SHAPES of THINGS
They had Eric Clapton. They had Jeff Beck. They had Jimmy Page. In the late ’60s no other band could get close to them. And without the Yardbirds there would be no Led Zeppelin.
Paul McCartney likes to explain the sleuth-like method by which he, John Lennon and George Harrison learned new chords in their Liverpool days. In the absence of an internet — not to mention guitar magazines and lesson books — they would get wind of another guitarist who had solved the mystery of a particular triad and travel by bus some distance to receive this new key, unlocking yet another dimension of the guitar’s fretboard.
IT WAS A SIMILAR sort of quest that brought Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page together when they were both about 16 or 17, around 1960 or 1961. Beck’s sister, Annetta, told him about a kid at her art college in Epsom who played a “funny guitar” like his, and she decided they should meet. As it happened, Page lived all of about 10 minutes away. “There was a knock on the door, and there was Jeff ’s sister, and there was Jeff holding his homemade guitar,” Page recalled in a 2019 video for Fender. “We just bonded immediately.”
Page would soon launch his career as a session musician, a move that would bring him success, money and some small measure of fame. Beck, meanwhile, would work his way through a string of groups, from the Deltones to the Tridents. But while the latter act was keeping busy on the local scene, Beck knew there was little future in it. “The Tridents had built a great following,” he said in Alan Clayton’s book The Yardbirds. “But there was no way I could exist — they weren’t paying me anything.”
As luck would have it, Page’s friendship would bring him an introduction to the Yardbirds, the group that would launch him on his way. The Yardbirds were so much more than the Tridents. They had always been fantastically flash, inscrutably cool and fabulously out of reach. Their early shows were self-described as “rave-ups” — wild, hair-down, knickers-off parties for the willfully far out, the fashionably “fuck you.” They weren’t dirty rockers or poncey mods, but they dressed to the nines, part King’s Road, part proto– Haight–Ashbury chic.
They formed in May 1963 around the creative nucleus of 20-year-olds Keith Relf, on vocals and harmonica, and Paul Samwell-Smith, a bassist, guitarist, keyboard player, vocalist, percussionist,
producer and all-round leading light. As members of the Metropolitan Blues Quartet, Relf and SamwellSmith had played on the same jazz-blues circuit as the Rolling Stones before teaming up with 20-year-old Jim McCarty (drummer, vocalist, guitarist) and two other schoolboy pals: 18-year-old Chris Dreja (guitar, bass, keyboards) and 15-year-old Anthony “Top” Topham, the band’s first lead guitarist. Taking their name from jazz legend Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, they started out playing covers of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Elmore James — strictly high-quality, underground purist R&B.
Which is how they hooked up with Eric Clapton, an 18-year-old blues disciple who had recently been in the Roosters, a short-lived R&B band. When Topham bailed to get a proper job, Clapton took his place. By then the Yardbirds had replaced the Stones as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, and owner Giorgio Gomelsky had become their manager. For the next 18 months, the Yardbirds toured as the backing band for Sonny Boy Williamson II. In the meantime, Gomelsky landed the band a deal with EMI. Despite the group’s club success, nothing the Yardbirds did sold during the early Clapton days, certainly not their debut album, Five Live Yardbirds, an R&B purist’s delight released into the commercial abyss at the end of 1964.
That’s when Gomelsky discovered a hit-in-themaking: “For Your Love,” written by 19-year-old future 10cc star Graham Gouldman. Led by Brian Auger on harpsichord, the recording was made by Relf and McCarty, along with session musicians on bass and bongos. Clapton and Dreja were called in only for the freak-out midsection. “For Your Love” was a Top 10 hit in the United States and Great Britain, but it was the wrong fit for Clapton, who called it “pop crap.” He bailed afterward to join John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
The Yardbirds found his replacement in a 21-year-old maverick named Jeff Beck. But Beck hadn’t been the band’s first choice. That was Jimmy Page, by then a successful and accomplished session guitarist who had played with Shirley Bassey (“Goldfinger”), the Nashville Teens (“Tobacco Road”), Dave Berry (“The Crying Game”) and Them (“Baby, Please Don’t Go”), as well as the Kinks, the Who and Herman’s Hermits. Sadly for the Yardbirds, he couldn’t fathom trading it all for a one-hit wonder.
But he did have the good sense to suggest his friend Beck, knowing he would be a good fit with his brilliant soloing and stylistically unique playing. Beck was at Page’s house one day when Jimmy played him Five Live Yardbirds. Gauging Beck’s appreciative response, he offered to make a recommendation.
Three weeks later, Beck was in the studio with the group, recording the next Yardbirds single, another Graham Gouldman song — and obvious hit-in-themaking — “Heart Full of Soul.” “I didn’t like them when I first met them,” Beck said. “They didn’t say ‘Hi’ or anything. They were pissed off that Eric had left; they had thought that the whole Yardbirds sound had gone.”
It had, but Beck would bring with him a new and more potent sound. And unlike Clapton, he craved
“The Tridents had built a great following. But there was no way I could exist — they weren’t paying me anything”
the spotlight in a way that would shame a firefly. “I wanted people to look at me, know what I was doing,” he said. “I’m not one of those guys who wants to fade into the background onstage.”
For the next nearly two years, the Yardbirds were at the peak of their powers, commercially and artistically. They had a string of major hit singles in Britain and America, all Gouldman-written or blues covers, until they came to their seventh single, “Shapes of Things.” Credited to McCarty, Relf and Samwell-Smith, it reached number three in the U.K. in March 1966 and soon after that hit the Top 10 in the U.S. With its marching-army-of-robots rhythm, its feedback-laden guitar solo and its tang of the Asiatic, “Shapes of Things” was the most exoticsounding single of the year, so much so that music historians now cite it as possibly the first truly psychedelic record.
But for all his brilliance as a guitarist, Beck was temperamental, and his relationship with the band was strained. “He was always a lovely guy, Jeff,”
McCarty says, “and I used to really like him. But when it came to playing. he was different. You never really knew what sort of mood he was going to be in. And that depended a lot on what sort of sound he got onstage. If he got a good sound onstage, he’d be quite happy, and it would be a happy gig. But the reverse was that he’d get very angry… He could kick an amp offstage or kick an amp over, or he could walk off. He usually did the whole gig. He didn’t disappear. But he walked off one time on one TV show we were doing. He didn’t like the mix of his guitar, it was too quiet. And we were just miming.”
It was bassist Samwell-Smith, though, who was the first to leave. He was outraged when a drunken gig at the annual May Ball at Queens College in Oxford turned into a near-brawl between Relf and some of the students. It was June 18, and the timing couldn’t have been worse: The group had a new album coming out: Yardbirds, a.k.a. Roger the Engineer. Enter Page, who by then had become fed up with the session guitarist scene and was watching Beck’s success with envy. On June 21, three nights after Samwell-Smith made his exit, Page made his debut as the Yardbirds’ bassist at the Marquee Club. It was a short-lived arrangement. Soon after, Chris Dreja moved over to bass, making way for Page to take over guitar and forming with Beck what would be the first “twin-solo” guitar lineup in British rock.
“It definitely gave the band a kick up the arse,” Dreja says, adding that he wasn’t put out when Page took his place as guitarist. “Not at all. No, no. I’m a man who knows his own limitations.” He jokingly suggests that Page wasn’t moved from bass to guitar because he was the better guitarist but because Page was such a bad bass player. “As a bass player he was rubbish. Too many bloody notes, mate!”
Sadly, the only real recordings this two-guitar Yardbirds lineup made are “Stroll On” and “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” a track cut in the summer of 1966 that shows how much potential the group had. A superb piece of psychedelia, it signaled not only the rise of hard rock but, singularly, the roots of Led Zeppelin — and not only in its explosive sound: The single features not Dreja on bass but Page’s session pal John Paul Jones.
As it happened, Jones had some history with Beck already. In May, before the session for “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” Beck, Page and Jones were joined by Who drummer Keith Moon on another recording at London’s IBC Studios, for what was supposed to be Beck’s debut solo single: a guitarinflamed version of Ravel’s Bolero (see page 32). For Beck, who was already dreaming of starting his own group, the writing was on the wall.
On August 5, 1966, this new Yardbirds lineup launched their first American tour. Dreja and Page reveled in life on the road in America, but Beck suddenly decided he wanted to stop completely. While the group was in Hollywood the previous January, he’d fallen in love with an actress named Mary Hughes, a 22-year-old blond beauty who had starred in a handful of “bikini” movies like Muscle Beach Party and drive-in B-flicks like Fireball. She would also star alongside Elvis Presley in 1967’s Double Trouble. Beck would write the song “Psycho Daisies” for her and sing the lead when it was a Yardbirds B-side. By all accounts, he was distraught at having to leave her behind, resulting in bouts of bad behavior both on and offstage.
“We were playing this place in Tucson, Arizona, this warehouse full of people,” Beck would recall. If that’s correct, the date would have been August 21, at Thrift City on Speedway, the site of a former department store. “I had this piggy-back amp setup — a Vox Beatle thing, if you’ll pardon the expression — and I’d just gone crazy, did my act, smashed the amp, pushed it over.” The amp head had exited the building through a window and was swinging to and fro as it dangled precariously from its cable. “The thing that saved someone’s life down below,” Beck said, “was the fact that it had a locking plug.”
In September, the Yardbirds returned to Britain for a tour where they opened for the Stones. It was during this time that the group made its nowlegendary appearance in Michelangelo Antonioni’s
“I didn’t like them when I first met them. They didn’t say ‘Hi’ or anything”
1967 film Blow-Up, where Beck destroys his guitar after his amp fails. Antonioni had tried unsuccessfully to get the Who for the scene, then the psychedelic group Tomorrow, featuring future Yes guitarist Steve Howe. In the end it was the Yardbirds who took the job, playing “Stroll On” — their updated ‘“reworking” of Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’” — before Beck was called on to “do a Townshend,” as he put it, and smash his guitar. “I didn’t mind playing a very wild number with lots of violence in it, lots of chords smashing away, but I didn’t actually want to destroy the guitar,” he said. “What a cheat: The first part shows me playing a Les Paul, and in the second part I’m smashing up a cheap old thirty-five-dollar Japanese model.”
Back on tour in America as part of the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars — where they shared the bill with such luminaries as Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, Brian Hyland and Gary Lewis & the Playboys — the Yardbirds suffered as Beck went from bad to worse. Following an outburst backstage at a gig in Beaumont, Texas, on October 31, the band dropped the guitarist off at Corpus Christi Airport. Shortly afterward, the Yardbirds heard he had been spotted back in Los Angeles, where he’d been hitting various night spots accompanied by Hughes.
And with that, Jeff Beck’s tenure in the Yardbirds came to an end. The group completed its U.S. tour as a four-piece, and a press release was issued explaining that Beck was “ill,” a guise that he kept up even in an early 1970s interview with Rolling Stone: “I really wanted Jim Page on lead guitar with me because I knew it would sound sensational,” he told the magazine. “It lasted about four or five months, then I had this throat thing come on…”
Jeff Beck was a free man, but one with no direction to follow.