Yardbirds - Heart Full Of Soul

The Yardbirds were one of the most important and influential bands of the first half of the Sixties. The English band's fame, besides their ability to turn rhythm'n'blues into an extremely dynamic language, capable of being both progressive and psychedelic, when not powerfully proto-metal, is tied to the importance that the quintessential instrument of rock music, the electric guitar, took on in their sound, picked up in turn by guitarists destined to become legends such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

Having A Rave Up!

Their story begins in 1963: we're in the southwest suburbs of London, where singer and harmonica player Keith Relf and bassist Paul "Sam" Samwell-Smith throw themselves into the electric blues fray by founding the Metropolis Blues Quartet, which within a few months, after toying with the provisional name Blue-Sounds, would settle on its definitive name, Yardbirds, with a line-up rounded out by drummer Jim McCarty and guitarists Chris Dreja and Anthony "Top" Topham, who came over from the Suburban R&B. According to McCarty's account in his memoirs, the name Yardbirds was borrowed from Jack Kerouac's novel "On the Road", where it referred to the drifters who hung around railway yards. The drummer also adds that, for Topham, it was also one of the possible nicknames of jazz saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker.

Pressured by his parents, who wanted him to keep studying, Topham would end up bowing out within a few months, making room for another guitarist who was already held in high regard, but who at the time, to make ends meet, worked as a carpenter, playing here and there on the side to indulge his deep passion for the blues. His name is Eric Clapton. "Eric and I", Relf would recall, "were old friends... we'd met back in art school. We used to go around together to parties and we'd only play acoustic blues and that sort of thing. And actually it's from those kinds of roots that the Yardbirds came out, that is, from the kind of party that was fashionable in 1962, when people would gather in small groups and there were always a couple of guitarists playing blues".

What really fired the imagination of young British enthusiasts was above all the electrified blues of Chicago. When, in 1929, following the catastrophic Wall Street crash, many people abandoned the rural South of the United States, brought to their knees by an unprecedented economic crisis, several Delta bluesmen also packed up and went looking for fortune elsewhere. Many of them ended up settling in the Chicago area, where the rural blues of their origins underwent a process of urbanization, turning into that Chicago blues characterized by electric guitar, amplified harmonica, and a pulsing rhythm of drums and bass. Thanks to that sound, many English bands, including the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds themselves, found a way to rise above the mediocrity of much homegrown music, whose only goal was to reach as wide an audience as possible. Ironically, it was precisely those same English bands, especially after the Beatles' triumph on American soil, who showed the new generation of American musicians that the twelve-bar form could be the ideal vehicle for all kinds of experimentation and hybridization, starting with the one that sent the "devil's music" on a collision course with the thrilling vibrations of rock'n'roll, a graft that found a great ally precisely in the new electric instrumentation.

After Eric Clapton's arrival, the Yardbirds began hammering away relentlessly. Thanks to a series of blistering live shows, in which they performed classics by Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson II and so on, the band earned no small amount of respect on the English rhythm'n'blues circuit, proving to be more technically accomplished than the Rolling Stones and the Animals, but less charismatic, mainly because they lacked a frontman who could compete with the sensual Mick Jagger or the "animalistic" Eric Burdon.

From their very first, incendiary concerts, the Yardbirds won acclaim not only for their instrumental skill, but also for the overwhelming force of their so-called "rave-ups" (literally, "wild party"), long, sometimes very long (up to thirty minutes!) blues-based instrumental digressions (the idea is said to have come from Samwell-Smith) built on solos, distortion and feedback, which some even compared to the free-flowing musings of jazz. A typical rave-up of theirs tended to drift away from the song's original framework, but precisely for that reason ended up enriching and intensifying it, suggesting the idea of a journey (think of what would, a few years later, become the psychedelic "trip") and an exploration at the edges of the unknown, often anchored to a structure that tended toward repetition, with the harmony often taking on the character of a genuine drone (helped along by a deafening volume level) and an incessant rhythmic pulse, dragging the music toward a climax that served as a prelude to the "return to the ranks".

Usually, the Yardbirds' early rave-ups drew all attention to Clapton, a well-mannered and shy type who, during those vibrant instrumental rides, took on the guise of an electric shaman, drawing on an extraordinary gift for improvisation. "While most other bands played three-minute songs", the guitarist would recall in his autobiography, "we took three-minute pieces and stretched them out, and the audience would go wild, shaking their heads maniacally and dancing in all sorts of outlandish ways. For my guitar I used light-gauge strings, with a very thin first string, which made it easier to bend notes, and it wasn't unusual, during the most frenzied moments, for me to break at least one string".

Besides Keith Relf (who played harmonica with an emotional style and great improvisational ability), another anything-but-marginal presence in the makeup of their rave-ups was Paul Samwell-Smith, whose bass accompanied the improvisations from the back, letting out extremely powerful notes that, like genuine explosions, steered the band toward new paths to explore through smoldering improvisation. To avoid straining his fingertips too much and to give his bass an even more powerful sound, Samwell-Smith decided to use black, plastic-coated strings: "My fingers traveled up and down the fretboard of my instrument, so I had to resort to that trick to avoid too much damage", he would recall.

According to some critics, the roots of the long psychedelic meditations that, a few years later, would become a must for many American and English bands can be traced most directly back to the Yardbirds' rave-ups.

Having taken over from the Rolling Stones at the Crawdaddy Club and having meanwhile won the esteem of promoter Giorgio Gomelsky (an extremely exuberant and charismatic character, marked by an always well-groomed beard and a Russian accent that betrayed his Georgian origins), the Yardbirds set off on a short British tour (December 1963-January 1964) alongside one of their heroes, Sonny Boy Williamson II, who had been brought over to England to capitalize on the wave of interest that, for some years, had driven the Queen's young subjects to snap up as many blues records as possible, especially Chicago blues, much of it tied to the legendary Chess Records. Some of the recordings from those shows would end up, three years later, on Sonny Boy Williamson And The Yardbirds.

In February 1964, the Yardbirds signed their first contract with Columbia Records, recording, just a month later, on 20 March to be precise, about ten live tracks at the Marquee Club in London, which would end up on Five Live Yardbirds (10 tracks; 42:11), which hit record store shelves the following December. "We were much better live, and we proved it with that first LP of ours", Clapton would write in his autobiography. "With few other live albums around, 'Five Live Yardbirds' turned out to be a groundbreaking record. It had a much rawer sound.

Made up entirely of covers, mostly drawn from blues and rhythm'n'blues (with the exception of the rock'n'roll of "Too Much Monkey Business", which opens the record paying tribute to Chuck Berry), Five Live Yardbirds is one of the decisive moments in the shaping of English blues-rock, as well as one of the most important live albums of the first half of the Sixties, despite a recording that wasn't quite up to the occasion, due to the venue's acoustics and the use of a rather poor two-track recorder. Small traces of their rave-ups can be heard on tracks such as "Smokestack Lightning", "Respectable", "Louise", "I'm A Man" and "Here 'Tis". Worth noting, finally, is Clapton's performance, whose guitar delivers, here and there, brief but incisive improvisations.

Between May and October 1964, the band released two moderately successful singles ("I Wish You Would"/"A Certain Girl" and "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl"/"I Ain't Got You"), but it would only be with "For Your Love" (March 1965; B-side: "Got To Hurry") that the Yardbirds would really take off, reaching number three on the English chart and climbing to number six on the American one, which earned them regular airplay on the BBC and appearances on the well-known TV show Ready Steady Go!.

Recorded with the addition of Brian Auger's harpsichord and Denny Piercy's bongos, "For Your Love" turned their classic rhythm'n'blues into a catchy pop contraption (its author, eighteen-year-old Graham Gouldman - future member of 10cc - had written it with the Beatles' latest work in mind), something that didn't sit well with Clapton, who had always stood out as one of the Yardbirds' most orthodox members when it came to blues devotion. "When they decided to record 'For Your Love'", the guitarist would say, "I knew it was the beginning of the end for me, because I couldn't see how we could make a record like that and still be ourselves. It felt to me like we'd completely run out of steam. I played on that track, although my contribution was limited to a very brief blues riff in the middle section, and as a consolation they gave me the B-side, an instrumental called 'Got To Hurry', which was based on a melody hummed by Giorgio Gomelsky, who took songwriting credit under the pseudonym O. Rasputin. By that point, I was already a fairly surly and discontented character and I deliberately made myself as unpopular as possible: I was always argumentative and dogmatic about whatever was put in front of me".

It was like this that, a few days after the track was recorded, Clapton was summoned by Gomelsky, who had for some time already been the band's manager and producer: "Clapton came into my office and you could tell he wasn't happy at all. He didn't like the music and, besides being unhappy with Keith's voice, he was also unhappy that the track didn't need a lead guitar". Chris Dreja, however, remembers it differently: "Eric was a purist, to the point of being blinded by it, and he didn't realize that the rest of the band was happy if it could achieve results by playing something that went beyond his classic comfort zone. Looking back, I think it hurt him deeply, given how close we'd been over the previous years".

To thrill you with delight

I’ll give you diamonds bright

There’ll be things that will excite

To make you dream of me at night

For your love

For your love

For your love

Disappointed by the band's choices, on March 25th, the very day the single was released, Clapton packed his bags and went off to play with John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers, though not before recommending, as his replacement, a certain Jimmy Page. However, once approached by Relf and co., Page turned the offer down, because he didn't want to give up his lucrative work as a sessionman, but perhaps also because he wasn't yet willing to go into competition with his old friend. In turn, though, he pointed the band toward another guitarist, Jeff Beck, who, after listening to Five Live Yardbirds, accepted without a moment's hesitation. A former art student, Beck had up to that point made a living working as a sessionman (he played, among others, with Screaming Lord Sutch) and lending his six-string to the Tridents, an outfit responsible for a powerful brand of rhythm'n'blues, "like Jimmy Reed's stuff, which we beefed up to make it more rock," as he would later put it. Beck had never been a true blues devotee, but he had on his side an unbridled imagination and a desire to experiment with new tonal and stylistic solutions that would take the Yardbirds' music to a new level. During live shows, the guitarist from the London suburb of Sutton could go as far as literally torturing his own guitar, coaxing out of it, through the use of various effects, proto-metal, atonal, percussive sounds, or sounds bordering on pure noise. His influence on guitarists of the Sixties would be second only to that of the unreachable Jimi Hendrix.

As David French, author of "Heart Full of Soul: Keith Relf of the Yardbirds," writes, "Beck had absorbed Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but he also had a deep love for the musicians of the Fifties, who used a much broader range of guitar technique, players like Freddie King, Les Paul, Cliff Gallup and Scotty Moore. Where Clapton was obsessed with a very narrow slice of Chicago blues, Beck instead drew on all sorts of different things and mixed them all together, creating something completely new. He combined phenomenal technique with limitless imagination and a deep interest in pure sound, from feedback to harmonics to the sounds generated by the first guitar effects units, such as the Binson Echo-Rec, treble boost, and some of the earliest fuzz pedals that Roger Mayer, a friend of Jimmy Page's, was building at the time. And, even more importantly, his playing was highly melodic and full of feeling; with just a few notes, he managed to project a moody intensity that blended perfectly with both Keith's voice and the overall sound and image of the group. At the same time, Beck was an electrifying, charismatic performer, with dark good looks and a shock of dark hair that quickly made him one of the Yardbirds fans' favorites."

Thanks to his use of the Binson Echo-Rec, Beck could create artificial echoes and reverb-drenched sounds, but he was also interested in the possibility of sustaining the strings' vibrations for as long as possible. So he turned to his friend Roger Mayer, a former British Admiralty engineer, who designed a brand-new device for him. That's how Beck came to be one of the earliest experimenters with the fuzz box, which not only lengthened notes but also added a layer of light sound distortion that would go on to become a hallmark of both psychedelic rock and garage-rock.

Guided by Beck's adventurous instinct, the Yardbirds also began moving toward Eastern-tinged sounds, which at that very time were starting to seep into the pop-rock world, helped along by the increasingly widespread use, among the more curious fringes of British youth, of drugs such as marijuana and LSD. The Yardbirds weren't heavy users of those substances themselves, but they quickly came to share the outlook of those who, spurred on in part by hallucinogenic visions, had begun to regard rock as a genuine art form. Here's what Keith Relf told Rave magazine: "Pop music is like abstract painting. In a way, it's easier to paint a sunset by thinking of it in classical pictorial terms than to paint it as an abstract mass of color. People need to feel what the artist was trying to achieve. When we record one of our songs, we're not necessarily singing about mists and sunsets, but we're bringing to life a sound that can evoke, in listeners' minds, thoughts and images that speak to them."

Spurred on by the emerging psychedelic culture, on April 20th, 1965 the Yardbirds recorded "Heart Full Of Soul" (again penned by Gouldman), a song that alternates between minor- and major-key melodies and on which, alongside the sound of a tabla, you can also hear a guitar line trying to mimic the sound of a sitar: it was Jeff Beck who played it, and to get that sound he combined bending, sustain and legato playing, venturing into what is probably the first extended modal improvisation on electric guitar. With this song (released as a single three months later), the Yardbirds effectively produced one of the very first examples of what would soon come to be called "raga rock."

Trivia: on the very first recording of "Heart Full Of Soul," which was never released because the band wasn't happy with it, you could hear the sound of an actual sitar, played by a musician brought in for the occasion, who nonetheless had quite a few problems playing in 4/4. As Gianfranco Salvatore also notes in "I primi quattro secondi di 'Revolver'. La cultura pop degli anni Sessanta e la crisi della canzone," that was nonetheless the "first recording of a pop song with a part given over to the sitar."

Sick at heart and lonely

Deep in dark despair

Thinking one thought only

Where is she, tell me where

And if she says to you

She don’t want me

Just give her my message

Tell her of my plea

And I know, if she had me back again

Oh, I would never make her sad

I got a heart full of soul

To meet the growing demand for English bands on American soil, spurred on by the Beatles' historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show (it was February 9th, 1964, and some seventy-three million American viewers were left spellbound by the Fab Four, true pioneers of the so-called British Invasion), Gomelsky had in the meantime organized the Yardbirds' first tour of the United States. To cash in on the success of "For Your Love," the manager had also picked out the material for the band's first studio LP, whose title echoed that very same hit single that had caused Clapton's departure.

For Your Love (June 1965 – 11 tracks; 31:04) was released only in the American market, featuring, besides the aforementioned title track, some decidedly "harder" blues-rock material ("A Certain Girl", "I Ain't Done Wrong", and, above all, the proto-metal of "I'm Not Talking", the latter two perfect showcases for Beck's talent), more or less standard rhythm'n'blues excursions ("I Ain't Got You", "I Wish You Would"), a couple of rock'n'roll numbers ("Putty (In Your Hands)", "Good Morning Little Schoolgirls") and a few concessions to more markedly pop sounds ("Sweet Music", "My Girl Sloppy"). Even though Clapton was by then just a distant memory, his lead guitar can be heard on most of the tracks on the record, leaving Beck only three performances: "I'm Not Talking", "I Ain't Done Wrong" and "My Girl Sloopy". This was because Gomelsky had dug deep into the material, mostly covers, left over from the band's first incarnation.

In September 1965, the Yardbirds landed at New York's John F. Kennedy airport, ready to set off on tour across the States, where they were supported by the Spiders, who confessed to their American colleagues that they'd spent the last few months studying every track on For Your Love. A few years later, taking inspiration precisely from a Yardbirds song ("The Nazz Is Blue"), the members of the Texan band would opt for the moniker Nazz, before being kissed by success as Alice Cooper.

Once they reached Memphis, the Yardbirds knocked on the door of Sam Phillips' Sun Records, and on 12 September 1965 recorded two tracks, "The Train Kept-A-Rollin'" and "You're A Better Man Than I". A week later, in Chicago, they cut a cover of Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man". The band then spent a few days in New York, where they also got the chance to meet Pop Art icon Andy Warhol.

Back home, Relf, Beck and the others got ready to promote the single "Evil Hearted You"/"Still I'm Sad", due out on the first of October (it would reach number three on the UK chart), while doing their best to satisfy the various magazines requesting interviews. In the pages of Rave, besides pointing out that the band had by now moved away from "pure blues" and stating bluntly that their number one goal was to record "hit records", because "if we want to earn a living, we have to play popular music" and therefore "there's no point playing music that only specialists can appreciate", Keith Relf, probably remembering his meeting with Warhol, described the band's music with the phrase "pop art", although a few days later, in Leeds University's Union News magazine, he would opt for the probably more effective "new wave pop music".

With as many as four tracks lifted from Five Live Yardbirds (all placed on side B), the Yardbirds' new LP, Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds (November 1965 – 10 tracks; 37:40), kept the English band's flame burning bright on American soil. The record, in fact, despite stalling at number fifty-three, would stay on the chart for a full thirty-three weeks.

Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds is one of their best records, thanks to tracks remarkably ahead of their time such as "You're A Better Man Than I" (martial pace, booming bass, a decidedly "dark" pop attitude and a masterful guitar solo), "Evil Hearted You" (with its sinister, proto-psychedelic atmosphere), "Still I'm Sad" (in which the Eastern-tinged mood is made even more menacing by Gregorian vocalizations in counterpoint) and the rocking blues of "The Train Kept A-Rollin'", a track that, retitled "Stroll On", fitted with brand new lyrics and a sound halfway between hard rock and proto-metal, the Yardbirds would end up performing in a scene from "Blow-Up", Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece released in 1966. Rounding out one of the greatest A-sides of early rock's first phase, there's the revival of "Heart Full Of Soul" and a version of "I'm A Man" with its "grating" muted-string rhythm and a powerful "locomotive" build-up, the one that, live, would kick off a wild rave-up.

If you're wondering where the Gregorian vocalizations on "Still I'm Sad" came from, know that the duo McCarty/Samwell-Smith, who wrote the track, were inspired by manager Giorgio Gomelsky: "A few years earlier, I'd spent some time in a Benedictine monastery, where the monks had a choir that sang Gregorian chants every day, and the students had to learn them… Some time later, purely by chance, while Keith, Sam and I were taking a leak in the bathrooms of Aylesbury Town Hall, during a break between two sets of a show, I started singing a cappella some of the bass parts of those Gregorian chants… and Keith and Sam's ears instantly pricked up. From that moment on, every time we found ourselves in the bathroom, I'd come up with new improvised chants, until one day 'Still I'm Sad' materialized".

Hugely influential on both the garage and American psychedelic scenes, Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds struck the imagination of many musicians, more or less up-and-coming, of the time, thanks above all to its harmonica and guitar work. As David Aguilar, singer of the Chocolate Watchband, one of the most highly regarded garage-rock outfits of that period, would recall: "What made that record so great was the harmonica and especially the way the harmonica and guitar answered each other. 'I'm A Man' had been around for a long time, but it had never been played like that. For us it was a much higher level of energy, we could put a lot more into it and we could stretch it out…".

Evil hearted you.

You always try to put me down,

With the things you do,

And words,

You spread around against me.

Evil hearted you

The fame the band had earned over the preceding months was such that even the organizers of our Sanremo Festival wanted them among the participants. So, in January 1966, they took to the stage in the city of flowers on two separate occasions: the first time, alongside Lucio Dalla, they performed the breezy pop of "Paff… Bum!"; the second time, instead, they backed Bobby Solo on the saccharine "Questa volta". Needless to say, both songs were eliminated immediately, and overall the whole affair turned into a rather depressing experience for the band, who, pushed by Gomelsky, had even recorded a single containing the two aforementioned songs.

"Those two songs were the worst things we ever did. (…) It was very strange. When we got up on stage, the audience, who had never really seen an electric band before, started grumbling and booing. It was awful" (Jim McCarty).

In February of that same year, the Yardbirds released "Shapes Of Things" as a single, featuring a guitar solo with feedback played on a single string (G) which, it seems, would go on to influence both the Paul McCartney of "Taxman" and the Paul Butterfield Band's "East-West". This is how Beck would recall coming up with it: "I kept changing my guitar sound. So we decided to make two or three recordings of my guitars and then we mixed them all together".

According to critic Richie Unterberger, "Shapes Of Things" (which was the first hit written by the band itself) should be regarded as "the first great psychedelic rock classic," something also confirmed by Relf's lyrics, which linger on dreamlike visions while remaining loosely centered on a firm condemnation of all wars: “Shapes of things before my eyes/ Just teach me to despise/ Will time make men more wise?/ Here within my lonely frame/ My eyes just heard my brain/ But will it seem the same?/ Come tomorrow, will I be older?/ Come tomorrow, may be a soldier/ Come tomorrow, may I be bolder than today?/ Now the trees are almost green/ But will they still be seen/ When time and tide have been?”

You can't stand still in this business! You have to be ahead of your time!

(Jeff Beck)

Despite having recorded one of their finest tracks ("Shapes Of Things"), the Yardbirds took a while to digest the resounding flop at Sanremo, which led to a gradual erosion of trust in their relationship with Giorgio Gomelsky. What also unsettled the band was the sheer speed at which the music scene was changing at the time, prompting Jeff Beck to remark that "you can't stand still in this business! You have to be ahead of your time. One thing's for sure: the beat scene has reached saturation point for bands. To keep up, you have to keep producing new sounds..."

Indeed, 1966 was a truly thrilling year for what was then generically called "pop": Bob Dylan released his masterpiece, "Blonde On Blonde", Frank Zappa debuted with what many consider his best record, the extraordinary "Freak Out!", the Beach Boys, led by the brilliant mind of Brian Wilson, transfigured surf-music's endless summer into baroque-pop vertigo on the grooves of "Pet Sounds", while the Beatles pulled one of their most beloved and influential works out of the hat, "Revolver"... and that's naming just a few of the biggest names. In short, the great guitarist was absolutely right when he argued that, to stay afloat, the Yardbirds would have to fight tooth and nail!

That's how, after firing Gomelsky and bringing in a new manager in the person of Simon Napier-Bell, the band holed up at Advision Studios in London, where within a week they recorded the twelve tracks of their masterpiece. Made up entirely of original compositions and released in July 1966, Yardbirds (12 tracks; 35:52 — also known as Roger The Engineer, a title inspired by the cover artwork drawn by Chris Dreja depicting a caricature of sound engineer Roger Cameron) shows a great balance between the rawness of their hard blues-rock and the experimental tensions of psychedelic music, which in that very year of 1966 was entering its most creative phase.

As the opening track, "Lost Woman," demonstrates, the band kept relying on long instrumental digressions — what we'd now call "proto-progressive" — but which at the time simply reflected the more adventurous acts' desire to push past the standard structures of song form. It was a desire the Yardbirds had been among the first to pick up on, back when, at the start of their career, they'd approached the Chicago blues repertoire with that same adventurous spirit later transfigured into the sweltering arrangements of their rave-ups.

After the restless boogie of "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" — with its handclaps, jubilant backing vocals, puffing harmonica and Indian-tinged echoes (a track inspired by Bill Haley & His Comets' classic "Rock Around The Clock," and also the title under which the album was released in the United States and other countries) — the twelve bars of "The Nazz Are Blue" make room for Jeff Beck's guitar, which also takes center stage on the raw "Rack My Mind," the instrumental "Jeff's Boogie" and the unbridled "What Do You Want," which harks back to rock'n'roll's origins.

"I Can't Make Your Way," on the other hand, is a delightful example of psychedelic pop-blues, free of real excess but marked by an infectious singalong quality, while the skeletal riff of "He's Always There" is perfect for triggering a track with distinctly mephistophelian overtones. The ballads "Farewell" and "Turn Into Earth" also carry the scent of slightly altered consciousness, or at least of dreamlike vapors. The album's most peculiar tracks, though, are "Hot House Of Omagararshid" (a Latin-aquatic party) and "Ever Since The World Began," which moves from a psychedelic sabbath into breezy pop-rock.

Cars and girls are easy come by in this day and age

Laughing, joking, drinking, smoking

Till I've spent my wage

When I was young people spoke of immorality

All the things they said were wrong

Are what I want to be

Once Yardbirds [Roger The Engineer] was released (it would be the only Yardbirds album to reach the UK Top 20), Samwell-Smith, tired of touring, decided to quit and focus on production instead. He was replaced by Jimmy Page who, despite being a guitarist, picked up the bass to give Chris Dreja time to get the hang of his new instrument. When Jeff Beck suddenly fell ill before a show at San Francisco's Carousel Ballroom, Page took his place, proving his full worth on six strings. So when Beck recovered, nobody thought of handing him the bass again (which stayed permanently in Dreja's hands); instead, everyone agreed to carry on with a lineup featuring two lead guitars.

The only recorded fruit of what remains, without a doubt, one of the most explosive lineups of the era was the single "Happening Ten Years Time Ago"/"Psycho Daisies" (October 1966), whose A-side offers a pulsing blend of psychedelic sounds and Eastern-tinged moods, slashed through by the two guitars' searing stabs, which also take the lead on the B-side, more geared toward garage-rock/proto-hard territory. For the record, the bass on "Happening Ten Years Time Ago" was played by John Paul Jones, another future Led Zeppelin member.

In that fateful year of 1966, the band also appeared in "Blow Up," widely regarded as the pinnacle of Michelangelo Antonioni's cinematic art. The Italian director was, in fact, originally interested in Pete Townshend, the guitarist and leader of the Who, who had a habit of ending shows by smashing his guitar against the amplifiers — an idea he'd developed by studying the self-destructive art of Gustav Metzger, one of the leading figures of so-called "auto-destructive art." To get in touch with Townshend, Antonioni asked Simon Napier-Bell for help, but the manager couldn't convince him. The shrewd manager, however, didn't miss the chance this presented, and so he steered the director toward Jeff Beck instead, claiming that he too, when playing with the Yardbirds, enjoyed smashing guitars... It wasn't true, and yet, when the band was filmed performing "Stroll On" (a powerful proto-metal reworking of Tiny Bradshaw's "Train Kept A-Rollin'," introduced by the drums' martial march and a wash of harmonized guitar feedback), Beck — who'd been given several cheap Hofner Senator guitars to use instead of his Les Paul, and who, shortly before filming the scene, had confessed to a journalist that he felt deeply embarrassed doing something he himself would never actually do! — did his best to imitate Townshend.

Dazed and confused

In October 1966, the Yardbirds returned to the United States for a new string of concerts. Under the stars and stripes, their fame had grown even further, and everyone was hoping to cash in. In Connecticut, the band supporting them was Chain Reaction, whose singer, Steven Tyler, would later become an international star with Aerosmith. Once in California, the Yardbirds also played the Fillmore West in San Francisco, while in Texas the band geared up for a month of shows across the South and Midwest as part of the "Caravan Of Stars," organised by TV host Dick Clark, who had also roped in acts far removed from the English band's ambitions, such as Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, and Bobby Hebb. It was one of the lowest points of the Yardbirds' adventure, as McCarty would confirm a few years later: "It was terrible: four weeks on the road in this old Greyhound bus, playing two shows in different cities every night. I think Simon [Napier-Bell] wanted to kill us. We were averaging four hours of sleep a night. It was the worst possible thing for us."

The "Caravan Of Stars" experience was especially stressful for Jeff Beck, who was already worn down at the time by a nagging, persistent bout of tonsillitis. The breaking point came in early November, at the end of the band's show at the Memorial Auditorium in Dallas. On the verge of a breakdown, Beck hurled his guitar onto the dressing-room floor, not far from a stunned Keith Relf. A few days later, on 30 November 1966 to be exact, Napier-Bell announced that Beck had left the band for health reasons. In the end, agreeing to share guitar duties with Jimmy Page had proven to be a problem for him, as Beck himself would confirm years later: "It didn't work out, and in fact it only lasted three months (...) I didn't want to share the spotlight. I wanted to hog it all. I thought: 'What the hell! Did I work this hard just to split it?'"

In a 1977 interview, Page would instead recall his musical interplay with Beck like this: "Sometimes it worked brilliantly, other times it didn't. There were a lot of harmonies that I don't think anyone else had ever done, or at least not the way we did them. The Stones were the only ones using two guitars at once, going back to the old Muddy Waters records. But we leaned more towards solos than rhythm playing. The thing is, the parts need to be clearly defined, and I'd notice I was doing what I was supposed to do while Jeff was doing something completely different. That was fine for the improvised sections, but there were other parts where it just didn't work."

Despite Beck's departure, the Yardbirds lost none of their taste for sonic exploration, as shown by Little Games (10 tracks; 30:28), their fourth album, released in July 1967, just a month after the release of that "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" with which the Beatles had taken their studio experimentation to a whole new level. Even though Epic had handed production duties to Mickie Most (already working with Herman's Hermits and Donovan), in an attempt to produce a relatively more commercial record that might also yield a hit single or two, Little Games didn't become a bestseller, but it nonetheless confirmed the status of a band that made eclecticism one of its strongest weapons. Proof of this comes from a title track that plays the baroque-pop card (with John Paul Jones on bass and handling the cello arrangements), the honky-tonk-tinged rock'n'roll of "Smile On Me", the Who-leaning garage rock of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor" and "No Excess Baggage", the instrumental "Glimpses" (a psychedelic trance of layered guitars, quasi-Gregorian chant and assorted samples), and a "Stealing Stealing" that digs up a traditional folk song made famous by the Memphis Jug Band in the late 1920s. And while "Drinking Muddy Water" sees the band retracing roads leading straight to Chicago blues, the little march of "Little Soldier Boy" instead points towards a parallel universe where lysergic trips resemble children's fairy tales.

One passage deserves a note all of its own: the acoustic raga-folk of "White Summer", featuring a Page solo that lends the whole thing an almost Eastern atmosphere, reinforced by Indian percussion and tablas played by Chris Karan and by an oboe entrusted to an unidentified session player. Apparently, this instrumental was inspired by an old Irish song, "She Moved Through The Fair", already covered in 1963 by Davy Graham under the title "She Moved Thru' The Bizarre/Blue Raga" and embellished with Indian-flavoured touches. After becoming one of the pillars of Led Zeppelin, Page would draw on "White Summer" to write "Over The Hills And Far Away", the third track on the album "Houses Of The Holy". As was his habit, though, he wouldn't bother crediting the source even in that case...

Glimpses of clouds in a forest

Can review well within us

And never to linger on one is life

Energy radiates from the source

The life around us is but a reflection of our own

Flowing within never-ending boundless infinity

Time is just a cumular limit

Which with one glimpse can overcome

Can overcome

Among the grooves of Little Games, it's nonetheless Jimmy Page who really steals the show. The guitarist not only experimented, on the suggestion of Scottish violinist David Keith McCallum, Sr., with using a cello bow (something he would go on to keep doing with Led Zeppelin too), but also had fun repeatedly altering its sound, using open tunings, a wah-wah pedal and various fuzz effects. When playing live, he had also taken to using pre-recorded tapes onto which he had previously laid down assorted noises.

Little Games didn't sell particularly well, but luckily, a few months earlier, The Yardbirds Greatest Hits had managed to break into the Billboard Top 30, becoming the band's biggest commercial success on the American market.

Meanwhile, Simon Napier-Bell, worried about the band's fate (which, despite having toured extensively through Australia, New Zealand, France and Denmark, where it had shared more than one stage with Roy Orbison and the Walker Brothers, couldn't count on satisfactory earnings), had asked Peter Grant to take over as manager. As Grant himself would later recall, on arriving he realised there wasn't much he could do to improve the band's fortunes. Still, drawing on his practical streak, he managed to secure it a measure of financial stability, even though the band had deliberately chosen not to play its more recent material live, focusing instead on reviving the more adventurous songs from its early days, as well as on reworking material far removed from its own turf, such as the Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting For The Man", Bob Dylan's "Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine", and "Dazed And Confused" by the relatively unknown Californian singer-songwriter Jake Holmes, who had opened a New York Yardbirds show in August 1967. "Dazed And Confused", which Page would later bring along into Led Zeppelin (you'll find it, uncredited!, at the end of side A of their 1969 debut), became, with a slightly reworked lyric and a new arrangement (built around an introduction and an improvised section featuring bowed guitar), one of the key moments of Yardbirds concerts between late 1967 and 1968. Together with other live recordings (captured during the band's final American tour) and several demos, "Dazed And Confused" would end up on Yardbirds '68.

In January 1968, the single "Goodnight Sweet Josephine"/"Think About It" was released, two tracks that laid bare the rift that had been building within the band following Jeff Beck's departure. While Jim McCarty and Keith Relf wanted to shift the music's centre of gravity towards more folk and pop sounds, Jimmy Page wanted to keep pushing along the trajectory of a powerful, metallic, vaguely psychedelic sound.

Between the following March and April, more material was recorded live in New York (including the unreleased "Knowing That I'm Losing You", an early version of what would later become Led Zeppelin's "Tangerine"), but none of the band members were particularly enthusiastic about it, perhaps sensing that their adventure as the Yardbirds was by then drawing to a close. However, once Led Zeppelin became the record industry's cash cow (that is, right after releasing their first album), Epic tried to cash in by putting out Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page (September 1971), which gathered tracks from one of those 1968 New York shows, only to have to backpedal once Page's lawyers made themselves heard...

After playing two shows in Los Angeles (31 May and 1 June, documented on the bootleg Last Rave-Up In L.A.) and a couple more in Alabama (4-5 June), the Yardbirds lost Relf and McCarty along the way, both because of the differences in outlook already mentioned and because the two had started getting heavily into drugs, something not much appreciated by the more sober Page and Dreja. "Keith wrote great lyrics," Chris Dreja would recall. "Then he started drinking and taking all sorts of drugs. At the start he was a very sensitive young man, but after six intense years in the business he became a bit of a mess. Some people self-destruct." And again: "Keith was becoming increasingly unreliable, which was a real irony, because it was the first time we'd had a totally reliable guitarist." For the record, the band played its final concert at the College of Technology in Luton. It was 7 July 1968.

At that point, Jimmy Page seemed headed for a solo career, yet just a few months later, for contractual reasons, he and Dreja kept working on the idea of a new Yardbirds line-up, with a sound transformed into a collage of textures and enriched by the presence of a mellotron, a keyboard instrument whose reputation was rapidly growing thanks to its use in the then-emerging progressive rock scene. Dreja, however, decided to drop out after a few experiments, turning his attention to photography, which had meanwhile become one of his greatest passions. Page, on the other hand, didn't give up and launched the New Yardbirds project, with John Paul Jones (real name James Baldwin) on bass, Robert Plant on vocals and John Bonham on drums. Shortly after, the band would change its name to Led Zeppelin, going on to write one of the most compelling stories in rock history.

After launching the acoustic duo Together, Relf and McCarty founded Renaissance, destined to become one of the most beloved bands of English progressive rock. With Renaissance, Relf would only record the first two albums (the self-titled 1969 debut and "Illusion", released two years later), before moving on to producing various artists and, subsequently, to Armageddon, a band poised between hard rock, progressive and proto-metal, who debuted on the long format in 1975 with a self-titled album. For Relf, that was his last recording experience: a year later, while playing electric guitar in his basement at home, he was tragically electrocuted. He was only 33.

Throughout the second half of the Seventies and the entire following decade, the Yardbirds' reputation continued to be fuelled by word of mouth among industry insiders and fans alike, as well as by the release of archival material and several compilations, including Shapes Of Things: A Collection Of Classic Yardbirds Recordings 1964-66 (1977), The Yardbirds Favorites (1977), London 1963: The First Recordings! (1981), the three volumes of Legend Of The Yardbirds (1982) and Greatest Hits, Vol. 1: 1964-1966 (1986).

Indirectly, the band's reputation was also bolstered by the birth, in 1983, of the Box Of Frogs project, through which Chris Dreja, Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty crossed paths again, recording, together with singer John Fiddler, two albums of blues-rock tinged with pop and an eye on AOR: the self-titled 1984 debut – on which Jeff Beck played guitar on four tracks: "Back Where I Started", "Another Wasted Day", "Two Steps Ahead" and "Poor Boy" – and 1986's "Strange Land", with old travelling companion Jimmy Page guesting on guitar on "Asylum". Nothing truly memorable, but the records were nonetheless well received on American college campuses, which would have given the band the chance to embark on a surefire successful US tour, had Dreja, Samwell-Smith and McCarty not scuppered the whole thing due to their aversion to touring, a move that also enraged old comrade Jeff Beck, who was supposed to join them as lead guitarist.

Epilogue, or something very much like it

In 1992, Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja, aided by singer and bassist John Idan, revived the Yardbirds at the invitation of Peter Barton. With the backing of a Rock Artist Management manager, the band played live extensively for around a decade, drawing more than satisfactory crowds, which naturally led to the idea of recording new material, put together in 2003 by a new line-up comprising, alongside the Dreja-McCarty-Idan trio, guitarist Gypie Mayo and harmonica player Alan Glen.

Birdland (15 tracks; 56:52), released by Favored Nations and saddled with a truly hideous cover, was an overall mediocre record, bound to stir the nostalgia of the band's most die-hard English fans, who were no doubt tempted by the chance to hear, alongside seven new tracks mostly written by McCarty, new versions of eight of their Sixties classics (including "I'm Not Talking", "The Nazz Are Blue", "For Your Love", "Train Kept A Rollin'", "Shapes Of Things" and "Mr. You're A Better Man Than I"). Several tracks are embellished by the presence of a few star guests, including Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Slash, Brian May, Steve Lukather and, above all, Jeff Beck, who plays guitar on "My Blind Life".

Many more concerts, live albums (including 2007's Live At B.B. King Blues and the more recent Live in France from 2020) and further compilations followed.

To this day, the band is still active, with a line-up that, despite further shifts, continues to reach out with genuine passion to its most devoted old-school fans – the same fans who, this past January 10th, bid their final farewell to Jeff Beck, struck down by a lethal form of bacterial meningitis.

Strollin' on,

'Cos it's all gone,

The reason why.

You made me cry,

By tellin' me,

You didn't see.

The future bore,

Our love no more.

If you want to know,

I love you so,

And I don’t want to let you go

Ride the wave of great music

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