Review: The Yardbirds - Having A Rave Up (1965)

Tracks: 1) You’re A Better Man Than I; 2) Evil Hearted You; 3) I’m A Man; 4) Still I’m Sad; 5) Heart Full Of Soul; 6) The Train Kept A-Rollin’; 7) Smokestack Lightning; 8) Respectable; 9) I’m A Man; 10) Here ’Tis; 11*) Shape Of Things; 12*) New York City Blues; 13*) Jeff’s Blues; 14*) Someone To Love; 15*) Like Jimmy Reed Again; 16*) Chris Number; 17*) Here ’Tis; 18*) Stroll On.

REVIEW

As I have pointed out in my past reviews — with a little hyperbole, perhaps, but isn’t hyperbole the true spice of life? — the Yardbirds in their Jeff Beck phase did not put out a whole lot of material, but pretty much every single they put out during their «miracle year» from spring of 1965 to winter of 1966 helped jump-start a new sub-genre in rock music. Beck’s role in that wond’rous adventure was pivotal, and, in some ways, his career was strikingly parallel to that of Jack Bruce within Cream — after leaving or dissolving their respective bands, both Jeff and Jack would embark on lengthy, sophisticated, and rewarding solo careers that deliberately eschewed overt commercialism (leaving their former bandmate Eric Clapton to reap all that cash instead) and, in the eyes of many a «demanding» music lover, produced much finer results than their early achievements on the «pop-rock» market. But no matter whether we like it or not, as long as the memory of rock music ever lives on, Jack Bruce will be forever associated with ‘Sunshine Of Your Love’, while Jeff Beck will always have a ‘Heart Full Of Soul’.

Technically speaking, ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ was a fairly formulaic follow-up to ‘For Your Love’, written by Graham Gouldman in precisely the same standard fashion any corporate songwriter writes for his paycheck. The opening minor key sets up a predictably somber, brooding mood; the lyrics are almost unbearably simple and clichéd (and by April 1965, this could already sting a little); the bridge section shifts key and tempo, trying to make things a little brighter and more vivacious before settling back into somberness; and both songs even have the exact same running length of two and a half minutes (though at least ‘Heart’ gets a little space for a guitar solo). I suppose that Clapton, the staunchly anti-commercial warrior (heh heh), would have hated the second song just as much as he hated the first one, and thanked God one extra time for guiding him all the way to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers instead.

However, in between Gouldman’s songwriting, Beck’s inventive approach to guitar playing, and the Yardbirds’ improved approach to vocal harmony arrangements (perhaps their most significant achievement on the UK scene from a collective perspective), ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ just uses ‘For Your Love’ as a trampoline to leap so much further in the pre-set direction. The opening raga-like bended riff — the very one that a professional Indian player could not get quite right on sitar the week before — adds a feeling of acute physical pain to the brooding somberness, and connects perfectly with the opening lyrics: "Sick at heart and lonely / Deep in dark despair..." I am sitting right now, trying to come up with at least one example of a pre-April 1965 pop/rock song that would deliver such a sharp suicidal punch, and nothing comes to mind — naturally, the Zombies would be an apt point of departure, but the Zombies did not have a guitar player of Jeff Beck’s caliber. ‘She’s Not There’ is in the same thematic ballpark, but it’s not really a rock song, is it? We might just as well go ahead and dub ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ the first ever genuine goth-rock song to grace the airwaves.

Lots of subtle touches make this recording a stand-out, chief among them Beck’s handling of the main riff — a riff that, all by itself, might not be the eighth wonder of the world (it stands somewhere in between the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ and the Animals’ ‘It’s My Life’ in terms of actual chords), but applies for candidate status with the addition of fuzz (one of the earliest examples of a fuzzy riff in rock) and, most importantly, that nasty wobble in the middle — we’d already heard Beck use the same technique on ‘I’m Not Talking’, but here it is placed at the center of the melody, and it certainly suits the overall disturbed mood of the song much better than a regular sitar sequence ever could. Then there are the vocal harmonies — those cavernous "oh-oh, whoah-oh!" from the rest of the band that feel like they grow organically out of Relf’s own solo modulation. These would soon be taken to a whole different dimension on ‘Still I’m Sad’; here they have a more «vignettish» touch to them, but this still does not eliminate the question of where the hell they came from? there was nothing quite like that level of spookiness in UK pop before. Finally, Jeff’s solo — comparatively minimalistic, it humbly and loyally mimics the vocal melody, doing the same type of perfect job that George Harrison did with his solo in ‘I Should Have Known Better’: when the vocal melody is so dang fine, why go someplace else when all you have to do is amplify the human voice with magic electric current? Beck is one of those rare players who never lets technical sophistication and gimmickry get in the way of expressing relatable feelings, and when there is no need to go all avantgarde on our asses, he has the good sense not to go there.

For the B-side of the single, the band could not come up with anything better than a fairly common 12-bar blues jam (‘Steeled Blues’, available as a bonus track on the regular CD edition of For Your Love), on which Beck tries to be Elmore James and Relf tries to be Little Walter — pleasant, but obviously forgettable; it did not, however, prevent ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ from becoming the band’s biggest ever commercial success on the UK charts (in the US, it did not manage to match the chart heights of ‘For Your Love’ — too scary for American audiences?) and once again putting them in the spotlight. There are several old clips of the band lip-syncing to the song on TV: I particularly «like» this one, with the go-go girls in the background rockin’ their standard moves to the song like it was ‘Shout And Shimmy’ or something — a classic textbook illustration of the ever increasing distance between cutting-edge pop music and basic pop music industry in that one year when humanity (in pure theory) could have been saved by music (but wasn’t).

A few months later, Graham Gouldman’s fabulous «Male Ego Destruction Trilogy» would come to its ultimate conclusion with ‘Evil Hearted You’ — another great song, though this time around one might complain that the formula was becoming just a tad too predictable: more minor chords, more spooky vocal harmonies, more abrupt tempo changes for the mid-section, more dark sulking and brooding. In ‘For Your Love’, Keith Relf was meaning to get the girl, at whatever cost necessary; in ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, he was meaning to get her back as the only way of saving himself from suicide. In ‘Evil Hearted You’, he finally seems to be at her side for good, but only at the cost of her having him under her thumb — "persuading, degrading, on my knees I try to please" — a kind of submissiveness Mick Jagger would probably find way below his masculine dignity, but apparently far more suitable for Keith’s artistic persona (and perhaps his real life persona, too, as Keith was never known for excessive womanizing and seems to have been happily married to April Liversidge from 1966 until his tragic death in 1976).

This time around, though, the song opens with a couple of power chords — almost like The Who, except Pete Townshend preferred bright, lively, ass-kickin’ major chords at the time, whereas here the opening E-minors set a gloomy attitude from the very first seconds. (This does not prevent the opening from showing a striking progression similarity with The Who’s ‘Amazing Journey’ four years later). However, it is not the static gloom that makes the song — it is its smooth vocal and instrumental careening from top to bottom and then back to top. "Evil hearted you, you always try-to-put-me-down..." — here is where Relf plunges all the way down to hell together with Samwell-Smith’s bass, only then to plummet right back up like a jack-in-the-box with "with the things you do..." The chorus, once they get to it, is not rigidly separated from the verse — it functions like an extension of that devilish Ferris wheel; and for the solo, Beck employs a sliding technique because there’s simply no other way to play it. The entire song slides from ecstasy to despair with each bar, and Jeff’s little guitar piece is once again the culmination of that journey.

Much like ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, ‘Evil Hearted You’ has also been described as "Middle Eastern-influenced" (by Richie Unterberger), although comparisons have also been drawn to Ennio Morricone and probably half a dozen other potential sources; I would say that the most "Middle Eastern-influenced" thing about the song might actually be its lyrics (which bear a striking resemblance to certain themes in Persian poetry), while the actual melody... I don’t really have a clue where that melody comes from, other than the unique mind of Mr. Goldman. But I do know I’d love to see Alice Cooper try to cover this one, since it very much foreshadows the deep, dark sound of the classic Alice Cooper band (or quite a bit of Alice’s solo career, for that matter).

As fine as ‘Evil Hearted You’ happens to be, though, its B-side (or, rather, «twin A-side», since it charted separately in the UK) might have been even more important for the Yardbirds — it was the first original contribution from Paul Samwell-Smith (who is allegedly responsible for the lyrics and vocal arrangements) and drummer Jim McCarty (main melody); for the latter, ‘Still I’m Sad’ was actually the beginning of a modest, but respectable career in art-rock / folk-prog that would eventually see him form Renaissance with Keith Relf. Mood-wise, though, ‘Still I’m Sad’ could not be further removed from the romantic dynamics of Relf-era Renaissance; original or not, it had to fit in with the stylistics of Gouldman-penned hits, and so McCarty and Samwell-Smith decided they simply had to beat their primary meat provider at his own game of doom, darkness, and despair.

Completely leaving the territory that established their original reputation — that of bluesy R&B rave-ups — McCarty and Samwell-Smith give us a slow, atmospheric, drony acoustic ballad whose vocal melody should probably be traced back to the Celtic tradition, except that the vocal harmonies, as everybody has already raved about, are arranged as a genuine Gregorian chant — low, deep, echoey, drawn-out in waves of «heavenly» modulation. The combination makes the song feel like part of a soundtrack to a film about the Black Death — a long, slow, mournful, desperate-but-humble funeral procession (I can almost picture Keith Relf wrapped in a black hood and cloak — too bad this never happened on TV, though on occasion all three guitarists at least would position themselves as part of said procession) that just happens to pass you by, with almost no dynamic development along the way. Too bad The Monks, one of the most eccentric American garage rock bands from that period, never considered covering the song for their Black Monk Time album in 1966 — here is a «black monk performance» par excellence if there ever was one.

The resulting sound is so dramatically different from everything the Yardbirds did before that it feels as if they are busy impersonating a different band — a year and a half before Sgt. Pepper, and, one might argue, with more clarity and a sharper sense of purpose than Sgt. Pepper, for all its inventiveness and ambitiousness, ever had. A bit too overtly theatri­cal, mayhaps, or even a bit «corny» (would certainly feel so from the point of view of a Western classical scholar), the song more than makes up for it with its sheer boldness. Who even thought of building up this kind of a dark, dreary sound in the burgeoning folk-rock movement of 1965? Not The Byrds, by any account. Who followed it up? Pretty much everybody from The Jefferson Airplane to The Velvet Underground, what with their own perks and everything. (Also for the record, the best cover of ‘Still I’m Sad’, amusingly enough, belongs not to Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, who kinda messed up the thing by turning it into a bombastic rocker, but to... Euro-disco clown-kings Boney M., whose version was surprisingly respectful to the original instead of expectedly disco-ifing the melody).

For some reason, ‘Still I’m Sad’ was seen fit for the US market while ‘Evil Hearted You’ was not — were Epic Records afraid of the word "evil"? — so the October ’65 single release in the US featured a relatively fresh recording of Bo Diddley’s ‘I’m A Man’ instead. We already knew, by that point, that the Yardbirds were big fans of the song, with a notoriously sped-up rearrangement being included on Five Live Yardbirds — the tempo was, in fact, so ridiculous that it felt like the band was simply rushing through the braggy lyrics to get to the rave-up jammy bits. But the Beck-era studio recording goes even further than that. The most interesting part of the song begins around 1:30, when the main melody is over and the band increases the tempo even further, with the rhythm section tight and tense while Relf and Beck are holding an extended distorted guitar-harmonica conversation, Jeff calling out Keith and Keith responding to the best of his blowin’ ability until the guitarist gets tired of the friendly sparring and launches into a head-spinnin’ «chicken-scratch» rhythmic pattern that somehow still manages to climb up the scale despite the sound being almost completely muted. This actually adds a melodic aspect to the band’s already patented noise-making — they begin to sculpt the noise rather than simply generate it.

Short as it is, that last minute of ‘I’m A Man’ is a precious exercise in the controlled chaos of garage-rock — and there are probably at least a dozen, if not more, inclusions on the U.S. Nuggets box set that owe a direct debt to this recording (‘Tobacco Road’ by The Blues Magoos is a particularly glaring example). Not even The Who (whose own version of ‘I’m A Man’ would also be released the same year) could raise their trademark ruckus at such an insane tempo — their idea of playing was much too slovenly for that. And, of course, the very idea of a single release that had ‘I’m A Man’ on one side and ‘Still I’m Sad’ on the other... one template for all the garage / hard / heavy rock bands in the world to come, one for all the Gothic / artsy / classically-influenced dark-folk groups to follow. At that particular juncture in time, even the Beatles rarely boasted «double A-side» combinations like these.

With both ‘Heart Full Of Soul’ and ‘I’m A Man’ faring quite respectably in the US charts, Epic Records thought that it would be a good thing for the band to end the year with another American LP — the only problem being that, what with all the touring and the lack of original songwriting, the Yardbirds had very little left in the vaults to offer. This did not exactly frighten Epic, who suddenly remembered that Five Live Yardbirds never got an American release, so here was their chance to do something completely different — a refreshingly mixed experience of one studio side of material, which would include all the recent hit singles, and one side of live performances. That these were essentially two different bands — the older, more «traditional» rhythm’n’blues / rave-up Yardbirds with Clapton and the newer, more experimental and creative Yardbirds with Beck — was a fact that could not bother record executives even if they were all forced to listen to Theodor Adorno during their bedtime story time.

As a result, for all of us nowadays Having A Rave Up is really a dismembered torso of a record, with one side that is completely useless to everybody who already owns Five Live Yardbirds (and they didn’t even necessarily pick all the best tunes from that particular show — where’s frickin’ ‘Too Much Monkey Business’?). The other side would constitute a 17-minute EP, on which they at least had the decency to also include ‘Evil Hearted You’ (previously unissued in the States). Still, four songs was clearly not enough, so they had to add two more outtakes that the band recorded in Memphis on September 12, with the legendary Sam Phillips himself overseeing the process — and a good thing they did, as these two songs are every bit as monumental as the ones we already discussed.

‘Train Kept A-Rollin’, which the Yardbirds learned from Johnny Burnette & The Rock’n’Roll Trio, turned out to be a true cornerstone in the evolution of hard rock and heavy metal — but since I have already dedicated an entire essay to the highly singular life of that particular song, I probably need say no more in this review, other than reiterate how much ass it kicks. The other song was ‘Mr. You’re A Better Man Than I’, and the worst thing I can say about it is that it was written by Mike Hugg, one of the key members of Manfred Mann, a band with which I have a serious aesthetic bone to pick. Fortunately, Hugg was probably the most tasteful and integral member of the band, so the worst thing I can really say about the song is that its earnest-to-God socially conscious lyrics, clearly striving for the same goals as Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, end up more than a little cheesy in their straightforwardness ("can you see a bad man by the pattern on his tie?" — hey, you know what, I think that with a little effort I can actually see a bad man by the pattern on his tie, yessiree bob!).

But in the hands of the Yardbirds, ‘You’re A Better Man Than I’ becomes more than just a protest song. It would be quite interesting to hear Hugg’s original demo (the much later slow jazzy version that Manfred Mann Chapter Three recorded in 1969 was clearly a brand new «artsy» reworking) — I have no idea if it had anything approaching that leaden-heavy bass sound that Phillips worked out for the band; for most of the song’s first half, it belongs to Samwell-Smith, who pretty much buries all the other guitars under his groove. Remember that we’re still talking September ’65; there really weren’t that many pop-rock songs around that would elevate the bass groove above the role of auxiliary foundation — ‘You’re A Better Man Than I’ was a trailblazer in that department, and moreover, this purely musical decision enhances the angry protest vibe of the song ten-fold. Maybe the lyrics are a little cheesy, but from the very opening notes it is Paul’s bass which loudly announces that the boys are being fuckin’ serious over here, mister.

Then, of course, there’s Beck’s guitar break — this time, we are not in graceful melodic pop territory, and our man Jeff takes the wise decision to stop emulating the lilting guitar melodies and just blast off. Starting off low, distorted, and droney, he slowly but surely moves higher and higher in space, gaining in pitch, intensity, and ecstasy until the melody just explodes and with one super-angry bend he brings the burning shards of his rocket back to Earth, only for Paul and his monster bass to take charge once again and guide Relf into the last verse. Again, an inspiration to garage-rock bands all over the globe, and arguably the single most pissed-off guitar break of 1965, not to be bested until the arrival of Jimi Hendrix on the scene (and even then, I would argue that this style of playing was far more influential — people could actually figure out how to imitate Beck on ‘You’re A Better Man Than I’ and imitated the shit out of him, from Ted Nugent to Joe Perry and beyond). Even Relf, usually the weakest link in the band, seems to get so electrified by his guitar-playing buddies that he actually gets enraged by the time he rolls the verse into the chorus. And so there you go — sixth perfect song out of six perfect songs to complete Side A of Having A Rave-Up, easily the single most perfect LP side of 1965. Too bad the second side ended up as the... uhm... single most perfect live LP side of... 1964? whatever.

Unfortunately, the LP was released just a tiny wee bit too soon — three months too early, to be exact — to make that side even more perfect with the inclusion of ‘Shapes Of Things’, the natural and logical ideal conclusion to the Yardbirds’ «magic year». Nowadays it usually forms the first bonus track on the CD edition of the album, but you should definitely listen to it in tandem with the other classics rather than after the extra serving of Five Live Yardbirds — that way, the creative arc of the band appears before you in its proper form.

In all honesty, ‘Shapes Of Things’ should probably be discussed together with the ensuing LP, Roger The Engineer, with which it shares more elements than with its predecessors (compositional complexity, use of feedback, psychedelic over­tones etc.). But since it is already mixed in with the other bonus tracks on here, and since its original version dates back to sessions from December ’65, and since this review is all about greatness anyway (Roger The Engineer is a good, but not a great record), let’s talk about its own greatness here as well.

First and foremost, they actually wrote it (it’s only their second ever truly original composition after ‘Still I’m Sad’), and I have no frickin’ clue how they wrote it. There’s a bit of a marching band in there, and apparently a bit of Brubeck, but the chords are an absolute mess and the song totally defies genre certification. It’s probably «pop» — but nothing like the pop of Graham Gouldman, and nothing like the pop of the Beatles. People usually call it one of the earliest examples of pure psychedelia because of Beck’s feedback and fuzz over raga chords, but if by «psychedelic» we want to mean «messing with your mind», then I’d say the song seriously messes with your mind even before Jeff launches into his fabulous break. How a band that suddenly, out of complete nowhere, learned to craft their songs that way ended up fizzling out and going creatively bankrupt in less than a year’s time is one of the cruellest pieces of irony from the height of the Sixties, right up there with Brian Wilson’s crash-and-burn over Smile.

Second, that utterly, totally insane instrumental section. This is just a little earlier than ‘Eight Miles High’ and a lot earlier than ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ — two songs that first come to mind when listening to this glorious mess (the next thing to come to mind is, of course, once again a large selection of Hendrix tunes). Several overdubbed guitar parts, distorted and fuzzified to absurd heights, played very obviously with the likes of Coltrane and/or Ravi Shankar in mind. You can clearly discern the influence of this sound on Revolver, but its own immediate predecessors are much more difficult to discern. In all, it is probably a good candidate for any list of «Top 10 Innovative Songs Of The 1960’s» or something.

Third, it is musical innovation that agrees with the general message of the song. Emboldened by their treatment of Mike Hugg, perhaps, the Yardbirds were growing more and more socially conscious with each day, and ‘Shapes Of Things’ was their personal commentary on the turbulent times they were living in. Quite a few people, upon hearing the opening line of "shapes of things before my eyes...", form the opinion that the song has something to do with drugs, but actually it does not: shapes of things simply refers to the current state of affairs, and even the psychedelic instrumental break is essentially just re-enacting events on the battlefield (confirmed by McCarty’s martial drum patterns) — one of the first, if not the first, musical representations of the chaos of war in pop music. Needless to say, despite some usual clumsiness in the lyrics, the message still hits very hard — as I hear "please don’t destroy these lands, don’t make them desert sands" to the news of yet another Ukrainian town reduced to rubble and dust by a detachment of my «heroic» compatriots, the answer to the simple opening question of "will time make men more wise?" seems more obvious than ever — but even more painful are the words of the final verse. "Soon I hope that I will find / Thoughts deep within my kind / That won’t disgrace my kind" is the exact feeling that I have now experienced for more than two years at least several times each and every fuckin’ day. Hey, thanks for rubbin’ it in, you bastard Yardbird assholes. Oh, what’s that you say? "Come tomorrow, may I be bolder than today?" You’ve got to be kidding me. I can’t believe this is really happening...

The bottomline is probably this: at the exact moment when the Yardbirds recorded and released ‘Shapes Of Things’, they were the single most cutting-edge thing happening in the UK — and maybe in the entire world. A catchy pop song shifting between three different tempos, none of which are a proper commodity on the market? with otherworldly guitars all over the place? and a well-put together set of progressive, anti-war, mildly philosophical lyrics? yes, you could find isolated examples of any of these elements, but put them all together and you get... well, something that was a bit of a tough nut for the public to crack: the song should have been a deserved #1 everywhere, but it stalled at #3 on the UK charts (stuck right behind the Hollies’ ‘I Can’t Let Go’ — hey, give the people lively sunshine pop over psychedelic anti-war declarations any day!) and at a shameful #11 in the US. After this, it would be all downhill for the Yardbirds: from the Beatles to the Who to Hendrix, all of their chief competitors would study the lesson of ‘Shapes Of Things’, skilfully use it for their own purposes, and leave the unfortunate band bickering in the dust.

In addition to ‘Shapes Of Things’, the Repertoire Records edition of Having A Rave Up contains almost a dozen bonus tracks that are generally of a much higher quality than the bonuses to For Your Love, but clearly do not even begin to compare to the timeless awesomeness of the Magnificent Seven. The earliest of these, ‘New York City Blues’, is an outtake that was taped at the same session as ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ — but it is essentially just ‘Five Long Years’ with a new set of (probably improvised and arguably quite stupid) lyrics; it is still a mighty joy to hear Jeff Beck soloing over a slow 12-bar blues arrangement, but, honestly, this is one area in which he is easily beaten by Slowhand, and if you want great music like this from 1965–66, you are well advised to head straight for Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton. The rest of the tracks mostly date from the band’s early ’66 sessions for the future Roger The Engineer, still produced by Giorgio Gomelsky before the band got rid of him midway through. They all sound good, but there is no sense to discuss most of them outside the context of that album (e.g. ‘Jeff’s Blues’ = future ‘The Nazz Are Blue’, ‘Someone To Love’ = future ‘Lost Woman’), or, in fact, discuss them at all (‘Like Jimmy Reed Again’ — sounds exactly like promised; ‘What Do You Want’ = an instrumental jam based on Bo Diddley’s ‘Who Do You Love’), especially because some of the tracks are disappointingly anachronistic after ‘Shapes Of Things’ (for instance, what made them want to produce a brand new studio version of Bo Diddley’s ‘Here ’Tis’, already served well done on Five Live Yardbirds?).

The only true gem here, delivered right at the end of the bonus track run, is ‘Stroll On’, the re-recording of ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ (with new lyrics) that the band produced for the soundtrack of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, with Jimmy Page already in the band, playing second lead guitar next to Beck — making this track a very rare example of both guitarists battling each other. However, I single it out not because of the ass-kicking twin break (which is quite short anyway), but because of the extra injection of heaviness received by the classic main riff, now played at about the same level of growly distorted depth as would only be achieved by the likes of Black Sabbath four years later — and, in spots, is actually reminiscent of the Eighties’ thrash metal style. If you think that Aerosmith really turned it up to 11 when they covered the Yardbirds’ arrangement of the song almost a decade later — well, think again, because Joe Perry’s original Jam Band allegedly began playing the song right after Perry caught Blow-Up on the big screen.

Overall, though, the relative mediocrity of the bonus tracks, and the weirdass composition of the original album mean a big fat nothing; even if Having A Rave Up consisted of nothing but fart noises and San Remo standards for 50% of its duration, the remaining 50% would still count as one of 1965’s (and the Sixties’ in general) most glorious moments. Finding a thicker concentration of perfect templates for pop-rock, art-rock, goth-rock, hard rock, garage-punk-rock and whatever other rocks there are on the seashore within such a brief period of time is quite a challenge — maybe the Kinks, with their mix of hard-and-art, came somewhat close that year, but even the Kinks did not experiment in so many genres, nor did they have a guitar genius like Beck to carry those experiments to such instrumental bliss.

If there is one small complaint that I might voice — a complaint that, perhaps, ultimately cost the Yardbirds their future — it is that, as great as the individual songs are, they never truly coalesce into a wholesome musical identity for the band. This is not just a mere stab at the idea of «diversity»: within the Beatles, for instance, the very different personalities of Lennon and McCartney fit with each other like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, at their best, forming a complex and contrasting, but wholesome perspective. With the Yardbirds, though, only Beck at this point could be said to represent a distinct musical persona — and he did not really have any proper sparring partner within the band: Samwell-Smith and McCarty were only just tentatively coming into their own as artists, while Keith Relf continued as Keith Relf — a good, idealistic kid whose enthusiasm and empathy remained strictly disproportionate to his artistism and musical talent. In other words, no single Yardbird with the exception of Beck was, roughly speaking, tremendously interesting on his own — which makes this achievement run even more amazing in the end, but also suggests an explanation for why it was so short-lived and why, in the end, the Yardbirds became more of a «compost» for other, more successful projects rather than one big, strong, solid collective legend on the same level with the other giants of the 1960s.

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