Page wasn’t much of a bass player, but he was too good a guitar player to remain on that instrument. After two months, Chris moved to bass. Jeff: “Jimmy can’t play the bass for toffee; Chris was better.” Jeff and Jimmy got the idea that they could perform Jeff’s previous lead guitar lines in tandem. On September 23, 1966, at the Royal Albert Hall, after a handful of dates without Jeff, The Yardbirds debuted Jeff and Jimmy’s dual guitars, or “stereo guitars” arrangement. When they were focused, it worked brilliantly. But Beck was an undisciplined feel player compared with Page’s precision, and quite often it didn’t work. As Jimmy Page told ZigZag magazine’s Pete Frame in 1972, “That was all well in theory and at rehearsal, but on stage Beck would often go off into something else.” In addition, Jeff hadn’t anticipated sharing the guitar hero spotlight: “I didn’t want my territory being encroached upon. I wanted to be it.”
Not able to articulate his concerns with words, Jeff acted out: he missed dates, played inconsistently when he showed up, and was prone to destroying malfunctioning amps. He even complained of asthma sufferer Keith Relf’s “coughing and sputtering” and the hissing from his inhaler during his solos.
Rumors had been circulating for months that Jeff was going to leave the group. In September, Barbara Sims wrote a letter to the KRLA Beat: “I am a Yardbird fan and as one who follows them as much as I can I would like to ask this. Where is Jeff Beck? He has not played with The Yardbirds on this whole tour but I see him on the [Sunset] Strip with Mary Hughes. Is he no longer in the group and is the rumor true that he is married?”
The Yardbirds toured extensively over the summer, taking a few days off in October to record a new single, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” and to film and record a song for Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” was Keith’s idea of reincarnation, according to McCarty. Page, McCarty, and John Paul Jones (on bass) recorded the basic track. Beck arrived late and added his parts. In a flood of confusion—sounds of a jet plane taking off and a throbbing European police car siren—two lead guitars lash out. During the instrumental break Jeff mocks a clueless acquaintance, “Why do you got long hair?” At a period when few groups were yet knowledgeable about feedback, the record seemed eons ahead of its time. Now considered a psychedelic masterpiece, it was a commercial flop, managing to get only to thirty in the US and forty-two in the UK. The long guitar solos and jamming were a precursor to what would later be termed the “progressive era” in rock. Many now think of The Yardbirds as founders of “psychedelic rock.” On the UK flip side “Psycho Daisies,” Jeff sings, “California’s my home with Mary Hughes.”
Antonioni wanted a group to smash one of their instruments in a recreated Ricky Tick Club in his new movie. The Who, his first choice, passed. The Yardbirds’ performance, a messy appropriation of “Train Kept A-Rollin” rewritten as “Stroll On,” was representative of a Yardbirds concert except for the tranquil audience and Beck smashing a guitar during an amplifier malfunction, which was more Antonioni’s vision. Decades later fans can appreciate how good the band looks in the well-shot film.
The band was back in the States on October 21 to record a Great Shakes (milkshake powder) radio commercial, and play a number of dates before joining the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour on October 28. The Yardbirds were third-billed and felt out of place with the other acts: Gary Lewis & The Playboys, Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs, Bobby Hebb, and Brian Hyland. If you were Jeff Beck, would you want to be stuck on a bus for a month-long grueling tour of the South and Midwest—for little money—or be back in LA snuggling with “the Brigitte Bardot of Malibu,” as Mary Hughes was sometimes called? Jeff claimed he had tonsillitis and hightailed it back to California three days after the tour started.
Soon after, Beck was no longer a Yardbird. As brilliant as Jeff could be as a guitarist, at this point it was good riddance: no longer having to put up with his tardiness, his absences, his sulking, his amp smashing. Jim: “He was a nervous guy who had trouble expressing himself. He kept it all bottled up. I don’t think Jeff fit in. He did with our sense of humor, like doing impressions of Roger Moore in The Saint. He was more from a car mechanic background.” Chris: “Jeff is a man of his emotions. He’s a slightly out of control egomaniac.” Jim: “Jeff and Jimmy would switch off playing lead guitar. Then Jeff started to get worse and kept on packing in tours before we’d finished, so it became the four of us. We’d kicked Jeff out. It was his own fault because he kept on letting us down. But the way we were at the end, the four of us was the best combination we’d had.”
Once American teens had been energized to form rock bands in the styles of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Now it was The Yardbirds’ turn. Count Five, from San Jose, California, copied The Yardbirds’ playing on “I’m a Man” so effectively that they scored a top five single with “Psychotic Reaction” in 1966. Todd Rundgren’s first recorded band, Nazz, even took their name from a Yardbirds B-side. When Vincent Furnier and his bandmates—all big Yardbirds fans—became aware of the other Nazz, they changed their name to Alice Cooper.
Simon Napier-Bell, who successfully managed Wham! in the eighties and took them to China, had his fill of The Yardbirds. He referred to them as a “miserable bloody lot” and singled out Paul Samwell-Smith and Jimmy Page as the most troublesome. He made an arrangement with Mickie Most to take over production, and Most’s partner Peter Grant to take over management, retaining a percentage for himself.
Most tried to “resuscitate” (his term) the group, but was unsuccessful. He recorded four singles with them of which “Little Games” charted the highest, reaching only fifty-one in the US. As a result, the Little Games album was released in America but not the UK. “My involvement with The Yardbirds was nothing, really,” Mickie told me. “It was toward the end and the fire had gone out. It was more out of contractual obligation than anything else. They liked doing the songs.”
It wasn’t as if Most wasn’t trying to have a hit with the group, or that he wasn’t successful with other artists. During the year of recording The Yardbirds, he had nine Top 30 hits in the UK and six in the US. He even hit the Top 20 in the UK with Jeff Beck’s debut single. Mickie recalled Jeff turning up in his office when he was supposed to be on tour in the States with The Yardbirds, telling him that he met a girl who didn’t think he should be in the band anymore. Mickie: “Jeff said, ‘I want to be a pop singer.’ I played him ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’ and he said ‘Let’s do it.’ Jeff recorded two guitar solos, almost identical. I liked them both, so I stuck them on.”
It’s clear Mickie wasn’t right for The Yardbirds. “Mickie Most was just impossible to talk to because he was the big producer star,” Jim said. “When you’d start criticizing him, he’d tell you how much money he’d made. Instead of recording singles, we should have been making an album. We hadn’t realized that the market had changed from singles to albums.”
Keith and Jim’s lifestyle eventually caught up with the psychedelic culture that had embraced their music. “When we first went to California we were straight as a die,” Jim said. “We might drink half a pint of beer, but that’s it. We had this great following of hippies and freaks. From the music we were playing, they thought we were acidheads.” Chris added: “People did misconstrue that we were about drugs, when we were really about the music.” But after a while both Keith and Jim got heavily into LSD and smoking pot. Chris continued: “Keith got more involved than the rest of us. He burned incense and candles and turned his hotel room into a Buddhist temple. He bought himself a projector and projected stars on his body to see what they felt like. He’d play East-West by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band or Freak Out! by The Mothers of Invention.”
As Jimmy was new to the band, he was still fresh and had energy. The other three were tired. Chris: “Keith was a sensitive man who wrote great lyrics, but like many alcoholics, he had a schizophrenic aspect to him.” Jeff weighed in: “I think he was manic-depressive. He
wanted to kill everybody. He used to read Guns & Ammo [magazine] to work out how to commit the perfect murder.” During their last US tour, even Jim McCarty succumbed. He had a minor breakdown and was replaced for a couple of performances.
On March 30, 1968, the band recorded a live album at New York’s Anderson Theatre. It was finally issued in September 1971. The band performed well and, as at most shows, some numbers were better than others. The standouts for me are “Heart Full of Soul” and “Over Under Sideways Down,” both of which are more powerful than their studio versions. Live Yardbirds Featuring Jimmy Page was available only for a few months. Page convinced CBS to cease shipping the LP because the title attempted to exploit his popularity with Led Zeppelin. Among the new material the band performed, Chris regrets they never made a proper studio recording of “Dazed and Confused” as it was an audience favorite. (Curiously, the song was titled “I’m Confused” and had no songwriting credit.) It’s more familiar as the fourth song on Led Zeppelin’s January 1969 debut album. The song was credited to Jimmy Page, but he didn’t write it.
On August 25, 1967, The Yardbirds headlined the Village Theater in New York. They took in folksinger Jake Holmes’ opening set, entranced with a song he performed from his new album “The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes. The next day McCarty bought a copy from a Greenwich Village record store, and the group worked up their own version, with Keith doing a lyric rewrite. When Led Zeppelin was released with his song—with Page’s new lyrics—Holmes didn’t initiate legal action. He was making a lot of money writing music for commercials for major companies. His most memorable jingles are Dr. Pepper’s “Be a Pepper” and the US Army’s “Be All That You Can Be.” Only decades later, under the threat of legal action, did Page agree to a settlement; the song now credited to “Jimmy Page inspired by Jake Holmes.”
The group completed its US tour on June 5, 1968, and then played a final date on July 7 at Luton Technical College in Bedfordshire before breaking up. Jimmy wanted to continue with the band, but only Chris was onboard. The pair auditioned new members, and it was reported in the press that the new lineup included Robert Plant on vocals and Paul Francis on drums. But Chris had second thoughts, determined he didn’t want to do it any longer, and elected to pursue a career in photography. In September Jimmy’s new band fulfilled an already-booked ten-date tour of Scandinavia as The New Yardbirds. The band played a few newly booked UK dates the following month, and a tour was in the works for the US. Jimmy changed the name to Led Zeppelin only after Chris threatened to sue if he continued to use “The New Yardbirds.”
Despite the creativity of the group as a whole, The Yardbirds are most remembered for having three of rock’s best guitarists passing through their ranks. Jim described how they compared: “Eric impressed me the most, he was a neat player. Jeff, on a good night, had more guts. Jimmy is very adaptable. He can play a wider range than the other two, but won’t. I don’t know why.”
In the decade after the group’s demise, The Yardbirds influence was apparent in Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Alice Cooper, Cheap Trick, Rush, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and others. Jeff Beck recorded “Shapes of Things” on his Truth album; Todd Rundgren recreated “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” on Faithful; David Bowie covered two of The Yardbirds’ songs on Pin Ups, so did Rush on their 2004 tribute EP Feedback.
“The Yardbirds never quite made it,” Jim said in 1970. “They made it in one way in that they made a sort of fame, but they missed out slightly. If we knew then what we know now, we could have been one of the biggest things.”
Chris: “It was one of those bands where the ingredients were just right. We were an emotionally bound together group of people.”
The Yardbirds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992.
At Rhino we produced a couple of anthologies and reissued Five Live Yardbirds, with the speed corrected. We also tried to do other projects. When The Yardbirds broke up, Jim and Keith formed a group, Together, because they wanted to go in a musical direction like The Turtles. The Turtles’ vocalists Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman wished that their group had a guitar virtuoso like Jeff Beck. I thought of realizing their one-time desires by combining the relevant elements of each group. As The Yardbirds (except for Relf, who died in 1976) played well when they reunited to record as the Box of Frogs in 1984 (with Beck on three songs), I thought of flying Kaylan and Volman over to London to record an album with remaining members Beck, McCarty, Dreja, and Samwell-Smith. It took some persuasion to convince Samwell-Smith, who preferred producing to playing bass. (He had produced the two Box of Frogs LPs, as well as five gold albums and one platinum for Cat Stevens, and a gold album for Carly Simon.) During my phone conversation with him when I was in London in September 1987, he expressed his frustration regarding Jeff: “Sometimes he showed up for a session, other times he wouldn’t.” As this would have been an expensive endeavor for us, I didn’t want to risk our finances if Beck was unreliable, and didn’t proceed.
I also met one of my best friends because of The Yardbirds. In 1973, a few months after I settled into my own apartment and got a listed phone number, I received a call from a stranger: “Are you the Harold Bronson who wrote the cover story on The Yardbirds in Rock Magazine?” Bill Stout was an artist, an illustrator, and a Yardbirds fan. We met and hit it off. In addition to sharing a love of rock ’n’ roll and going to shows together, I tried to involve him as much as I could in Rhino projects. Bill created the original Rhino logo. Over forty years later, we remain friends to this day.
The Spencer Davis Group
I got a call from Marty Cerf, the director of creative services at United Artists Records. UA had generated a new music periodical, Phonograph Record Magazine, that would feature their own artists as well as ones not affiliated with the label. He wanted me to interview Spencer Davis for one of the initial issues. As part of a new acoustic duo, Spencer had a new album coming out on Media Arts Records. The Spencer Davis Group’s catalogue was on UA.
The Spencer Davis Group were a mid-sixties R&B band from Birmingham, in the West Midlands area of England. The city, second only to London in population, was England’s biggest manufacturing region and supported a rich rock music scene, spawning The Moody Blues, The Move, Electric Light Orchestra, Black Sabbath, and half of Led Zeppelin. In America, The Spencer Davis Group had only two Top 10 records, but in the UK they had five big hits—including two number ones and a number two—and three Top 10 LPs, in just fifteen months. Then Steve Winwood left to form Traffic, and The Spencer Davis Group never recovered.
When I interviewed Spencer in January 1971, he voiced his disgust with the whole London pop music scene. He had hit records, yes: “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “I’m A Man,” among them. But he was tired of being recognized on the street and having his phone ring constantly. Mostly, he was discouraged with the way The Spencer Davis Group had been going. He found that he was losing sight of his musical ideals and decided to chuck it all during a US tour in 1969.
Feeling that he had to get away, Davis packed his guitar and his family and migrated to a house just north of Hollywood. With no furniture in the living room, we sat on the carpet for our interview. Spencer was enthusiastic, jumping from one subject to another, and seemed just as willing to discuss the old Spencer Davis Group as his new career.
For Spencer, who grew up in Swansea, Wales, it all started with the blues: “When I first heard the blues—like when I heard Big Bill Broonzy or Jesse Fuller on the Six-Five Special TV show—it was a revelation. When I saw Bill play his guitar and bend a guitar string, I thought, ‘Maybe that’s something I can do.’ I immediately went out and bought a guitar. There were thousands of kids who could play better than me, and even better than Broonzy or Lead Belly, but they didn’t communicate the emotion or the blues experience.
“The thing about blues is its emotion: the intense feel, the spirit and the drive, and the lack of pretension. It was primeval, a cry of help.
But the blues could also be happy music, like Gus Cannon and the jug band sound. I fell in love with Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee, Willie Dixon, and so many others. So, that’s what inspired me to be a musician. At one point, I had a blues duo with my girlfriend, Christine Perfect [Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie]. Toward the end of 1962, when I was a student in Berlin, I played bohemian-type coffeehouses. I used to sing the blues, and folk songs by Woody Guthrie (‘900 Miles,’ ‘Ramblin’ Blues’), Joan Baez, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
“I did a gig in Birmingham where I went to the university. There I saw the Muff-Woody Jazz Band. Muff Winwood played guitar. Stevie Winwood played piano like Oscar Peterson, and he was incredible. He played the melodica in addition to singing. He was doing a Ray Charles solo and it just knocked me sideways. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
“I played an interval spot at the Golden Eagle in 1963, my final year in university. I tore everybody up—the song was ‘Got My Mojo Working’ by Muddy Waters—so they offered me the residency as headliner at the club. This meant taking over from an out-and-out rock and roll band with dyed hair whose guitarists played their guitars behind their backs. I felt that I needed a rock band to compete.
“I rounded up Steve and said, ‘Let’s form a band, because I know so many songs and you know so many.’ So he agreed to join on the condition that his brother Muff came as well, regardless of musical value. Muff came along because he was Steve’s older brother and he had the driver’s license. Steve was too young to drive. We got Peter York, who had been playing in various trad jazz and mainstream bands, to play drums.” The band formed in April 1963.
For a time they were billed as the Rhythm and Blues Quartet or RBQ, then Muff suggested “The Spencer Davis Group” as it was a nice-sounding name. He also thought that, as Spencer was the most outgoing, he would do most of the interviews so the others could sleep late. The band’s popularity soared. “We could have played the Golden Eagle eight nights a week,” said Spencer. Robert Plant and Noddy Holder (of Slade) saw The Spencer Davis Group there and considered the band an inspiration.
My British Invasion Page 14