The Yardbirds
important work in color
1964: With Sonny Boy Williamson * Five Live Yardbirds (UK release). 1965: For Your Love * Having a Rave Up (includes 3 songs from Five Live Yardbirds). 1966: The Yardbirds (UK) * Over Under Sideways Down * Roger the Engineer (UK). 1967: Greatest Hits * Little Games. 1970: Performances by Clapton, Beck, Page. 1971: Live Yardbirds (’68 performance with Jimmy Page). 1975: Yardbirds. 1986: Greatest Hits, Vol. 1. (1964-66). 1991: The Yardbirds, Vol. 1: Smokestack Lightning * The Yardbirds, Vol. 2: Blues, Backtracks and Shapes of Things. 1998: Yardbirds on the BBC. 2003: Birdland.
The story of the Yardbirds isn’t merely the story of three great guitarists: it may be exactly the opposite. Eric Clapton, as represented on The Yardbirds with Sonny Boy Williamson and Five Live Yardbirds, was reserved, standoffish, paralyzed by reverence. This has been called taste – but the rest of the Yardbirds (rhythm-scrubbing phenomena Chris Dreja, walking-bass addict Paul Samwell-Smith, flam-heaven pummeler Jim McCarty and flamboyant harp player and uninhibited shouter Keith Relf) blitzed the audience with their patented low volume to high volume waves of sound that remain some of the more impressive displays of British Invasion electricity. There’s a point on Five Live Yardbirds where Clapton takes one of his few solos and what sounds like a piano starts hammering out sixteenth notes right along with him and, surprise, it’s Keith Relf’s harmonica which in general takes up 10 times as much space as Clapton’s guitar – to good effect. When the Yardbirds recorded the single "For Your Love" using mostly congas, harpsichord and upright bass, Clapton fled to John Mayall’s band and to a job that had less distractions in the center of the stage. Later, Clapton, in Cream, would attempt to outdo the Yardbirds’ raving rock by playing faster. It didn’t work. What Clapton left behind with the Yardbirds, besides the raucous Five Live, was the spotty For Your Love album, which has seminally revved up moments like "I’m Not Talking," "I Ain’t Got You," "I Ain’t Done Wrong," and "I Wish You Would."
Jeff Beck, a guitarist of brilliance and banality, inspiration and bad taste, fit right in for 18 months (not a small stretch of time considering Beck’s unquenchable infidelity) on an important batch of songs that continued to expand the dynamic range of rock guitar – squeals, whammy-bar moans, feedback showcases – with baby steps that were immediately emulated and adapted into more mature work by whatever guitar players were listening at the time (Pete Townshend, Dave Davies, Jerry Garcia, John Lennon, Roy Wood): but what was most important about the band remained the revved up aggression displayed on the cover tunes and the Yardbirds' ability to energize their move toward pop. As a US release, Having a Rave Up manages classic status by cheating – several songs from Five Live Yardbirds are included. The band soon crashed when attempting to write an album of originals: these songs are represented by The Yardbirds, Over Under Sideways Down, and Roger the Engineer, USA and UK releases which share songs with each other and the subsequent Greatest Hits package. Roger the Engineer is the most complete package and it’s a mess: there’s some neat guitar tricks, but little of the energy/synergy of old.
Jimmy Page joined the Yardbirds in their waning days and reinvigorated them, although the studio document of his version of the band, Little Games, is weak and may have precipitated the final breakup. But as a live performer, Page adapted himself easily to the Yardbirds’ sonic exuberance, wrapping himself effortlessly around Relf’s harmonica while adding fiery guitar solos to the band’s spirited pull-out-the-stops momentum. Taped from a live show featuring Page, Live Yardbirds is incredibly inspired: Dreja has moved to bass, Smith is gone and Relf is singing his much-maligned heart out. The sonic power of the old Yardbirds is resurrected here, suggesting that they really were a live band daunted by the niceties of the studio. When Relf and Dreja left the band, Jimmy Page put together a new lineup. That lineup became Led Zeppelin and the fact that you can play Live Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin back to back with little transitional discomfort, especially on the Yardbirds’ version of "Dazed and Confused," shows what kind of level the band was playing at as they entered the seventies.
The point has been missed: this was not a band about guitarists. Once the rhythm section started raving, rock improv was never the same.
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