Permanent Records is an ongoing closer look at the records that matter most.
It’s hard to argue that The Yardbirds aren’t the most overshadowed “important” 1960s rock band. They were eclipsed in their own time by the commercial success and cultural impact of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and their legacy has been woefully obscured over the last several decades by the collective careers of its three guitarists: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. People do talk about The Yardbirds—usually in the context of what was happening in Great Britain in the mid-1960s or as a prelude of what was to come—but they were far more than a preface project. One need only to listen to their sophomore studio effort Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds to understand why.
Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds is probably the prime example of the sound of the British Blues movement that overwhelmed the city of London from about 1960 to 1966. It’s also happens to be one of the great collections of latent avant-garde, psych pop music that dominated the charts shortly thereafter. That diametrically opposed sensibility stems from the differing viewpoints of the two guitarists whose work stands as the focal point of this particular record: Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. And actually, it’s that same difference of viewpoint that drove the former out of the group entirely, making way for the latter to come in and completely innovate the sound of the electric guitar.
By the spring of 1965, Clapton had become entirely fed up with his bandmates. When he first joined The Yardbirds in 1963 they were a strict Blues band and that’s all that he was content to play. They cut their teeth early on performing late-night sets of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf covers at their manager Giorgio Gomelsky’s Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, and had even toured with the great harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II in ’63 and cut a live record with him. Then The Beatles happened, and then The Rolling Stones happened, and suddenly it became clear to the rest of The Yardbirds that there was a real viability in pursuing a more pop and world music influenced sound. Unfortunately for Clapton, that now meant that he was faced with the prospect of following the rest of the band down what felt to him like a gimmick, a musical rabbit hole that he had no intention of pursuing.
The final straw for Clapton was the single “For Your Love.” With its harpsichord accents and bongo rhythms, it was about as far away from the blues as one could imagine at the time. “When The Yardbirds decided to record ‘For Your Love,’ I knew that was the beginning of the end for me,” Clapton wrote in his autobiography. “I didn’t see how we could make a record like that and stay as we were. It felt to me that we had completely sold out.” He quit the group on March 25, 1965, the same day the single was released to the larger public.
Even without one of the greatest guitarist on the scene in the fold—worshiping fans didn’t scrawl the phrase “Clapton is God” on park benches and tube stations for nothing—the band decided to soldier on and cast a wide net for a replacement. At one point they approached Jimmy Page, who was working as one of the most prolific session guitarists on the scene, having built up a sizable reputation for his contributions to The Kinks and The Who. He turned them down flat, but not after recommending a friend of his named Jeff Beck for the gig. When Gomelsky phoned Beck, who was working as a car paint sprayer at the time, to see if he’d be interested in joining the band, he eagerly accepted the invitation.
Jeff Beck was everything that Eric Clapton wasn’t. Where Clapton was a traditionalist, Beck seemed completely intent on pushing his sound to the absolute limit. To achieve this end, he employed the use of a Binson Echorec unit to create artificial echo and reverb sounds and turned to his friend Roger Mayer, a former engineer for the British Admiralty, to design a device that would help him sustain sound. Thus he became one of the earliest adopters of the fuzz pedal, which not only stretched out notes, but added a distinct-sounding layer of overdrive that later became the signature of both psych and garage rock.
Almost immediately after Beck joined the group, the Yardbirds took off for a fall tour of the United States. “For Your Love” had been a huge hit for the band, going all the way to No. 1 on the U.K. singles charts, and reaching No. 6 in America. The demand was high for some in-person shows. Looking to capitalize doubly on that success as quickly as possible, the band also booked a number of recording dates while on the road in the U.S. In Memphis, they linked up with legendary Sun Records label head Sam Phillips and recorded two tracks, “The Train Kept-A-Rollin’” and “You’re A Better Man Than I” on September 12, 1965. A week later they found themselves in Chicago, where they stopped by the epicenter of that city’s famed blues scene, Chess Records, and laid down a rather appropriate cover of the Bo Diddley song “I’m A Man.” Eventually, they took the tapes of all three songs with them to New York City and punched them up at Columbia Recording Studios.