This record is from 1965 and, unusually it would seem for this blog, was a proper hit, both here in Blighty and in America. The Yardbirds though are not really thought of as being a "hits" sort of band. They're remembered primarily as being the Ur-Led Zeppelin and secondarily as being the launchpad of the careers of Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. Like most things people are remembered for, these are partial truths.
Clapton was (and remains) a great guitarist but the popular perception of him is of a former innovator who now (1999 to time of writing, basically) has ossified into some kind of "Blues Purist." I think this idea is based upon his work with Cream but I genuinely don't get it - he's always been a blues purist. I've been incredibly fortunate with the youtube today and dug up this:
That's Clapton, aged about 19, on guitar on the left. Very different to the single I'm getting further away from by the minute, although there's only about a year separating them. The real star of that clip though is singer/harmonica blower Keith Relf, more on him later.
Anyway, Clapton was disheartened by the pop direction the band started to head in and left just in 1965 to join John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, where he met Jack Bruce with whom he formed Cream. stop tittering at the back there. It as in The Bluesbreakers that he really started his career in earnest and made the connections with other musicians that soon led to graffiti proclaiming his deistic nature. When he joined the Yardbirds he WAS a promising young blues guitarist, but there were plenty of them around. Hell, two of the others were in the group after him.
They became Led Zeppelin only in the sense that Jimmy Page needed a band to fulfil a tour after the band broke up. The ROCK guitar sound that characterised his work owed very little to The Yardbirds and in fact can be heard on "Je n'attends plus Personne" by Francoise Hardy for which Page, then a session musician, provided the growly fuzzy guitar. This was in 1964, before he joined the Yardbirds, when he must have been about six years old.
This leaves us with our 3rd guitarist and that's the one who actually plays on the single I'm supposed to be writing about - Jeff Beck. He also has been highly regarded throughout his long career but not quite to the extent of the other two. Given who the other two are, I think this is understandable and not something we should hold against him. This is a great little single and Beck's riff is quite savage and sharp. I picked it up for 70p at a market stall. Listening to it shorn of all the cultural baggage it still makes me want to dance. Mid-60s pop 45s seem pretty bomb-proof and cut and pressed to be loud and to be played on a crummy portable record player. Teenager-friendly, in other words. I'm going to go and play it again. Sometimes owning it as one single in a large box can make it easier to strip away the mythos surrounding a song and do a wee-bit dance.
To finish, I wrote near the start that I'd have a bit more to write about Keith Relf. He died in 1976 and the oft-repeated story is that he electrocuted himself playing electric guitar in the bath.
It's not true. Of course it's not true, I mean, that would be monumentally stupid. His electric guitar was badly wired and that electrocuted him while he was playing, nowhere near a bath, him being a professional and all.
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