Thursday, June 26, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Music: Early birds

The Yardbirds reclaim relevance 35 years later

By Newt Briggs

Nowadays--unless you've spent the last 13 weeks tricking yourself out on "American Idol"--it can be a real pain in the ass to land a record deal. Apparently, it's just not enough anymore to be the band that laid the groundwork for everything from `60s psychedelia to heavy metal. Nor is it sufficient to have introduced the world to three of the supreme six-string technicians of all time--Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page--thereby virtually inventing modern rock guitar. Of course, it becomes a bit of a tough sell when you haven't recorded an album in, say, 35 years; and instead of Clapton, Beck and Page, you've got a dude named "Gypie" Mayo on the lead axe.

Still, when all else fails and you've been snubbed by every corporate parasite from Hollywood to Hermosa Beach, there's always your friendly neighborhood car detailer. As drummer Jim McCarty of The Yardbirds discovered last year, he might have just the hook-up you need.

Says McCarty: "When we last played in Las Vegas--I think it was in 1997--we played a show with The Animals in the Hilton. As it happened, [rhythm guitarist] Chris [Dreja] had invited an old friend to the show--this Chinese girl who had worked for Fleetwood Mac for a long time. I think she thought she was going to see a retro band, sort of an echo of what The Yardbirds used to be, but she was very pleasantly surprised by the performance. You know, we really knocked her out, and after that she started working to get us a record deal. So she tried all the various majors in Los Angeles without much success. Anyway, her neighbor was a young guy who used to clean the cars of this producer named Ray Shears, who'd just started a label with Steve Vai. The kid, of course, had never heard of The Yardbirds, but one day he was talking to Ray and he said, `My neighbor gave me this demo record. It's pretty cool. It's this group called The Yardbirds, and they're looking for a record deal.' And Ray says, `What?! The Yardbirds? They're still around?' And that's how we ended up recording Birdland."

Actually, it wasn't the only time The Yardbirds had trouble with an album. Formed in 1963 as the Metropolis Blues Quartet, the band's big break came less than a year later when they got to tour Europe turning out 12-bar for Chicago bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson--a tour that was later memorialized on Sonny Boy Williamson and the Yardbirds. Backing Williamson wasn't an easy task, particularly for a quintet of twentysomething British white boys, but it was made near impossible by his daily drinking binges.

"The afternoon of each show, we'd rehearse a whole lot of songs with him just to sort of know what we were doing," McCarty says. "But when it came to the show, he'd be quite drunk, and he'd start playing a bunch of different ones. He was used to drinking probably a bottle of scotch a day by then. That's why the recording sounds very hesitant. He'd start playing, and we'd wonder, `What's this? I don't remember this song.'"

Whatever problems the Yardbirds had with Williamson, they certainly blossomed in the four years that followed. Changing styles (and guitarists) with almost every new album, the band delved into a bit of everything--R&B, fuzztoned rock 'n' roll, Brit pop--reinventing it all as they went. But perhaps their greatest contribution to the music of the era was the rave-up--frenzied musical jams that, like their techno counterparts, sometimes lasted until the wee hours of the morning.

That said, The Yardbirds' current resurgence seems to be at least partially rooted in the renewed popularity of garage rock--a trend spearheaded by the Strokes, the Hives and the White Stripes. Although McCarty denies any real connection to this lo-fi revival, the facts speak for themselves: Last year, the White Stripes performed a show of Yardbirds covers with none other than Jeff Beck at London's Royal Albert Hall. Still, McCarty is stubborn in his dissent. "If you listen to the new album, it combines everything, all the different things we were doing way back when. As far as I'm concerned, the whole garage rock thing is just a coincidence."

In the end, it might be academic anyway, because, like it or not, The Yardbirds will probably always be best remembered for launching the careers of Clapton, Beck and Page--a fact that begs the question:

Mercury: Of the mighty three guitarists, who was the worst to work with?

Jim McCarty: [Laughter] The worst one--that's a funny one. Normally, it's the other way around. Well, they were all very good in their own way, and they were all difficult in their own way. It's hard to compare them.

M: It was Clapton, wasn't it?

JM: You didn't hear that from me.