--Jon Savage, Faber Book of Pop
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| Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press. |
Blues was a big deal in Britain during the post-World War II period. The Brits took it seriously and they embraced a Black American musical style that seemed to also embody, or least evoke, their own shell-shocked state of mind once the fighting finally stopped. Basically they all had the blues personally, in the rubble of bombed-out London especially, and along with the Black Yanks’ other great gifts to the world, r&b and rock and roll, the blues records they discovered, often left behind by American soldiers passing through town, struck a deep chord inside them. The bright and shiny energy of Beat music, another term for the early renegade rock sounds in Britain, was also something top of mind for the newly liberated youth culture just then raunchily emerging from the shadows of the conservative 1950’s and into the feverish light show of the 1960s. The combination of blues, beat and rock would become an irresistible force field for many young talented musicians and hip listeners with a taste for the exotic. And this Yardbirds band was so far ahead of the curve they’re still living in the future.
It’s a delight to have another superlative exploration by Peter Stanfield of the wild merger of blues, rock and roll, skiffle and beat sounds all stirred into the simmering cauldron of 1960’s pop music of the highest order. This was the upper altitude of popular culture where actual revolutionary artworks were cleverly disguised as commercial radio hit songs, and deceptively simple yet deeply thoughtful tunes such as The Who’s “Substitute,” Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” The Beatles’ (the ultimate beat amalgam) “Paperback Writer,” and “Over Under Sideways Down” by The Yardbirds, were shaking up both the entertainment industry as well as the worlds of fashion and social engagement. Stanfield – who deftly reminds us that pop music is also pop art, has explored this realm ably in his previous book on The Who, with its suitably over-the-top title, A Band With Built in Hate: The Who From Pop Art to Punk – in his new tome approaches one of the most important and influential but least understood and appreciated bands of the 60’s.
Once again he has a way with robust titles that only appear to be exaggerations but are actually totally accurate, and in The Yardbirds: The Most Blueswailing Futuristic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound, he gives this innovative group the critical attention (best described as obsessively researched and compulsively detailed) which they so richly deserve. His evolutionary trajectory of a band whose root influence, and later development in radical rock music history, is almost as crucial as their music itself, traces their growth from what blues elder Sonny Boy Williamson seductively called a “blueswailing unit” to a psychedelic giant and finally to an experimental phenomenon leading to three other mammoth groups of the era. It is, as always, a vastly entertaining romp he takes us on. From the emergence and evolution of British blues through beat music and beyond, into the outer reaches of progressive or prog-rock (long before it even had a name) and then finally into a sonics explored by several founding members subsequent to their departure from the Yardbirds. And Stanfield’s is the ideal narrative voice to tell us the behind-the-scenes story of a pop legend with several lives.
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| The Yardbirds. (Photo: Rockarchive.com) |
The author of this fabulous pop/rock music history also has a methodical, even archival stance on documenting the milieu, as exemplified in his opening proviso: “This book is the story of The Yardbirds’ magnificent reverberations, those sonic truths that left their mark on artists like the Velvet Underground, MC5 and the Stooges. The Yardbirds’ tale is told through the primary materials they generated, the traces they left in music, in national, regional and local presses, and in teenage magazines of the day. It is not a history made of reminiscences but rather a story made from contemporary documents and artifacts. This scrapbook of cuttings is placed within the evolving context of the times, and the rapid developments within pop culture as The Yardbirds reached out for their own future-now and helped to spin those revolutions.” And his cogent journalistic voice weaving in and out of the cuttings is precisely what makes this book so important.
Indeed, part of the challenge The Yardbirds faced during their ascent, and also descent, was that from the outset they were always almost nearly a decade ahead of their time, and Stanfield accurately assesses their futurist posture as something that would not actually occur in the late 70’s with the advent of punk, rather than the actual time period in which they found themselves in the mid-60’s. Transition had been their middle name from the get-go, and Stanfield follows their meteoric rise with a vertiginous vigor it clearly warrants. Having been formed in the year of The Beatles, 1963, they skillfully surfed the initial tidal wave of a huge British appetite for Black American musical motifs such as blues, soul, and r&b. Theirs was a genuine respectful homage to their visiting mentors then filling the London club scene with a heady mix of the original masters (Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters et al) and their adoring young-upstart beat purveyors (The Rolling Stones, Graham Bond, John Baldry, Animals et al). This cultural collision was electrifying and the pace of stylistic change, personnel shuffling and management upheavals was equally hyperactive.
Though their three early towering guitarists, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, often appeared to outshine their fellow members, the seamless mix of charismatic lead singer Keith Relf (who in the dark could be mistaken for Brian Jones), inventive drummer Jim McCarty, gifted bassist/rhythm player Chris Deja, and innovative bassist/producer Paul Samwell-Smith, was a crucial instrumental menu for their uniquely frenetic sound. As were the clanging metallic binges incorporating aural innovations such as eye-melting amplification, reverb, sustain, feedback, distortion and fuzztone effects, which formed the basis for a bridge between Brit r&b, psychedelia and the later heavy metal monument popularized by ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page’s band Led Zeppelin. By 1968, however, after showing us what the future would sound like, The Yardbirds were done. Leader Keith Relf, his sister Jane, and Yardbirds drummer McCarty would subsequently form the influential symphonic folk-rock band Renaissance. Sadly, and somewhat ironically, perhaps, Relf would pass away at only 33 by accidentally electrocuting himself with an improperly grounded electric guitar in his home studio.
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| Jeff Beck (Photo: Rockarchive.com) |
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| Jimmy Page (Photo: Rockarchive.com) |
In addition to celebrating The Yardbirds’ knack for being a hybrid of practically prescient raw punk vibes alarmingly slathered in shimmering pop icing, Stanfield’s most important contribution to pop/rock scholarship is his cultural positioning of a group that started out with a gifted but arrogant 19-year-old Eric Clapton delivering edgy Brit-tinged r&b, then passed through a bright and shiny pop phase which was very successful (“For Your Love” was a huge commercial hit), only to lose Clapton almost immediately under the PR guise of his supposedly more musically purist intentions. The guitar virtuoso was replaced at once by two new lead guitarists who were most certainly just as gifted, first by the brilliant Jeff Beck (who I think was not only as talented as Clapton was but was also someone even the abundantly confident Eric eventually admitted was his superior) and then by Jimmy Page, who was, and still is, simply in a class all of his own.
If interpersonal ego issues, management disappointments and changing tastes hadn’t intervened, the brief 18 months of Page’s Yardbirds tenure, once it overlapped with Beck’s brilliance in a phenomenal echo of the twin guitarists Peter Green and Danny Kirwan of early bluesy Fleetwood Mac, might have succeeded in achieving the kind of truly evolutionary leap that Mac later made when they morphed into glistening pop royalty that thrived as a blockbuster stadium extravaganza for half a century and won multiple Grammys. Stanfield is at his best when he chronicles the dizzying disruptive energies of fame and fortune that made The Yardbirds so vital a link with what he calls the third generation of rock music. They were also the essential bridge to Clapton’s powerhouse band Cream and Page’s staggering Zeppelin, not to mention the genius of Beck’s departure to form Jeff Beck Group with an incendiary lineup mix of Rod Stewart, Ainsley Dunbar, and Ronnie Wood, among other session gods of the era.
The actual historical artifacts they left behind, the records themselves, Stanfield is especially skilled at assessing in retrospect, as when he extols the jittery virtues of their debut live album in 1964, Five Live Yardbirds.
Mick Jagger said of his counterpart Keith Relf, ‘The bloke with The Yardbirds is just about the best.’ It was the truth. Five Live Yardbirds is excitement over refinement, passion over presentation, mistakes over perfection, youthful spontaneity over staid rehearsal. Yet the album was not even given an American release. The band were worthy successors to the Stones crown. In the early 1970’s, in a column for The Listener, John Peel referenced Five Live Yardbirds as one of the ten or so LPs from which he would never be parted. The accuracy of a live set (at the Marquee Club) is captured with beautiful accuracy. It’s the first appearance on a LP of Eric Clapton, and despite his many recordings in the wake of his Yardbirds success, none equals the excitement of his playing at the Marquee.
Stanfield’s praise is at par with Peel’s, declaiming that if you can’t find Five Live Yardbirds, and you listen to The Stones’ live Get Yer Ya Yas Out or The Who’s Live at Leeds you’ll hear the same level of immediacy and finesse. High praise, to be sure, considering I also rank those two albums to be the greatest live rock records ever released. And this notion that a debut album is a live one also reminds us of the true roots of beat music: it was meant to be heard live in performance and danced, or twitched to, in a primordial manner, which was why it so influenced garage rock, psychedelic trance, and later on new wave and grunge rock. The German music critic Ernest Borneman claimed to have coined the term beat, or big beat, music in a column he wrote in Melody Maker magazine to describe the Brit vibe of evoking American rock and roll on a loud metallic blind date with the skiffle style.
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| The first album. (Columbia Records, 1964.) |
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| The fifth album. (Columbia Records, 1967.) |
Whatever its origins, The Yardbirds would remain true to that clanging, echoey primal beat motif all across their comet-like career, and in fact there are those among us who sincerely believe that Cream, The Jeff Beck Group and Led Zeppelin (weirdly at first billed as “The New Yardbirds, with Jimmy Page”) are actually the almost sublime triumph of beat music, its gold standard even, and a heavier-than-thou apotheosis before it eventually morphed into the reactionary, rage-drenched style it was always unconsciously prophesying: punk. Audaciously, Page borrowed some of the steam then still rising from The Yardbirds after his departure, not to mention some of their playbook, such as “Dazed and Confused,” as Stanfield wistfully reports: “Billed as ‘Formerly The Yardbirds’, Led Zeppelin were booked to play the Crawdaddy Club in November of 1968, the place where Relf, Dreja, McCarty, Samwell-Smith and Clapton had first schemed and dreamed only five years before.” Sometimes, history rhymes.
And in the Disc and Music Echoes final edition of 1968, Richard Robinson opined, “Jimmy Page and his new group Led Zeppelin arrived in the U.S. to spend Boxing Day in New York. If you’re a blues fan but still love the sound of high-powered rock, Led Zeppelin will please you. This new group, headed by ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page, has just released their first album and it is a study in shotgun rock. Guitars run at screaming speeds, vocals are soft and then screaming hard, and the songs are impressive.” They were indeed impressive. And when a mate and I soon afterward saw one of their first concerts at a small hall called the Rock Pile in Toronto in 1969 (an event from which I am still recovering), we may have been among the few who knew the origin of their peculiar name. As they were being launched, the Who’s manic drummer Keith Moon petulantly declared that they would “sink like a lead balloon.” That was all the encouragement that the super-confident Page needed. As Stanfield puts it so well in The Yardbirds: “The cult of originality, like the valorizing of lead guitarists, was about to go into overdrive. Tomorrow is Now.”
– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.
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