The Yardbirds are an English rock band that had a string of hits in the mid 1960s, including "For Your Love", "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" and "Heart Full of Soul". The group is notable for having started the careers of three of rock's most famous guitarists: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, all of whom were in the top fifteen of Rolling Stone's 100 Top Guitarists list (Clapton as #4, Page as #9, and Beck as #14). A blues-based band that broadened its range into pop and rock, The Yardbirds were pioneers in the guitar innovation of the '60s: fuzz tone, feedback, distortion, backwards echo, improved amplification, etc. The band's disintegration led to the formation of the rock band Led Zeppelin, formed by Jimmy Page in 1968.

The bulk of the band's most successful self-written songs came from bassist/producer Paul Samwell-Smith who, with singer/harmonica player Keith Relf, drummer Jim McCarty and rhythm guitarist/bassist Chris Dreja, constituted the core of the group. The band reformed in the 1990s, featuring McCarty, Dreja and new members.

History

Beginnings

Originally named the Metropolitan Blues Quartet in 1962–63, the band formed in the London suburbs, out of the Kingston Art School, first performing as a backup band for Cyril Davies, and achieved notice on the burgeoning British rhythm and blues scene in September 1963 when they took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, succeeding the Rolling Stones. They drew their repertoire from the Chicago blues of Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Elmore James, including "Smokestack Lightning", "Good Morning Little School Girl", "Boom Boom", "I Wish You Would", "Rollin' and Tumblin'", and "I'm a Man".

Original lead guitarist (Anthony) Top Topham left and was replaced by Eric Clapton in October 1963. Crawdaddy Club impresario Giorgio Gomelsky became the Yardbirds' manager and first record producer. Under Gomelsky's guidance the Yardbirds signed to EMI's Columbia label in February, 1964. Their first album was "live", Five Live Yardbirds, recorded at the legendary Marquee Club in London. Blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson II invited the group to tour England and Germany with him, a union that later engendered another live album.

Breakthrough success and Clapton departure

The quintet cut two singles, "I Wish You Would" and "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl", before their third, "For Your Love", a Graham Gouldman composition, gave them their first major hit. Clapton, at the time a blues purist, left the group in protest to join John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. Clapton recommended Jimmy Page, a prominent young studio session guitarist, as his replacement. Page, uncertain about giving up his lucrative studio work and worried about his health, recommended in turn his friend Jeff Beck. He played his first gig with the Yardbirds only two days after Clapton's departure.

Jeff Beck's tenure

Beck's experiments with fuzz tone, feedback, and distortion fit well into the increasingly raw style of British beat music and the Yardbirds began to experiment, producing arrangements reminiscent of Gregorian chant and various European and Asian styles ("Still I'm Sad", "Turn Into Earth", "Hot House of Omagarashid", "Farewell", "Ever Since The World Began") though their commercial appeal began to wane. Beck was voted #1 lead guitarist of 1966 in the British music magazine Beat Instrumental.

The Beck-era Yardbirds produced a number of memorable recordings, single hits like "Heart Full of Soul", Bo Diddley's "I'm A Man", and "Shapes of Things" and the Yardbirds album (known popularly as Roger the Engineer and first issued in the U.S. in an abridged version called Over Under Sideways Down).

The Yardbirds embarked on their first US tour in late August, 1965. A pair of Yardbirds albums was put together for the U.S. market; For Your Love (which included an early take of "My Girl Sloopy"), and Havin' A Rave Up With The Yardbirds, half of which came from Five Live Yardbirds. There were three more US tours during Beck's time with the group. A brief European tour took place in April 1966.

The Beck/Page line-up

In June 1966, shortly after the sessions that produced Yardbirds (aka, Roger The Engineer), Samwell-Smith decided to leave the group and work as a record producer. Jimmy Page agreed to play bass until rhythm guitarist Dreja had rehearsed on that instrument. The Beck-Page tandem is heard on the single "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago", though this featured Beck and Page on twin lead guitar, with John Paul Jones on bass: it was backed with "Psycho Daisies", which featured Beck on lead guitar and Page on bass (the B-side of the U.S. single, "The Nazz Are Blue", features a rare lead vocal by Beck).



The Beck-Page era Yardbirds also recorded "Stroll On", a rendering of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" recorded for the Michelangelo Antonioni film Blowup, though Relf changed the lyrics and title to avoid seeking permission from the copyright holder. "Stroll On" features a twin lead-guitar break by Beck and Page. Their appearance in Blowup came after The Who declined and The In-Crowd were unable to attend the filming. The Velvet Underground were also considered for the part but were unable to acquire UK work permits. Director Michelangelo Antonioni instructed Beck to smash his guitar in emulation of The Who's Pete Townshend: the guitar that Beck smashes at the end of their set is a cheap German-made Hofner instrument.

The Beck-Page lineup recorded little else in the studio and no live recordings of the dual-lead guitar lineup have surfaced (save a scratchy cover of the Velvet Underground's "Waiting for the Man"). The Beck-Page Yardbirds recorded a commercial for a milkshake product "Great Shakes" using the opening riff of "Over Under Sideways Down", featured on 1992's Little Games Sessions & More compilation.

There was also one recording made by Beck and Page with John Paul Jones on bass, Keith Moon on drums and Nicky Hopkins on piano — "Beck's Bolero", a piece inspired by Ravel's "Bolero", credited to Page (Beck also claims to have written the song). "Beck's Bolero" was first released as the B-side of Beck's first solo single, "Hi Ho Silver Lining" and was included on his first album, Truth.

The Yardbirds' final days: the Page era

Beck was fired from the group after a tour stop in Texas in late October 1966 and the Yardbirds continued as a quartet for the remainder of their career. Page became the new lead guitarist and introduced his technique of playing with a violin bow, suggested to him by David McCallum, Sr., a session musician),, and the use of a wah-wah pedal.



The Yardbirds' commercial fortunes were declining. "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" had only reached No. 30 on the U.S. Hot 100 and had fared even worse in Britain. Columbia's hit-making producer Mickie Most failed to reignite their commercial success. The "Little Games" single released in the spring flopped so badly in the UK that EMI did not release another Yardbirds record there until after the band broke up (a UK release of the "Goodnight Sweet Josephine" single was planned the following year, but cancelled). A version of Tony Hazzard's "Ha Ha Said The Clown" — on which only one band member, Relf, actually performed — was the band's last single to crack the U.S. Top 50, peaking at No. 44 in Billboard in the summer of '67. Their final album, Little Games, released in America in July, was a commercial and critical non-entity. A cover of Harry Nilsson's "Ten Little Indians" hit the U.S. in the fall of '67 and quickly sank).

The Yardbirds spent most of the rest of that year touring in the States with new manager Peter Grant, their live shows becoming heavier and more experimental. The band rarely played their 1967 singles on stage, preferring to mix the Beck-era hits with blues standards and covers from groups such as the Velvet Underground and American folk singer Jake Holmes, whose "Dazed and Confused", with lyrics rewritten by Relf, was a live staple of the Yardbirds' last two American tours that went down so well that Page selected it for the first Led Zeppelin record, on which it appears with Page credited as writer.

By 1968 Keith Relf and Jim McCarty wished to pursue a style influenced by folk and classical music while Jimmy Page, at a time when the psychedelic blues-rock of Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience was enormously popular, wanted to continue with the kind of "heavy" music for which Led Zeppelin would become famous. Chris Dreja was developing an interest in photography. By March Relf and McCarty had decided to leave, though the other two managed to persuade them to stay at least for one more American tour. The Yardbirds' final single, recorded in January and released two months later, reflected these divergences. The A-side, "Goodnight Sweet Josephine", was in the same vein as their Mickie Most-produced singles of the previous year, while its B-side, "Think About It", featured a proto-Zeppelin Page riff and snippets of the "Dazed" guitar solo. This last single did not even crack the Hot 100.

A concert and some album tracks were recorded in New York City in March (including the currently unreleased song "Knowing That I'm Losing You", an early version of a track that would be re-recorded by Led Zeppelin as "Tangerine"). All were shelved at the band's request, although once Led Zeppelin were successful Epic tried to release the concert material as Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page. The album was quickly withdrawn after Page's lawyers filed an injunction.

On July 7, 1968, the Yardbirds played their final gig at Luton Technical College in Bedfordshire, England. Twelve years later to the day Led Zeppelin would play their final concert in their original line-up in Berlin.

Yardbirds and Zeppelin

Jimmy Page, and Chris Dreja, with a tour slated for the fall in Scandinavia, saw the break-up as an opportunity to put a new lineup together with Page as producer and Grant as manager. Procol Harum's B.J. Wilson, Paul Francis, and session man Clem Cattini, who'd guested on more than a few Yardbirds tracks under Most's supervision, were considered as drummers. Young vocalist and composer Terry Reid was asked to replace Relf but declined because of a new recording contract with Most and recommended the then-unknown Robert Plant. Plant, in turn, recommended his childhood friend John Bonham on drums. Dreja bowed out to pursue a career as a rock photographer and bassist/keyboardist/arranger John Paul Jones who, like Cattini, had worked with Page on countless sessions including several with the Yardbirds, was recruited. Rehearsals began in August; in early September, Page's revised Yardbirds embarked on the Scandinavian tour after which the group returned to England to produce an album, still billed as The Yardbirds as late as October 1968.

A change was reportedly hastened, in part, by a cease-and-desist order from Dreja, who claimed that he still maintained legal rights to the "Yardbirds" name. The band restyled itself 'Led Zeppelin', named by Keith Moon as a response to the comment that the new venture would go down "like a lead balloon" and Moon thought more like a "lead zeppelin." The spelling of "lead" was changed to avoid confusion over its pronunciation. This effectively closed the books on the Yardbirds for the rest of the century.

After the Yardbirds

Vocalist Keith Relf and drummer Jim McCarty formed an acoustic-rock group called Together and then Renaissance, which recorded two albums for Island Records over a two-year period. Jim McCarty formed the group Shoot in 1973. Keith Relf, after producing albums for Medicine Head (with whom he also played bass) and Saturnalia, resurfaced in 1975 with a new quartet, Armageddon, a hybrid of hard, thrusting rock and folk that included former Renaissance bandmate Louis Cennamo. They recorded one promising album before Relf died in an electrical accident in his home studio on May 14, 1976. In 1977, Illusion was formed, featuring a reunited lineup of the original Renaissance, including drummer Jim McCarty and Keith's sister Jane Relf.

In the 1980s Jim McCarty, Chris Dreja and Paul Samwell-Smith formed a short-lived but fun-enough kind of Yardbirds semi-reunion called Box of Frogs, which occasionally included Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page plus various friends with whom they had all recorded over the years. Jim McCarty was also part of 'The British Invasion All-Stars' with members of Procol Harum, Creation, Nashville Teens, The Downliners Sect and The Pretty Things. Phil May and Dick Taylor of the The Pretty Things, together with drummer Jim McCarty, recorded 2 albums in Chicago as The Pretty Things-Yardbirds Blues Band "The Chicago Blues Tapes 1991" and "Wine, Women, Whiskey", both produced by George Paulus.

The Yardbirds were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992. Nearly all the original surviving musicians who had been part of the group's heyday, including Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, appeared at the ceremony, the first of three for Eric Clapton, who was unable to attend this one as he was working on a show for MTV's "Unplugged" series. Accepting the induction on behalf of the late Keith Relf were his wife April and son Danny.

Reformation

Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja reformed the Yardbirds in the 1990s, with John Idan handling bass and lead vocals, and touring regularly since then with a number of guitarists and harmonica players passing through their ranks.

In 2003, a new album, Birdland, was released under the Yardbirds name on the Favored Nations label by a lineup including Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, and new members Gypie Mayo (lead guitar, backing vocals), John Idan (bass, lead vocals) and Alan Glen (harmonica, backing vocals), which consisted of a mixture of new material mostly penned by McCarty and re-recordings of some of their greatest hits, with guest appearances by Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Slash, Brian May, Steve Lukather, Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, John Rzeznik, Martin Ditchum and Simon McCarty. Also, Jeff Beck reunited with his former bandmates on the song "My Blind Life". And then there was the rare and improbable guest appearance on stage in 2005 by their first guitarist from the sixties, Top Topham.

Since the release of Birdland, Gypie Mayo has been briefly replaced by Jerry Donahue, and subsequently in 2005 by the then 22-year-old Ben King, while Alan Glen has been replaced by Billy Boy Miskimmon from Nine Below Zero fame.

Note: The Yardbirds released a live 2007 CD, "Live At B.B. King Blues Club" (Favored Nations).

Lead vocalist John Idan would retain his front man position. Ben King would also remain as lead guitarist as any reunion with Page and Beck would be temporary.

The first episode of the 2007/2008 season for "The Simpsons" featured The Yardbirds' "I'm A Man" from the CD "Live At B.B. King Blues Club" (Favored Nations).

According to his website, John Idan resigned from the Yardbirds in August 2008, although his last gig with them was on Friday 24 April 2009, when they headlined the first concert in the new Live Room venue at Twickenham rugby stadium. John Idan has been replaced by bassist David Smale, brother of the virtuoso guitarist Jonathon Smale. According to an official press release his addition to the band will bring both power and creativity to the rhythm section.

Members

Current members

(Touring Band)

• Andy Mitchell - lead vocals, harmonica (2009-present)
• Ben King - lead guitar (2005-present)
• Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals (1963-1968, 1992-present)
• David Smale - bass guitar (2009-present)
• Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals (1963-1968, 1992-present)

The Yardbirds Line-Ups (1963-1968)

Original lineup (June 1963 - October 1963)	Keith Relf - lead vocals, harmonica Anthony "Top" Topham - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar Paul Samwell-Smith - bass, backing vocals Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Clapton replaces Topham (October 1963 - February 1965)	Keith Relf - lead vocals, harmonica Eric Clapton - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar Paul Samwell-Smith - bass, backing vocals Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Beck replaces Clapton (March 1965 - June 1966)	Keith Relf - lead vocals, harmonica Jeff Beck - lead guitar, vocals Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar Paul Samwell-Smith - bass, backing vocals Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals, percussion
Page replaces Samwell-Smith (June 1966 - September 1966)	Keith Relf - lead vocals, harmonica Jeff Beck - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, bass Jimmy Page - bass, guitar Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Beck is fired (November 1966 - July 1968)	Keith Relf - lead vocals, harmonica Jimmy Page - guitar Chris Dreja - bass Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals, percussion
New Yardbirds (September 1968 - October 1968)	Jimmy Page - guitar Robert Plant - lead vocals, Harmonica John Paul Jones - bass John Bonham - drums
Yardbirds become Led Zeppelin (October 1968)

Reformed Yardbirds Line-Ups (1992-Present)

First lineup of reformed group (1992)	Chris Dreja - guitar Rod Demick - bass, harmonica Jim McCarty - drums, vocals
Idan Joins (1992 - 1993)	John Idan - lead guitar, lead vocals Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals Rod Demick - bass, harmonica, backing vocals Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Idan replaces Demick, Garman and Majors join (1994 - 1995)	Ray Majors - lead guitar, backing vocals Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Laurie Garman - harmonica Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Mayo replaces Majors (1995 - 1996)	Gypie Mayo - lead guitar, backing vocals Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Laurie Garman - harmonica Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Glen replaces Garman (1996 - 2003)	Gypie Mayo - lead guitar, backing vocals Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Alan Glen - harmonica, percussion Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Miskimmin replaces Glen (2003 - 2004)	Gypie Mayo - lead guitar, backing vocals Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Billy Boy Miskimmin - harmonica, percussion Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Donahue replaces Mayo (2004 - 2005)	Jerry Donahue - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Billy Boy Miskimmin - harmonica, percussion Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
King replaces Donahue (2005 - 2008)	Ben King - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Billy Boy Miskimmin - harmonica, percussion Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Glen returns to the band (2008 - 2009)	Ben King - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals John Idan - bass, lead vocals Alan Glen - harmonica, percussion Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals
Idan and Glen quit the band (2009 - Present)	Andy Mitchell- vocalist, harmonica Ben King - lead guitar Chris Dreja - rhythm guitar, backing vocals David Smale- bass guitar Jim McCarty - drums, backing vocals

Discography

See The Yardbirds discography

References

Bibliography

• Yardbirds (John Platt, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty) Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983 ISBN 0-283-98982-3
• Yardbirds : The Ultimate Rave-Up (Greg Russo) Crossfire Publications 1997 ISBN 0-9648157-8-8
• The Yardbirds (Alan Clayson) Backbeat Books 2002 ISBN 0-87930-724-2

Notes

1. Schumacher, Michael (2003). Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton, pp. 44-45. Citadel Press. ISBN 0806524669.
2. Bockris, Victor; Malanga, Gerard. Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (2002): 107
3. Anyway Anyhow Anywhere: The Complete Chronicle of The Who
4. Fricke, David. "Secrets of the Guitar Heroes: Jimmy Page" Rolling Stone June 12, 2008
5. Dave Lewis (1994), The Complete Guide to the Music of Led Zeppelin, Omnibus Press, ISBN 0-7119-3528-9.
6. Buckley, Peter (ed.) (2003). The Rough Guide to Rock, p. 1198. ISBN 1843531054.
7. Dave Schulps, Interview with Jimmy Page, Trouser Press, October 1977.
8. Dominick A. Miserandino, Led Zeppelin - John Paul Jones, TheCelebrityCafe.com.
9. Jimmy Page Online
10. http://www.johnidan.com/news.html The Yardbirds had introduced a new era of experimental rock music in the 60s John Idan's Official Website
11. http://www.theyardbirds.com/news.html

External links

• Official Site
• Yardbirds American Website
• Favored Nations Yardbirds Page