Tracks: 1) Too Much Monkey Business; 2) Got Love If You Want It; 3) Smokestack Lightning; 4) Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl; 5) Respectable; 6) Five Long Years; 7) Pretty Girl; 8) Louise; 9) I’m A Man; 10) Here ’Tis.
REVIEW
"Good evening, and now it is time for birdmerizing... yardmerizing... in fact, most blueswailing Yardbirds. Here they are, one by one: the drums — Jim McCarty, the rhythm guitar — Chris Dreja, the bass — Paul Samwell Smith, lead guitar — Eric Slowhand Clapton, the singer and harp — Keith Relf: Five Live Yardbirds!" No idea who was the announcer on that particular night, but it is hard to forget that intro — and hard not to chuckle at the album sleeve photo, poking a different kind of fun at the band’s name. (And for all the Eric Clapton haters out there in the COVID-19 era, this may be the only chance you ever get to stare at your anti-hero behind bars!).
Each time I listen to Five Live Yardbirds, I cannot help being reminded of just how irreparably skewed is our modern perception of all those young R&B bands that sprang up all over the UK in the early 1960s. What we do is hear them (usually with an air of timidity and reverence) recording short, thinly sounding, relatively quiet covers of Chicago blues and Chuck Berry in the studio; see them properly dressed and, as a rule, lip-syncing to the same studio recordings on their scant TV appearances; read condensed biographic descriptions of their early years which largely focus upon their managers, producers, and girlfriends; and, if we are very very lucky, we can occasionally treat ourselves to «raw» bootlegs with awful sound quality, the closest we ever come to true history but also a total chore to sit through and enjoy.
The club scene, however, is where it was all really happening — where bands such as the Animals and the Rolling Stones could feel themselves free from the shackles of their public image and the restrictions imposed on them by the record industry, long before the psychedelic revolution shook all these foundations to their core. The club scene was where you could really go wild, extending your three-minute singles into lengthy free-form jams or trance-inducing dance grooves; at the expense of clarity and precision of sound, for sure, but with the added benefit of being able to release the proverbial beast inside. We know the huge difference between a studio and a live Stones album, or a Who album, or a Led Zeppelin album from the late 1960s / early 1970s, but, if at all possible, this gap must have been even wider in the early 1960s — it is just because that era was so poorly documented that we are not constantly reminded of where it was at.
Consequently, manager and producer Giorgio Gomelsky’s pioneering decision to make the first album by his latest acquisition, the Yardbirds, a real live one was nothing short of entrepreneurial genius — and exceptionally favorable for the Yardbirds themselves, a band that had not yet properly found its studio wings, and had a lot going against it in terms of competition. Its strict separation between rhythm and lead guitar left rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja without any active voice whatsoever (unlike John Lennon, he did not sing, did not write, and did not even laugh and act like a clown, mostly sticking to just wearing a frown). In the rhythm section, bass player Paul Samwell-Smith was, at best, competent, and drummer Jim McCarty, even being somewhat more than just competent, was, after all, just a drummer.
The weakest link, however, was their frontman: Keith Relf, next to the wildman image of people like Mick Jagger and Eric Burdon, looked and sounded like a timid, well-behaved, clean-cut college student, probably very nice to know, handsome in an almost teen idol sort of way, and clearly admiring his blues and R&B idols to a much higher degree than being capable of imitating them. In the States, such nice young gentlemen usually went to Greenwich Village and became reverent folkies; in the UK, the same degree of academic reverence could easily be applied to blues and R&B. Which is not to imply that Relf had any sort of scholarly background — his father was a builder, after all — but he did look like an adoring young scholar most of the time, and performed the material accordingly.
The Yardbirds’ first of many bits of luck came along in 1963, when their lead guitarist Top Topham had to leave for art school and cede his place to one Eric Clapton, of the Roosters’ (non-)fame. With the young, but still virtually unknown, guitar prodigy at their side, the Yardbirds gained something that nobody else had in the entire British R&B scene — a top-notch blues guitarist who could not only cop all the black dudes’ licks to perfection, but put his own stamp on the songs as well. Unfortunately, no recordings survive from the Roosters (who were only active for several months in 1963 anyway; Tom McGuinness, the band’s other guitarist, would later join Manfred Mann), but one thing is for sure: much, if not most, of Clapton’s guitar genius had already been manifested before he joined the Yardbirds — you don’t really get to listen to a very young Eric Clapton and go «wow, amazing how he got from this to ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’ and ‘Layla’!» You have no choice, really, but to hunt down all those TikTok videos he recorded in his bedroom in Surrey when he was only twelve... uh, wait a minute. Never mind.
Anyway, as their first album clearly shows, the Yardbirds never had the slightest intention of turning into «The Eric Clapton Revue» (or, for that matter, any guitar player’s revue, be it Eric, Jeff, or Jimmy in later years). The man was too shy to sing, too stiff to show off on stage, and he did not even take solo turns on at least half of the numbers that they performed — drastically underused, some might say; admirably humble, others might object. Regardless, Clapton’s presence on these tracks is a good, but far from only, reason why Five Live Yardbirds still deserves your attention more than half a century since its release.
The most important thing about Five Live Yardbirds is that it is the only document of its epoch, at least outside the scarce territory of crappy-sounding bootlegs, which lets you hear what a genuine club-based «rave-up» sounded like at the time. (It was actually not the first live album by a UK R&B band — that honor should probably go to Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated; however, Korner’s live recordings had an even more «academic» feel to them, and were typically performed by middle-aged men with a mixed training in blues and jazz, rather than by exuberant young kids with plenty of rock’n’roll energy to spare). Those of the album’s songs (recorded, by the way, at the Marquee Club on March 20, 1964) that go well over three minutes usually turn, sooner or later, into loud, noisy, «primitive» jams, with all the band members kicking the shit out of their instruments — about as far removed from one’s idea of an Eric Clapton-led band as possible. And in those blessed moments when the band reaches its energetic peak, any individual shortcomings on the part of the players just melt away, and what remains is an awesome tribal groove, perhaps best felt on dance-oriented R&B numbers such as the Isley Brothers’ ʽRespectableʼ or Bo Diddley’s ʽHere ’Tisʼ which closes the show. ʽHere ’Tisʼ, in particular, features a mammoth groove from the rhythm section — for a short while, Jim McCarty ceases to be a suburban British kid and becomes one of the Loa-possessed mythical African savages... a clichéd bit of praise, for sure, but honestly, you do not often get such spirited bombast from anybody else in the Britain of 1964.
Straightahead rock’n’roll and blues numbers are, of course, generally saved by the young Mr. ʽSlowhandʼ Clapton — when it comes to Chuck Berry’s ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ, if you want great lead vocals, hear the Hollies; if you want young punk flavour, your best bet is the Kinks or the Downliners Sect; but if you want top level lead guitar with the rawest, sharpest, screechiest tone of 1964 and the speediest, most easily fluent picking style of them all, you shall have nowhere to turn to but the Yardbirds. All of these British bands were united in transforming Chuck’s original solos from a harmlessly playful invitation to dance your hips off into a rallying call for air-punching the lights out of your virtual oppressors; but nobody other than Eric Clapton could bring an almost military-like order and elegance to that onslaught without sacrificing the rage and fury. Come to think of it, you do not often hear Eric Clapton engaging in a fast Chuck Berry number anytime after his Yardbirds days (even in Hail! Hail! Rock’n’Roll, they brought the man on stage to assist Chuck with ‘Wee Wee Hours’, a slow blues), so this is sort of a unique experience to show you that yes, Mr. Clapton could rock’n’roll away like crazy in the early days, before blues purism ate out a large chunk of his youthful abandon.
Unfortunately, if quite predictably, the sound quality of the recording is too poor to properly enjoy all the nuances of Eric’s lead guitar — he probably does great on the classic blues tune ‘Five Long Years’, but you would really have to wait thirty long years for the definitive version on From The Cradle; Eric’s thin Fender Telecaster tone can only be discerned through the dense and dark smokescreen of the rhythm section (Samwell-Smith’s bass obscures every note played by the man) and will probably be deemed barely listenable by all who have been spoiled by the cleaner live recording standards from the 1970s and later on. Still, unspoil yourself just a bit, take the record in the context of its time, and it won’t be much of a problem to understand the ‘God’ tag on this young man — which, technically, would not be applied until his stint with John Mayall, but it is already quite clear that a completely new standard for electric guitar playing is being set here.
That said, ʽToo Much Monkey Businessʼ, ʽFive Long Yearsʼ, and John Lee Hooker’s ʽLouiseʼ are pretty much the only songs on which Eric gets a proper solo spot — all the more ridiculous considering how often Keith Relf gets a solo spot with his harmonica, which he really only plays because he is a non-guitar-playing frontman, and if you are a frontman in a rhythm-and-blues band and you do not play a guitar, you at least have to play harmonica. Like Mick Jagger, you know? Even on ʽGood Morning Little Schoolgirlʼ — the studio version of that song had Eric playing a darn fine guitar solo, but this live version only has Keith. WHY? Admittedly, he is decent with the instrument, but neither Sonny Boy Williamson nor Little Walter have much to fear in the competition department.
Every once in a while, though, the Yardbirds really come together as a single powerful unit: ultimately, you will never «get» the point of the album if you just think of it as a launching platform for Clapton’s soloing (let alone for Keith Relf’s singing and harp playing). The first such number is ‘Smokestack Lightning’, formerly a creepy voodoo show focused on Howlin’ Wolf’s persona, but here transformed into a collective bombastic ritual, with Relf as the harp-blowing shaman and the rest of the band banging away with all their might to bring all those sleepy spirits out of their slumber. This is where drummer Jim McCarty summons Keith Moon-like powers, both guitarists sacrifice melody for aggressive noise, and we, the listeners, temporarily forget the aura of teenage entertainment that normally rules over this album and begin taking these guys really seriously. This is harder to do on subsequent rave-ups such as the Isley Brothers’ ‘Respectable’ or Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Girl’, because these numbers are mostly there to provide a good time for the dancing crowds — ‘Smokestack Lightning’, on the other hand, is much more of a proto-psychedelic jam to which it is much easier to groove while sitting down, nodding your head, and letting yourself be taken far away into a world of mysterious swamps, dense smoke, three-headed alligators, and oddly colored mushrooms — regardless of whether you need some chemical assistance for this or not.
Overall, all the inevitable criticisms aside, Five Live Yardbirds is more than just a historical document: it is a special experience that lets you penetrate those «wild and innocent days» like nothing else — before egos and drugs took over and maybe added some extra wildness, but definitely took away most of the innocence. Because of their long and troubled history, the Yardbirds may not have carved out such an unmistakable identity for themselves as a band as they did for several of their classic songs — but in a way, this recording carves out an identity for the year of 1964 that is much more telling than any of the great studio albums recorded by a variety of artists in that same year. On top of that, you get the earliest bunch of Eric Clapton solos known to mankind, so, what’s not to like?
Tech note: since the dawning of the CD era, Five Live Yardbirds have apparently been released in a million different repackagings, many of which throw on tons of bonus tracks — such as the band’s early studio singles (which we shall discuss later, in a separate review for For Your Love), or additional live performances from the Crawdaddy Club and other venues: seek out the one that has a rippin’ version of Chuck Berry’s ʽLet It Rockʼ on it, a really tight performance and another extremely rare occasion to hear a young Eric do a fast Chuck number.
Only Solitaire: The Yardbirds reviews
"And for all the Eric Clapton haters out there"
Are there any? I never met one. I think him a bit overrated, but not way enough to hate or even dislike him (like I dislike U2 for instance).
"Eric do a fast Chuck number"
See what I mean? I like the original better, including Chuck's play. As it's a rewrite of Johnny B Goode we can compare it (via YouTube eg) with Chuck's live performance of 1958. On that one Chuck and his band beat The Yardbirds on all fronts. That doesn't mean Eric and the others are bad, not at all. Had I been there I would have greatly enjoyed myself. It means that Chuck (who then was at his peak) was superior because brilliant. And Eric is a bit overrated, while still very good.
As live acts The Animals, The Who (or The High Numbers if you prefer) and The Rolling Stones were better than The Yardbirds in 1964. Regarding the Rolling Stones I recommend the footage of the infamous Kurhaus, Scheveningen concert - when the Dutch audience managed to scare the band off the stage.