Jimmy Page on his time in the Yardbirds and the compilation album Yardbirds '68, MOJO, December 2017
The Yardbirds' legendary rave-up at New York's Anderson Theatre in March 1968 revealed their Jimmy Page line-up at its most "arse-kicking". Now a legitimate release — including formerly obscure studio recordings — it delivers a fitting swan song for British R&B's original punk rockers, and a premonition of Led Zeppelin's thunderous arrival. "Jim and Chris said, 'We didn't realise we were that good," Page tells Phil Alexander.
"I'm going to tell you the honest truth," says Jimmy Page with a conspiratorial look. Soaking in the last rays of the September sun outside a west London café, the guitarist is revisiting the final days of The Yardbirds, the band he joined in May 1966 and who split two years later as their final US tour reached California.
"When we got to the hotel where we were staying on Sunset Strip there was a palmist. [Tour manager] Richard Cole said to me, 'Why don't we go to the palmist for a laugh?' So we did. The palmist goes through every one of my digits and says, 'In a very short time, you are going to make a decision that will change your life.'"
Within two days Page had learned that The Yardbirds were splitting for good. And, after his visit to the fortuneteller, he knew what he had to do. "Obviously, I made the decision to start a new band right then, but that guy saying that was pretty eerie, wasn't it?"
On September 7, 1968, just over three months after that fateful afternoon in Los Angeles, Page would play his first show with new bandmates Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones, briefly billed as The New Yardbirds. "It was pretty quick, really," says Page of Zeppelin's whirlwind formation. "But I really knew what I wanted to do because I'd learned so much."
Page's next venture would benefit enormously from his experience of The Yardbirds' last years, a period he returns to with a new two-disc release simply entitled Yardbirds '68. Disc one contains the group's show at New York's Anderson Theatre on March 30, 1968; disc two showcases what Page calls "studio sketches" laid down during a session recorded at the same time and which, up until now, have never been officially released.
The tapes made at the Anderson Theatre show have long been shrouded in controversy, the four-piece of Page, frontman Keith Relf, bassist Chris Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty having objected to the sub-standard recording as well as subsequent chicanery. "The label added sounds, like a bull-fighting cheer or people clinking cocktail glasses," winces Page. "So we said, 'No, it's not coming out.' But it came out, and it was withdrawn. Then they tried to slip it out again [as Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page in 1971] on the strength of Led Zeppelin before it got withdrawn again."
Having restored the Led Zeppelin catalogue two years ago, Page has remastered and remixed these last Yardbirds recordings in a bid to showcase the band as they truly were. Following the mixing process, Page played the results to surviving participants McCarty and Dreja and to the Keith Relf estate (the singer having passed away in 1976 at the age of 33). "It was important that they were all into it, and they really were," he says. "Jim and Chris said, 'We didn't realise we were that good.' I also really wanted to represent Keith in the right way because he was such a fantastic frontman."
In fact, Page's relationship with Relf pre-dated the 1963 formation of The Yardbirds, the pair having first met in a rehearsal room in London's Maddox Street and jammed on some Jimmy Reed covers. Page's close friendship with Jeff Beck (whom he famously recommended as a replacement for Eric Clapton when the latter quit the band in early '65) is just another factor binding him to The Yardbirds. As we prepare to discuss the impact of the group on his own musical development, we head back to one of his first sightings of the band…
When did you first see The Yardbirds live?
I was walking down the stairs into the Marquee when it was still on Oxford Street and they were on-stage. Eric was still in the band and the energy was just so amazing. That was also with [bassist] Paul Samwell-Smith and he was a big part of their sound, just so dynamic. That was around the time that they were doing all the stuff you can hear on Five Live Yardbirds [the band's live debut, recorded in March 1964]. They knew all the right songs, and there was a lot of stuff from the Chess and Vee-Jay catalogue from the '50s in their set.
What was different about them at that point?
They had these intense crescendos that they would do, and then they would come back from that into these riffs. They were just really exciting and, in my opinion, far better than anything else that was going on outside of the Stones and The Pretty Things. They definitely had a specific style and I hadn't heard that on record before. When Jeff joined the band, he used to play me acetates of what they were doing. I think his work in that band was unparalleled and really hard to follow.
You were at the Oxford University show in May 1966 when Keith, somewhat worse for wear, berated the audience…
I was. Keith did a sort of punk act. He started swearing at all these people who were dressed in penguin suits. It was so in advance of punk that even some band members weren't ready for it! (laughs) Paul Samwell-Smith resigned on the spot. They had some gigs coming up and they said, "What are we going to do?" And I said, half jokingly, "Oh, I'll do it." But to be honest it almost came out like some sort of Tourette's reaction! (laughs)
At that point Jeff Beck was still in the band…
Yes. The reality was that Jeff had said, "It would be great if you were in the band," and we discussed twin guitar parts and harmonies, just the way you'd have brass sections in a big band — that sort of punch. There was an opportunity to move things around so I'd start out on the bass, but Paul Samwell-Smith's shoes were really big shoes to fill. The idea was that Chris would take over the bass, and then I'd be doing stuff with Jeff on guitar. That's how that happened.
There weren't any other bands at that time with two lead guitarists…
Probably not. It was more rhythm and lead in those days. But what is there to hear of what we did? There's only really the one thing — [the October'66 single] Happenings Ten Years Time Ago — where you have two real lead players. And it was the first record that really didn't do anything for the The Yardbirds! It was the first failure for them! (laughs)
The Yardbirds toured the States in August'66 as part of the Dick Clark Caravan Of Stars tour. Was that your first experience of life on the road in America?
Yes, it was. I'd been to the States twice and visited LA and New York but that was my first time touring. I was so looking forward to doing it and we played the first show in Dayton, Ohio, in a shopping mall! (laughs) There weren't many people there and it was pretty terrible. I thought, "Christ! Is this it?" That was pretty surreal and then there was another gig that was in an ice rink. They rushed the stage and you couldn't get away because you were slipping all over the place on the ice. But after that, we went into proper venues and I was pretty relieved. The underground clubs were just starting to emerge and you could sense the change, something new was happening. That tour was strange, really.
It was an old-school pop package tour wasn't it?
Yes. I was thinking about all the people who were on it recently. There was Bobby Hebb who wrote Sunny. I remember one place where he jumped off the stage into the pit where there was a piano and he just started playing. I'm not sure why the piano was even there! Maybe it was from the days of silent movies. I just thought, “Heʼs quite a card!" We didn't really fit on that bill at all.
Jeff left a few days into that tour. Was the slog too much for him?
I don't know. The official story is that we'd been in LA, we started the tour and he got tonsillitis and so he left and we carried on as a four-piece. At the time, the others weren't too happy about it but as that tour went on it was almost like musical slave labour. It was absolutely horrible.
There weren't enough seats on the bus, so some people were sleeping in the luggage racks. There was a toilet that broke down after two days and Sam The Sham And The Pharaohs — the Wooly Bully guy — he had two female backing singers and there were no toilet facilities for them, which was absolutely gross. It continued to be gross when you look at how long that tour was. Jeff bailed out but everyone else stuck it out. So, whereas there had been a few incidents previously where I had played lead guitar throughout the set, at that point I switched to lead permanently and Chris Dreja stuck on bass.
The release of Sgt. Pepper had a huge impact on music, but had The Yardbirds already embarked on their own psychedelic journey on recordings like Still I'm Sad (October'65) and Shapes Of Things (February'66)?
To be honest The Yardbirds had always pushed things forward — even in those early days with Eric, they had something different going on. They described it as 'rave-up', didn't they? That was a good term because it was about pumping the music up, and doing that in an almost trance-like way.
What we introduced was the layering of sound on-stage. I had tapes of the Staten Island Ferry coming into dock with all the hooters. There were recordings of railroad trains too, and I used the bow on Glimpses, so to me that was going into the realms of psychedelia. I suppose, though, it was possibly more avant-garde than psychedelic.
By mid-'67 you'd also added a cover of The Velvet Underground's I'm Waiting For The Man to the set.
Yeah. I'd seen The Velvet Underground at the Scene Club early on and we'd started to cover Waiting For The Man but I hadn't met Warhol at that time. Then we did this show at a state fair or something [Michigan State Fair, Detroit, November 20, 1966], and in the same confines Warhol was hosting a 'Mod Wedding' and The Velvet Underground were playing so we all went and hung out afterwards. I thought they were an amazing band, really thrilling.
On March 28, 1968, The Yardbirds played their first US show on what would be their final tour. Two days later you played the Anderson Theatre In New York and the label decided to record it. What do you remember about the gig itself?
We turned up and did a quick rehearsal and they re-positioned the mikes, but no one knew whether the recording was going to sound any good. That was the problem: no one had a clue. I would've preferred to have recorded a different show when we were really able to stretch out during two sets. The sets we played were different every night and there was a version of I Ain't Got You that was really stretched out. But because we were recording the show and things weren't sounding great we did the same set twice rather than varying things so I Ain't Got You isn't on there. What you hear is the set pretty much as we played it, warts and all.
I'm A Man is pretty much 10 minutes long and, along with Dazed And Confused, it highlights the improvisation that was going on. The set almost feels transitional…
It does. The set has the hits that The Yardbirds were known for as well as other stuff that we were starting to develop. You're A Better Man Than I sounds really great. But a song like Drinkin' Muddy Water isn't perhaps one of the band's best known songs but it's really indicative of how arse-kicking the band were at the time.
Musically, it's not too dissimilar to what happened six months on or so. It's the same sort of freedom that was encouraged. It was the blueprint that was continued into Led Zeppelin.
The studio recordings on Yardbirds'68 — was that material intended for the next album?
There was a bit of that, but we were just getting comfortable with doing it ourselves. [Little Games producer] Mickie Most was a singles man. Albums just weren't his thing. So it was down to us, and to me, to do the rest. So, in New York, it was a question of going in to try a few things, and not having someone saying, "Next!" I'm not sure we were necessarily thinking that we were going to start on a new album. I do think, though, that it was probably the first time I'd recorded in a studio in America. I would have been keen just to do that.
Again, the material you worked on is varied, starting with Avron Knows — a really hard-driving tune.
Avron Knows is interesting and it really starts taking off. Chris's bass almost sounds like he's playing a bloody upright. It's a totally different thing in terms of his sound. Then we do another version that sounds pretty different again. It's a different way of playing it and it kind of shows how we were trying loads of things and the enthusiasm we had at the time.
Who exactly was Avron?
Avron was a guy Keith knew. Keith thought Avron was really with it and hip, but Jim had a different view of him! To be honest, The Yardbirds could be pretty abstract with their lyrics. Think about Happenings Ten Years Time Ago — that was all about reincarnation. With Avron Knows, it's like a conversation between Keith and Jim, and it's a bit of fun with those different views.
You were also writing yourself by then…
Yes, I've got Knowing That I'm Losing You which I wrote before I was in The Yardbirds, and which became Tangerine [on Led Zeppelin III]. The construction remains exactly the same. There's also [the acoustic] Spanish Blood which I think is brilliant. Jim McCarty came up with that spoken word section which is just incredible.
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Eastern Promise
JIMMY PAGE's late-'60s search for new sounds made him an early pilgrim to India…
THERE WERE a number of reasons I decided to go to Mumbai," says Jimmy Page, recalling his stopover en route back from The Yardbirds' tour of Australia and New Zealand in early 1967."Ravi Shankar, who I had met before, was setting up his institute. According to his label, World Pacific, he was building this amazing place. It was going to have a floor dedicated to dance, one floor to music, one floor to singing, and so on, so I wanted to see what was going on because it sounded bloody marvellous. So I decided to go on the way home but the other guys didn't want to come. They wanted to go via San Francisco."
An avid listener to the BBC's World Service as a teenager, Page was fascinated by Indian music from an early age. One of the first Western musicians to own a sitar, his visit to Mumbai was also motivated by his desire to buy more instruments.
"When I got there I didn't actually get to see the institute because they'd only started laying the foundations," he smiles, "To be honest, I don't know if they ever did get to finish it in the end, but I did get some great instruments which was one of the major reasons for going, and I did have an amazing trip. Just getting off the plane on your own with no hotel, no nothing, is a great feeling. That was also pretty brave at the time."
Page would return to India, notably when he and Robert Plant visited Mumbai in the early 70s, their sessions at EMI Recording Studio in Mehta Road in March 1972 to record with the cream of local session musicians yielding thrilling versions of Friends and Four Sticks — both of which were finally officially released on the expanded version of Led Zeppelin's Coda album in 2015.
"I always love going back to India," says Page. "But that first trip was really cool. I really loved it."
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A few weeks after the New York show and session you arrived in California and Keith Relf and Jim McCarty told you the band was ending. How did you react?
I said, "Surely we're in a really good position at this point? We've got a really good cult audience that really like what we do, and maybe we should take some time once we've finished the tour to really work out what we want to do?" That's when they told me that they didn't really want to have anything to do with The Yardbirds.
I think Keith kept pretty quiet at the time, and Jim did most of the talking. I asked them what they wanted to do, because what we'd done on-stage and in the studio was quite varied. If we took it seriously, we could go anywhere we wanted. But they said they wanted to form a band that sounded like The Turtles. That's when I thought, "You can count me out!" But they wanted to count me out anyway because they just wanted to do something completely different. That's why they ended up playing with Keith's sister [in Renaissance].
Wasn't there another US tour announced for that September?
I'm not sure about that but there were those Scandinavian shows that were booked which is why [Led Zeppelin] went over there under the radar as The New Yardbirds. There was a cloak of secrecy, really, because we were going to change the name once we'd finished the album.
Between those last Yardbirds sessions and Led Zeppelin's first album, there's a big difference in approach.
It's not fair to make a comparison because the circumstances are different. The approach is totally different but you also have four superstar musicians playing together, and I don't mean that with any disrespect to the musicians in The Yardbirds because they are so bloody good. But [Zeppelin] goes into a different area of almost ESP-like communication that is second to none.
Each of us, in that room during our first rehearsal [on August 12, 1968], hearing that, it was like, "Oh, my God. I have never heard anything like this or experienced a communion on that level." After that there was no way we weren't going to play together. We had to ensure that we did. The fact that we routined the material and managed to play it live before we recorded it gave it a real confidence. You can't compare the two things.
Your own playing style on the first Zep album was also much heavier…
Yes. John Bonham was a fantastic drummer, a genius of the drums. When he was playing with Tim Rose [before joining Led Zeppelin], he played the parts he needed to but, after that first rehearsal, we all knew this was an opportunity to go way beyond where we'd been before. I played guitar on that album like I hadn't played guitar before. The whole vehicle was different. John Bonham played drums in a way where he flexed his musical muscles and he was able to become everything that he could imagine. Everyone was encouraged to come into the band in that way.
Another key player at that time was Peter Grant, who started managing The Yardbirds in that final year. Obviously, that partnership between you and him was key to getting Zeppelin the deal with Atlantic.
Yes. That's a fair assessment because he was so important. So was the fact that I'd worked with [producer, songwriter and Atlantic exec] Bert Berns. He had asked me to come over to America to become a studio musician. I didn't but I stayed with him in New York, and he took me down to meet the people at Atlantic. The deal was nothing to do with [the fact that] Dusty Springfield recommended us. That's a load of nonsense. It was the fact that we went to see Mo Ostin [at Warner Bros] on the West Coast, but that was really just to build it [and say to Atlantic], "We're already talking to someone else."
Looking back at your time in The Yardbirds, and that period in'68 in particular, what did you learn and take with you?
It's interesting because what I learned in the studio — we'll call it the academic side was really important. Even bringing a fuzzbox into the situation — which happened earlier on — that really changed everything. Everyone used one after that. But I also started doing other things, like playing with the bow.
There was the studio discipline —recording, production — but there was also the organic aspect of playing live and stretching the ideas and the techniques much further. Those were the two parts of the puzzle that just fitted together. There were lots of ideas going on at that time and without my time in The Yardbirds I just wouldn't have got to them. That's why I was keen to get this record out. Historically, it's good to have both the Anderson Theatre and the studio recordings out too, because it really just proves how good the band really were.
