Yardbirds

Where it all began: Marquee Club, 1964

 

                                            

Western man has been stifled in a non-magical universe known as "the way things are." Rock music can be seen as one attempt to break out of this dead soulless universe and reassert the universe of magic…. It bears some resemblance to the trance music found in Morocco, which is magical in origin and purpose—that is, concerned with the evocation and control of spiritual forces.... It is to be remembered that the origin of all the arts—music, painting and writing—is magical and evocative; and that magic is always used to obtain some definite result.

                                —William S. Burroughs, 1975

All that Israel heard was the aleph with which in the Hebrew text the first Commandment begins, the aleph [A] of the word anokhi, “I”…. Then the people were overwhelmed, they could no longer endure the divine voice…. Moses alone was able to withstand the divine voice, and it was he who repeated in a human voice those statements of supreme authority that are the Ten Commandments.

 —Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism

My acquaintance with Keith Relf and the Yardbirds had begun innocuously enough. It was one ordinary day in March 1976 when I slapped a brand new second-hand record on my brand new second-hand turntable and lit up a brand new pipeful of delight. Everything was brand new that day. I was acing all my courses, so not a worry in the world, for a change. I was starting to keep pretty hip company, too, courtesy of my record collection. My friend Phil loved the Yardbirds, and this latest of mine was their first, Five Live Yardbirds, recorded at the Marquee Club in London in March 1964. Ironically, Phil had their last, a bootleg called Last Hurrah in the Big Apple, recorded live at the Anderson Theater in New York on their final tour in 1968. I knew of them vaguely, through their connection with Led Zeppelin. Phil had played for me "Nobody's Fault but Mine," a souped-up old blues number from the Zep's latest album, Presence. The searing, ultra-amplified harmonica solo nearly killed me. "That's the Yardbirds, all over again," Phil said. From what I later heard of his bootleg, I knew they had something dark and mysterious in that harmonica that excited me, that seemed the source of something. I had to hear more. I brought the needle down on Five Live Yardbirds and felt the delicious crackle of ancient vinyl stirring to life.

I'm sure the stuff in the pipe helped us along, but there was something tingling and immediate we felt right away in the intimate club noise, captured so long ago, at the dawn, as it were, of the rock culture in which we bathed ourselves daily (but in actuality only 12 years earlier). Now, here at the beginning, there was even a formal introduction of the group by a deejay. The only name we recognized was "Lead guitar, Eric 'Slowhand' Clapton!" Much applause. Then, the last member: "The singer and harp, Keith Relf!" To our surprise, even more applause. "FIVE LIVE YARDBIRDS!" And then they launched, very much alive indeed, into Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business." Very fast, slurred vocals by Relf, then this old-time rhythm-and-blues shouting and wailing as Clapton flew into a breakneck, stinging guitar run.

Relf's harmonica ("harp") didn't appear until midway through the second number, Slim Harpo's "Got Love if You Want It," and I said out loud, to the whole world and to nobody in particular, "That's it!" It was so sinuous, sensuous and lilting, but with such an edge to it. It was brand new to us, too, since we'd never heard the American original he was emulating. But this was just a tantalizing taste – we had to wait until the final number for the full banquet.

Relf had been politely and enthusiastically introducing all the songs, but now, at the end, he just breathlessly snarled, "Hizza numba now . . . cold Umma Man" (Translation: Here's a number now called I'm a Man). Then that primal beat, one TWO three FOUR, one TWO three FOUR, and the harp, sharp and assertive now, and Keith's tough, distorted vocals. This was clearly the big number, the ultimate treatment. They were taking this song to town, and us with it. Relf gave us all the harp we were craving and more, a two-minute harmonica "essay" in the middle, with lots of  playful lingering and meandering around the bass and rhythm guitar, then a sort of doubling and tripling of time to build excitement before the return of the stark beat to introduce the third verse.

That's when things really got intense. Relf starting quietly, "Goin' back down . . .", then descending quickly into an even more twisted, gutteral snarl, ". . . to Kansas TO . . . get me a MOJO . . . that John the ConqueROO . . . ", and shifting again to a quiet ferocity by the chorus: "Now umma man . . . spelled-uh M . . . A . . . N . . . MAN!" Then Relf wailing, conjuring the rhythm to life again, and a vast, unbearable buildup of bass, furious rhythm guitar, faster and faster, louder and louder, Relf shouting, harp screaming in helpless distress, total frenzy, utter mayhem—then the bass finally tumbling over the top into release, the final verse, Keith's harp leading the charge, loud and triumphal like some terrifying ancient war trumpet:

Line I SHOOT
Will never miss,
Make-uh love tuh yuh, Babe,
Yuh can't reSIST . . .

Now umma man, spelled M . . . AYE . . . N
MAN

When Relf pronounced that final "A" as "AYE", there were some sort of weird, dark overtones in his voice that raised our eyebrows and made us both shake our heads in amazement. "What the hell was that?" I said to Phil. "Who does this guy think he is, the Devil?"

We both agreed it was a musical orgasm of sorts, although in my case any such analogy was purely speculative. Sexual naivete aside, I never forgot that first day, and years later I began to wonder whether I ever got over it. A week later I caught a terrible flu, which put me in bed for all of March break. Afterward, I never felt quite right. Nothing was physically wrong, but I had a bad, metallic, deathlike taste in my mouth for weeks and weeks. Just a coincidence, probably, but my nervous system never got back to normal. Somebody, or something, had pulled a few wires out of my switchboard—or plugged a few new ones in.

Keith the Mysterious, 1967

 Ah, Keith

Let's flash forward to a summer day in 1984. I was at the Record Store, the best secondhand and collectors' shop in town—the owners were friends of Jane's, and saved all the rare Yardbirds for me—and a new girl was minding the store, an ethereal young beauty. I had never seen her before that day, and I never saw her again. I didn't even think to ask her name. I was chatting her up about my Yardbirds thing, and she professed herself an ardent fan as well. We marvelled in succession at the three guitarists, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, icons all.

"And then there was Keith," I added, nodding my head in thoughtful appreciation..

"Ah, Keith," she said quietly, bowing her head slightly and casting her eyes downward. We shared a few seconds of contemplative silence. Nothing needed to be said. We understood each other.

 

Here's Keith

Ah, Keith, founder and leader of the Yardbirds, blueswailer and harp player extraordinaire, apt to be confused with Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones with his moppish blond hair, in fact sharing with Jones a certain dark, intense fatalism and, like Jones, destined for an early death. Relf and Jones, each striving to infuse his own emotional strain of mysterious and exotic cross-cultural influences into pop-rock. Funny, they looked almost like twins at times, and they both probably came closest to attaining what they were after in the same year, 1966, Jones with his arrangement of haunting electric sitar in "Paint It, Black," and Keith with his lyrics and vocal arrangement of "Happenings Ten Years' Time Ago." Both vital to the texture and chemistry of their respective groups, too—when Keith left the Yardbirds in 1968, the group ceased to exist, and when Jones died in 1969, the Stones became just one more band of sterile, degenerate rock-and-rollers. Keith had pioneered a certain sound, though, a dark and often searing collaboration of virtuosic electric guitar and harp that was carried over into Led Zeppelin in their transformations of such blues standards as "When the Levee Breaks" (1971) and "Nobody's Fault But Mine" (1976). So, in a sense, by the time I finally heard Keith, I'd already heard his sound, filtered through imitators.

 

Here's Brian: See what I mean?

I eventually heard Keith's other sounds, too, especially the Tibetan-Gregorian chant numbers he collaborated on with their brilliant bassist-producer Paul Samwell-Smith (who later went on to produce Cat Stevens into mega-stardom). These had those dense, dark vocal harmonies and overtones that seemed to come from another dimension, another part of the trademark Yardbirds sound you can already hear a bit on their first hit, "For Your Love" (1965). The chant-inspired material held for me a kind of cosmic edge, a strange mingling of ecstasy and doom I hadn't encountered anywhere else in pop music. When Keith interrupted the light-hearted "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" to chant the chorus—"When...will...it...end?"—the overtones hinted at the end of something much weightier than the perpetual pop adolescence described elsewhere in the song.

The story of the group itself, which I had to glean almost entirely from album liner notes, was quintessential pop-rock legend. Innovative over-achievers from the start, but unlucky and under-appreciated in their own time, plagued by bad management, bad timing and mercurial personalities, they helped usher in an incredible array of startling new sounds during their brief five-year tenure (1963‒68), and somehow Keith, despite being overshadowed by the succession of genius guitarists, seemed to me to embody the whole complex alchemy of their explorations.

First, as the "Blueswailing Yardbirds," following the Stones into the Crawdaddy and later the Marquee Club in Soho, setting the small, intimate crowds on fire with their relentless R&B "rave-ups," like the one in "I'm a Man" that had dismantled me so completely and unexpectedly in 1976, Keith wailing, harp blasting like the trumpets at Jericho, Samwell-Smith on bass and Chris Dreja on rhythm guitar going faster and faster, lashing their instruments until their fingers bled . . . but then very controlled and disciplined in the studio, recording their surprise international hit "For Your Love" with its heavy harpsichord, and shedding their guitarist, the precocious purist, Eric Clapton, in the process.

Clapton's replacement, Jeff Beck, nonchalantly redefining rock guitar to a space-age pyrotechnic level that inspired countless US sixties punk imitators (Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" the most notable and obvious, another gem it took me years to find), going all the way to Chess Studios in Chicago in 1965 (where Bo Diddley had originally recorded the song 10 years earlier) to refashion "I'm a Man" at impossible, breakneck speed, torturing the song into infinity and nearly dismantling me again when I heard this version for the first time in 1984. Writing and recording on that same session their most famous hit, the futuristic ecological anthem "Shapes of Things," leading into their most amazing year, 1966, when they seemed to anticipate, in one or two quick gulps, the whole future of rock, culminating in the transcendental "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," so far ahead of its time that it flopped back then and, ironically, had to wait another ten years to find its audience.

 

Yardbirds travelling to the future, 1966

Sadly, the year it all really came together for them, 1966, was also the year it began to fall apart. First, the retirement of Samwell-Smith, who had contributed so much, both onstage and in the control booth, to fashioning their sound. Then, shortly after brilliant session guitarist Jimmy Page was added to replace him, the departure of Jeff Beck in some vague combination of exhaustion and jealous egomania (from drummer Jim McCarty's liner notes to their 1966 album "The Yardbirds": "It's often been said that Jeff Beck is one of the leading guitarists in the country, and I'm inclined to agree with him."). Then the final tours in 1967–68, as a four-piece with Jimmy Page. Another sound altogether, and yet still characteristically Yardbirds—the dark, ethereal guitar-harmonica daemon that resonated into Led Zeppelin but was never quite equalled by them. Keith and McCarty on LSD now most of the time, Keith integrating enigmatic, Hamlet-like soliloquies into "I'm a Man," their live showpiece, and Page introducing all sorts of ghostly effects, including bowing his guitar like a viola, wringing from its tortured neck what sounds like moans from the spirit world ("the grand sorcerer of the electric guitar," as Keith calls him on one of the bootlegs). Yes, they still had it in their best moments as a live band, but, mismatched with pop producer Mickie Most, they produced a series of dubious pop singles and called it quits in mid-1968, just before the sort of extended, innovative treatments they were offering in their live performances—but had never bothered to record properly—began to catch fire in the rock marketplace, as albums replaced singles as the primary medium for serious listeners.

John-the-Baptists, crying in those wilderness days before mega-hype and rock videos, forerunners of so much to come, and yet for us Yardbirds fans, what they had been in themselves was more than enough. Like me and the girl at the Record Store, most of us tended to be a tad obsessed and fanatical. Dig these 1979 liner notes for the bootleg recording of their last concert in L.A., penned by the fan who recorded it on his cassette machine and describing in vivid terms the charismatic effect of the late Yardbirds sound:

When I attended this concert, I felt joy, reverence and an inescapable feeling of doom. Doom for myself, doom for the Yardbirds. In the back of my mind the thought, "Anything this great will be destroyed!"  "When will it end?"  "It has!"

The central voice you hear is that of the late Keith Relf (1943–1976). He is also responsible for the strange harmonica, balancing agilely in the depths of Jimmy Page's eternal statements of life, death, lost love and lonesome sacrifice . . . .

Holding in the palm of his outstretched hand the skull, the philosopher's stone, the image of Hamlet's brooding self-reflection, Relf soliloquizes about the unknowable and unforgivable . . . .

Then the flash . . . the rush . . . the fanfare . . . the attack . . . the debate with steel forces   . . . the victory and breakthrough . . . the infamous "Yardbird build-up" . . . the jail break. He's going—into infinity—goodbye, Keith Relf . . . .

Beatific masterpieces. Dazzling, awesome, frightening. Hitler Youth. The marching, rotating swastika. The European blood running in their veins, deeply flowing into dark labyrinths of Aryan ancestry. Then black anguish, the southern blues, Africa 2001, Negro blood radiating into white boys . . . . A combination of Apuleius, Sonny Boy Williamson and the terror of Sauron . . . .

How many people in the room really heard the meaning of these songs? Few indeed.  Set aside some time to honestly fathom the depths. Listen to each word, try to pick them out. Crack the code of the Rosetta stone . . . .

These sounds activate the air around your jumping ears into multidimensional quantum leaps, pinwheels interlocking in austere perfection . . . Mythology of the nuclear age. The philosophy of total expression in boundless electricity. The ultimate Yardbird build-up, the overtone . . . . It's 1979, the collapse is near. Here are the Yardbirds!

Well, I couldn't maintain quite that pitch of apocalyptic fanaticism, but people had become generally aware that the Yardbirds were my thing. At the Carswell Christmas party in 1984, Jane had given me a T-shirt she'd made for me, "The Yardbirds" in big black, stylized Yardbirds lettering—their logo, essentially. Then I played some of my Yardbirds and sixties R&B for people to dance to. To my surprise, they quite liked it, especially the 1965 studio version of "I'm a Man," which made us all dance faster and faster, like dervishes, until we felt like dissolving into thin air. "Dancing the Apocalypse," I called it, having no idea what that meant.

Aside from the liner notes, though, there was still a dearth of information about them. In March, I eagerly scooped from a second-hand store a tattered paperback from the mid-sixties called The Pop-Makers, a collection of "inside-scoop" articles on various English groups of the time—The Animals, Manfred Mann, the Kinks and, happily, the Yardbirds. The Yardbirds piece followed them to and from a typical, gruelling package gig, and included several casual snapshots of members of the group on the train. Alison pointed out that in the photo of Keith, he looked a lot like me—his eyes, his expression. I had to agree. None of the other photos I'd seen of him looked much like me, but this one did. Strange, I thought.

In July I took a three-week trip to the Maritimes, stopping in Toronto on the way there and back. Walking down Queen Street in downtown Toronto one afternoon on the homeward visit, I passed an art bookstore and thought I saw the word "YARDBIRDS" on the spine of a book inside. I wheeled right and entered the store for a closer look. I was right! Somebody had finally written a book about them! It was an anecdotal biography of the band written by a journalist with the help of the rhythm section, Dreja and McCarty, and there were plenty of photographs. Needless to say, I bought it, and that gave me the idea of heading to Peter Dunn's Vinyl Museum on Yonge St. for a look at their Yardbirds stuff. There I found the motherlode: a new bootleg of live radio performances, and an interview disc with, once again, Dreja and McCarty. Well, they were finally starting to get the word out, marketing some of this stuff.

The interview and the book contained lots of great anecdotes, but they tended to overlap a lot, and there was still a frustrating lack of real dope on Keith. What there was of it made him seem even more hidden and enigmatic. This from the only page in the book which deals with him explicitly:

. . . the main work in building up the band's image was being done by Keith Relf, to a large extent without the rest of them even knowing. Chris explains: "In the backline of a band you can't really see what the front man is doing . . . It was only when I saw film of us that I knew he was getting into all these moody looks and hand movements. It started to happen when we started appearing on TV. I have to admit that he did look quite striking, that sort of Brian Jones look . . . As a performer he could be terribly unpredictable . . . He could be really good; he was never a Walker Brothers–style cultivated image, you got him for real, whatever that was at the time."

Keith was easily the most complex member of the band: genuinely more bohemian than the others, a deep thinker and very sensitive, but sadly with an inbuilt self-destruct mechanism. As Jim says, "He never purposely put people down, but he used to get into such a state that sometimes you just couldn't relate to him. . . . When he was in a good state of mind he was a very gentle person, but the slightest thing knocked him off the rails."

Perhaps Keith was just too complex to describe easily, or perhaps Dreja and McCarty were reticent because he was no longer alive. In any case, they left me thirsty for more. The interview did contain an interesting discussion of Keith's conception of "Happenings Ten Years' Time Ago." Apparently, the song concerns the transmigration of his soul after death, through the eyes and ears of his "next lifetime," so to speak, in the form of a vivid but ambiguous déjà vu experience. The lyrics certainly bear this out, and this accounts for the confusing Cockney voice in the middle which is nearly drowned out by the soaring guitars of Beck and Page, the voice being Keith's imitation of an actual "character" who used to follow the group around, asking the same inane questions as in the song: "Pop group, are yuh?" "Playin' in Chicago tonight, are yuh, then?" "Wattya do wif all yer long hair, then?" The explosion that precedes all this confusion must signify the "post-Keith" character's recognition of the vision. (In the live bootleg version, Keith substitutes for the explosion a splendid high-pitched wail, like the sound a person might make while falling from a great height in a dream.) In the last verse, which precedes both the explosion and the vision, he feels all this coming and wonders what the heck is going on:

It seems to me I've been here before,
The sounds I heard and the sights I saw.
Was it real or was it in my dreams?
I need to know what it all means.

So the song essentially takes place in two dimensions—the "post-Keith's" real lifetime and the lifetime of the “original” Keith that he's "remembering" (though it's not like a normal memory; as "post-Keith" says, "Memories don't strike me so . . ."). And, as one of the interviewers says, it's still curious—ten years isn't much of a transmigration, is it? There were, as it turned out, though, ten years between the song and Keith's death, so it did perhaps make sense in some strange way.

Keith also liked to rent a projector, while staying in hotels on the road, to project colours onto himself, and stars, crescents and other celestial shapes. "Yes, Keith was always a strange one," commented McCarty. I had read in a lost fragment of liner notes somewhere (or had I only dreamed it?) that Keith's mother was "some sort of spiritualist," which lent another mysterious twist. One conclusion that seemed unanimous: Keith was driven and intense. Severely asthmatic, he suffered a collapsed lung in 1965 and almost died. So he was doing all that great harmonica essentially with one lung! Another fan testified on the interview disk liner notes:

Sometimes just watching him onstage—when it really got bad for him and he had to take out his inhaler in the middle of a word to get some oxygen—was one of the most shocking things I'd seen.

That Keith was deep and intense I had known the first time I heard him—his penetrating focus in "I'm a Man" was mesmerizing—but I had never suspected he was battling such tremendous limitations. Whatever his musical vision was, whatever he was trying to put across, must have been of ultimate importance to him. Now that I thought of it, in those live bootleg extended versions of "I'm A Man" recorded on their last tour in 1968, he seemed to be taking the song pretty damn seriously.