Grahame Bent for Shindig! (May 2025)
Mark Paytress for Mojo (May 2025)
Claudia Eliott for Classic Rock (May 2025)
Daryl Easlea for Record Collector (May 2025)
Dave Satzmary for Library Journal (March 2025)
Russell Newmark for The Beat (April 2025)
Tony Blackburn Can't Make Your Way
Remarkably, bizarrely, incongruously, the bland of the bland, Radio One DJ Tony Blackburn delivered a rather faithful version of the Yardbird’s ‘I Can’t Make Your Way’. It appears on Side Two of his debut album Tony Blackburn Sings (flat, I might add) sitting alongside Four Tops and Vera Lynn covers. There’s a rather reserved attempt to emulate Beck’s guitar lines and an added backing vocal line “I can’t make it baby’, which I rather like. John Peel introduces Tony’s version [here] so please do give it your full attention
Awhile before Tony got a strangle hold on the Yardbirds’ tune, Texan and one time member of Gene Vincent’s Blue Caps, Scotty McKay, gave it his best shot. As part of the underused Simon Napier-Bell arranged contract with Columbia that gave individual Yardbirds the opportunity to produce the work of other artists, Jim McCarty took his new American friend, who he had met on the Dick Clark Caravan of the Stars tour in 1966, into the studio for a run through of ‘I Can’t Make Your Way’, released in March 1967 [here]. It’s a pleasant enough excursion, piano is the featured lead instrument, but it is all a bit lacklustre, doesn’t over shadow Blackburn’s version, which wouldn’t take that much effort, and is not a patch on Al Stewart’s cover of the Yardbirds’ ‘Turn into Earth’ that Paul Samwell-Smith helmed for Decca (released in August 1966) [here].
For a band that had a problem writing original material the Yardbirds nevertheless oversaw some arresting cover versions of tracks from Roger. Though not from that album, you might also want to tune into Manfred Mann’s Henry Mancini-esque ‘Still I’m Sad’ [here] . . . Down the road apiece, I suspect I’ll be back with more of the same . . .
Recorded after his dalliance with the Yardbirds on the Dick Clark Caravan and his Columbia 45, McKay’s tribute to the band with ‘Train Kept-A-Rollin’ (note the writer credit) is outstanding and even better in the unedited version you can hear here
Bear Family have a very fine compilation of Scotty’s tracks in their ‘Rocks’ series, which comes with a biography that is as detailed as you could hope for. The edited single version of‘Train Kept-A-Rollin’ makes an appearance but not ‘I Can’t Make Your Way’, which was probably because it doesn’t rock.
The Who and the Young London Look
March 1965 . . . Seventeen magazine runs a 20 page survey of London fashion trends . . . The Who, who were the self-proclaimed face of London 1965 [here], play backdrop in one of the fashion shoots, possibly orchestrated by photographer Joseph Santano.
At least two other images from this shoot are in circulation and Richard Barnes has used the following of the band alone in Maximum R&B. Are there more to be seen?
This one is usually cited as being from the ‘Young London Look’ themed issue but I suspect it’s from a subsequent edition. Joseph Santano is credited lower right
The Yardbirds (and Georgie Fame) also played the role of props in a Seventeen fashion shoot (September 1967)
Yardbirds – Little Games in the World of Rock
John Cabree’s The World of Rock (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1968) makes a claim to be the first book of rock history [here] which may or may not be true but like all its competitors it would have been out of date even before the author had read the proofs. By the early summer of 1968 the Yardbirds were no more; here though they are still an active force and their Little Games album is given a rare positive spin. Their demise, however, is implicit in their relegation to being a ‘second string’ British act, below even the Bee Gees . . . There really could be no return after that billing
THE SECOND STRING
The new snobbishness among record buyers has had one distressing side effect – the waning interest in the work of the lesser English groups. There are several besides the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and the Bee Gees who should not be overlooked. The most important of these are the Yardbirds, the Hollies, and the Kinks.
. . . The Yardbirds were the most exciting experimental rock group of the first several years of the British revival. Always a step or two ahead of the Rolling Stones, they pushed rock further structurally and harmonically any other group. They had a few medium-size hits. their main influence came through album sales to other groups and live appearances (they are the group that breaks up the guitar in Antonioni's Blow Up).
Their biggest problem on record has always been lack of discipline. They would engage in interesting harmonic, instrumental, or structural experiments— baroque chants, electric saws, and so on—and they had, in Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck consecutively, two of the best guitarists in Britain. However they often released tracks that needed to be worked out further in the studio.
On their newest release the Yardbirds are with producer Mickie Most (Herman's Hermits, Donovan, early Animals), and the result is an album as exciting as their earlier ones and a good deal more ordered. The range is wide and the writing is improved.
Highlights include a beautifully commercial song about maturation (“Little Games”); a harsh, bluesy “Smile on Me”; a remarkable fusion of folk rock and Eastern music in “White Summer” ; a gay adaptation of the nursery rhyme “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor”; a thing called “Glimpses”, which sounds as if it might be the theme from a hippie movie; a beautiful folk-rock tune called “Only the Black Rose”; and “Little Soldier Boy”, an anti-war protest, in the background of which there is an ironic trumpet parodying both martial music and Beatles baroque.
Linda Eastman provided many of the book’s choice images
ZOWIE ONE – The Yardbirds Play New Brighton Tower Ballroom
One of the better discoveries made while researching my Yardbirds book was Caroline Silver’s The Pop Makers: British Rock’n’ Roll, the Sound, the Scene, the Action (Scholastic Book Services, 1966). It is a trove of pop lore with chapters on the Animals, Cilla Black, The Beatles, Dave Clark Five, Alexis Korner, Manfred Mann, Rolling Stones, The Who and the Yardbirds. The latter are singled out to exemplify the daily grind of playing the pop game; as was often the case the ’Birds were given a human, fallible, face and positioned as the anti-stars of the music machine.
Silver was a British writer translating the domestic scene for an American readership while many of the photographs, and all those of the Yardbirds, are unique to this volume. Caroline’s then husband, Nathan Silver was the photographer. If you can find a copy of the book snatch it up quick . . .I’ll be putting up a separate post on The Who’s chapter.
In the dressing rooms members of the groups talked, played cards, or read books and magazines as they waited for their turn to play. Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja, who had spent the early part of the evening visiting Jim's aunt in Liverpool, signed autograph books sent in from the audience. Keith and Sam went off to explore New Brighton and did not return until just before they had to perform. Jeff sat in a corner answering questions put to him by reporters from the local newspapers. "I wish I'd paid more attention at school," he said seriously, as the last reporter left, "because I'd find it much easier to express myself now if I had. What I liked or disliked never seemed to matter at school, but now I'm made to sit up and people expect me to be kind of a radiant person, perfect in every way. And I'm not; I've got terrible faults.It's terrible being expected to be a sort of god, because you don’t know in what way.
Rolling Stones, New Brighton Tower Ballroom, August 1964
The tower and ballroom burnt down in 1969
The Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Bob Dawbarn – Nothing but the Truth
Bob Dawbarn, Max Jones, Ray Smith and Robin Rathborne. Snatched from HERE
From the mid-1950s until 1970, Bob Dawbarn [obituary here] was a key figure in Melody Maker’s editorial talent pool. A tireless advocate for jazz, he, like many of his peers, had to adapt his taste (and swallow bile) to incorporate the cuckoo in Trad’s nest, R&B.
In May 1964 he gave his personal response to the Rolling Stones, arguing with his colleague Ray Coleman, who liked the band, that it was ‘farcical to hear the accents, sentiments and experiences of an American Negro coming out of a white-faced London lad’. But more than their inauthenticity or long unkempt hair, the biggest crime the Stones committed, as far as Dawbarn was concerned, was that they didn’t swing.
In the face of rock’s eventual dominance of Melody Maker’s coverage of new musical trends, all to the detriment of jazz, it is quite a feat of perseverance by Dawbarn to have stayed the course and stuck with his job throughout the 1960s. But it is even more surprising to discover that before retiring from the game altogether he did a short stint at Sounds in its inaugural year. Mostly he wrote about his first love, jazz, career overviews of Jelly Roll Morton and Lester Young and the like, but he also returned to those far-off R&B days with a look back at The Yardbirds.
It is a wholly work-a-day account ,which does little more than reinforce the clichés that had grown up around the band subsequent to its demise, though his first impression of the ‘Birds as the ‘loudest R&B group the world had ever known’ is well worth the price of entry and is undoubtedly true . . .
The motivation for Dawbarn’s blast of nostalgia was no doubt due to Sounds having published a rather splendid interview with Jeff Beck two weeks previously. Asked about his time in the Yardbirds, Beck was candid, thoughtful and, I think, honest in his response, which was certainly not his usual way of weighing up his experience of being the ‘sound of 1975 in 1965’
Looking back, how do you view your time with the Yardbirds now? What was it like?
Great. I was flying all the time in that group, everything was happening. Crawling out from underneath a car and playing in a group was great but on top of that it was such a great group. It was a progressive group at a time when everyone else had stopped, everyone else was just playing stock things but that group was the only one of its kind. It was probably the happiest time in my life.
What do you think would have happened if you could have stayed together?
Could have got worse, could have got better but at the time we broke up there was so much tension in the group that we couldn't have stayed together even if the music was good. And when Samwell-Smith left the group the Yardbirds seemed to lose their goal, he was such a strong influence.
What was it like with Jimmy Page in the group, was it better then?
It was over in a flash, a storm in a teacup, it never had a chance to get off the ground. When Jimmy Page was in, Samwell - Smith was out of the picture altogether, and Page played bass in the beginning. When he started playing guitar, it was about six months after Samwell-Smith had left and not long after that I left. It was a very short space of time when we played together. I repaid a favour, he got me a job with the Yardbirds originally and then he came into the same group and I left him the job of lead guitarist. I got sacked really ... I made it impossible for them to keep me on, I kept blowing dates.
Yes, you had a reputation for not turning up?
Yes.
A fair reputation?
Well, there was always a good reason. Something good on television or something ...
Mary Hughes even . . .
The Most Blueswailing Futurisitic Way-Out Heavy Beat Sound – The Yardbirds
Street date February 2025 . . .
The Word from Mose Allison and the Yardbirds: "I’m Not Talking"
If you want to demonstrate to a non-believer why The Yardbirds are among the elite movers and shakers of second-generation rock ’n’ roll then ‘I’m Not Talking’, as found on the flip-side of the US release of ‘Shapes of Things’, will cure their apostasy. Recorded at Advision Sound Studios on 13 April 1965, just one short month after Jeff Beck’s first recording session with the band, none of their peers at that point in time came anywhere close to the coiled controlled aggression displayed on this cover of Mose Allison’s jaunty sounding yet intently spiteful song.
‘My Girl Sloopy’ on the top-side, ‘I Ain’t Done Wrong’ and ‘I’m Not Talking’ jammed together on the flip
In every which way, this cut on US Epic leaves all others behind . . . sonic perfection
Allison was a darling of English art school common rooms; his seemingly effortless bridging of rustic and sophisticated, country and city, black and white, modern and traditional styles was conjoined by a reserved cool that made him sound like no other, until Georgie Fame. The boys and girls in their art school days looked to similarly cross the divides, most usually between home and exile, their time studying art also a time to figure out adult identities (or refuse them, to be forever adolescent).
Rolling Stone Discotheque, New York, September 1965
Part of the attraction of Allison’s music was his undoubted authenticity, a white Southern man who played in a mixed-race trio and who had, it appeared, permission to play the blues, yet who vocalized without blatant imitation of Black voices. Allison seemed to take the blues into the modern age, an ambition that the Yardbirds shared. He was a model worth emulating, as Townshend surely comprehended with the Who’s covers of ‘Young Man Blues’, ‘Eyesight for the Blind’ and ‘One Room Country Shack’.
Allison played on the same bill as the Yardbirds at the fourth National Jazz and Blues Festival in August 1964; they had lifted ‘I’m Not Talking’ from that year’s The Word from Mose, his third album for Atlantic. The Yardbirds kick his song in the head with two drum rolls under revving guitars before exploding down the straight, Beck riding the clutch into the corners, Dreja, McCarty and Samwell-Smith pumping full-throttle, no let up. ‘I’m Not Talking’ is 100 per cent greased-up rock ’n’ roll, the toughest number recorded in Britain in 1965, no question, no argument. Recorded seven months earlier, ‘I’m Not Talking’ is a fulsome precursor to the Who’s ‘My Generation’, scratching the same attitude and style into a Bentley’s paintwork. Both numbers reached the similar conclusion that talking only breeds confusion – things said at midnight might not be said in the morning.
The Swedish version of For Your Love is an improvement on the US edition excluding ‘Sweet Music’ and ‘Putty’ but is still less than perfect.
Gomelsky wasted the two tracks by hiding them on the lower deck of a British EP and on the ragbag For Your Love album, squeezed between Clapton-era rejects of Major Lance’s ‘Sweet Music’ and the Shirelles’ ‘Putty (In Your Hands)’, both trite exercises in the Yardbirds’ hands that fail as pop and anything else they might have aspired towards; the rest of the album included the six sides from the first three singles and their woeful cover of the Vibrations’s ‘My Girl Sloopy’. ‘I’m Not Talking’ and ‘I Ain’t Done Wrong’ would have been better held in reserve to be coupled with subsequent singles and the numbers they would record in the States.
Beck had auditioned for the band in February and made his debut at the Fairfield Hall on 5 March. That the song meant something to him and the band is indicated by it being a key feature of two sessions recorded for the BBC in March 1965 and a third in June, bookending the Advision session in April. All the parts are already present and correct on the Saturday Club take from 20 March but it is a slight, thin affair lacking in the released torque that is exhibited to killer effect on the version cut for Top Gear just two days later.
The third version played for the Saturday Swings show, 4 June, is more cocksure; the band sound comfortable and almost at ease in putting it over, but the cut lacks the nervous rush of tension of their second March run through. They carried over that agitated tautness into the Advision session and then added a bottom end to the sonic structure that is missing on the radio takes. That base constrains and releases Beck’s lead which spools free and snaps back like the screaming line an angler lets run to pull in a hooked marlin.
The BBC sessions are best heard, no argument, on the new Repertoire 4 CD set The Ultimate Live at the BBC which not only boasts of 28 previously unreleased tracks but has seriously improved audio taken from newly discovered and best available sources. Compiled by Ashley Wood, who also provides the authoritative session notes, this is a serious upgrade on all existing collections of off-air and transcription disc collections. Essential
ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE! . . . The Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin – University of Kent 1967 and 1971
I’ve eaten a good many meals in Rutherford Dining Hall, the idea of Led Zeppelin playing there, as rumour had it, seemed as fanciful as them playing the even smaller venue Bridge Place Country Club (now a restaurant) in a village near to Canterbury. I’ve been there once and I can’t figure out where they would have played – all the rooms seem entirely inadequate for a rock band. . .
The Who had played Eliot Dining Hall the year before, which is the same size as Rutherford, holds approximately 600 bodies, but then, as it turned out, the event took place in the Sports Hall and not where I bought chips and beans.
The gig was part of Zeppelin’s ‘Back to the Clubs’ tour and their sixth UK jaunt, the idea was to reconnect with their audience. . . . which Robert Plant, at least for this reviewer, singularly failed to do . . .
Back when they played in Bridge in December 1968, Zeppelin were billed locally as ‘The Yardbirds’, possibly the last time they were promoted as such in Britain.
Before the three original Yardbirds up and quit on him in the Spring of 1968, Jimmy Page had played alongside Keith Relf, Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja for the University’s Summer Ball, 1967 . . . Their performance was slammed in the student paper InCant.
No Ball!
NOT AGAIN! YES, AGAIN I’M AFRAID – ANOTHER ASTERICK-AWFUL DANCE!
The really significant word in the above statement/exclamation is ‘Dance’. Friday the 2nd of June was to be the University of Kent at Canterbury Summer Ball. What we actually got was a rather upper-second-rate hop.
What price non-culmination? About £200 in the red! Much of this debt probably due to the £300-odd paid for 50-minutes’ ‘worth’ of un-danceable Yardbirds.
To cap it all, the buffet served day-old lemon mousse . . . . the horror
In defence of The Yardbirds, there were complaints about nearly every band subsequently booked for freshers week or the end of year ball. You couldn’t dance to any of them and they were always too loud and money was inevitably lost . . . Of all the bands who played the University in the 1960s and first half of the 1970s – Manfred Mann, Kinks, The Move, Procol Harum, Ten Years After, The Who – only Fairport Convention, twice, turned a profit. University gigs were subsidised and always ran at a loss, but lemon mousse, at least, was never again on the menu . . .
Traces They Left . . . Yardbirds in Australia
Thousands of Sydney teenagers, most of them girls packed into Sydney Stadium last night for the ‘Big Show’ . . . Keith Relf (above) lead singer of the English group, clutching the microphone and gleaming in a shirt of pink silk, seems to reflect the hysterical excitement of the evening.
Sydney Morning Herald (January 24, 1967)
Morning Herald (January 8, 1967)
Morning Herald (January 15, 1967)
An old picture . . . Morning Herald (January 22, 1967)
Morning Herald (January 24, 1967)
‘The Yardbirds, four bedraggled but friendly Englishmen’
Melbourne’s The Age (January 25, 1967)
‘The Yardbirds were disappointing compared to their discs’, wrote Mike Walsh.
Sydney Morning Herald (January 29, 1967)
Festival Hall, Melbourne (January 26-27)
‘Yardbirds . . . a bizarre English group . . . Lead guitarist Jimmy Page bears a mention if only for his dress –a black frock coat, heavily jewelled tie, synthetic shirt and purple bellbottom trousers. On his lapel he wore medals – I don’t know why; they certainly aren’t for his singing’.
First night review, The Age (January 27, 1967)
State Express’s Terry Clark claims to have played sessions with The Yardbirds . . . Another chancer?
Sydney Morning Herald (December 3, 1967)
Yardbirds at Dayton's Super Youthquake, August 5, 1966
The Yardbirds first appearance on their debut US tour with Jimmy Page was for two afternoon shows, Friday August 5, 1966, at Dayton’s department store in their eighth floor auditorium.
Outside of showcase gigs like those at the Hullabaloo in Hollywood, back at the start of 1966 when Paul Samwell-Smith was still in the band, The Yardbirds’ US shows that year were mostly as part of some bigger event, like this smash fashion bash.
Dayton’s department store was massive, a size that must have seemed beyond belief to young Englishmen in 1966
Jimmy Page outside the store, snap taken by fan John Morris [HERE]
All a blur: image of the gig that is floating around on Facebook with Beck present and correct.
The Super Youthquake was a month long back-to-school bash, The Yardbirds no more than a blip in the scheme of things – at best they were part of a promotional gambit, another piece of English culture, like a faux Carnaby Street window display
‘Girl watchers’ . . . . those attending the afternoon shows. All very ’66 Mod and not a word on the ’Birds – the ostensible reason they had gathered to look and be looked at
Image is from the press conference given in the store, it is not a publicity shot like those used in advertising the event that still featured Paul Samwell-Smith.
The Yardbirds were in Minneapolis but a day before moving on to Davenport, Iowa and then Chicago for a meeting with Cynthia Plaster Caster who would take a mould of Beck’s leg . . . After the Dayton’s gig you could buy the demonstrator Fender amp they’d used (perfect working order) or pick up a ‘Yardbird’ type fuzztone (bring ad for special discount). . . . The traces they left . . .
