The first album by The Yardbirds [Five Live Yardbirds] was a live recording. What was the decision process that went into this?
Very simple — in England we didn't have the recording business that was so established and dominant as here [the USA], you know. So bands really had to gather an audience by playing live. This was something they could do. Most English bands were very good live bands.
They were all club bands.
In England the club idea was not like here. It wasn't as there was a physical place and that was it. It was evenings run by promoters in the back of pubs who had little rooms where music happened, and people used to go and dance. The English music scene from skiffle onwards — even before that, traditional jazz and stuff — really took place in the back of pubs, and those were "clubs."
You're talking about the young British bands?
The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds. There were a couple of blues bands outside of London. This wasn't rock n' roll — this was the blues. The rock n' roll thing came in afterwards. It's very interesting how the possibility of recording happened. The first time that Sonny Boy Williamson came to England he stayed with me. I took him in my car and we went to all these places where there were blues bands. In the South End there were The Paramounts that [later] became known as the Procol Harum. In Birmingham there was the Spencer Davis [Group] where Steve [Winwood] was like, fourteen and playing the organ. In Newcastle there was a band called the Alan Price Kansas Blues Quintet, later known as The Animals. I ended up there and found a guy, Phillip Wood, who had a portable Ampex machine — mono. He had done demos for The Animals — a kind of straight, innocent character, but he had this equipment. I think it must have been the only Ampex one inch (whatever it was at the time) portable recording device. When I saw this I went, "Wow! Let's drag this into the club." And we recorded Sonny Boy with The Animals the first time that Sonny Boy went up there. I convinced Phillip to come to the next venue. I did a big thing on February 28th (which was my birthday) in 1964, in Birmingham. It was my first edition of a British blues festival — Sonny Boy, Rod Stewart and Long John Baldry — anybody that could play a couple of blues numbers would be on this, and that's how we convinced the Marquee to let us have a go at recording the live stuff.
What do you think caused this seeming explosion of bands at that point?
What creates real phenomenal turn-arounds in civilizational culture is the love of something. The love of the blues became very important. Either it grabbed you or it didn't, but the ones that got grabbed by it soon became musicians because they loved it so much they wanted to play it. Rock n' roll had a period of success in England, but it was based on the kind of commercial rock n' roll you had here. You had the Elvis Presley imitations like Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. A very significant development was the opening of the Marquee Club — owned by jazz musician Chris Barber. At one point it was suggested that [British blues legend] Alexis Korner would get his own night at the club — a blues night. This became the magnet for all the young blues players. The blues and skiffle thing were more [for] student types. The commercial type thing gave way to people like Cliff Richards and The Shadows. It had nothing to do with blues. When The Yardbirds came to the point of making some kind of a statement, making a live album was the answer. We were playing to a thousand people in the Marquee and the atmosphere was unbelievable. That was the thing that I started off doing at the Crawdaddy Club with The [Rolling] Stones — just do forty-five minute sets — they had to stick! They had to have a catharsis of some kind. Fundamentally, all of that was based on the Bo Diddley beat.
Because it could go on forever.
It could go on forever. The last song of the bands would be twenty minutes of a Bo Diddley-type of thing. That's why I called my club Crawdaddy, because it was a reference to "Crawdad" by Bo Diddley.
The first thing that occurs to me when I listen to the live album is what an incredible band they were. How loud was it?
It couldn't have been that loud — they were twenty-five watt amps.
Still, there was such a power to it.
Yes. Often times there were homemade bass amps. It was also at the very beginning of all that stuff. Tom Jennings [Vox] and Jim Marshall used to work for us. We had to go and find engineers. At the time there were no independent studios in London. If you wanted to have anything recorded you had to have a deal with a record company. Then finally a blind BBC engineer [Angus McKenzie], a wonderful guy, took over an old synagogue on Baker Street and started a recording studio there, later to be known as Olympic Sound. They're still going. They had a really cool engineer there, Keith Grant, and he listened to blues and other kinds of iconoclastic things. I convinced him to drag half the studio out of the synagogue and to bring it down to my place in Richmond to record The Yardbirds with Sonny Boy Williamson, and he set up his control room in the kitchen. It was early days for this kind of stuff. I know you heard the album, but I don't know what condition you heard it in — I don't know what generation it is. I was really pleased with the results [at the time].
It sounds really great.
You hear the room. You hear the people in the room. We put mics up in the room as well. It was my idea to get the room into a source for a soundscape type of thing. I always looked at it as something you could reproduce visually somehow in your head, whatever the distance is in the thing and wherever anything stood so it would kind of frame around and be solid. One of the big problems was getting the vocals sufficiently present because Keith [Relf] was not a great singer and we had to do with what we had. We didn't do much overdubbing on the live album — we might've patched a little vocal backing on or something. We only had a day to do this, so we started at one in the afternoon to set up the stuff and we recorded two sets, because the band did two forty-five minute sets. So, that's how we did it and then we took the best things and cut a little bit — just editing and putting it together and that's all.
Interestingly, you're immediately made aware that this is being recorded as a album, because the guy introduces the show as the Five Live Yardbirds album that is being recorded.
Hamish [Grimes] — he was my acolyte and coconspirator. He's the one that does the introduction and took the photographs in the early days.
How did The Yardbirds come into your life?
If you remember, The Rolling Stones were the first band that played in my club. I did the whole thing to promote the blues idea. When they hit the big time and they left the club, I had to figure out what the next band was going to do. By that time the Stones had built up a huge following — I had a thousand people every Sunday night at my club. We had all this dancing going on and it created the attention in the press and everything else. I decided I wanted to look for a band that had improvisational inclinations — that could add to this ritualistic thing that characterized the exchange between the stage and the audience. I wanted somebody who was able to extend the format — the form. I listened to quite a number of bands at the time. I wanted to find something that would allow us to break out a little bit of the blues thing because I'm against purism. I'm for authenticity, but I'm against purism.
You're certainly interested in innovation.
I wanted to find a band that would add some arranging ideas. One day I was walking up the stairs to this rehearsal room and there's a band rehearsing upstairs that my friend Hamish had found. I'm hearing them doing this kind of breaking down — going up and down — and I'm thinking, "This is the band that should follow The Stones at the Crawdaddy." I worked with them and we rehearsed and this is really great, inventive stuff and I'm saying, "Extend that." And then I played them some musique concrète and shit like that and, "If you could do this kind of stuff on the guitar..."
So were you informing The Yardbirds about other kinds of music?
Oh yeah, definitely. I saw the potential immediately and this was the very beginning of the idea that rock n' roll could reach out and not necessarily borrow things, perhaps even in a tribute kind of sense — pay tribute to all this underdog music that nobody was listening to because, [mocking tone] "Oh, that's so strange. That's so weird." Stravinsky was a big hero of mine, always. My father was Russian and he was heavily into music so we had a very good education in Russian and Hungarian avant-garde classical music. I totally encouraged all that noise stuff. [Then] at one stage we had to pay-we had to take our hat off to the business and say, "Okay, fine, we have to go to the studio and we have to make singles. We have to get on the radio."
Was this still '64?
Yeah, that was '64, something like that. The Beatles did it all. They came along and they cleared the way all of sudden and the record business didn't know a fucking thing. They didn't know what hit them. They didn't know what had hit them because all of a sudden there's this genre of music they had no idea how to deal with. That's how independent production was able to have its start, because the record companies didn't know anything.
The sounds The Yardbirds were making on this album, on tracks like "Smokestack Lightning" and "Here 'Tis" — they could've come from a noise band this year. The scratching things Clapton does — the idea that this was the same year that The Beatles were doing, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" — it's kind of mind blowing.
Oh definitely — and Eric [Clapton] left it, which I could never understand. I think he got scared. I remember him sometimes walking off the stage at the end of these sets completely shaken. I remember him saying, "I can't do this anymore." Because you were really taken over by this kind of incredible stuff, which I loved and wanted to encourage. I'd tell him, "Don't be scared. This is fine. This is great." But you know how it is when you're touching certain things like the Devil's chords and whatever — you get to a point where you're in unknown territory and it can scare you. I think Eric never went back to this. Not even in Cream, which I could never understand. I always wanted to ask him, "Hey what the fuck?" because now he's so sort of traditional, conventional and conservative — he turned into a kind of a really nice, elegant, but not really heavy guitar player. [Jeff] Beck took over completely, but not exactly completely either.
Speaking of Jeff Beck, on "Mister, You're a Better Man Than I" [Having a Rave Up], there is a point during his solo when he clearly steps on his distortion pedal. You can hear the first note of his solo is still clean. Was the whole band recorded live?
Yes.
So, he had to do his solos during the rhythm track?
Yes. We did that with Sam Phillips in Memphis. The one big difference from recording in England and recording here was the drum sound. We all wanted that drum sound. The Stones had already done that [recorded in the USA]. All the [UK] blues bands wanted to go to Chess when they got to America. This kind of sustained stuff on Jeff's thing, we did about three weeks after we did "Shapes of Things" — which we did at Chess Records Studio in Chicago. If you listen to that song you'll hear a guitar — a sustained kind of guitar thing very similar to this. We wrote "Shapes of Things" in the Holiday Inn in Chicago the day before we recorded it and it was based on a Dave Brubeck riff which we had heard when we were traveling from Little Rock to somewhere at night. You travel and you try to listen to the stations as you go along and you lose them after twenty miles. Anyway, Sam [bassist Paul Samwell-Smith] was in the back and I was driving and I said, "Oh look, that's a real good stand up bass line." Then we threw it all together in the bar of the Holiday Inn at two o'clock in the morning and recorded it the next day. And there, Jeff was kind of a bit lost. We needed to have a guitar solo and we didn't have time and again, I was always worried about not finishing. So I did something that was perhaps a little bit dishonest to save the situation. Jeff was playing this solo — we couldn't get a solo together that would accommodate the space. Either it was too much sustain and not enough phrasing or there was too much phrasing and not enough sustain, so I kept the two and mixed them together.
So there was some overdubbing going on at this point?
Yes. I always kept the overdubbing possibility for the vocals because it's not easy for a singer who hasn't got a big voice to get the acoustic space you needed. When the 4-track recording thing happened we would do the backing tracks first. Then we would do the vocal.
The backing tracks would be the rhythm guitar, bass and drums?
So, Beck at that point — was he part of the rhythm tracks?
Yeah, he would play everything. Then we would add the vocal and the vocal backing at the same time and then we would add solos or anything like that. We started recording in mono, and if you wanted to do any overdubs you had to go from 1-track to another 1-track by adding things to it. In England, before you went from 1-track to 4-track you went to 3-track. We also didn't record in stereo in those days because it didn't exist to anyone. It was, "What's stereo?" All that stuff was done in mono.
How did the hook-up with Sam Phillips take place?
We drove out of Little Rock, Arkansas after we got beaten up by rednecks. It was night, sneaking out like thieves to get to Memphis. We got there at six in the morning and we tried to find Sam — who had gone off fishing. I had called CBS when we got here from England, "Whatever you do, you have to arrange a recording session at Sun Studios. We have two days. You have got to get Sam Phillips." We worshipped him. The sound in the studio!
Were all these people, like the Chess people and Sam Phillips, were they just completely confused about all this attention or did they understand?
Oh, not at all! They were delighted.
I'm sure they must have been, but all of the sudden all these Brits are worshipping them and the average American citizen had no idea who they were.
Sam Phillips was so taken by us. We didn't find him until midnight that night — we spent eighteen hours trying to find him. At midnight he comes back totally drunk out of his mind with a fishing rod. He didn't even know that CBS [was trying to contact him] and he didn't really want to do this. He said, "I'm not an engineer any more. I don't want to engineer no Limey bands!" It was only because I had six hundred dollars cash in my pocket that he decided to open up the studio at midnight. But when he heard The Yardbirds tune up, he couldn't believe it — his ears propped up. He got some coffee and sobered up. He wouldn't let us out of the studio — we were in there until seven in the morning or eight. He'd say, "Let's do another one." He had a penthouse in the Holiday Inn and we ended up there at ten o'clock in the morning drinking Wild Turkey! It was one of the loveliest, loveliest experiences ever — a transforming experience. He couldn't believe it. He engineered the whole thing — I was his assistant. "Move the mic over there." "Okay." He put so much concentration into trying to really get a good sound for us. The Yardbirds were principally "trained" as a live band, so when entering a studio they were ready — there were no hesitations about the material. This did impress the engineers — including Sam Philips who praised us for it — and no time was ever wasted.
Did you have a particular studio in the UK that you worked out of?
Mostly Olympic Sound. We brought a lot of business there. The sound engineers were my good mates. We used to go out drinking and I never wanted to be one, but I wanted to know everything they knew so I could talk to them and they could understand what I was after.
