Only Solitaire Reviews: The Yardbirds

	FIVE LIVE YARDBIRDS
	Album released: Dec. 4, 1964	V	A	L	U	E	More info:
		3	3	3	3	3
Tracks: 1) Too Much Monkey Business; 2) Got Love If You Want It; 3) Smokestack Lightning; 4) Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl; 5) Respectable; 6) Five Long Years; 7) Pretty Girl; 8) Louise; 9) I’m A Man; 10) Here ’Tis.
REVIEW "Good evening, and now it is time for birdmerizing... yardmerizing... in fact, most blueswailing Yardbirds. Here they are, one by one: the drums — Jim McCarty, the rhythm guitar — Chris Dreja, the bass — Paul Samwell Smith, lead guitar — Eric Slowhand Clapton, the singer and harp — Keith Relf: Five Live Yardbirds!" No idea who was the announcer on that particular night, but it is hard to forget that intro — and hard not to chuckle at the album sleeve photo, poking a different kind of fun at the band’s name. (And for all the Eric Clapton haters out there in the COVID-19 era, this may be the only chance you ever get to stare at your anti-hero behind bars!).
Each time I listen to Five Live Yardbirds, I cannot help being reminded of just how irreparably skewed is our modern perception of all those young R&B bands that sprang up all over the UK in the early 1960s. What we do is hear them (usually with an air of timidity and reverence) recording short, thinly sounding, relatively quiet covers of Chicago blues and Chuck Berry in the studio; see them properly dressed and, as a rule, lip-syncing to the same studio recordings on their scant TV appearances; read condensed biographic descriptions of their early years which largely focus upon their managers, producers, and girlfriends; and, if we are very very lucky, we can occasionally treat ourselves to «raw» bootlegs with awful sound quality, the closest we ever come to true history but also a total chore to sit through and enjoy. The club scene, however, is where it was all really happening — where bands such as the Animals and the Rolling Stones could feel themselves free from the shackles of their public image and the restrictions imposed on them by the record industry, long before the psychedelic revolution shook all these foundations to their core. The club scene was where you could really go wild, extending your three-minute singles into lengthy free-form jams or trance-inducing dance grooves; at the expense of clarity and precision of sound, for sure, but with the added benefit of being able to release the proverbial beast inside. We know the huge difference between a studio and a live Stones album, or a Who album, or a Led Zeppelin album from the late 1960s / early 1970s, but, if at all possible, this gap must have been even wider in the early 1960s — it is just because that era was so poorly documented that we are not constantly reminded of where it was at. Consequently, manager and producer Giorgio Gomelsky’s pioneering decision to make the first album by his latest acquisition, the Yardbirds, a real live one was nothing short of entrepreneurial genius — and exceptionally favorable for the Yardbirds themselves, a band that had not yet properly found its studio wings, and had a lot going against it in terms of competition. Its strict separation between rhythm and lead guitar left rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja without any active voice whatsoever (unlike John Lennon, he did not sing, did not write, and did not even laugh and act like a clown, mostly sticking to just wearing a frown). In the rhythm section, bass player Paul Samwell-Smith was, at best, competent, and drummer Jim McCarty, even being somewhat more than just competent, was, after all, just a drummer. The weakest link, however, was their frontman: Keith Relf, next to the wildman image of people like Mick Jagger and Eric Burdon, looked and sounded like a timid, well-behaved, clean-cut college student, probably very nice to know, handsome in an almost teen idol sort of way, and clearly admiring his blues and R&B idols to a much higher degree than being capable of imitating them. In the States, such nice young gentlemen usually went to Greenwich Village and became reverent folkies; in the UK, the same degree of academic reverence could easily be applied to blues and R&B. Which is not to imply that Relf had any sort of scholarly background — his father was a builder, after all — but he did look like an adoring young scholar most of the time, and performed the material accordingly. The Yardbirds’ first of many bits of luck came along in 1963, when their lead guitarist Top Topham had to leave for art school and cede his place to one Eric Clapton, of the Roosters’ (non-)fame. With the young, but still virtually unknown, guitar prodigy at their side, the Yardbirds gained something that nobody else had in the entire British R&B scene — a top-notch blues guitarist who could not only cop all the black dudes’ licks to perfection, but put his own stamp on the songs as well. Unfortunately, no recordings survive from the Roosters (who were only active for several months in 1963 anyway; Tom McGuinness, the band’s other guitarist, would later join Manfred Mann), but one thing is for sure: much, if not most, of Clapton’s guitar genius had already been manifested before he joined the Yardbirds — you don’t really get to listen to a very young Eric Clapton and go «wow, amazing how he got from this to ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and ‘Layla’!» You have no choice, really, but to hunt down all those TikTok videos he recorded in his bedroom in Surrey when he was only twelve... uh, wait a minute. Never mind. Anyway, as their first album clearly shows, the Yardbirds never had the slightest intention of turning into «The Eric Clapton Revue» (or, for that matter, any guitar player’s revue, be it Eric, Jeff, or Jimmy in later years). The man was too shy to sing, too stiff to show off on stage, and he did not even take solo turns on at least half of the numbers that they performed — drastically underused, some might say; admirably humble, others might object. Regardless, Clapton’s presence on these tracks is a good, but far from only, reason why Five Live Yardbirds still deserves your attention more than half a century since its release. The most important thing about Five Live Yardbirds is that it is the only document of its epoch, at least outside the scarce territory of crappy-sounding bootlegs, which lets you hear what a genuine club-based «rave-up» sounded like at the time. (It was actually not the first live album by a UK R&B band — that honor should probably go to Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated; however, Korner’s live recordings had an even more «academic» feel to them, and were typically performed by middle-aged men with a mixed training in blues and jazz, rather than by exuberant young kids with plenty of rock’n’roll energy to spare). Those of the album’s songs (recorded, by the way, at the Marquee Club on March 20, 1964) that go well over three minutes usually turn, sooner or later, into loud, noisy, «primitive» jams, with all the band members kicking the shit out of their instruments — about as far removed from one’s idea of an Eric Clapton-led band as possible. And in those blessed moments when the band reaches its energetic peak, any individual shortcomings on the part of the players just melt away, and what remains is an awesome tribal groove, perhaps best felt on dance-oriented R&B numbers such as the Isley Brothers’ ʽRespectableʼ or Bo Diddley’s ʽHere ’Tisʼ which closes the show. ʽHere ’Tisʼ, in particular, features a mammoth groove from the rhythm section — for a short while, Jim McCarty ceases to be a suburban British kid and becomes one of the Loa-possessed mythical African savages... a clichéd bit of praise, for sure, but honestly, you do not often get such spirited bombast from anybody else in the Britain of 1964. Straightahead rock’n’roll and blues numbers are, of course, generally saved by the young Mr. ʽSlowhandʼ Clapton — when it comes to Chuck Berry’s ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ, if you want great lead vocals, hear the Hollies; if you want young punk flavour, your best bet is the Kinks or the Downliners Sect; but if you want top level lead guitar with the rawest, sharpest, screechiest tone of 1964 and the speediest, most easily fluent picking style of them all, you shall have nowhere to turn to but the Yardbirds. All of these British bands were united in transforming Chuck’s original solos from a harmlessly playful invitation to dance your hips off into a rallying call for air-punching the lights out of your virtual oppressors; but nobody other than Eric Clapton could bring an almost military-like order and elegance to that onslaught without sacrificing the rage and fury. Come to think of it, you do not often hear Eric Clapton engaging in a fast Chuck Berry number anytime after his Yardbirds days (even in Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll, they brought the man on stage to assist Chuck with ‘Wee Wee Hours’, a slow blues), so this is sort of a unique experience to show you that yes, Mr. Clapton could rock’n’roll away like crazy in the early days, before blues purism ate out a large chunk of his youthful abandon. Unfortunately, if quite predictably, the sound quality of the recording is too poor to properly enjoy all the nuances of Eric’s lead guitar — he probably does great on the classic blues tune ‘Five Long Years’, but you would really have to wait thirty long years for the definitive version on From The Cradle; Eric’s thin Fender Telecaster tone can only be discerned through the dense and dark smokescreen of the rhythm section (Samwell-Smith’s bass obscures every note played by the man) and will probably be deemed barely listenable by all who have been spoiled by the cleaner live recording standards from the 1970s and later on. Still, unspoil yourself just a bit, take the record in the context of its time, and it won’t be much of a problem to understand the ‘God’ tag on this young man — which, technically, would not be applied until his stint with John Mayall, but it is already quite clear that a completely new standard for electric guitar playing is being set here. That said, ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ, ʽFive Long Yearsʼ, and John Lee Hooker’s ʽLouiseʼ are pretty much the only songs on which Eric gets a proper solo spot — all the more ridiculous considering how often Keith Relf gets a solo spot with his harmonica, which he really only plays because he is a non-guitar-playing frontman, and if you are a frontman in a rhythm-and-blues band and you do not play a guitar, you at least have to play harmonica. Like Mick Jagger, you know? Even on ʽGood Morning Little Schoolgirlʼ — the studio version of that song had Eric playing a darn fine guitar solo, but this live version only has Keith. WHY? Admittedly, he is decent with the instrument, but neither Sonny Boy Williamson nor Little Walter have much to fear in the competition department. Every once in a while, though, the Yardbirds really come together as a single powerful unit: ultimately, you will never «get» the point of the album if you just think of it as a launching platform for Clapton’s soloing (let alone for Keith Relf’s singing and harp playing). The first such number is ‘Smokestack Lightning’, formerly a creepy voodoo show focused on Howlin’ Wolf’s persona, but here transformed into a collective bombastic ritual, with Relf as the harp-blowing shaman and the rest of the band banging away with all their might to bring all those sleepy spirits out of their slumber. This is where drummer Jim McCarty summons Keith Moon-like powers, both guitarists sacrifice melody for aggressive noise, and we, the listeners, temporarily forget the aura of teenage entertainment that normally rules over this album and begin taking these guys really seriously. This is harder to do on subsequent rave-ups such as the Isley Brothers’ ‘Respectable’ or Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Girl’, because these numbers are mostly there to provide a good time for the dancing crowds — ‘Smokestack Lightning’, on the other hand, is much more of a proto-psychedelic jam to which it is much easier to groove while sitting down, nodding your head, and letting yourself be taken far away into a world of mysterious swamps, dense smoke, three-headed alligators, and oddly colored mushrooms — regardless of whether you need some chemical assistance for this or not. Overall, all the inevitable criticisms aside, Five Live Yardbirds is more than just a historical document: it is a special experience that lets you penetrate those «wild and innocent days» like nothing else — before egos and drugs took over and maybe added some extra wildness, but definitely took away most of the innocence. Because of their long and troubled history, the Yardbirds may not have carved out such an unmistakable identity for themselves as a band as they did for several of their classic songs — but in a way, this recording carves out an identity for the year of 1964 that is much more telling than any of the great studio albums recorded by a variety of artists in that same year. On top of that, you get the earliest bunch of Eric Clapton solos known to mankind, so, what’s not to like? Tech note: since the dawning of the CD era, Five Live Yardbirds have apparently been released in a million different repackagings, many of which throw on tons of bonus tracks — such as the band’s early studio singles (which we shall discuss later, in a separate review for For Your Love), or additional live performances from the Crawdaddy Club and other venues: seek out the one that has a rippin’ version of Chuck Berry’s ʽLet It Rockʼ on it, a really tight performance and another extremely rare occasion to hear a young Eric do a fast Chuck number.

	FOR YOUR LOVE
	Album released: June 13, 1965	V	A	L	U	E	More info:
		4	3	4	3	3
Tracks: 1) For Your Love; 2) I’m Not Talking; 3) Putty (In Your Hands); 4) I Ain’t Got You; 5) Got To Hurry; 6) I Ain’t Done Wrong; 7) I Wish You Would; 8) A Certain Girl; 9) Sweet Music; 10) Good Morning Little Schoolgirl; 11) My Girl Sloopy.
REVIEW Back in the day, it was common practice for record labels to not allow their artists to put out LPs until they’d proven their worth with at least one or two substantial hit singles, and upon first glance, that might have precisely been the deal with the Yardbirds: March ’65 = release and chart success of ‘For Your Love’ (the single); June ’65 = follow up with the album of the same title. Extra scrutiny, however, shows that the real situation was more complex. First, the Yardbirds already had an official LP — Five Live Yardbirds — courtesy of Giorgio Gomelsky putting pressure on their record label, Columbia. However, it was only released in the UK (and other members of the Commonwealth), since the band had not managed to make a dent in the US market with their first singles. That situation was reversed with the release of ‘For Your Love’, which became a smash hit across both sides of the Atlantic — and at that point, their American distributor (Epic Records) accepted the idea of a studio LP, while the UK division of Columbia, on the other hand, stalled. The UK, in fact, would not see the release of a proper Yardbirds studio LP until Roger The Engineer in 1966 — and for a good reason, because the Yardbirds never really got together to make a proper studio LP until Roger The Engineer. For the first two years of their existence, they concentrated fully on singles — a decision that ultimately made them a disservice in terms of critical reputation. As great as your individual songs may be (and one might make a strong case for the Yardbirds’ line of 1965–1966 singles as the most musically important and astonishing line of that entire era), people tend to remember those years for the emergence of the album as the more important medium than the single, and if you lived through them without a Rubber Soul, an Aftermath, or a Pet Sounds to your name, well... it’s like you weren’t all there.
So the American market did receive a couple of Yardbirds albums in 1965 — but they were pretty odd bastards, slapped together from widely different periods and sessions, with pretty poor sequencing at that. Take For Your Love, for instance. Most of the songs on it are from the Clapton era of the band, but there is no Clapton on the front sleeve: only Jeff Beck, sitting at a... keyboard? He isn’t even playing one on any of the songs here. The Beck / Clapton material is chaotically interspersed, although at this point the gap between the two eras is not yet quite as huge as it would become by the end of the year — still, they should have probably at least tried to segregate the two groups of songs onto different sides of the LP, because ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ and ‘My Girl Sloopy’ feel really odd next to one another. Nevertheless, it is at least good to have most of the early Yardbirds studio stuff in one place — and what was lacking would be lovingly assembled by Repertoire Records thirty-four years later and packed into thirteen bonus tracks for the expanded CD release of the album; this is probably the most commonly accessible version these days, and it provides a more or less exhaustive history of the Yardbirds from the earliest demo versions recorded at the R. G. Jones Studio on December 10, 1963, and up to their first attempt to record ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ in April 1965, which ended in failure because the hired sitar player, according to Beck, couldn’t properly nail the 4/4 time signature (!). These sixteen months were not the greatest months in Yardbird history — but they were certainly the sixteen months that put the band on the general musical map and prepared them for greatness. Okay, so we should probably subtract the first three months, because all of the bonus tracks that date from the December ’63 R. G. Jones Studios sessions are sort of... just okay. Most of them are covers of American idols — Chuck Berry, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Billy Boy Arnold — performed in a fairly tepid and cautious manner. This early version of ‘Boom Boom’, for instance, feels like the boys are almost afraid to push themselves too far, next to the blazing-cannon rendition of the Animals — and so does ‘Baby What’s Wrong’, for that matter; basically, whenever the Yardbirds try on for size anything that was or would be done by the Animals or the Stones, they inevitably lose big time because of their overall «nice college boy» attitude. What’s worse, at this point in time they were also unable — in the studio, at least — to make the best of their single most musically gifted member: Clapton’s guitar tone on those early demos is thin, and although he already shows an impressive fluency, producing a lilting, harmonious blues sound that had few equals on the British rhythm’n’blues scene, he is being way too modest for all that talent to be properly noted. The first of the Yardbirds’ many sonic mini-revolutions, then, took place sometime between those tentative sessions at the R. G. Jones Studios and their first proper venture into the Olympic Studios in London, which allegedly took place some time in March 1964. You can easily hear the difference when comparing the «long» version of ‘I Wish You Would’, their first single (actually, the early demo version; amusingly, it ended up by mistake on the official 1965 Canadian version of For Your Love, retitled Heart Full Of Soul), and the final product from three months later. The former is a slightly darker, swampier, more menacing cover of Billy Boy Arnold’s original, extolling his trademark riff (which you can probably also recognize on Bo Diddley’s ‘Diddley Daddy’, since that song was also based on an Arnold original) and rather making a musical hero from bassist Paul Samwell-Smith than Eric — it is his chuggin’ train of a bassline that really holds together the «messy», climactic noise sessions in the middle and at the end of the song. It’s a good, tight jam, but the Stones could do that kind of jamming just as well, and maybe even Manfred Mann. However, by the time the boys got to Olympic Studios, they were all set to use advanced studio technology to their advantage — and give themselves as musicians that extra push which takes you out of the crowd and puts you among the chosen few. Just compare the opening bars of the old version with the new. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the extra distortion on the opening guitar riff (not quite sure if it’s played by Eric or, more likely, by rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja). The old one was a lil’ puppy dog cautiously sniffing around the corners; the new one is a gruff, angry beast snappin’ at your heels — the tone is not as thick and rumbling as on ‘You Really Got Me’, yet it is still one of the earliest examples of a seriously hard, crunchy rock riff on a British rhythm’n’blues record. The rest of the band step up their game as well, particularly Jim McCarty, who gives his drums a more bombastic, cymbal-heavy sound than on the demo version. Tellingly, the only member of the band who pretty much stays the same is Keith Relf: his singing and harp playing are nearly identical on both versions (identically stiff, that is). I have seen people complain about the messy, murky production on those early Yardbirds singles, but I have a hunch that they do not quite get the point — Gomelsky and the band were most likely trying to emulate the acoustics of the band’s live sound from all those small, tight-packed, cavernous clubs they were playing in, which is why there’s so much echo and reverb all around and the instruments sometimes congregate in a swampy puddle. It doesn’t quite work, of course, but I have no problem with the production as long as it does not hide the catchiness of the original songs or the enthusiasm of the band. On the other hand, I can also see how some might prefer the older version of ‘I Wish You Would’ — not only is it «cleaner», but it is also longer, thus, more representative of the Yardbirds’ famous jamming style. Basically depends on whether you want four minutes of old-school dark blues or two minutes of a «blues-punk» explosion. Claptonologists world-wide, though, will probably get a bigger kick from the B-side, a cover of Allen Toussaint’s somewhat novel piece of New Orleanian R&B called ‘A Certain Girl’ — originally produced by Toussaint himself, but performed by singer Ernie K-Doe in 1961. Back then, it was a very typical New Orleanian piece distinguished by a very typical humorous New Orleanian attitude — the same one you observe on contemporary releases by Huey ‘Piano’ Smith and similar artists. Why it became so popular in the UK is unclear (an even earlier cover than the Yardbirds’ was by The Paramounts, who would eventually grow into Procol Harum), but in any case, The Yardbirds strip away much of the original’s playfulness and humor (the only «funny» bit still left in is the call-and-response of "what’s her name? — I can’t tell you! — NOOOOO..."), tightening up everything so that the song becomes more of a threat than a joke. Again, the song is dominated by Samwell-Smith’s thick, fuzzified bass, giving it a very unusually heavy aura for early 1964 — and again, the Olympic Studios version is crunchier and more aggressive than the R. G. Jones Studios demo. But what specifically distinguishes the finalized version of ‘A Certain Girl’ is, of course, the guitar break by Eric Clapton. It is not just historically significant — though it is damn well historically significant — as the first ever commercially released example of a guitar solo by soon-to-be «God» of electric guitar playing. It also, well, just kicks ass. Out of nowhere, it bursts through a broken window in your living room, like a zombie dog in Resident Evil, and wreaks tightly controlled havoc for nearly 30 seconds, before vanishing in a puff of smoke, leaving you with your jaw on the floor in a "what was that?..." state of mind — at least, I’m pretty sure that was the kind of reaction quite a few people might have lived through in 1964. Today, it might be easier to understand the impact if, once again, you compare that ferocious guitar break with the solo on the earlier demo version (I pity the poor Canadians who, by mistake, got that version instead). The early version is, well, just a decent guitar solo. The polished Olympic Studios break is a shrill, screechy, crackly blast of distortion, perfectly constructed from a melodic point of view and at the same time full of youthful rage spirit. I could, in fact, argue that, for all the dozens and dozens of magnificent Clapton solos throughout his career, none have managed to surpass the original guitar break on ‘A Certain Girl’ in terms of beauty of tone, technical smoothness, and emotional dynamics. Its only potential flaw is that it is quite short — and, actually, for some people it might not be a flaw at all (I, for one, will certainly take this beautiful brevity over quite a few over-extended Cream jams). The fact that the single did not chart either in the UK or in the US is quite a bit of a travesty — when you consider, for instance, that right at the same time the Stones’ ‘Not Fade Away’ was riding up all the way to #3, you can’t help but feel a little pity for ‘I Wish You Would’ and that criminally underappreciated Clapton solo on the B-side. For some reason, though, the general British public just wasn’t too enamored with the Yardbirds’ take on rhythm’n’blues — which could, of course, be explained by various technical reasons such as lack of proper publicity, although I also suspect that having Keith Relf as the band’s frontman didn’t really help the band get extra attention. (Admittedly, he was quite dashing visually in a Brian Jones kind of way, but it seems as though good looks could actually work against you if you were playing in a «wild» rhythm’n’blues band: ultimately, it was Mick who got all the girls, not Brian, and all of the Yardbirds looked almost pathetically «clean» for a band that took its inspiration from such «dirty» music). Not at all disencouraged by the lack of public interest, the Yardbirds at first persevered, putting out a second single in the same vein, although this time the roles were reversed: the more humorous and playful of the two songs was chosen as the A-side, while the darker and grittier blues-rock number was relegated to the back. Amusingly, I have seen some negative reactions thrown at ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ for being much more silly and corny than Sonny Boy Williamson’s, Muddy Waters’, or John Lee Hooker’s versions — but this is not the same ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’! This is actually a cover of a novelty number originally recorded in 1961 by «Don and Bob» (Don Level and Bob Love, an obscure rhythm & blues duo who used to record for Chess) which simply borrows its title from the old blues number, but is otherwise a merry teen anthem, rather in the style of the Coasters and other «light» R&B artists of the time. The Yardbirds do it relative justice, though the lyrical matter feels a bit «immature» for their serious image ("won’t you let me take you to the hop, have a party at the soda shop" is a pretty shoddy pick-up line for Keith Relf and the boys) — and once again, Eric tries to save things with a gritty, clenched-teeth guitar solo, a little less distorted than the one on ‘A Certain Girl’ but just as melodic and smoothly fluent, and again feeling like it kinda sorta belongs in a completely different song. The B-side is where it all finally comes together: the band’s cover of Jimmy Reed’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ finally stands out loud and proud against the (slightly later) competitive release by the Animals — the Yardbirds’ group harmonies are no match against Eric Burdon, but the heavy guitar sound crushes the Animals’ much thinner performance, and Alan Price’s eloquent organ solo is buried by Clapton’s firecracker break, which, combined with the song’s stuttering tempo, is a natural early predecessor of the classic ‘Steppin’ Out’ instrumental in his days with John Mayall. More importantly, the guitar break is now fully coherent with the rest of the song — vocals aside, this is all as pissed-off and nasty as the Yardbirds ever got in their Clapton days. Oh, and there’s none of that cavernous production on ‘I Ain’t Got You’, so this time, Eric’s solo jumps out directly at you, the poor prey, out of the speakers, letting you enjoy that sharpest, shrillest, dryest, crackliest guitar tone of 1964 in all of its red-hot glory. Catch it while it’s hot: the only places where you can feel it to its fullest effect are those early Yardbirds singles and the album with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. By late 1966, it would be gone. The only other recording from that period which made it onto the LP but had not previously been issued as a single is ‘Putty (In Your Hands)’, a cover of a semi-obscure, LP-only Shirelles number from 1962. If you like your mean old riff to be delivered by a mean old electric guitar rather than a dirty brass section, you’ll probably enjoy the Yardbirds cover more than the original — otherwise, there is little to cherish about it, because Keith Relf is Keith Relf, and Eric Clapton is nowhere to be seen (no solo breaks on the recording, true to the original). Gender studies people might give a shoutout to Keith and the boys, though, for turning the rather predictable girl-submissive attitude of the original ("you say hop and I’ll hop, you say come and I come") into boy-submissive — though, frankly, we must admit that none of those performers really gave much of a damn about the words they were singing, as long as the melody was catchy and the energy was flowing. I mean, one minute Keith Relf sings "you can use me, abuse me, without your love I ain’t nothing at all", and the next one he’ll go "all you pretty women stand in line, I’ll make love to you in an hour’s time", and where’s the internal contradiction in that? I don’t see any contradiction. Do you see any contradiction? And now we finally come to the oddest chapter in the history of the Yardbirds, which was pretty packed with odd chapters, but this one certainly takes the cake. Perhaps if Columbia Records did not reject the proposal of young songwriter Graham Gouldman to put out one of his first original compositions, ‘For Your Love’, as the first single for his own band, The Mockingbirds, history would have played out in a different way. As it was, what was not good enough for The Mockingbirds turned out to be quite alright for The Yardbirds — or, at least, a slightly truncated version of The Yardbirds, because Chris Dreja and Eric Clapton only join in with their guitars for the short middle section. Instead, the dominant instrument on the recording is a (fairly simplistic) harpsichord, played by the not-yet-too-famous Brian Auger. The jump from the first two singles to ‘For Your Love’ was the single most ambitious thing in the life of the Yardbirds — before this, their gaze had always been strictly directed across the ocean, but here was a song actually written on UK soil and channelling rather the (somewhat abstract) spirit of the «European art song» than the African-American tradition. Suddenly, it was becoming obvious that Keith Relf and drummer Jim McCarty might have been cut out not for the blues but for the slowly emerging universe of «art-pop» — a suspicion that would be fully vindicated four years later, when, upon the final dissolution of the Yardbirds, the two of them would go on to found Renaissance, and yes, the long road to Renaissance properly starts here, with this recording of ‘For Your Love’, its look-at-me-I’m-so-baroque harpsichord, and the crazyass promotional movie in which the entire band dressed up as knights and musketeers. Naturally, Clapton hated it, though who knows — maybe if they’d thought of a nice guitar break in the middle to butter up Mr. Slowhand, he wouldn’t be so adamant about leaving the band. This definitely wasn’t his kind of music, and although in later years he’d go on to make many recordings that easily qualify as «pop», most of them were still blues-based. The chords of ‘For Your Love’, however, are in more of a medieval folk vein (hence all the suits of armor, I guess), and that was, I guess, just way too «white» for Eric at the time. (Although do give props to Mr. Gouldman for throwing in that middle section which, for a while, pushes the song in a completely different direction — bluesy, in fact!). My own problem with the song is that there is a bit too much repetition: the entire second half adds absolutely nothing to the first one, and the mid-section is too short and simple. Straining a bit, I think I could see Cream covering it, with Jack Bruce giving a much more soulful tint to "I’d give you diamonds bright, things that will excite and make you dream of me at night" (he’d have to use his best "I’ll be with you when the stars start falling" intonations) and then following it up with ten minutes of jamming before reverting to the verse once again. Here, at 2:30, strangely enough, it’s just a tad too short and a tad too long at the exact same time. But still a flash of early art-pop genius from the man who’d go on to give us 10cc. As a bitter reminder of what was more important for the Yardbirds’ historical reputation — Clapton or the harpsichord — we have to consider the B-side to ‘For Your Love’: ‘Got To Hurry’, for some reason credited to Gomelsky even if the base melody is just a standard blues shuffle, reminiscent of Booker T. & The MG’s ‘Green Onions’, essentially just a showcase for Eric’s guitar playing from top to bottom. But who remembers it? Nobody. It’s just a blues jam, and all that soloing does not even have the ferociousness of ‘A Certain Girl’ and ‘I Ain’t Got You’ oozing out of it. No wonder that Eric always gets derided by the cool people for leaving the Yardbirds because they were going «poppy»: given the choice between records like ‘For Your Love’ or ‘Got To Hurry’, it would seem fairly clear that the future belonged to this kind of «innovative pop» rather than that kind of «conservative blues». But then again, why should we even choose sides? Eric’s decision ultimately gave us three more years of The Yardbirds and three years of Cream, so basically a win-win for everybody involved. It was the mid-Sixties, for Christ’s sake — if you had talent at all, almost everything you did would fall on fertile soil anyway. The 21-year old Jeff Beck (actually older than Clapton by almost a year) came in as Eric’s replacement just in time for a couple of recording sessions that yielded enough material to complete the band’s first studio LP — and the first of these recordings should have laid to rest any fears of one of Britain’s most revered rhythm’n’blues combos going «soft» and «artsy» for good. The slashing, choppy chords that open ‘I Ain’t Done Wrong’, the only original composition on the album (credited to Keith Relf, though I’m sure Beck should take most of the credit for transforming a generic 12-bar blues into something seriously different), announce the arrival of an even grittier and dirtier brand of the Yardbirds than ever before, and, more importantly, a much more experimental brand of the Yardbirds. In between the brief opening and closing verses, Beck and the band pull just about all of the stops that could technically be pulled in early ’65. There are aggressive bits of «heavy metal slide guitar», sometimes by itself, sometimes in a call-and-response mode with Relf’s harmonica. There’s weird sound effects that resemble flanging and wah-wah (even if the wah-wah wasn’t properly invented yet!). There’s a proto-punkish barrage of «dirty» chords that nobody had ever considered putting inside a basic 12-bar blues number before. And it’s all captured on a track that nobody even remembers, because it was never released as a single. Even more impressive is ‘I’m Not Talking’, a cover of a relatively recent piano jazz composition by Mose Allison. Allison was in the process of becoming the talk of the town, largely due to the «viral» (for the time) popularity of his ‘Parchman Farm’, already a staple inclusion into the repertoire of many rhythm’n’blues artists; the smarter ones, however, were willing to dig deeper into this weird, not-easily-categorizable artist’s work (The Who would score a big winner in a few years with ‘Young Man Blues’), realizing that his unconventional, modernistic approach to vocal jazz — imagine a cross between Thelonious Monk and Nat King Cole! — could be converted into heavy rock with most fascinating results. Taking a relaxed, pensive, but subtly dynamic original recording, the Yardbirds turn it into a fast-paced, frenetic, hystrionic «new-school-rock’n’roll» number, driven by a metallic riff whose brutal tone puts ‘I Wish You Would’ squarely in the past. Even Relf gets unusually energized for the performance, screaming his head off, but there is no question that the song belongs to Beck — he plays a couple of totally head-spinning guitar breaks for the time. The approach is completely different from Eric’s: where Clapton would put huge emphasis on fluent smoothness, having each single lick flawlessly floating out of the previous one, Beck plays it broken-up and choppy, rarely letting you predict which frets his fingers shall land on next — which makes the solos somewhat harder to memorize, but easier to admire in terms of improvisational freedom. Additionally, ‘I’m Not Talking’ is the first classic example in the Beck canon of the man’s life-long fascination with sustain and vibrato; the protagonist of the song may not be «talking» (by the way, "things like idle chatter / Ain’t the things that matter / That’s one thing I can do without" is quite a sound piece of advice for our age of social media, though, alas, hardly at all realizable), but Beck’s guitar is talking all the way — or, rather, grumbling, wailing, sighing, grinning, and spasming, all due to the guitarist’s mastery of the vibrato mechanism. Listening to this track, it’s as if you are witnessing the birth pangs of the classic hard rock sound. Not a single other guitarist for miles around was doing stuff like that in April ’65 — and the only reason why it fell to Clapton, after all, to be pronounced «God», rather than Beck, is because this kind of sound was way too «far out» at the time for the general public. Again, no need to promote favoritism or generate empty claims of objective superiority: both approaches were and remain perfectly valid and admirable, and I, for one, have absolutely no problem observing ‘A Certain Girl’ and ‘I’m Not Talking’ sharing space on the same chunk of vinyl — in fact, I sometimes amuse myself by imagining an impossible version of the Yardbirds where Clapton, Beck, and Page would all be playing at the same time, sort of like a Lynyrd Skynyrd thing. Wouldn’t that be something? (On second thought, they might have created too much anti-matter in the process, so perhaps better not). Last, but not least, on the album comes ‘My Girl Sloopy’, and while I’m not really a huge fan of its pseudo-Caribbean vibe, it does continue and solidify the tradition of the Yardbirds regularly setting up mini-revolutions in popular music. By the time they finally got to recording it with Beck (although the idea of adding it to the repertoire had already been expressed by Clapton in late ’64), the song was already a staple with contemporary garage bands — the original version, released by The Vibrations on the Atlantic label, was not exactly «rock», but its party attitude and simplistic ‘Louie Louie’-style chord structure were infectious, and it was a good pretext to get the audience on its feet and join in the rave-up. The most commercially successful version of the song would be recorded by The McCoys a few months later, introducing the world at large to the dubious talents of Mr. Rick Derringer — but the Yardbirds went for a much more experimental approach, with «experimental», in this particular case, being the song’s length and structure: at more than five and a half minutes in length, it is an extended jam based on the «I-feel-too-good-to-stop-this» principle. The band just goes on and on, sending out their rays of support to the mysterious «Sloopy Girl», speeding up, slowing down, ad-libbing, whooping, basically just running around in free-form mode. It’s all a bit silly, and the jubilation feels just a bit less than adequate, but it’s one of those «door-opening» moments — of the «hey, I never thought one could get away with something like this» variety. Not sure if this vibe was exactly what Eric was thinking of when he recommended the song to the band, though... And it is at this point that our retrospective finally comes to a pause, breaking off at a rather arbitrary point — at the very moment when For Your Love was released as an album in the US, the band was already witnessing the rise in the charts of its next single, ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, which would open yet another mini-era in Yardbirds history... but that will be the subject of the next review. The Repertoire Records release does throw in, as a bonus track, the earliest version of ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ with the inclusion of a sitar part, but we’ll talk about this later; a few other inclusions from later recording dates can be dismissed as well, like the rather uninteresting pop-rock tune ‘Paff.. Bum’ and the band’s appropriately horrendous contribution (‘Questa Volta’, sung by Keith Relf in perfectly dreadful Italian) to the appropriately horrendous San Remo festival (a place where they belonged about as naturally as Martin Scorsese at Comic-Con). But, well, this is the price to pay for historical accuracy and completionism — for every amazing Jeff Beck solo, you have to endure a bit of Keith Relf trying to be Lucio Battisti. Ah, just... forget about it. In retrospect, For Your Love seems to have become a little lost in the shadow of Having A Rave Up, its far more mature, diverse, and influential follow-up — in a large part, this is due to the serious anti-Clapton, pro-Beck bias on the part of «discerning audiences» who might sincerely believe that Eric’s role in the band was actually holding them back from achieving proper greatness. It’s not an unreasonable attitude, but in reality, the things that the Yardbirds were doing with Clapton in 1964 were just as groundbreaking — not to mention enjoyable — for that year as the things they would be doing with Beck in 1965 (and then you could always argue that whatever they were doing with Beck in 1965 would be totally eclipsed and obliterated by the achievements of Hendrix in 1967, and so on ad infinitum). The difference is that Eric wanted to stay inside his comfort zone — the blues — whereas for Beck, the blues was never a comfort zone for him in the first place (he himself admitted, in various interviews, that he felt more drawn to jazz and avantgarde before joining the band). But that does not mean that Clapton’s playing on all those early Yardbirds singles did not try to expand that zone, or adapt it to Eric’s own personality, or modernize it in ways that no Chicago player in the 1950s could have dreamt of. Even the new breed of fierce American electric guitar players, such as Freddie King (probably the single biggest influence on Eric at that period), could not really match the combination of tone and fluency achieved by Eric at the time: in fact, if you study the evolution of Freddie’s playing style over the years, you could build up a solid case that it was a back-and-forth process of mutual influence, where American guitarists like King would push British guitarists like Clapton and then take quite a few lessons from them in return. Which is, come to think of it, a perfectly natural process in the tightly intertwisted world of proactive musicians — a big chunk of which around 1964-65 is reflected within this album in quite a beautiful mess.

	HAVING A RAVE UP
	Album released: Nov. 15, 1965	V	A	L	U	E	More info:
		4	5	5	5	4
Tracks: 1) You’re A Better Man Than I; 2) Evil Hearted You; 3) I’m A Man; 4) Still I’m Sad; 5) Heart Full Of Soul; 6) The Train Kept A-Rollin’; 7) Smokestack Lightning; 8) Respectable; 9) I’m A Man; 10) Here ’Tis; 11) Shape Of Things; 12) New York City Blues; 13) Jeff’s Blues; 14) Someone To Love; 15) Like Jimmy Reed Again; 16) Chris Number; 17) Here ’Tis; 18) Stroll On.
REVIEW As I have pointed out in my past reviews — with a little hyperbole, perhaps, but isn’t hyperbole the true spice of life? — the Yardbirds in their Jeff Beck phase did not put out a whole lot of material, but pretty much every single they put out during their «miracle year» from spring of 1965 to winter of 1966 helped jump-start a new sub-genre in rock music. Beck’s role in that wond’rous adventure was pivotal, and, in some ways, his career was strikingly parallel to that of Jack Bruce within Cream — after leaving or dissolving their respective bands, both Jeff and Jack would embark on lengthy, sophisticated, and rewarding solo careers that deliberately eschewed overt commercialism (leaving their former bandmate Eric Clapton to reap all that cash instead) and, in the eyes of many a «demanding» music lover, produced much finer results than their early achievements on the «pop-rock» market. But no matter whether we like it or not, as long as the memory of rock music ever lives on, Jack Bruce will be forever associated with ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’, while Jeff Beck will always have a ‘Heart Full Of Soul’.
Technically speaking, ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ was a fairly formulaic follow-up to ‘For Your Love’, written by Graham Gouldman in precisely the same standard fashion any corporate songwriter writes for his paycheck. The opening minor key sets up a predictably somber, brooding mood; the lyrics are almost unbearably simple and clichéd (and by April 1965, this could already sting a little); the bridge section shifts key and tempo, trying to make things a little brighter and more vivacious before settling back into somberness; and both songs even have the exact same running length of two and a half minutes (though at least ‘Heart’ gets a little space for a guitar solo). I suppose that Clapton, the staunchly anti-commercial warrior (heh heh), would have hated the second song just as much as he hated the first one, and thanked God one extra time for guiding him all the way to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers instead. However, in between Gouldman’s songwriting, Beck’s inventive approach to guitar playing, and the Yardbirds’ improved approach to vocal harmony arrangements (perhaps their most significant achievement on the UK scene from a collective perspective), ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ just uses ‘For Your Love’ as a trampoline to leap so much further in the pre-set direction. The opening raga-like bended riff — the very one that a professional Indian player could not get quite right on sitar the week before — adds a feeling of acute physical pain to the brooding somberness, and connects perfectly with the opening lyrics: "Sick at heart and lonely / Deep in dark despair..." I am sitting right now, trying to come up with at least one example of a pre-April 1965 pop/rock song that would deliver such a sharp suicidal punch, and nothing comes to mind — naturally, the Zombies would be an apt point of departure, but the Zombies did not have a guitar player of Jeff Beck’s caliber. ‘She’s Not There’ is in the same thematic ballpark, but it’s not really a rock song, is it? We might just as well go ahead and dub ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ the first ever genuine goth-rock song to grace the airwaves. Lots of subtle touches make this recording a stand-out, chief among them Beck’s handling of the main riff — a riff that, all by itself, might not be the eighth wonder of the world (it stands somewhere in between the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ and the Animals’ ‘It’s My Life’ in terms of actual chords), but applies for candidate status with the addition of fuzz (one of the earliest examples of a fuzzy riff in rock) and, most importantly, that nasty wobble in the middle — we’d already heard Beck use the same technique on ‘I’m Not Talking’, but here it is placed at the center of the melody, and it certainly suits the overall disturbed mood of the song much better than a regular sitar sequence ever could. Then there are the vocal harmonies — those cavernous "oh-oh, whoah-oh!" from the rest of the band that feel like they grow organically out of Relf’s own solo modulation. These would soon be taken to a whole different dimension on ‘Still I’m Sad’; here they have a more «vignettish» touch to them, but this still does not eliminate the question of where the hell they came from? there was nothing quite like that level of spookiness in UK pop before. Finally, Jeff’s solo — comparatively minimalistic, it humbly and loyally mimics the vocal melody, doing the same type of perfect job that George Harrison did with his solo in ‘I Should Have Known Better’: when the vocal melody is so dang fine, why go someplace else when all you have to do is amplify the human voice with magic electric current? Beck is one of those rare players who never lets technical sophistication and gimmickry get in the way of expressing relatable feelings, and when there is no need to go all avantgarde on our asses, he has the good sense not to go there. For the B-side of the single, the band could not come up with anything better than a fairly common 12-bar blues jam (‘Steeled Blues’, available as a bonus track on the regular CD edition of For Your Love), on which Beck tries to be Elmore James and Relf tries to be Little Walter — pleasant, but obviously forgettable; it did not, however, prevent ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ from becoming the band’s biggest ever commercial success on the UK charts (in the US, it did not manage to match the chart heights of ‘For Your Love’ — too scary for American audiences?) and once again putting them in the spotlight. There are several old clips of the band lip-syncing to the song on TV: I particularly «like» this one, with the go-go girls in the background rockin’ their standard moves to the song like it was ‘Shout And Shimmy’ or something — a classic textbook illustration of the ever increasing distance between cutting-edge pop music and basic pop music industry in that one year when humanity (in pure theory) could have been saved by music (but wasn’t). A few months later, Graham Gouldman’s fabulous «Male Ego Destruction Trilogy» would come to its ultimate conclusion with ‘Evil Hearted You’ — another great song, though this time around one might complain that the formula was becoming just a tad too predictable: more minor chords, more spooky vocal harmonies, more abrupt tempo changes for the mid-section, more dark sulking and brooding. In ‘For Your Love’, Keith Relf was meaning to get the girl, at whatever cost necessary; in ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, he was meaning to get her back as the only way of saving himself from suicide. In ‘Evil Hearted You’, he finally seems to be at her side for good, but only at the cost of her having him under her thumb — "persuading, degrading, on my knees I try to please" — a kind of submissiveness Mick Jagger would probably find way below his masculine dignity, but apparently far more suitable for Keith’s artistic persona (and perhaps his real life persona, too, as Keith was never known for excessive womanizing and seems to have been happily married to April Liversidge from 1966 until his tragic death in 1976). This time around, though, the song opens with a couple of power chords — almost like The Who, except Pete Townshend preferred bright, lively, ass-kickin’ major chords at the time, whereas here the opening E-minors set a gloomy attitude from the very first seconds. (This does not prevent the opening from showing a striking progression similarity with The Who’s ‘Amazing Journey’ four years later). However, it is not the static gloom that makes the song — it is its smooth vocal and instrumental careening from top to bottom and then back to top. "Evil hearted you, you always try-to-put-me-down..." — here is where Relf plunges all the way down to hell together with Samwell-Smith’s bass, only then to plummet right back up like a jack-in-the-box with "with the things you do..." The chorus, once they get to it, is not rigidly separated from the verse — it functions like an extension of that devilish Ferris wheel; and for the solo, Beck employs a sliding technique because there’s simply no other way to play it. The entire song slides from ecstasy to despair with each bar, and Jeff’s little guitar piece is once again the culmination of that journey. Much like ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, ‘Evil Hearted You’ has also been described as "Middle Eastern-influenced" (by Richie Unterberger), although comparisons have also been drawn to Ennio Morricone and probably half a dozen other potential sources; I would say that the most "Middle Eastern-influenced" thing about the song might actually be its lyrics (which bear a striking resemblance to certain themes in Persian poetry), while the actual melody... I don’t really have a clue where that melody comes from, other than the unique mind of Mr. Goldman. But I do know I’d love to see Alice Cooper try to cover this one, since it very much foreshadows the deep, dark sound of the classic Alice Cooper band (or quite a bit of Alice’s solo career, for that matter). As fine as ‘Evil Hearted You’ happens to be, though, its B-side (or, rather, «twin A-side», since it charted separately in the UK) might have been even more important for the Yardbirds — it was the first original contribution from Paul Samwell-Smith (who is allegedly responsible for the lyrics and vocal arrangements) and drummer Jim McCarty (main melody); for the latter, ‘Still I’m Sad’ was actually the beginning of a modest, but respectable career in art-rock / folk-prog that would eventually see him form Renaissance with Keith Relf. Mood-wise, though, ‘Still I’m Sad’ could not be further removed from the romantic dynamics of Relf-era Renaissance; original or not, it had to fit in with the stylistics of Gouldman-penned hits, and so McCarty and Samwell-Smith decided they simply had to beat their primary meat provider at his own game of doom, darkness, and despair. Completely leaving the territory that established their original reputation — that of bluesy R&B rave-ups — McCarty and Samwell-Smith give us a slow, atmospheric, drony acoustic ballad whose vocal melody should probably be traced back to the Celtic tradition, except that the vocal harmonies, as everybody has already raved about, are arranged as a genuine Gregorian chant — low, deep, echoey, drawn-out in waves of «heavenly» modulation. The combination makes the song feel like part of a soundtrack to a film about the Black Death — a long, slow, mournful, desperate-but-humble funeral procession (I can almost picture Keith Relf wrapped in a black hood and cloak — too bad this never happened on TV, though on occasion all three guitarists at least would position themselves as part of said procession) that just happens to pass you by, with almost no dynamic development along the way. Too bad The Monks, one of the most eccentric American garage rock bands from that period, never considered covering the song for their Black Monk Time album in 1966 — here is a «black monk performance» par excellence if there ever was one. The resulting sound is so dramatically different from everything the Yardbirds did before that it feels as if they are busy impersonating a different band — a year and a half before Sgt. Pepper, and, one might argue, with more clarity and a sharper sense of purpose than Sgt. Pepper, for all its inventiveness and ambitiousness, ever had. A bit too overtly theatrical, mayhaps, or even a bit «corny» (would certainly feel so from the point of view of a Western classical scholar), the song more than makes up for it with its sheer boldness. Who even thought of building up this kind of a dark, dreary sound in the burgeoning folk-rock movement of 1965? Not The Byrds, by any account. Who followed it up? Pretty much everybody from The Jefferson Airplane to The Velvet Underground, what with their own perks and everything. (Also for the record, the best cover of ‘Still I’m Sad’, amusingly enough, belongs not to Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, who kinda messed up the thing by turning it into a bombastic rocker, but to... Euro-disco clown-kings Boney M., whose version was surprisingly respectful to the original instead of expectedly disco-ifing the melody). For some reason, ‘Still I’m Sad’ was seen fit for the US market while ‘Evil Hearted You’ was not — were Epic Records afraid of the word "evil"? — so the October ’65 single release in the US featured a relatively fresh recording of Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m A Man’ instead. We already knew, by that point, that the Yardbirds were big fans of the song, with a notoriously sped-up rearrangement being included on Five Live Yardbirds — the tempo was, in fact, so ridiculous that it felt like the band was simply rushing through the braggy lyrics to get to the rave-up jammy bits. But the Beck-era studio recording goes even further than that. The most interesting part of the song begins around 1:30, when the main melody is over and the band increases the tempo even further, with the rhythm section tight and tense while Relf and Beck are holding an extended distorted guitar-harmonica conversation, Jeff calling out Keith and Keith responding to the best of his blowin’ ability until the guitarist gets tired of the friendly sparring and launches into a head-spinnin’ «chicken-scratch» rhythmic pattern that somehow still manages to climb up the scale despite the sound being almost completely muted. This actually adds a melodic aspect to the band’s already patented noise-making — they begin to sculpt the noise rather than simply generate it. Short as it is, that last minute of ‘I’m A Man’ is a precious exercise in the controlled chaos of garage-rock — and there are probably at least a dozen, if not more, inclusions on the U.S. Nuggets box set that owe a direct debt to this recording (‘Tobacco Road’ by The Blues Magoos is a particularly glaring example). Not even The Who (whose own version of ‘I’m A Man’ would also be released the same year) could raise their trademark ruckus at such an insane tempo — their idea of playing was much too slovenly for that. And, of course, the very idea of a single release that had ‘I’m A Man’ on one side and ‘Still I’m Sad’ on the other... one template for all the garage / hard / heavy rock bands in the world to come, one for all the Gothic / artsy / classically-influenced dark-folk groups to follow. At that particular juncture in time, even the Beatles rarely boasted «double A-side» combinations like these. With both ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ and ‘I’m A Man’ faring quite respectably in the US charts, Epic Records thought that it would be a good thing for the band to end the year with another American LP — the only problem being that, what with all the touring and the lack of original songwriting, the Yardbirds had very little left in the vaults to offer. This did not exactly frighten Epic, who suddenly remembered that Five Live Yardbirds never got an American release, so here was their chance to do something completely different — a refreshingly mixed experience of one studio side of material, which would include all the recent hit singles, and one side of live performances. That these were essentially two different bands — the older, more «traditional» rhythm’n’blues / rave-up Yardbirds with Clapton and the newer, more experimental and creative Yardbirds with Beck — was a fact that could not bother record executives even if they were all forced to listen to Theodor Adorno during their bedtime story time. As a result, for all of us nowadays Having A Rave Up is really a dismembered torso of a record, with one side that is completely useless to everybody who already owns Five Live Yardbirds (and they didn’t even necessarily pick all the best tunes from that particular show — where’s frickin’ ‘Too Much Monkey Business’?). The other side would constitute a 17-minute EP, on which they at least had the decency to also include ‘Evil Hearted You’ (previously unissued in the States). Still, four songs was clearly not enough, so they had to add two more outtakes that the band recorded in Memphis on September 12, with the legendary Sam Phillips himself overseeing the process — and a good thing they did, as these two songs are every bit as monumental as the ones we already discussed. ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, which the Yardbirds learned from Johnny Burnette & The Rock’n’Roll Trio, turned out to be a true cornerstone in the evolution of hard rock and heavy metal — but since I have already dedicated an entire essay to the highly singular life of that particular song, I probably need say no more in this review, other than reiterate how much ass it kicks. The other song was ‘Mr. You’re A Better Man Than I’, and the worst thing I can say about it is that it was written by Mike Hugg, one of the key members of Manfred Mann, a band with which I have a serious aesthetic bone to pick. Fortunately, Hugg was probably the most tasteful and integral member of the band, so the worst thing I can really say about the song is that its earnest-to-God socially conscious lyrics, clearly striving for the same goals as Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, end up more than a little cheesy in their straightforwardness ("can you see a bad man by the pattern on his tie?" — hey, you know what, I think that with a little effort I can actually see a bad man by the pattern on his tie, yessiree bob!). But in the hands of the Yardbirds, ‘You’re A Better Man Than I’ becomes more than just a protest song. It would be quite interesting to hear Hugg’s original demo (the much later slow jazzy version that Manfred Mann Chapter Three recorded in 1969 was clearly a brand new «artsy» reworking) — I have no idea if it had anything approaching that leaden-heavy bass sound that Phillips worked out for the band; for most of the song’s first half, it belongs to Samwell-Smith, who pretty much buries all the other guitars under his groove. Remember that we’re still talking September ’65; there really weren’t that many pop-rock songs around that would elevate the bass groove above the role of auxiliary foundation — ‘You’re A Better Man Than I’ was a trailblazer in that department, and moreover, this purely musical decision enhances the angry protest vibe of the song ten-fold. Maybe the lyrics are a little cheesy, but from the very opening notes it is Paul’s bass which loudly announces that the boys are being fuckin’ serious over here, mister. Then, of course, there’s Beck’s guitar break — this time, we are not in graceful melodic pop territory, and our man Jeff takes the wise decision to stop emulating the lilting guitar melodies and just blast off. Starting off low, distorted, and droney, he slowly but surely moves higher and higher in space, gaining in pitch, intensity, and ecstasy until the melody just explodes and with one super-angry bend he brings the burning shards of his rocket back to Earth, only for Paul and his monster bass to take charge once again and guide Relf into the last verse. Again, an inspiration to garage-rock bands all over the globe, and arguably the single most pissed-off guitar break of 1965, not to be bested until the arrival of Jimi Hendrix on the scene (and even then, I would argue that this style of playing was far more influential — people could actually figure out how to imitate Beck on ‘You’re A Better Man Than I’ and imitated the shit out of him, from Ted Nugent to Joe Perry and beyond). Even Relf, usually the weakest link in the band, seems to get so electrified by his guitar-playing buddies that he actually gets enraged by the time he rolls the verse into the chorus. And so there you go — sixth perfect song out of six perfect songs to complete Side A of Having A Rave-Up, easily the single most perfect LP side of 1965. Too bad the second side ended up as the... uhm... single most perfect live LP side of... 1964? whatever. Unfortunately, the LP was released just a tiny wee bit too soon — three months too early, to be exact — to make that side even more perfect with the inclusion of ‘Shapes Of Things’, the natural and logical ideal conclusion to the Yardbirds’ «magic year». Nowadays it usually forms the first bonus track on the CD edition of the album, but you should definitely listen to it in tandem with the other classics rather than after the extra serving of Five Live Yardbirds — that way, the creative arc of the band appears before you in its proper form. In all honesty, ‘Shapes Of Things’ should probably be discussed together with the ensuing LP, Roger The Engineer, with which it shares more elements than with its predecessors (compositional complexity, use of feedback, psychedelic overtones etc.). But since it is already mixed in with the other bonus tracks on here, and since its original version dates back to sessions from December ’65, and since this review is all about greatness anyway (Roger The Engineer is a good, but not a great record), let’s talk about its own greatness here as well. First and foremost, they actually wrote it (it’s only their second ever truly original composition after ‘Still I’m Sad’), and I have no frickin’ clue how they wrote it. There’s a bit of a marching band in there, and apparently a bit of Brubeck, but the chords are an absolute mess and the song totally defies genre certification. It’s probably «pop» — but nothing like the pop of Graham Gouldman, and nothing like the pop of the Beatles. People usually call it one of the earliest examples of pure psychedelia because of Beck’s feedback and fuzz over raga chords, but if by «psychedelic» we want to mean «messing with your mind», then I’d say the song seriously messes with your mind even before Jeff launches into his fabulous break. How a band that suddenly, out of complete nowhere, learned to craft their songs that way ended up fizzling out and going creatively bankrupt in less than a year’s time is one of the cruellest pieces of irony from the height of the Sixties, right up there with Brian Wilson’s crash-and-burn over Smile. Second, that utterly, totally insane instrumental section. This is just a little earlier than ‘Eight Miles High’ and a lot earlier than ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ — two songs that first come to mind when listening to this glorious mess (the next thing to come to mind is, of course, once again a large selection of Hendrix tunes). Several overdubbed guitar parts, distorted and fuzzified to absurd heights, played very obviously with the likes of Coltrane and/or Ravi Shankar in mind. You can clearly discern the influence of this sound on Revolver, but its own immediate predecessors are much more difficult to discern. In all, it is probably a good candidate for any list of «Top 10 Innovative Songs Of The 1960’s» or something. Third, it is musical innovation that agrees with the general message of the song. Emboldened by their treatment of Mike Hugg, perhaps, the Yardbirds were growing more and more socially conscious with each day, and ‘Shapes Of Things’ was their personal commentary on the turbulent times they were living in. Quite a few people, upon hearing the opening line of "shapes of things before my eyes...", form the opinion that the song has something to do with drugs, but actually it does not: shapes of things simply refers to the current state of affairs, and even the psychedelic instrumental break is essentially just re-enacting events on the battlefield (confirmed by McCarty’s martial drum patterns) — one of the first, if not the first, musical representations of the chaos of war in pop music. Needless to say, despite some usual clumsiness in the lyrics, the message still hits very hard — as I hear "please don’t destroy these lands, don’t make them desert sands" to the news of yet another Ukrainian town reduced to rubble and dust by a detachment of my «heroic» compatriots, the answer to the simple opening question of "will time make men more wise?" seems more obvious than ever — but even more painful are the words of the final verse. "Soon I hope that I will find / Thoughts deep within my kind / That won’t disgrace my kind" is the exact feeling that I have now experienced for more than two years at least several times each and every fuckin’ day. Hey, thanks for rubbin’ it in, you bastard Yardbird assholes. Oh, what’s that you say? "Come tomorrow, may I be bolder than today?" You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t believe this is really happening... The bottomline is probably this: at the exact moment when the Yardbirds recorded and released ‘Shapes Of Things’, they were the single most cutting-edge thing happening in the UK — and maybe in the entire world. A catchy pop song shifting between three different tempos, none of which are a proper commodity on the market? with otherworldly guitars all over the place? and a well-put together set of progressive, anti-war, mildly philosophical lyrics? yes, you could find isolated examples of any of these elements, but put them all together and you get... well, something that was a bit of a tough nut for the public to crack: the song should have been a deserved #1 everywhere, but it stalled at #3 on the UK charts (stuck right behind the Hollies’ ‘I Can’t Let Go’ — hey, give the people lively sunshine pop over psychedelic anti-war declarations any day!) and at a shameful #11 in the US. After this, it would be all downhill for the Yardbirds: from the Beatles to the Who to Hendrix, all of their chief competitors would study the lesson of ‘Shapes Of Things’, skilfully use it for their own purposes, and leave the unfortunate band bickering in the dust. In addition to ‘Shapes Of Things’, the Repertoire Records edition of Having A Rave Up contains almost a dozen bonus tracks that are generally of a much higher quality than the bonuses to For Your Love, but clearly do not even begin to compare to the timeless awesomeness of the Magnificent Seven. The earliest of these, ‘New York City Blues’, is an outtake that was taped at the same session as ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ — but it is essentially just ‘Five Long Years’ with a new set of (probably improvised and arguably quite stupid) lyrics; it is still a mighty joy to hear Jeff Beck soloing over a slow 12-bar blues arrangement, but, honestly, this is one area in which he is easily beaten by Slowhand, and if you want great music like this from 1965–66, you are well advised to head straight for Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton. The rest of the tracks mostly date from the band’s early ’66 sessions for the future Roger The Engineer, still produced by Giorgio Gomelsky before the band got rid of him midway through. They all sound good, but there is no sense to discuss most of them outside the context of that album (e.g. ‘Jeff’s Blues’ = future ‘The Nazz Are Blue’, ‘Someone To Love’ = future ‘Lost Woman’), or, in fact, discuss them at all (‘Like Jimmy Reed Again’ — sounds exactly like promised; ‘What Do You Want’ = an instrumental jam based on Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’), especially because some of the tracks are disappointingly anachronistic after ‘Shapes Of Things’ (for instance, what made them want to produce a brand new studio version of Bo Diddley’s ‘Here ’Tis’, already served well done on Five Live Yardbirds?). The only true gem here, delivered right at the end of the bonus track run, is ‘Stroll On’, the re-recording of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ (with new lyrics) that the band produced for the soundtrack of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, with Jimmy Page already in the band, playing second lead guitar next to Beck — making this track a very rare example of both guitarists battling each other. However, I single it out not because of the ass-kicking twin break (which is quite short anyway), but because of the extra injection of heaviness received by the classic main riff, now played at about the same level of growly distorted depth as would only be achieved by the likes of Black Sabbath four years later — and, in spots, is actually reminiscent of the Eighties’ thrash metal style. If you think that Aerosmith really turned it up to 11 when they covered the Yardbirds’ arrangement of the song almost a decade later — well, think again, because Joe Perry’s original Jam Band allegedly began playing the song right after Perry caught Blow-Up on the big screen. Overall, though, the relative mediocrity of the bonus tracks, and the weirdass composition of the original album mean a big fat nothing; even if Having A Rave Up consisted of nothing but fart noises and San Remo standards for 50% of its duration, the remaining 50% would still count as one of 1965’s (and the Sixties’ in general) most glorious moments. Finding a thicker concentration of perfect templates for pop-rock, art-rock, goth-rock, hard rock, garage-punk-rock and whatever other rocks there are on the seashore within such a brief period of time is quite a challenge — maybe the Kinks, with their mix of hard-and-art, came somewhat close that year, but even the Kinks did not experiment in so many genres, nor did they have a guitar genius like Beck to carry those experiments to such instrumental bliss. If there is one small complaint that I might voice — a complaint that, perhaps, ultimately cost the Yardbirds their future — it is that, as great as the individual songs are, they never truly coalesce into a wholesome musical identity for the band. This is not just a mere stab at the idea of «diversity»: within the Beatles, for instance, the very different personalities of Lennon and McCartney fit with each other like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, at their best, forming a complex and contrasting, but wholesome perspective. With the Yardbirds, though, only Beck at this point could be said to represent a distinct musical persona — and he did not really have any proper sparring partner within the band: Samwell-Smith and McCarty were only just tentatively coming into their own as artists, while Keith Relf continued as Keith Relf — a good, idealistic kid whose enthusiasm and empathy remained strictly disproportionate to his artistism and musical talent. In other words, no single Yardbird with the exception of Beck was, roughly speaking, tremendously interesting on his own — which makes this achievement run even more amazing in the end, but also suggests an explanation for why it was so short-lived and why, in the end, the Yardbirds became more of a «compost» for other, more successful projects rather than one big, strong, solid collective legend on the same level with the other giants of the 1960s.

Recording years	Main genre	Music sample
1964–1968	Classic rhythm’n’blues	Heart Full Of Soul (1965)