This tug o' war would end in tears. The first Yardbirds album was a live set of blistering blues that featured Eric Clapton evolving on his feet. Then, after a couple of white boy R&B singles they put out the extraordinary For Your Love, driven not by blues harp and a raunchy Gibson semi but a harpsichord. Clapton the purist got up, took his axe and left. Jeff Beck joined about two weeks later and ushered in an era of uneasy change with straining throwbacks but brilliant peaks. This is the album he starred in.
The real title is eponymous but, as with the double set called the Beatles but better known as the White Album, no one calls it that. The usual title given this LP comes from the drawing on its front cover. A big man with loping simian arms plods along, in one hand a pair of headphones with a torn cable and in the other a spool with tape trailing behind him. His expression sits somewhere between confusion and anxiety, the evident result of working with the band. Following the waves of the headphone cable, in florid lettering, is the name Roger the Engineer. The huge machine in the background is a kind of Heath Robinson rendering of a recording console whose mix of chimney stacks and computer reels would testify to the mystery of the recording process were it not for the long necked bird drawn on its side and the five eggs beneath it. It was drawn by guitarist Chris Dreja.
Lost Women starts with an R&B shuffle and a solid bass riff. Keith Relf starts in over this and with a delay worthy of his status to come Jeff Beck only comes in in the chorus firing machine pefect barre chords. It's pretty standard Yardbirds fare until the solo, the rave up section where Relf sets in with some hard and sorrowful notes on the harmonica and Beck discretely following beneath. Relf lets fly and just as we expect Beck to follow as Clapton would have he doesn't. Instead, he wanders around the studio, finding the good points for feedback, uses his guitar's volume knob so the long droning notes slide into the ears like serpents. He refuses to open fire as anyone who moved into the maestro's podium would. He smoulders and lurks, giving the blues shouter a sinister intensity. Eric Clapton would never have thought of that. That's the point.
We are plunged head first into the single with the full band chugging hard, shouting in time while Beck twiddles a riff high up on the fretboard that sounds like an Arabic reed instrument. Relf launches into a lyric about consumerism and hedonism which might as well be Rock Around the Clock until the verse grinds into another drone with Beck's string bends wail beneath the strain: "When will it end? When will it end?" Repeat! "Over under sideways down. Backwards forwards square and round..."
Beck had already earned his stripes at live gigs but also contributed real presence to the singles before this LP like Heart Full of Soul, Evil Hearted You with their sitar like riffs and grown up surf rock solos before the massive strange Shapes of Things with its droning guitar interpolations and a solo section that combined a million note noodle with distant howling but articulate feedback that was more like a montage from a horror movie than a rock song from its time. This is why if you hear a chronologically correct compilation album from the band the songs will start out with a few unremarkable electric blues workouts and then suddenly sound like proto-psychedelia. There were already progressive leanings within the band that made Clapton flee the scene. Jeff Beck moved in and drove that exploratory spirit and led the charge. His influence is all over this otherwise frustrating and inconsistent set.
That said, but also in proof of it, the next track is a straightforward blue by Beck which sounds like a throwback to the days before he joined. The Nazz Are Blue is an unremarkable 12-bar. Energetic, sure and stinging with Beck's fiery lead licks but seems to drag halfway through without recovery. Maybe Keith should have sung it.
I Can't Make Your Way is a jaunty pop singalong the like of which the band would head into in their final alienating period with pop producer Mickie Most. It's the kind of track that would turn up on re-releases of Who albums when John and Moonie had been larking about in the studio by themselves. Nice enough but ...
Rack My Mind is back to the tougher side with a bluesy rifferama. Beck adds dynamics to it by playing harmonics in the second verse instead of the expected riffing clanging in with a stabbing lead lick in the bars before the chorus and emitting tiny squeals and more harmonics in the final verse before soaring into a huge screaming solo as the song rushes to its close.
Farewell closes the old Side One with a gentle vamp on the piano. Keith comes in mellow and calm about his impressions of looking at the world as though for the first time. The others join in behind as a credible choir ah-ing and humming down the chords, building to a lush third verse with a delayed falsetto at the end of the lines. Finally it's just Keith and the piano saying goodbye to the future. Is this a suicide note? It must be history's most gorgeous one. I can never play this one just once.
If you hear this on CD or in digital form without the side divisions you will wonder what they were thinking. Hot House of Omagarashid starts with screams and a drum break over a wobble board. No lyrics but the band chanting yah yah yah. Somewhere between a Martin Denny exotica piece and watching an old Tarzan movie though a veil of lysergic acid this is the most infectiously fun track on the album.
Jeff's Boogie seems to put the lie to any claim I made about Beck's yen for musical adventure as it's a plodding and uninspired 12-bar instrumental begins big and ends eventually. Listen for the guitar tone, maybe.
He's Always There draws into intrigue straight away as a downward darting riff and droning harmonies tense us up. It's like a weird minor key version of Shout. Across the room the narrator locks eyes with a babe and it means something but the guy, the man, the ape, the protector, the jailer, the husband, is always with her. The chorus breaks out in a looser time and a progression that sounds like The Who in their darker moments and ends down in whisperville with the title line as some tight latin percussion scrapes away. After two of those the whisper strains on as a kind of secretive, obssessive call and response. Everyone's been here.
Turn Into Earth slows its brisk three time down with a tolling piano chord progression. Minor rubs against major in the same modal mash that made Still I'm Sad so extraordinary. A lighter Gregorian wordless chanting starts and Relf's lead vocal seems to peel off from it. If Farewell was a suicide note in disguise Turn Into Earth is a whole manifesto. I can't hear Joy Division covering it but boy is the mood on their street. It's most likely Relf writing with the mood of the music. Still, the lyric is neat and forceful, leaving no escape route from "the darkness of my day." This, it should be remembered was the year of Paint it Black and Eleanor Rigby hitting the charts. But the knelling surrender in this one seems to outdo both as it waltzes on past the final statement, a kind of anti-light in all that paisley.
Urgent ride cymbals are joined by amp-distorted bass. A guitar chimes in and then Jeff comes in with slower barre chords gleaming with light distortion. Keith yells a 7th down to fifth tune (think Last Train to Clarksville, very common trope). Beck plays with the vamping rhythm guitar with bends, harmonics, amp tremolo, spilling colours all over the verses and noodles in the pentatonic in the choruses. He's slow to come into his solo and when he does it's a combination of all of those things, some flash, some mood lighting and feedback all into the fadeout. Exiting with drama that goes beyond the stage.
The final track explodes with operatics as Relf in his nastiest snarl tells us of the root of all evil in Ever Since the World Began as a piano sits in for a tubular bell and the choir sings the word money in fifths like a hellbound chorus line. This weirdly gives way to a guitar shuffle in a major key. Big bass underneath and more amp tremolo. Keith keeps on theme but this time firmly in swinging London as the goblin choir behind him changes from their scarlet drags to discotheque paisley, clicking their fingers and chirping, "ya don't need money". Relf delivers his last couplet ending with: "you sold your soul the answer's no." And everything stops. Breaks no, no screech. Bam. End. Huh?
Whether more tracks were planned or that was meant to lead on to another track with the sudden ending giving way to something more dramatic is unknown to me but it's a final statement that goes rapidly from a bang to a whimper with nothing to follow. One of the strangest endings of any conventional rock album I've ever heard. The movie has that one last scene that completely twists everything you saw, lasts for a few seconds of one shot and the credits roll against a stark black field.
I don't know that I should still be surprised by this, given that I've known this album for decades now (I bought the early 80s reissue) and have always considered it strange the way that rushed creative work always does. The new hotshot guitar slinger comes in for the big production, adds some flash here and there but mostly keeps to the atmosphere, drawing it from some unlikely shadows and always impressing with his restraint in the application. The band as a whole present their first wholly original set and it's an uneasy pull between their live reputation as blues shouters and the electro-pioneers they were on the pop charts. Both approaches have mediocre produce along with the brilliance and we end up with this uneasy jumble.
It's important to remember that not everyone in the great British rock 'splosion o' the 60s wasn't detonated all at once nor by teams as unified as The Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Listen to the early Who albums to hear similar awkward shoehorning of live and studio identities. While The Who and The Kinks ironed this problem out on record The Yardbirds weren't so well served. Unstable from the word go, the line-up seemed publicly dependent on the star guitarist and, while there was clearly some songwriting talent to go with the wonderboys' sonic inspiration, so much of it was left there. Two paint-by-numbers 12 bar work outs that drag everything down so the new axeman can be featured completely belie all the really intriguing stuff he was putting in on the rest of the tracks he was on (Farewell is the only one without any guitar). And for all of Beck's hotshot flash his major contributions to the Yardbirds' greatness were the magnetic sonics he used to transform their pop singles rather than take any earnest opportunity for an extended workout on a long player.
After this album Beck's friend, the one who'd passed up earlier and recommended Jeff, Jimmy Page joined and briefly added his own brilliance to Becks live and in a few singles (can see the lineup in the movie Blow Up). Beck got sick and left and Jimmy took over just in time for Mickey Most to try and turn them into Herman's Hermits as they crumbled in his hands, leaving a few minutes of psychedelia here, some proto-heavy metal there, a lot of unconvincing pop and a lot of mess. A year after this the band had morphed, losing a face here and gaining another there until they had to admit they weren't The Yardbirds but Led Zeppelin. And from that time there were no more tigers in the village.
But here we have a strange thing. A set of massive potential recorded well for a change, it cannot lift its slighter moments to the heights around them and as a result they come off worse than filler. Islands of greatness in an ocean of gormless failures. Harsh? Maybe, but this is what happens when a band puts all its eggs into a star player and still tries to chase up those good ideas that he'd normally not be part of. Curiously, Beck did take part in the good ideas, bringing plenty of his own. It's just that when they rendered unto their old identity it sounded forced and fake. This is a shame as while that strip of outstanding songs that hint at sounds beyond their time in the compilations seems betrayed at first listen to a set that was intended to sit as a collection but can't. The ideas are there, it's just takes a few listens. The trick is getting beyond the first, or even through it. But do it.
Listening notes: I used to own a deep dish reissue of the stereo mix from the 80s but for this referred to a more recent CD remaster, namely the mono mix on the 2 disc Repertoire set (the pic I used in this post is not quite the cover art but it mostly is).
No comments:
Post a Comment