09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Yardbirds' Review: The Reign of the Guitar Gods
'It's a shame the Yardbirds have no image,' opined Herman's Hermits' Peter Noone bluntly in 1966, 'because they would be the Number One group in England.' It's true that the Yardbirds—whose 'magnificent reverberations' are chronicled in Peter Stanfield's 'The Yardbirds: The Most Blueswailing Futuristic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound'—remain a difficult band to peg among their peers. They were tricky to market, too, stiff and uncomfortable in publicity photos. Despite the powerful, affectless voice of their singer Keith Relf, the Yardbirds frontman offered no Mick Jagger-like threat to the female populace. One British magazine described him as 'frail like a sparrow,' more likely to engender maternal feelings in its teen readership.
In any case it was its succession of genius guitarists to whom the rest of the band was in thrall. The sequence began with Eric Clapton, who left in 1965 over a mix of personality clashes and his own blues orthodoxy. He was followed by sonic adventurer Jeff Beck, who moved front and center with his arsenal of fuzz, distortion and feedback, and, finally, Jimmy Page, who arrived in 1966 as a bassist but graduated to guitar, violin bow in hand, foot rocking on the wah-wah pedal. Their classic mid-'60s lineup included Chris Dreja on rhythm guitar, bassist Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty on drums (the sole original member in the current iteration of the band).
The London rhythm-and-blues scene—including the Crawdaddy Club, where the Rolling Stones were launched—gave the Yardbirds their start. Their signature was the 'blueswailing' rave-up, the instrumental interlude that could stretch any three-minute number into a sweaty epic jam, feeding off the proximity of an audience moving, in the words of one contemporary journalist, 'like a crazy caterpillar on pep pills.' Their debut album, 'Five Live Yardbirds,' recorded at the Marquee Club in 1964, would later be tagged by All Music Guide as 'the best such live record of the entire middle of the decade.'
After Mr. Clapton's departure, the Yardbirds gravitated toward commercial pop ('For Your Love,' 1965), then pioneered psychedelia ('Shapes of Things,' 1966) before unexpectedly and ill-advisedly joining forces with Mickie Most, the producer of acts such as Herman's Hermits and Donovan. When Relf and Mr. McCarty left in 1968, Mr. Page, in pursuit of a 'heavy beat sound,' recruited new members into an act that briefly toured as the New Yardbirds. They re-formed as Led Zeppelin, inheriting some Yardbirds tunes including the staple 'Dazed and Confused.'
