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Digging In to The
Yardbirds History
by Colin Fleming

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The band in 1966 with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in their
line-up

The summer after my final year of junior high, I

became a full-fledged British Invasion addict… some
two decades after it all actually happened. I wore out
a number of Beatles tapes that summer while on
vacation. I’d read about them too, and when you read
enough about one band, you start to see references
to a horde of others. Bands that your favorite band
were influenced by, had an influence on, competed
against, despised, what have you.

So it wasn’t long before I was awash in British

Invasion bands: the Stones, Gerry and the
Pacemakers, the Hollies. I liked The Animals better
than anyone but The Beatles, because their sound
was tough, even tougher than the Stones.

The Animals had finesse too, like the Beatles, though

not nearly as much range. The Beatles would come at
you from a number of directions; you never knew
how they’d build up their sound. Sometimes, a track
hung everything on the drums: the riff, the melody,
the vocals. Other times, a song was all voices, one
harmony leading into another. They’d serve up plenty
of guitar cuts too, with cheeky licks, and avant-garde
flourishes – feedback, backwards solos, guitar parts
filtered through Leslie organ speakers.

The Yardbirds with Eric Clapton (C)

The Animals built everything up from the organ and

Eric Burdon’s voice. They were so good that you could
listen to them again and again and not get bored, but
they also felt primitive to me. Or industrial, maybe,
like The Animals – who hailed from the far northern
English industrial and mining city of Newcastle –
were the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of a 19th century
factory novel, jammed with hulking edifices, chary
smoke on the horizon, grubby fingers and row
houses.
All of those bands played electric music, of course,
but I wanted something more electrical still, like it
was made out of dancing lighting, all bendy and
flashy and protean. Something that could practically
make you hear the protons and neutrons bouncing
off each other.

I remember reading one quote in some music book

I’ve never been able to find again that said – and I
think this might be exact – “There are exactly four
rock bands that matter, and The Yardbirds are one of
them.” Hmmm. The Beatles and the Stones must have
been two of them; I didn’t know who the third was –
Kinks? Beach Boys? The Who? – but The Yardbirds,
eh?

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A Different Breed of British Band

They were another British band, but not really a
British Invasion one. As far as I could gather, they
were too out there for that. Not sufficiently poppy.
The Stones weren’t all that poppy, but they made for
a good contrast with the Beatles, and everyone could
say the Beatles are angelic and kind while the Stones
were salacious and filthy. Total hogwash on both
sides of that ledger, but there was a very workable
schism there for journalists who probably didn’t care
for either group.

What you mostly read about the Yardbirds was this

blather about how they served as a preparatory
school, of sorts, for three guitar gods: Eric Clapton,
Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. The prep school angle
suggested, of course, that the Yardbirds weren’t the
end-all-be-all, but rather something skilled players
passed through, on their way to that eventual end-
all-be-all. As misleading as it gets.
The rest of the band could bring it, too: Jim McCarty
was a fine blues-rock drummer, Paul Samwell-Smith
had a melodic touch on the bass, and rhythm
guitarist Chris Dreja freed-up space for the band’s
various guitar titans to do what they did.

But classic rock fans who are into Clapton tend to

gravitate to Cream or his solo work. Page admirers
nearly all fall in with the hordes who worship Led
Zeppelin. Beck followers tend to be more open to
variations from following his wide-ranging musical
path through a host of stylistic realm. But it seems
most people treasure what all three did after The
Yardbirds. Yet The Yardbirds are what captivated me,
and where the three esteemed English rock guitar
heroes did much of their most exciting and
innovative work.

Clapton, whose Yardbirds tenure went from 1963

into the early spring of 1965, would go on to blues
purism with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and then
form Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker – a
juggernaut of a supergroup if there ever was one
(and a band, ironically, that fostered the same kind of
longterm fan base as the Yardbirds; i.e., a legion
made up of loads of musicians), and then eventually
toss off lots of solo career twaddle that pleased
plenty of housewives and Foreigner fans.

Enter Jeff Beck, who was more of a renegade, a

drifter, a hired gun who frequently was not for sale,
save when he wanted to follow his own idiosyncratic
career path. Page, who came on board and played
bass for a while with Beck in the band, would of
course later launch Led Zeppelin, and there was even
a brief period where Beck and Page co-teamed on
lead guitar for the Yardbirds until Beck dropped out
in 1966 and Page saw the band through to their end
in 1968.

Related: Our Album Rewind of Jeff Beck’s 1968 solo

debut, Truth

Untangling The Yardbirds Legacy

Even as a teenager who was new to all of it, I could
tell how messed up their discography was. It was like
no one in the band or managing them had ever
thought to record proper albums, like everyone else
was doing by then, or put the Yardbirds in a studio
that was up to snuff in terms of helping them get
their sound down on tape. So there were a lot of
gappy greatest hits tapes.
You’ve probably heard a song like “For Your Love” on
the radio. Oldies stations love it. Clapton, though,
hated it, and absconded, slagging the band off as a
bunch of pop merchants who didn’t want to make
blues music so much as climb the charts and cause
some teenyboppers to scream and wet themselves in
the process.

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The
band
then
asked
Jimmy
Page to
join. He
turned
them
down,
given
how much success he was having as a session guitar
player. But he was kind enough to recommend his
buddy, Jeff Beck, and it is the Jeff Beck incarnation of
the Yardbirds that we can hear as we’ve never heard
it before on a 2011 boxed set called Glimpses: 1963-
1968.

Basically, here’s what we had, pre-Glimpses: a live set

recorded at London’s Marquee Club in 1964,
additional live cuts from ’63 (all with Clapton); a
number of studio tracks from ’64 and ’65 (the latter
featuring Beck) that were shoe-horned into a couple
of spotty albums with the earlier live material
thrown in; some vanguard singles from ’66 that
would have blown someone like John Coltrane’s
mind, plus the band’s one proper studio album with
Beck, Roger The Engineer, from the same year. A
second studio album, Little Games, with Page, from
’67, plus some more live material as the band
became more and more Zeppelin-like, culminating
Live Yardbirds Featuring Jimmy Page, one of the
rarest LPs of the 1960s – because Page had it
suppressed, basically – waxed at NYC’s Anderson
Theatre, with canned applause.

There were also a number of cuts recorded live on

BBC radio. Most of these feature Beck, and, as they
are live recordings, after a fashion, Yardbirds zealots
have regarded them as manna over the years. You
ain’t a Yardbirds buff unless you delight in the BBC
material. It’s the big boy stuff.

In recent years, the discovery of another ‘64 live tape

from the Marquee (which is included on the Glimpses
box) has bolstered the discography, but back when I
got into the Yardbirds, it was pretty easy to be
confused as to what all the fuss was about.

Not that they couldn’t bring it. Only the Beatles –

and we’re talking vanguard Revolver/Sgt. Pepper’s era
Beatles – to my ears, brought it like the Yardbirds
brought it on the singles that Beck lashed along.
Tracks like “Heart Full of Soul,” with its riff that
sounded like someone had plugged in a sitar and
uncorked the most serpentine ostinato figure that
anyone had ever heard. “Shapes of Things” and “I’m a
Man” were so out there as to be off the musical grid.

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“Shapes of Things” had a solo that defied you to

identify how anyone could even play it, let alone play
it yourself. Singer Keith Relf might as well have been
some Yeatsian sage, the herald of the future of sound
itself, or maybe some prophet who’d lately been
hanging out in the Book of Revelation. There was
prescience in his voice, something supernal.
“I’m a Man” was the old Bo Diddley number, but the
latter’s machismo had been replaced by what you
might think of as something out of H.G. Wells, a kind
of rock ‘n’ roll sci-fi. We get to the end of the song,
and then it’s s rave-up time, a Yardbirds speciality.
You can hear the band’s patented rave-up technique
on the early Clapton material. Normally, the so-called
rave-up is instigated in the middle of the song. The
verse checks out, and each musician starts playing
louder, faster, and on and on and on, until you think
the music itself is going to explode, at which point,
the rave-up cuts off and the song proper resumes.

“I’m a Man” is as orgastic as anything you’ll ever hear,

and on the studio version we get a two man rave-up,
almost a rave-up duet with Relf blowing hot
harmonica lick, and then Beck responding with a
faster guitar solo, which Relf answers, and so on,
until Beck starts smashing strings, like he had
become hell bent to turn his guitar into a percussion
instrument. Fuck the strings, basically.

The rave-ups would continue into the Page era. Well,

they weren’t so much in evidence on Little Games, a
slice of pop fluff helmed by Mickie Most, who had
helped make Herman’s Hermits – a pleasing but twee
band – into stars.
 The Sole Landmark Yardbirds
Album
Discounting the BBC material, there was one bona
fide, full-length masterpiece in the entire Yardbirds
discography: 1966’s Roger the Engineer.

The LP featured a generous helping of rave-ups, but

as people would say to me in used record stores –
where the Yardbirds have always been kings and
such matters are discussed fervently – if you wanted
to experience the true genius of the band, you
needed to hear them live. And they didn’t mean on
the early Clapton material, or even the BBC tracks,
where Beck did things on the guitar that Hendrix
couldn’t better, on those same airwaves, a year later.
Nope. You needed to have heard them in some
sweaty beat club, or a now long gone auditorium,
where the Yardbirds, simply, shredded, and shredded
like no one ever had before.

Glimpses provides plenty of examples of such

shredding across a range of settings. There are
numerous takes on “I’m a Man,” with one of the
rawest coming from the fifth English National Jazz &
Blues Festival in summer 1965. This was an English
gig, and I remember watching the video back in my
mid-teens.

Relf was all nose in his vocals; that is, he might as

well been singing through it, such was the twang of
his voice, which was oddly and pleasingly, sinister
but beckoning at the same time. I loved how he
didn’t give a damn that he didn’t sing in a traditional
manner, and one can imagine all of the eventual
punk rockers who heard Relf and heard fresh
possibilities open up to them. His life was cut short
on May 14, 1976, at just 33.

Taking Blues-Rock Into the

Stratosphere
“I Wish You Would” – which had been the band’s first
single back in the Clapton days – starts in medias res
– that’s Latin for “in the middle of everything,” kids –
on the National Jazz & Blues Festival tape, making it
sound all the more interplanetary. Clapton riffed hard
on the song, both in the studio and on a 1963
Crawdaddy Club date. But whereas Clapton’s playing
was measured, like he was trying to work himself
into a tradition of electric bluesman like Elmore
James, Buddy Guy and Freddie King, Beck has no
interest in a tradition save the one he might be
starting in that very moment. The riff is made up of
serrated lines, and you start to wonder if this music
is somehow about to become physical and capable of
scoring flesh.

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Another version of “I Wish You Would” dates to a June

1965 gig in Paris, when the Yardbirds opened for the
Beatles. They must have sensed a battle of the bands
element at play, and while I’ve never been able to
find anything but this one song from their set, it’s
louder and punchier on Glimpses than it’s ever been
on any bootleg I have heard. The rapidity of Beck’s
playing is almost disorienting, and Relf riffs right
along with him, on harmonica punctuating the
intervals with those beguiling vocals of his.

The BBC cuts have always been in good fidelity, but

they’ve been burnished some more for this package,
and while they’re not often as intense as the material
that was cut in front of an audience – even though
they are, strictly speaking, live – it’s rather
remarkable that the clutch of “lost” Beeb cuts
presented on Glimpses possess something more
endemically Yardbirdsian than any other material on
the set.

The fidelity is rougher, scrappier, like they been

recorded by a schoolboy with a tape recorder pressed
up to the radio, which may be what happened. There
is a remarkable rendition of “Jeff’s Boogie,” which I’d
number as one of the premier guitar cuts ever
recorded, however unprofessionally. One might think
of it as a guitar epic in miniature, akin to a
condensed version of something like Hendrix’s
Woodstock take on “The Star-Spangled Banner” or
the famous Fillmore East rendition of “Machine Gun.”
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The Beck material leads into a number of sessions

with Jimmy Page on lead guitar. If you’re a Led
Zeppelin buff, this is the stuff for you, with songs and
arrangements that would feature in the early phase
of the Zep’s career. Personally, I’ve always thought of
Zeppelin as a much more cumbersome, lumbering
version of the Yardbirds, without the nuance, humor
and panache. The Yardbirds were liquid-y and
pliable; Zeppelin, brittle and metallic.

A/B-ing any of
the live
Yardbirds
versions of
“Dazed and
Confused” with
one by
Zeppelin will
give you some
idea. There’s more mystery to be had with any of the
Yardbirds cuts, while Zeppelin is all out in the open,
bashing away, throttling you with the riff. The
Yardbirds, meanwhile, seem to be trying to haunt you
with it, and, in large part, they succeed, even if this
iteration of the band had no intention of innovating
like the Jeff Beck one did.

You wonder what must have been going through

Jimmy Page’s head when he first joined the group, on
bass, and Jeff Beck was already deep in what I’d
argue was the most significant phase – in terms of
influence – for any guitarist since Robert Johnson
and before Jimi Hendrix. One of my favorite
performances here comes from Paris, but in the
summer of 1966 this time. “The Train Kept A-Rollin’”
was always one of the most exciting Yardbirds
numbers, which is saying something.

Beck kicks off the song by imitating a train whistle

with his guitar, and then serves up the crunchiest,
filthiest riff. The distortion thrilled me as a kid, as I
thought, “wait – can you do that? Is that allowed?”
Just dead brilliant. This particular version is faster
than its studio counterpart, and because of the guitar,
the lyric – which is putatively about lighting out on
the rails – is transformed, in the best Yardbirds style,
to suggest that here is a force beyond this world, hell
bent upon altering it at the same time. “Train kept
a’rollin all night long,” Relf declares, as Beck riffs, and
you realize that, to the band, anyway, the Yardbirds
are the train, and the night is limitless. They were
probably on to something there.

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About Latest Posts

Colin Fleming

Colin Fleming's work appears in The

Atlantic, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. He is
completing a book called Same Band You've
Never Known: An Alternative Musical
History of the Beatles.
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9 COMMENTS SO
FAR
JUMP INTO A CONVERSATION
RUSS #1
9 September, 2015, 14:58
It was their manager Simon Napier-Bell who
made the comment that there were only 4
rock bands on the planet worth managing…
and one of them was The Yardbirds.
" Reply this comment

S_POFCHER
30 August, 2016, 09:41
Russ – What were the three other bands?
He has managed: Ultravox, T Rex, Marc Bolan,
Japan, Asia, Candi Staton, Boney M, and
Wham!
" Reply this comment

UNDER ASSISTANT #2
9 September, 2015, 15:01
You failed to mention the album they did
with Jimmy Page-Little Games.
" Reply this comment

MIKE L #3
5 April, 2017, 08:40
Great article. I see by the comments it was
published awhile ago. Little Games is
mentioned in there so I’m not sure what the
above poster was reading. Growing up I was
first into Zeppelin. Cream and the Jeff Beck
group before the Yardbirds but certainly went
back and learned my share of where all the
guitar gods came from. The film Blow Up also
really upped my interest in the band. I
happened to catch Blow up 3 times in the
last year on cable and I still love seeing the
movie every time as its a great film with or
without the band. It’s awesome to see Beck
go bonkers in it as Page smiles and keeps on
playing. To this day Beck is still my all around
favorite guitar player along with John
McLaughlin. Though I have plenty of
American guitar greats I’d have to put up
there as close seconds like Duane Allman,
Jerry Garcia, Jimi etc. This article really makes
me wanna go seek out those live BBC
sessions so I’m looking them up later on
YouTube. Thanks for a great read.
" Reply this comment

JIMMY P #4
21 August, 2017, 09:00
No mention of The Yardbirds 1st guitarist.
..Tony Top Topham …???
" Reply this comment

JOHN ROSE #5
11 May, 2018, 07:59
Nice write-up, Colin. I’m assuming you have
the Chris May/Tim Phillips book “British
Beat.” My sister gave me a copy when I was
13. Somewhat dog-eared now, it’s still an
indispensable part of my library to this day.
" Reply this comment
GREG #6
3 November, 2018, 09:02
I don’t currently care too much about
Yardbirds’ music per se, but would have been
fun to be at their gig, the feeling, the
excitement, the dancing.
" Reply this comment

RECORDSTEVE #7
23 March, 2020, 13:08
I was reading along just fine until the “f”
word.
Surely a substitute word could’ve been used
to
accent/describe what you were trying to say.
Keep it clean please (use at least 60%
isopropyl)
" Reply this comment
 JMG #8
15 May, 2020, 03:21
The 1966 LP is NOT titled “Roger the
Engineer”, but “Yardbirds”. On the jacket,
spine and record label.
" Reply this comment

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