(as close to the original recordings reproduced live on DVD)
A unique 1960s UK band who was also The Lead Guitar Band of my high-school days. I first tripped over them in 1964 and their first hit “For Your Love” which cleverly used harpsichord and bongos. They featured young Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Led Zeppelin founder Jimmy Page, consecutively on lead guitar in a 6-year span. In fact, their guitar sounds and solos drove The Yardbirds from a blues-based path to a pop path to an experimental hard rock path. And, at one glorious moment in 1966, both Page and Beck were co-featured on “Stroll On”/aka “The Train Kept A-Rolling” in Michelangelo’s jazzy visual poem to Carnaby London in Blow-Up, still a 1960s classic which embodied and enshrined that time, place, and its attitudes and values forever on celluloid.
The band had a fab string of hits including “I’m Not Talking”, “For Your Love”, “Heartful of Soul”, “Shapes of Things”, “Over, Under, Sideways Down”, “I’m a Man”, “Mr. You’re a Better Man Than I”, and “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” (the latter futuristically timeless in its audacity). You can capture a lot of all this musical excitement on various CD collections and retro-ly on Making Tracks, shown above, a wonderful live DVD artifact released in 2012 with two of the original members on drums and rhythm guitar intact.
(It should be noted that Eric Burdon and The Animals came a close second to this UK band in edgy achievement, while none the other British bands of the day could play wildly like this including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, et al.)
It was inevitable that The Yardbirds would never become mainstream or sustain their lucky streak. In 1967, they crash-landed after bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and Beck departed, leaving just the lead singer-harmonicaist Keith Relf (who tragically electrocuted himself on his sound equipment at home) and rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja who moved over to play bass, leaving steady drummer and background vocalist Jim McCarty on drums and Jimmy Page to bow his guitar and play such acoustic chestnuts as “White Summer” and a heavy first version of “Dazed and Confused”, later inherited and popularized by his subsequent group Zeppelin.
I caught up with Jim and Chris when the early 2010s when the revised Yardbirds rolled through Century Casino here twice, and got their signatures and chatted briefly before the first show. Those shows are well-captured on the above DVD. As a long-time fan, it was very interesting to see how they did one of the difficult, ‘impossible’ favs, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”, which remains sublimely satisfying and a close facsimile of my worn-out 45 RPM.
A lot of favorite groups of our youth are, of course, a wonderful example of timing and being in the right place at the right time. All that and a deep feeling, too, of musical possibilities boldly realized; in this case, by an eclectic, unique band before its time and the time they came to the fore in. In that, permanence of special subjective sort still memorably accessible 40 years on today.