Zeppelin, a begatting that begins with Black Sabbath and ends with Wayne’s World‘s trip to the music store to have “Stairway denied!”

“Shapes of Things” to come, indeed.