Monday April 25, 2022 “Heart Full of Soul” The Yardbirds
In April of 1980 Alfred Hithcock passed on, but before he left he managed to instill some deep fears of commonplace things in moviegoers. We worried about our potentially murderous neighbors after Rear Window, were forever terrified of taking showers in motels thanks to Psycho and he turned birds, the least likely of predators, into frightening beasts with his movie The Birds.
So that started me thinking. There probably aren’t groups or songs named after our neighbors unless you happen to live in the Hollywood hills surrounded by rock stars and motels don’t make good names for rock bands (OK Martha Davis and the Motels, excepted) but are there groups or songs with bird names…you bet! And so we will be spending a week with some of those musical winged friends starting with Yardbirds.
There was a moment in time in the 60s when popular bands were breaking up and reforming new bands with musicians from other groups, and they were called ‘supergroups’...think Crosby Stills and Nash and most of the bands that Eric Clapton was in after he left today’s band, The Yardbirds.
But The Yardbirds may have been the superest of supergroups even before the term was invented. They were at least the superest band of guitarists having at one time included Clapton and then Jimmy Page and then Jeff Beck, with Page and Beck playing in the band together for a brief period. For a while during Clapton’s tenure The Yardbirds toured with blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson who said of their style, “These white boys want to play the blues in the worst way…and that's exactly the way they play.”
Eric Clapton, who saw himself as a blues guitarist, left the band as the Yardbirds moved from traditional blues and gravitated towards pop music like today’s “She’s Not There” which was written by Graham Gouldman. A songwriter of rare talent Gouldman wrote songs for the Yardbirds and the Hollies and he would go on to form the band 10cc. As an aside blues ‘traditionalist’, Eric Clapton would record a bucketful of very non-blues songs including “Wonderful Tonight”, “It’s in the Way That You Use It”, “After Midnight’ and “Lay Down Sally”.
The Yardbirds had a good run with five top ten hits and six albums but like most groups, as their fortunes and commercial success started to wane the group would dissolve. Beck would leave the group to embark on a solo career and Jimmy Page set off to start his own group which he initially named the New Yardbirds then later Led Zeppelin. And then once the distinctive lead singer Keith Relf called it quits, the Yardbirds flew away…sorry.
Stay safe and well…and sure yardbirds, slang for convicts, may not actually be winged creatures but many of them undoubtedly wish they could fly away.