Song 180: “Dazed and Confused” by Led Zeppelin, Part One, The Song Remains the Same

A History of Rock Music and 500 Songs by Andrew Hick Song 180 Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin Part 1 The Song Remains the Same Before we begin, this episode contains some mild mentions of mental health problems, alcohol abuse and violence. If those things are likely to upset you, you may want to check the transcript instead of listening. One of the biggest changes to the way popular music was marketed from the mid-60s onwards is the new emphasis that was put on performers who also wrote their own material. There had, of course, always been performers who wrote, particularly in the blues and country genres, where the smaller labels that put out records by new artists wanted to copyright in new songs as much as they wanted to write the recording, but in every genre to at least some extent. And we've looked at plenty of artists in recent episodes who didn't write all their own material. Bands like the Turtles, the Monkeys or the Birds, and most of the Motown artists, were at least as known for interpretations of other people's songs as for writing their own. But it was still the case that, in large part because of the promotion of Lennon and McCartney as songwriters as well as performers, and of Bob Dylan as a performer of his own material, as the 60s drew on, a key signifier of authenticity in popular music, a fraught concept at the best of times was whether the performer wrote the songs they were performing, and so there grew to be a change in the type of material it charted. Before the mid-60s, it was expected that songs would be performed by many different artists who would each do their own version in their own style. Tony Bennett's version of Cold Cold Heart bore little or no relationship to Hank Williams' and nobody expected it to. But as the idea of people performing their own material as a selling point rather than as just something that happened, started to become prominent in the industry. It also linked with another idea, one that was sold less to the public, but was nonetheless true. Increasingly, the unit of popular music was the record, not the song. As production was becoming more and more sophisticated, people were constructing sounds in the studio, rather than writing songs that would stand apart from their arrangements and performances. A record like, say, Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles is not a record that could easily be covered, though of course people have tried. The song is elusive, deeply personal, and rarely only makes sense when sung by John Lennon, while much of the power of the record comes not from the song, Great As It Is, but from the Mellotron and the orchestral arrangements and so forth. If you replace them, you lose half of what makes Strawberry Fields worth listening to. And this posed a problem for a whole generation of singers, because the pop singers who had come to prominence in the 30s, 40s and 50s, many of whom were still only in early middle age, had until very recently been having regular hits, and were far from willing to settle back into retirement. They had built their careers on recording their own interpretations of current pop hits, and suddenly most of the biggest hits were not songs you could easily reinterpret. almost all of them, whether from their own desire to keep up with the times or under record company pressure, felt like they had to record material by the new generation of writers. Sometimes they would manage to pull off something really rather special. Ella Fitzgerald, for example, recorded her Ella album produced by Richard Perry, in which she recorded songs by Smokey Robinson, Randy Newman and the Beatles. I feel your pain All the time we report Coopin' the blood Really blown down the blues But you'll have to Get them all pulled up After the sad boy Trouble And turn in what may be the definitive version of Harry Nilsson's Open Your Window. Open your window and take a deep start. Think about letting the rest of the world go flying. Keep a kite, taking it easy is easy as time. And holding your hand is such a natural high. Others were more mixed. Peggy Lee, for example, put out some great versions of songs by Randy Newman and Leder and Stoller, and did a very creditable take on You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman. Before the day I met you, life was so unkind. You're the key to my peace of mind. Cause you make me feel, you make me feel, you make me feel like a natural woman. And when my soul was in the lost and found. But sounds frankly lost when attempting everyday people. There is a long hair who doesn't like the short hair. For being such a rich one that will not help the poor one. Different stuff, for different times. And so on and so on and booby-doo-bee-doo-bee. Do-do-do-do-do. We can't believe it's never. There is a yellow one that won't accept... But sometimes the mismatch between singer and song could be so painful that it would continue to be a joke more than 50 years later. As with Frank Sinatra, a man who hated rock and roll and the younger generation with every fibre in his body, and his different interpretation of Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs. Robinson. And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson. Jilly loves you more than you will know. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson. Heaven holds a place for those who pray. Hey, hey, hey. The Jilly mentioned in Ternat-resalted lyrics is not, as one would expect, a woman. Rather, it's a tip of the hat to a man named Ermena Gildo Rizzo, known to everyone as Jilly. Jilly Rizzo was a former bouncer and small-time criminal turned bar owner, and the bar he owned, Jilly's in Manhattan, became the place where Sinatra spent most of his time when he was in New York, and it was there that the two most successful singers named Frank from New Jersey met, sometime towards the end of the 60s. While Sinatra was born in Hoboken, Frankie Valli was from Newark, about 12 miles away, and was, like Sinatra, an Italian-American. His birth name was Francesco Castelluccio and he had been inspired to become a singer in large part thanks to being taken by his mother to the Thea Sinatra show when he was seven years old. Success had come relatively late for Valli who had started performing in 1951 and made his first solo record in 1953 and had then struggled for years with a vocal group called The Four Lovers who had various line-up changes but didn't really come together as a group until they met the Royal Teens. There have been one hit wonders with Short Shots. Bob Gordio, the Royal Teens keyboard player, had co-written that song, and he joined the Four Lovers, who soon after changed their name to the Four Seasons. Very early on, Valley and Gordio agreed between themselves that the two of them, as lead singer and songwriter respectively, would actually be the Four Seasons legally. Other members came and went over the years, and Gordio stopped touring with the group in 1972, though he remained with them for recordings. But to this day, the Four Seasons partnership is Frankie Valli, who still tours in his 90s, and Bob Gordio, who is 82 years old. Indeed, that partnership has always been on the honour system. According to Gordio, there has never been a formal contract made up for their partnership, because it encompasses so many different aspects. Performance, owning of their master recordings, their publishing company, the Four Seasons name, and much more besides. Instead, they sealed the agreement with a handshake in 1962, and as Bally puts it, it has And they split everything. Gordio gets an equal royalty for every performance that Bally does, whether as the Four Seasons or the Solo Artist, and whether he's performing Gordio's material or someone else's. and similarly Valley gets 50% of Gordio's songwriting money whether for songs he wrote for the Four Seasons or for other artists After a false start with the single on Gone Records one of several labels started by George Golder and bought up by Morris Levy the Four Seasons had their first hit in 1962 with Sherry a song by Gordio which reached number one That record was produced by Bob Crewe, who would often co-write with Gordio. And soon there was a whole hit-making team based around the Four Seasons, with everyone having a part to play. Valley as lead singer, Bob True as producer and sometime lyricist, Bob Gordio as principal songwriter and uncredited co-producer, and Charles Colello, a former member of the Four Lovers who Valley had kept in touch with, and who had briefly joined the Four Seasons himself when bass player Nick Massey left before a permanent replacement was found, as a ranger, later joined by the additional songwriting team of Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell, who would write both as a team on their own and with Crew and Gordio. The group had a very distinctive style. Led by Valley's piercing falsetto, they combined harmonies influenced by the four freshmen, high lows and modern airs, though never as complex as any of those groups. With a stomping floor-on-the-floor beat very much in the style of the records Holland Dozier and Holland were producing for Motown around the same time. Not everything was a hit, but after Sherry they had three more number one hits in the next two years, Big Girls Don't Cry. Wolf like a man. And Magdal. In the years from 1962 through 1964, they were the second biggest American band in terms of record sales after the Beach Boys. And while the Beach Boys had more hits overall in that time, they didn't get their first number one until the four seasons had had four. There was a friendly rivalry between the two as a result, with the Beach Boys slipping in a dig at the East Coast group in their album track, Surfers Rule. The Four Seasons suffered more than the Beach Boys from the British Invasion. It didn't help that their record label, VJ, had picked up the license to the Beatles' first album before Capital had released I Want to Hold Your Hand, and VJ, understandably, decided to concentrate on making as much money from the Beatles as they could in 1964. VJ also ended up going bankrupt as a result of a combination of legal action by Capitol to try to reclaim the rights to that album, and trying to deliver vastly more stock than they had capacity to produce. Luckily for Valley, Crew and Gordio, they got the rights to their recordings back in a settlement when VJ collapsed, but the group wouldn't have a number one again until 1975. They did, though, have a run of top 20 and top 10 hits in the mid-60s, records like Big Man in Town. And let's hang on They also put out a version of Bob Dylan's Don't Think Twice It's All Right as the Wonder Who. It didn't take much to figure out who they were, thanks to Valley's distinctive And that made number 12. Not only that, but they tried the same trick that had been done with Buddy Holly and the Cricket, releasing some singles under Bally's name as a solo artist, though the tracks were recorded at four season sessions with the other seasons on backing vocals. Some of these were hits as well, like the crew and Gordio song Can't Take My Eyes Off You, which went to number two. Lonely night, I love you, baby Trusting me when I say Oh, pretty baby Don't bring me down my throat Oh, pretty baby Now that I've found you there Let me love you, baby Let me love you And even when songs weren't a huge hit for Ballyard the group, they would still often be a success for someone else. The Tremolos had a big hit in both the US and the UK with a version of Crew and Gordio's Silence is Golden which had been the B-side of Ragdoll Oh don't it fade to see someone cry Oh especially when someone is hurt Silence is golden But my eyes still see Stars is golden, golden But my eyes still see While Crew and Gordio's The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore, which had been a flop solo single for Valley, not even reaching the Hot 100, made the US Top 20 and UK No. 1 in a cover version by the Walker Brothers. They've gone and lost in the sky The tears are of this love in the night They've gone and lost in the night It's in it It's in it Valley and Sinatra met when the Four Seasons agreed at the last minute to replace the headliner at a benefit show Sinatra's mother had put on when the headliner became unavailable. Sinatra got Jilly to invite Valley to the bar to meet him and thank Valley for doing a favour for his mother. The two became friends and became closer in 1968 when they did some shows together for Hubert Humphrey's unsuccessful presidential campaign, the last time Sinatra would endorse a Democrat. He endorsed Ronald Reagan for Governor of California in 1970 and Humphrey's victorious opponent Richard Nixon in his 1972 re-election campaign. According to Colello, Valiant Sinatra got talking, and Sinatra asked Vali how he'd managed to have so many hits. Sinatra himself was in something of a career slump, and was worrying about how he could continue to be relevant in a market he didn't understand. Colello later said, Frankie had a lot of confidence in my ability, and he also had a lot of confidence in Gordio's ability. So he told Sinatra he had all those hit records because Bob Gordio wrote and produced all their songs, and Sinatra said, well, could he write some songs for me? He did, but they weren't the kind of songs that the Four Seasons had become famous with. Older Watertown Nothing much happening Down on Main Except a little rain Older Watertown Like everyone else in the music business, Bob Gordio had been shaken by the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967. While to modern ears, Pepper no longer sounds like that much of a departure from the music around it. We can hear more clearly how it was a natural response to the music that other artists were making at the time. It seemed like a total break from everything that pop music had been in 1967. And as a result, over the next year or two, all the pop actors who had been having hits in 1964 through 66 found themselves in the same position as those singers from an earlier age, trying desperately to adapt to the new style. And so just as the crooners were all making my rock and roll record, every beat group and vocal group that didn't just decide to give up and accept obsolescence, decided to make Our Sergeant Pepper, an orchestral psychedelic album that showed how ambitious they could be. We've heard about these in episodes on the Rolling Stones, whose Sergeant Pepper was of course their Satanic Majesty's request, and the Small Faces, who did Ogden's Not Gone Flake. But there were many, many more. The best and best known of these is The Zombies' Odyssey and Oracle, which now regularly makes lists of the greatest albums ever made. But there are also albums like the Bee Gees' Odessa. Who is the girl with the crying face Looking at millions of signs She knows that life is the running race Her face shouldn't show when it's not an e-flair Won't you comb your hair? You can be beautiful too Chad and Jeremy's of Cabbages and Kings Overcrowded world, what happens now? Better pray to your gods and hope that somehow Far from the shack you call home They aren't burning the grain that is life and engrown Cause the priceless have fallen again So eat up your rice, Billy dear They're starving in India, at least that's what I hear Come on my child And Jen and Dean's unreleased Carnival of Sound The coast is all the rainbow, running on my kids at times. With Penn and Ollie in the front, and my heart each takes back behind. Years have passed and they're still here, with a smile that time can't hold. And laughter breaks throughout the world, for their heart lives there, don't tell you why. And when Gordio had decided to make the Four Seasons' own Sergeant Pepper, he had decided to use a new collaborator he hadn't worked with before, a folky he had seen playing at a Greenwich Village club. Gordio had seen Jake Holmes singing a song titled Genuine Imitation Life, and decided that he would be the perfect lyricist to work on the Four Seasons' new socially conscious psychedelic material. Chameleons changing colours. While a crocodile cries. People rubbing elbows. But never touching eyes. Taking off their masks. Revealing. Holmes was a very odd character, who had had a bizarre career that intersected with many other stars long before connecting with Gordio. He had actually started out in comedy. He and his then-wife had formed a comedy duo that satirised the clean-cut folk singers of the time. Calling themselves Alan and Greer, they released one album, It's Better to Be Richer Than Ethnic, coincidentally on VJ Records, the same label that the Four Seasons were on at the time. Moms was the name she went by She was daddy's chocolate eclair. I recall the memo she typed thus. Ere she rode in pursuit of the fox in his lair. It read, It's better to be rich than ethnic. That's the American way. According to Holmes, Pete Teeger called Alan and Greer the most tasteless folk group ever, and a lot of their material is dated rather badly. The Ballad of the Camping Woodcutters, for example, is a parody 17th century ballad that uses a variety of words that have two meanings, but in all cases one of them is a homophobic slur. However, Holmes and his wife split up sometime in the early 60s, and obviously the Alan and Greer Act ended when the two parted ways. For a while, Holmes performed with Tim Rose the folk singer we've heard about in several episodes including the ones on San Francisco and Hey Joe playing bass with Rose and rhythm guitarist Rich Hudson in a trio variously known as The Feldmans and Tim Rose and The Thorns While that trio does not appear to have made any recordings that I can find according to Holmes it was with that group that Rose first started performing his slowed down arrangement of Hey Joe Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? Hey Joe, where you going with that money in your hand? I'm going downtown, I'm going to buy me a blue steel 44. But Holmes quit that act as well, and formed a comedy folk trio. Jim, Jake and Joan was put together by Holmes' manager, Fred Weintraub, and was meant to be a satirical comedy answer to Peter, Paul and Mary, who had been put together by Weintraub's rival, Albert Grossman. The group did a mixture of Alan and Greer material and newer comedy songs, but they were never very successful. As far as I've been able to tell, the only surviving recording of the group is from an ultra-low-budget feature film variously called Hootenannyagogo, or Once Upon a Coffee Shop. That film apparently only got a single screening at the time, but featured a bunch of similarly unknown artists, including the Goldfriars, whose leader Kurt Becher has also turned up in several episodes, and this performance by the trio. This is Bob Floyd, speaking to you from Flint, Michigan. I'm talking with young Betty Johnson here. Betty's class was divided into two groups, one brushed with crests, The other used another leading dentifrice. Betty, would you mind telling us the results of these tests? My group had 79% more cavities. And you weren't one of the lucky drug users. No. Tell me this. What did you learn from these extensive tests? I had a sucker. That group also split up soon, because when they turned up to perform at a rally for Robert F. Kennedy's senatorial campaign in 1964, Joan insisted on wearing a badge for his Republican rival and Jim decided that the group didn't need her anymore. Jim Connell became a minor bit part actor with a handful of credits in shows like Get Smart and The Wild Wild West usually for unnamed roles. Joan Rivers though had slightly more success and the reason the film is available today is because it's her first credited film appearance. After this Holmes briefly joined a rock group but decided that wasn't working and he wanted to be a singer-songwriter in the mould of Jacques Brel. He got together jazz guitarist Ted Irwin and bass player Rick Randall and started playing the Coffee Houses. In 1967, he released his debut album The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes, including the single Genuine Imitation Life. Taking off their masks Revealing Still another guy's genuine imitation people buying happiness the album did little although that song was picked up by Jackie Lomax a singer and friend of the Beatles who was managed by Brian Epstein, who released his own solo version as a single. Still another guy Can you hide? Imitating lies Holmes followed the above-ground sound with a second album, again featuring Irwin but no longer featuring Randall, who had had mental health problems and eventually refused to get on a plane. That one, A Letter to Catherine December, a collection of songs mostly about the breakdown of Holmes' marriage, is generally considered his greatest, and is very much in the same mould as albums like Astle Weeks, Forever Changers, and the early work of Tim Buckley, combining light orchestration, eccentric folk-style melodies, and jazz guitar. Love is made from separate rooms Doors locked shut from inside tombs Gold's fins to straw On magical swims But I still chase your eyes Climbing up a waterfall Neither of these albums did anything much in terms of sales, but Holmes was getting noticed by other musicians. He, Erwin and Randall played on the bottom of the bill to the Youngbloods and the Yardbirds in late 1967, and two of the Yardbirds immediately went out and bought his first album after the show, and Bob Gordio was similarly impressed. Holmes and Gordio wrote an entire album of songs for the Four Seasons, titled Genuine Imitation Life Gazette, and featuring the Four Seasons' own version of Holmes' first solo single as its title track. Chameleons changing colors While a crocodile cries People rubbing elbows But never touching eyes Taking off their masks Revealing still another guy Genuine That track included a section where they just copied the ending of Hey Jude, hoping and expecting to get sued for it and maybe get some free publicity. But of course, at that time, with one or two exceptions, mock musicians were generally of the opinion that it was okay to steal a little bit of each other's songs, and no action was ever taken. The material Holmes and Gordio came up with was very, very far from anything the Four Seasons were known for before Given songs like Big Girls Don't Cry and Sherry you can understand why people were not expecting a seven minute opening song entitled American Crucifix and Resurrection The head's out to wait The fruits of his feet And we've been waiting The weight of the force and pain The whole time we cry But they're loose and frozen Sweeping through the years of heaven Waiting in a brain of terror And why the first single, Saturday's Father, a slow ballad about a divorced father taking his kids out on the one day a week he has custody, was not a massive commercial success. He brings him home by supper time to where he used to stay. And so they kissed him on the cheek. She sees him off, but they don't speak. Today was Father's Day. The album was a masterpiece, and it was given an exceptionally imaginative, complex package, one that befitted an album of its status. The Gatehold cover was designed as a newspaper, with a mixture of joking articles about the band, one member marrying the silent film star Tida Barra, for example, and articles that were just the lyrics to some of the songs. This cover was later covered, as it were, by both John Lennon and Yoko Ono for their Sometime in New York City album. Lennon apparently said the album was a favourite of his, and Jethro Tull for Thick as a Brick. The album also featured an insert in the style of a colour supplement, including pages of joke adverts and a comics page with parodies of then-current newspaper comic strips done in the style of the underground comics that were popular at the time, and, sadly, reproducing some of the racist caricatures that were popular in that style. The whole thing was one of the most incredibly imaginative records of the late 60s, but sold pitifully compared to other Four Seasons albums, because their teen pop audience didn't want psychedelic satirical records with orchestrations that were something like a Van Dyke Parkes album, while the audience for that kind of material didn't want it from the Four Seasons. But it was the team behind this album, Holmes, Gordio and arranger Charles Colello, that Sinatra took on in the hope of revitalising his own career. After the introduction by Valli, who gets a special thanks in the liner notes to the record, and who seems to regard the eventual album as as much a part of his legacy as his own recordings, Gordio became the one who dealt with Sinatra and his team, and he was rather desperate to please him. At one point during the discussions, Gordio mentioned that he'd just bought a holiday estate, and suggested that Sinatra should come and visit as a pleasantry. Sinatra agreed and said, I'll bring my trunks, causing Gordio to panic. He didn't actually have a swimming pool there. He rushed to get one put in in the couple of days before Sinatra arrived, and then, depending on which version of the story you believe, either Sinatra cancelled at the last minute just as the pool had been completed, or there was a rainstorm just as it was completed which washed tons of soil into the pool and rendered it unusable. There seems to have been a little miscommunication between Sinatra's camp and Holmes and Gordio. They went off and wrote an entire concept album, and only later realised that he'd only been expecting to get a song or two. but as it happened Sinatra chose to record the entire album and it became the most remarkable record of Sinatra's career the album titled Watertown was conceived with the expectation that it would go along with the TV special which seems to have been planned at one point and the opening title track works to set the scene one can imagine the visuals as a camera tracks in from a distant shot of the town itself to Sinatra alone singing on a railway station platform Older Watertown Everyone knows the perfect crime Killing time And no one's going anywhere The bass figure at the start of the album seems to be though I never seen anyone state this definitively a nod back to Sinatra earlier hit Love and Marriage But if so it a bitterly ironic one and the album turns the theme of that track on its head. Watertown is an early example of the sub-genre of records that became popular in the early 70s, records about divorce. Sinatra is in character throughout the record, as an older man whose younger, vibrant wife has left him and their children and taken off to the big city. After the album's opening, we're introduced to the real premise as Sinatra sings about the breakup in the present tense. It's happening now, as if the protagonist is trapped in that moment forever. Just as I begin to say that we should make another try She reaches out across the table Looks at me and quietly says goodbye There is no big explosion No tempest in the tea The world does not stop turning round Most of the rest of the album consists of songs addressed to the protagonist's wife, Elizabeth, seeming to be letters he's writing, either talking about his current life and telling her about their children and how they're growing up, or reminiscing about their past life together. As the album goes on, we start to realise that the protagonist is an unreliable narrator. In his descriptions of his wife, it becomes clear that he never understood her, even though he loved her. She was brighter, younger and more ambitious than him, and seems to have run off with the man who shares more of those qualities. The album is one of the bleakest, most adult records I've ever heard, and is a genuinely difficult listen which has often reduced me to literal tears. the most devastating song in the context of the story is What Now Is Now where our protagonist is so deeply in denial but also deeply in love that he thinks the only thing stopping his ex-wife from returning to him is worry about either his reaction or that of the neighbours that she'll come back if only she knows she's forgiven Just one mistake is not enough to change my mind What now is now And I'll forget what happened then I know it all And we can still begin And the album ends with two songs that between them leave you wondering just how unreliable a narrator the unnamed protagonist is. And she says, we get the news that Elizabeth is returning. The price is high High as the sky And she says She says She says She's coming home And then in the final song, The Train, we return to that train platform as the protagonist waits and waits and waits and she doesn't come. The passengers for Allentown are gone The train is slowly moving on But I can't see you any place And I know for sure I'd recognize your face And I know for sure I'd recognize your face But the real punchline, the part that makes you wonder if you've been understanding what's going on at all, is hidden in the middle of the song when he's still happy and singing about how, we'll talk about the part of you I never understood and I will take good care of you and never let you cry. many times and more But the letters still are lying in my drawer Cause the morning mail had left some time before The letters he's been writing to her have just been put in her drawer. He never actually sent them, so what was she replying to? Did he ever receive a reply from her at all? He's been stood on the platform all day. At the start of the album, there's someone standing in the rain waiting for the morning train, but by the last track, the sun has broken through and the kids are coming home from school, so he's not been waiting for a particular train. He's just been stood there, in the rain, all day, waiting for Elizabeth to turn up. Watertown is a devastating, astonishing album, a masterpiece on a different level from almost any record of its type, and one of the few albums of this era to have truly literate and literary lyrics. Words which take on more meaning and significance the more attention you pay to them, rather than dissolving into meaninglessness. And it became Sinatra's worst-selling album ever. It's now regarded as one of the best things in his discography, but it took decades to reach that state. It's also one of the very few Sinatra albums to have inspired almost no cover versions. The only notable one is Nina Simone's rather lovely version of For a While. And I see a smile to put them in With so many other lives to listen to And some music that I've got to do I forget I'm not over you For a while The songwriting partnership between Gordio and Holmes soon petered out, given that the collaboration seemed to have the opposite of the Midas touch. There were a handful more credits on Four Seasons Records and one for Sinatra, mostly leftovers from their earlier collaborations. but the four seasons continued without Holmes. After a few years floundering, they released several more hits in the mid-70s, capitalising on a wave of nostalgia for the late 50s and early 60s, like December 1963, or What a Night. Valley continues performing as the Four Seasons to this day. Holmes went back to solo recording, but never had much more success as a performer. He did have some success as a songwriter though His next solo album, So Close So Very Far To Go was the closest he came to having a hit record the album making number 135 on the album chart while the lead off single, So Close, reached number 49 on the charts Sure I know There's been some time between us But I had to stand back some To get the room to see But it's alright now That somehow became something of a standard though Being recorded by a bizarre variety of performers Including the British comedian Freddie Starr But I had to stand back some To get me room to see It's all right now Hold on tight now I'll be staying I won't go Don't you cry now We can't try now Just take some distance To know Mary Travers, formerly of Peter, Paul and Mary So close, we almost didn't make it So close, but it looks like it's alright So close, I almost couldn't see you So close, but it looks like we're alright What a day And Harry Belafonte What a day Remember it was even raining When I said goodbye I didn't want to leave Just one look You could see my eyes were asking I could feel yours Pulling at my sleeve Belafonte, in fact, became a big advocate of Holmes' work and over the years he recorded many of Holmes' songs. While a crocodile cries People rubbing elbows Never touching eyes Taking off their masks Revealing still another guy Genuine imitation Most of Belafonte's records after the mid-70s contained at least one Holmes song, often several of them. Belafonte's last studio album, in fact, 1988's Paradise in Gazankulu, is entirely made up of songs co-written by Holmes, who Belafonte got to collaborate with black South African musicians to write an album of songs about the evils of the apartheid regime. But while Belafonte was the most prominent promoter of Holmes' songwriting, the material Holmes wrote for Belafonte was far from his most successful, because while Holmes' recording career was never a success, he wrote many, many songs that you have definitely heard, especially if you're an American of a certain age. Like this collaboration with Randy Newman. Or this. We do more before 9 a.m. than most people do all day. All that you can do Hey, First Sergeant Good morning You can do it in the army All this You're looking sharp You're looking good You've come so far We know how to make The most of who you are Mother and the sun It's what we've always done To let the best of men begin On so many faces, it's plain to see We give you all we have to give For all a man can be Where the race is run You're the champion Gillette The Gillette Acroplus system with a lubris smooth strip for the best a man can get. And of course, there was the song that impressed the yardbird so much that they had to go out and buy Holmes' first album after seeing him support them. A song that almost everyone who has heard a late 60s rock record has heard, though almost none of them knew it was by Holmes. I'm dazed and get used As it stays and go Am I being choosed? Will I just like to know? Give me a clue as to where I am at If you feel like a mouse Then you act like a cat Jimmy Page, the man who was credited as the sole writer of the most famous version of that song, started his musical career as a choir boy, something that seems not to fit with Page's later image as the biggest proponent of the occult and black magic in rock and roll music. But it was, paradoxically, his love of the devil's music that got him involved with the church. As he told the Sunday Times in 2010, in those days it was difficult to access rock and roll music because after all the riots happened in the cinemas when people heard rock around the clock in the film Blackboard Jungle, The authorities tried to lock it all down. So you needed to tune into the radio or go to places where you could hear it. It just so happened that in youth clubs there would play records and you'd get to hear Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis and Ricky Nelson. But you had to either go to church or be a member of the choir to go to the youth club. When he was 12, in 1956, Page decided to pick up an acoustic guitar that had been left in his family home by a previous occupier and had gone untouched for a long time. He was inspired by hearing Scotty Moore's playing on Elvis' Baby Let's Play House in particular. This is the one thing, baby, I don't want you to know. Moore would be Page's first guitar hero, and he decided that he needed to learn to play like that. He found a friend at school, Rod Wyatt, who showed him a few chords, and then he got hold of Bert Whedon's classic instruction manual, Play in a Day. He started playing guitar for up to seven hours a day, practising intently. An only child, who was somewhat spoiled by his parents, he was soon able to get a semi-acoustic guitar and an amp and a small tape recorder. While Scotty Moore was his first musical influence he soon found others most notably Chuck Berry who he became obsessed with to the point that in his teens he once hitchhiked 50 miles to get to a cinema which was showing the classic documentary about the Newport Jazz Festival Jazz on a Summer's Day because there was a performance by Berry of a single song in it. Like every teenager in possession of a guitar in 1957 Page formed his own skiffle group the James Page Skiffle Group Unlike most of them though Page even at 13 was ambitious and focused on success He made his first TV appearance that year on a children's show presented by Hugh Weldon playing guitar and also singing on Mama Don't Allow the old folk song and on Hugh the Ledbetter's Cottonfield Okay, now you're going to go into what? The Cotton song Cotton song Cotton away When I was a little baby My man used to rock me In them old cotton fields back home It was down in Louisiana Not a mile from Texarkana In them old cotton fields back home Now when them cotton balls get rockin' we don't They carry a bunch of cotton in them Oh, those cotton fields back home Way back home In the town in Louisiana I'll have them take me higher in them Oh, I'll have them take me higher in them Interviewed by Weldon between the songs, Page said that he wanted to go into biological research and find a cure for cancer. But it was very obvious even at that age that he was going to become a musician. The next few years saw him become ever more focused on emulating his guitar heroes. Along with Berry and Moore, his biggest influences in these early years were Cliff Gallop, the original guitarist for Gene Vincent's Blue Cats. I'm going to be on the road, moving away. I'm going to be on the road, moving away. I'm going to be on the road, moving on the line. Let's bang here. Auto was smart. The race was won. And yet come the devil, doing the harder he's born. and James Burton, who would go on to play with the Wrecking Crew and Elvis, but at this point was playing for Ricky Nelson. School friends remember Paige spending a long time trying to replicate Burton's solo on It's Late. to run out of gas. It's here to be. We gotta get home fast. Can't speak. Can't speak. We're in a slowdown zone. Oh baby look at that clock. Why can't it be wrong? If we could've left home at a quarter to nine we would've had fun with plenty of time. Page left school at 15 but not to become a biological researcher as he'd intended two years earlier. Instead, he was going to get into the music business and not just as a musician. At the age of 17 he approached local singer Chris Farlow, the leader of an R&B group, Chris Farlow and the Thunderbirds. Farlow was a few years older, and was starting to be regarded as the best blues singer in London at the time. Page offered to produce an album for Farlow and the Thunderbirds. He'd put up the money to record it himself, and he would supervise but not play on the session. The album didn't get released until 2017, but Page did finance and produce the record, which was made up of cover versions of contemporary R&B tracks, like Bobby Parker's Watch Your step and Ballot Strong's Money. That's what I'm all for. That's what I Ho, ho, ho, the trouble. Farlow remembered that Page already seemed to have a good understanding of the studio, and that he'd suggested recording the guitar by direct injection, rather than going through an amp. But while Page didn't play on that session, it was not because he had given up on playing the guitar. He was spending much of his time playing with a band called Red E. Lewis and the Red Caps, named in honour of Gene Vincent's Blue Caps. and around the same time he produced the follow album he was also introduced to the poet Royston Ellis who as we heard in the episode on Apache had been performing poetry recitals backed by the Shadows but was looking for other musicians to back him in his rocketry performances because the Shadows were now well on their way to dominating the British charts for the first chunk of the 60s. Ellis initially thought that the Red Caps could be his backing band for Southern Dates he had another band he was working with in the North but eventually just decided to use Jimmy Page on his own including, as we again heard in the Apache episode for what would be Page's second TV appearance. A glimpse from the flickering screen of a boy and his bird in the stalls not cuddling and kissing right at the back but slumped in the front row sharing a basket of fruit sucking an orange with casual pleasure then munching an apple and punching his bird with warm understanding and a tender lack of any accepted traditions While the Red Caps as a group didn't do much they did, through their connection with Ellis indirectly have a big effect on music history because, at least according to one biography of Paige I've used as a source for this episode it was the Red Caps who taught Ellis how you could get amphetamines from an inhaler, a trick he then showed to his northern band, thus introducing the Beatles to drugs for the first time. The Red Caps changed their name to Neil Christian and the Crusaders, and became a moderately successful touring band. They also got signed by Joe Meek, who produced their first single, recorded in October 1962, the month the 60s started. Come along, babe, this is where you're going, up on the road to love. Come along, babe, for this grand excursion, up on the road to love. No, it just won't get you anymore. So come along, babe, this is worth the knowing, we're on the road to love. A version of that without Meek's orchestral overdubs was released a couple of years ago, so you can hear Page's guitar playing better. However, by the time the single was released, in November 1962, Page had got tired of life on the road. He was becoming ill on a regular basis, coming down with repeated bouts of glandular fever, what Americans call mono, which he put down to touring in a cramped tour bus with no heating. and the general unglamorous lifestyle of the touring musician. Aged 18, Jimmy Page decided he was going to give up on becoming a musician and become an artist instead. He quit the band and started at art school, though giving up on the ambition to be a musician didn't stop him from being intensely interested in music. On October 22, he travelled all the way to Manchester to see the American Folk Blues Festival, a touring package featuring, among others, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Terry and Varnie McGee, and a name that would recur later in Page's life, Willie Dixon, who we can hear here on an earlier show from the same package store. A woman, baby kissed me. She squeezed me real tight. She looked me in her eyes and said, if it today's alright well I get nervous my man Page travelled to Manchester alone on the train but got the lift back to London with his friend David Williams and three friends of Williams' Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones Williams had met those three at Alexis Corners Club and soon Page would find himself playing occasional gigs with Corner and Cybil Davis, though only ever as a fill-in or a rock jam. He had no intention of ever going back on the road again. He had also found a new friend through going to art college. His classmate, Annetha Beck, told her brother Jeff that she'd found another person as mad about electric guitars as he was, and the two of them would sit around in Paige's family home playing guitar together for hours at a time. But then, everything changed for Paige. Colleen Johns, who was then starting his own career in the music business as a tape-op, was from the same area as Page and had seen him playing a handful of times. He told Mike Leander, just starting his own career as a producer, to check out Page's playing. And Leander offered Page a session playing on a single by Carter Lewis and the Southerners, Page's first session gig. It won't be long now I'll put the money down Oh, cuddle me tight Turn out the lights Your mama's out of town Paige would actually very briefly join that band, who would go on to become the Ivy League, and who would write, produce or sing on a string of hits for various manufactured bands including the new Vaudeville band, the Flowerpot Men, White Plains, and First Class. But what changed Page's life was the realisation that you didn't have to be in a band to make money as a musician. He could become a session player and not have to tour all around the country in a transit van. That first recording wasn't hugely successful, but Page had got the studio bug, and his second session was very successful. As we heard in the episode on Apache, the Shadows bass player Jeff Harris and drummer Tony Meehan had both quit what was the most successful group in Britain at the time, and they had started their own recording career. On Diamonds, written by Jerry Lawden, who wrote Apache, Harris plays the Dwayne Addie-style baritone guitar, but Page plays acoustic rhythm behind him. That went to number one, and Page now had a credit that would open innumerable doors for him as a session player, as did the bass player on that session, who was known then as John Baldwin, but would soon take on the stage name John Paul Jones. Page quickly became the second call session guitarist in London. The guitarist a new generation of pop producers called first was always Big Jim Sullivan, but if Big Jim couldn't do it, or if he needed a rhythm player as well as lead, he called Jimmy Page, who was Little Jim, partly in contrast to Big Jim, but also as a reference to the character from The Goon Show. Page was soon playing on multiple sessions a day, every day. Though when Moist and Ellis interviewed him for Channel TV, the tiny ITV franchise that only broadcast to the Channel Islands, in June 1963. He still seemed to think of the music as a distraction from art school, rather than a name in itself. What are the big names that you have backed on this? Chet Harris and Tony Meehan? Eden Cain? Duffy Power? What is it like working with some of the really big names of show business? Disappointing. Why is that? Well, they don't come up to how you expect them to be. rather disappointing on the whole, I would say. See, well, that's probably bad news for some record fans. What's your personal, well, your professional ambition? Is it to be a guitarist all the time? Do you want to make your own record? No, not necessarily. I'm very interested in art. I think I'd like to become an accomplished artist. Rather than the guitarist? Yes, possibly. Is this a means to an end for you? Are you hoping to earn enough money through your guitar playing? Yes, yes. I'm hoping to finance my art by the guitar. But as the British music business picked up in the wake of the Beatles' success, Page soon found himself with more session work than he could handle, especially from the American producers Shel Talmy and Burt Burns, and from Mickey Most. Sometimes he would just be adding some extra rhythm guitar, thickening the riff on a record otherwise made by a proper band, as in the Who's I Can't Explain, which also featured his former bandmates from Carter Lewis and the Southerners, now the Ivy League, on backing vocals. I think it's love trying to stay for you When I feel blue, girl, can't you play? Can't it play? Yeah, hear what I say, girl, can't it play? Get me in the head and I don't feel bad I think you say it's got me real mad I'm getting funny dreams together or Baby Please Don't Go by them, whose guitarist Bobby Harrison presented the way people later credited Paige for Harrison's lead part, when Paige was doubling the bass part instead. Baby Don't Go Baby Don't Go He played on Lulu's version of Here Comes the Night, produced like the Them track by Burns. He played rhythm to big Jim Sullivan's lead on The Crane Game by Dave Barry. know about the crying game. I've had my share of the crying game. First there are kisses. He's on Downtown by Petula Clark. That's him doing the sharp stabs in the second verse. Don't hang around and let your problems around you there are movie shows downtown maybe you know some little places to go to where they never close downtown just listen to the rhythm of a jello boss and over you'll be dancing with them too before the night is over happy again the lights are much brighter there and he's playing acoustic rhythm guitar on Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey. Goldfinger He's the man, the man with my touch He also played on a lot of less successful records, like a cover of Bobby Blue Bland's I Pity the Fool that Chell Talmy produced for a group called The Manish Boys, on which Paige did get to play lead for a change. I'm just standing there Watching you make a fool out of me And the little people They just wonder what they're doing Girl, they're just standing there Watching you make a fool out of me I pity the fool I said I pity the fool Though while that wasn't a hit at the time the singer would go on to much bigger things after changing his name from Davy Jones to David Bowie. Similarly, Page played on a cover version of the creepy blues standard Good Morning Little School Girl. Sadly for the singer on that track, whose first single it was, The Yardbirds released a much poppier version of the song the same month. Neither made the top 40, but the Yardbirds version was more successful. Though we'll be hearing more from Rod Stewart later. Not long after that, when Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds, they asked Page if he would be interested in joining the group. But Page was making far more money as a session player than he could from playing with a pop band that had had only one hit so far and so he suggested his friend Jeff Beck should join them. Sometimes the more obscure records would give Page the opportunity to shine in a way he couldn't on the more tightly arranged sessions for people like Shirley Vassie like his solo on Leave My Kitten Alone by First Gear a cover version of a Little Willie John R&B song released as a B-side by an obscure band who split up almost straight away afterwards. He also developed a speciality. He had bought a fuzz pedal, one of the first on the market, after hearing the Ventures track, the £2,000 B. However, he'd decided that the pedal didn't have enough sustain, and had worked with an electrician friend of his to create a more effective version, which he played on records like Bald-Headed Woman by The Who, produced by Shel Telmy. I don't want no bald-headed woman It'll make me mean, yeah Lord, make me mean I don't want no bald-headed woman It'll make me mean, yeah Lord, make me mean I don't want no sugar in my coffee And Dracula Daughter by Screaming Lord Such and the Savages produced by Joe Meek by a melody Page was becoming very wealthy as a session player. The average weekly wage in 1964 when Page was working regularly was £12. To pay for a single three-hour recording session was £9, and a session musician who was in demand would often play three sessions a day, five days a week, bringing in the equivalent of £2,000 a week in current terms. But he also knew that to make the real big money in the music industry, you should become a songwriter. Page's entry into professional songwriting came through someone with whom he was in both a romantic and creative partnership for a while. We've talked about Jackie DeShannon before a little, mostly in the episode on needles and pins by the searchers. DeShannon was a singer and songwriter based in California who had, after meeting Eddie Cochran, started a songwriting partnership with Cochran's more successful girlfriend Sharon Sheely, which had led to the mighty hits like Brenda Lee's Heart in Hand. Here I stand Heart in hand Looking like you Left behind by you De Shannon had, as a performer, recorded the original version of Needles and Pins, a song she always claimed to have co-written, but which was officially credited to Sonny Bono and Jack Mitchie, two people I could very easily believe would steal a songwriting credit. I saw him today I saw his face It was the face I loved And I knew I had to run away Get down on my knees and pray That they go away But till they begin Need no sense in love She adores her records her own song When You Walk in the Room I can feel a huge impression On my face I can feel that noise sensation taking place I can hear the guitar playing the blues every time that it is Both of those songs have been covered by the Searchers and become massive hits in the UK. So like many of the people with whom Paige was associated at this time, like Shel Talmy and Burt Burns, De Shannon had relocated from the US to the UK and decided to record here. At her first session at Abbey Road, De Shannon wanted the best acoustic guitar session player, and she was told that Paige was the one to go for. When she played him the song she'd written for the session, she was astonished at how well this young session player, a couple of years younger than her, handled her rudimentary riff. I don't turn your back on me, babe Oh, don't say our love can't be, babe I know you say we can't be lovers till the end of time Oh, I don't turn your back on me Incidentally, the weird swimmy sound on Paige's guitar there is not some sort of encoding issue with the file for this episode. It sounds like that on every copy of that track I've heard. After the session, DeShannon invited Paige back to her place to listen to a Bob Dylan album, and the two soon became lovers and also songwriting partners. Paige played on a lot of her demo sessions around this time, which leads to him sometimes being erroneously credited for having COVID in songs he didn't, like Dream Boy, which is credited to DeShannon alone, although features some very distinctive page playing on the demo. But the two wrote I've got my tears to remind me Released by Doug Gibbons In My Time of Sorrow, an album track from Marianne Peefall. In my time of sorrow In my time of feeling bad Oh, what I keep just to release All the good time A lot of sources credit Paige for having co-written Faithful's top ten hit, Come and Stay With Me, but that was written by De Shannon alone. They wrote Leaves That Come Tumbling Down for Judy Smith, who appears never to have released another record. Leaves come tumbling down Like my tears, they touch the ground So pretty they fall to embrace me Of all we had We've come to learn more Oh, they show me And stop that girl for Barbara Lewis. To me, to me, to me, to me, to me, to me, to me. Stop that girl, she's got a heart that once belonged to me. Paige also started to get some songwriting credits on songs he played on around this time. Mostly, these were studio jams put out as b-sides, but he did get one solo songwriting credit around this time. A single was put out under the name Kenny and Deny, presumably a typo for Denny. a studio duo consisting of Paige and session singer Kenny Rowe of the surf pop group Tony Rivers and the Castaways. The A-side, Try to Forget Me, was written by Paige and Gay Shingleton, a presenter of the TV show Ready Steady Go, for whom Paige produced a US-only single. But the B-side, Little Surfer Girl, was by Paige alone. Paige seemed to be thinking about becoming an artist. Not only did he release the Kenny and Stadai single, Around that time he also released his only record as a lead vocalist, encouraged by De Shannon. She Just Satisfies was co-written by Paige and Barry Mann, and Paige plays every instrument except the drums, played by Bobby Graham, while De Shannon had some backing vocals. Paige also made his first trip to America with Deshannon, visiting both coasts and hobnobbing with people in the American music business. He stayed with his old friend Bert Burns in New York, then travelled over to Deshannon's hometown of LA. According to many sources, while he was over there, he also played on Deshannon's big hit version of Baccarat and David's What the World Needs Now is Love. What the world needs now is love, sweet love It's the only thing that there's just too little of What the world is not, is love we love. No, not just for some, but for everyone. I say according to many sources, because some say he only played on the B-side, recorded in England, because he wasn't a member of the American Federation of Musicians. Without access to the session documentation, there's no way to know for sure. And as with many things to do with Page, the credits are very murky. According to many people, including both Marianne Faithful and Kim Fowley, it was the relationship with DeShannon that made Paige come out of his shell and stop being an introvert and start becoming much more experimental in his personal life. Their relationship didn't last much longer though. According to DeShannon, he wanted to split from the music world because he was getting disillusioned. Jimmy wanted to go to Cornwall or the Channel Islands and sell pottery. He couldn't stand the business, the strain, and I couldn't stand his dream of quietness, so he split. As Page was not able to cope with Jackie DeShannon's wild rock and roll lifestyle, he returned to the UK and went back to his session work. In particular, he was working a lot with Andrew Oldham, who like Mickey most would usually hire Page on guitar. Oldham was, at the time, looking for a new Marianne Faithfull, and Page played on several sessions for Oldham that were intended to replicate the success he'd had with Faithfull, like Vashti Bunyan's version of Mick Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' Something's Just Thick in Your Mind. Why does the sky turn grey every night? Sunrise again in time. Why do you think of the first love you had? Something's just thick in your mind. Why does the rain fall down on the ground? Just as both Oldham and Most would try to get Paige whenever they could, they would also often book bass player John Paul Jones. Jones had played on a lot of the same records as Paige over the years, and indeed the two had had oddly parallel careers even before they got to know each other. Jones had started out as a church organist and choir master as a teenager, and of course they'd both had their big break playing for Jeth Harris and Tony Meehan. The big difference was that Jones' parents had been in show business, with his dad being a professional pianist who played for Ambrose in his orchestra, one of the most successful dance bands of the 20s through the 40s. And so Jones had had far more formal musical training than Page, and was able to write orchestral charts, which meant he was often booked as an arranger, as well as a performer. Jones wasn't his birth name. He had been John Baldwin until Oldham had suggested changing his name, when he had released his only solo single produced by Oldham, a version of the Lee Hazelwood surf instrumental Baja. As with so many of the credits in this episode, there's a dispute as to who played on what, but according to most of the sources I've read, both Jones and Paige play on I'm not saying by another of Oldham's attempts at a new Marianne faithful, Nico. I'm not saying that I love you I'm not saying that I care If you love me I'm not saying that I care I'm not saying I'll be there When you want to see I can't give my heart to you Certainly at least Paige definitely plays on the B-side as The Last Mile is credited to Page and Oldham as writers and to Page as producer. Most sources say it's Page and Brian Jones playing the two guitars on the track though Page himself claims he's playing both. Ribbons were made for flowing So why not let them flow People were made for showing So why not let them show Show a little upset Show a little smile Cause it started on the last mile That was one of the three singles released as the debuts for Oldham's new label, started with Tony Calder, Immediate Records, and both Page and John Paul Jones would be regular players on immediate sessions especially Page who was made an in-house producer for the label The first three releases on the label were I'm Not Saying Hang On Sloopy by the McCoys licensed from the US through a partnership with Page's old friend Bert Burns and The Bells of Rimney by The Fifth Avenue a studio group that Page put together The Fifth Avenue record is almost a soundalike copy of The Birds version of the song apart from some Beach Boys inspired harmonies at the end and Paige's guitar solo. Of those three, only Hang On Sloopy was a hit, but Page would spend much of the next year producing and playing on sessions for immediate, almost always with Jones on bass. Records they played on for immediate included a single that Jagger and Richards wrote for the comedian Jimmy Tarbuck. We're wasting time inside my mind. The thought of him won't go away. Come every day. We're just wasting time. We're wasting time. Our clones are mine. And a single by Glyn Johns, the man who had discovered Jimmy Page, who was in his brief period of trying to be a performer rather than an engineer and producer. That track was something of a reunion for most of the people involved. Not only was John the man who had discovered Page, but the track was produced by Tony Meehan and written by Jerry Lawden, the man who had written Diamonds. However, novelties like that aside, Immediate also released many truly excellent and important records. One of Page's first productions for the label was John Mayall's Bluesbreaker's version of I'm Your Witch Doctor, the first recording of former Yardbird Eric Clapton with his new band. I'm your witch doctor, got the evil eye, got the power of the devil, I'm the country guy, gonna teach you love at the midnight hour, gonna feel you burning like a flashing cloud. Apparently, Page had to have strong arguments with the engineer on that session to convince him that it was okay to allow something that distorted to go on the tape. Page and Clapton were friendly at the time, but as we heard in the episode on Cream, they fell out when Page's home tape recordings of the two jamming blues instrumentals together were overdubbed with extra instruments by members of the Rolling Stones and stuck out by an idiot on blues compilations. Page played on pretty much everything that came out of immediate in 1965 and 66, from records by the Manchester-based Beach Boys soundalike act, the fact Totems, one of several Beach Boys soundalike groups that Oldham signed to cut covers of Brian Wilson songs for which he owned the UK publishing rights, to Out of Time, the number one single by Page's old friend Chris Farlow, written by Jagger and Richards and produced by Jagger. Out of touch, my baby, my old-fashioned baby I said, baby, baby, baby, you know how to stand Well, baby, baby, baby, you know how to stand I said, baby, baby, baby, you know how to stand Or at least the production is credited to Jagger. Arthur Greenslade, the arranger on the session, said that Jagger had been unable to get a decent vocal take out of Farlow, who, according to Greenslade, couldn't sing his way out of a paper bag, and that Oldham had later gone in and got Farlow to re-record the lead, line by line, and pieced it together. But there was one session in particular in 1966, not for immediate, that would point the way to Jimmy Page's future, His friend Jeff Beck had, after joining the Yardbirds, played on a string of hits which for many people seemed to redefine what rock guitar could be. While there were five people in the Yardbirds and all made musical contributions, especially Paul Samuel Smith, the group's bass player, who was the de facto producer of a lot of their records, as far as the casual audience was concerned, there were really only two people who mattered. One was Keith Ralph, the group's lead singer, who was never known as a particularly strong vocalist, but who did have a stage presence, while the other was Beck. So a plan had been hatched that each yardbird would release a solo single to let the different members of the group show their individual personalities and hopefully give them more of a profile with the public. The plan was quickly abandoned, with only Keith Ralph's Mr Zero getting released, but Jeff Beck's solo track, Beck's Bolero, was eventually released as a B-side. Everything about that track is contentious. One of the few things everyone agrees about is that Mickey Most, the track's credited producer, had nothing to do with the track. He got production credit as part of a deal later made by the Yardbirds manager Simon Napier-Bell. Napier-Bell always claims he produced it, but Page has always said it was him. There has always been bad blood between Napier-Bell and Page. Napier-Bell would employ Page sometimes as a session player when he was working as a music supervisor for films before going into pot management, though Page was always the second choice. Big Jim Sullivan was first choice. But he said later, I knew he was a brilliant technician and admired Bailers, but I never really liked Jimmy Page. He had a sneer about him. At school, the people who bullied me had this terrible, frightening sneer, and Jimmy Page reminded me of those people. Similarly, there were arguments between Page and Beck as to who wrote the piece. Page has always claimed to have written it himself, but not gone into much detail. Beck, on the other hand, has described the writing as follows. I don't care what he says, I invented that melody. He hit those A major seven chords and the E minor seven chords, and I just started playing over the top of it. He was playing the bolero rhythm, and I played the melody on top of it, but then I said, Jim, you've got to break away from the bolero beat, you can't go on like that forever. So we stopped it dead in the middle of the song, like the yardbirds would do in For Your Love. Then we stuck that riff into the middle, and I went home and worked out the other bit. While the track was intended, as far as Napier Bell was concerned, as a way to showcase Beck as a member of the Yardbirds, Beck himself had other ideas. There was word going round that Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker were planning to form a supergroup, and Beck was thinking along the same lines. Uncomfortable with the Yardbirds' musicianship, he wanted to form a band with the best players in London, and he wanted Jimmy Page to be the rhythm guitarist. On vocals, the two of them wanted to get either Steve Marriott of the Small Faces or Steve Wynwood of the Spencer Davis Group. They sounded out Marriott but got the response from Don Arden, the Small Faces' gangsterish manager. How would you like to have a group with no fingers? They decided the session where they tested these musicians out would be an instrumental one. On keyboards, they brought in Nicky Hopkins, the top session keyboard player in the UK. well known enough for this that the Kinks would a few months later release a track titled Session Man as a tribute of sorts to Hopkins He never will forget it all The day he played this piano hall A million sessions to go insane He's a session man Of course, a fresh end A population For the rhythm section, Beckett heard rumours that The Who's bass player and drummer were thinking of quitting their band, and he invited the two of them to the session. Keith Moon came, though he came in disguise to stop people realising he was thinking of quitting The Who. But John Entwistle never showed up, so they quickly called in John Paul Jones, because he was used to playing with Paige, and Napier Bell also thought highly of him. There were various versions of what happened next, but the general consensus version is that when one of them suggested making this line-up of musicians a permanent one, Keith Moon said, that would go down like a Led Zeppelin. But soon after that session, Beck at least got his wish to play more with his old friend Jimmy Page. The Yardbirds by early 1966 were becoming more popular in the US than they were in the UK. We heard last time how they were hugely influential on the MC5, but almost every garage rock band in the country in the mid-60s was more influenced by the Yardbirds, and in particular by Jeff Beck's guitar playing, than any other band. In the UK, there was something of an arms race between Eric Clapton, Beck, Pete Townsend, Peter Green and Dave Davis to see who could be the most impressive blues-based electric guitarist who could use feedback most creatively and who could wow everyone else the most That competition would die down in 1967 when Jimi Hendrix hit London and the rest of the pack realised they couldn't compete with him on his own terms and most of the innovation in British guitar playing for the few years after that would come from the acoustic side, with people incorporating finger-picking techniques learned from the guitarists at Les Cousins, which Page would frequent and which was the home of British folk baroque guitar. But in 1966, Beck was the only one of these musicians who had a profile in the US. Clapton, after quitting the Yardbirds, had resolutely decided to avoid making pop singles and was developing a reputation both as a great guitarist and as someone who would strop out of bands straight away. Peter Green, like Clapton, was mostly known for playing with John Mayall, who had no presence in the US. The Kinks had been banned from playing the US because of a Musicians' Union disagreement, and the Who wouldn't break through until Monterey. That left the Yardbirds as the only British band with a guitar hero of that kind to have any presence in the US. In May of 1966, the same month as the Becks Bolero sessions, Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys, who was in the UK to promote pet sounds, told the Record Mirror about an occasion when the Yardbirds, supporting them, had had to follow the Beach Boys' equipment. An anecdote which shows just how different the Yardbirds were from any other group to play America up to that point. Saying, Dennis plays drums so he doesn't understand amps, and Mike just sings so he doesn't understand what's going on with amps either. Jeff Beck turns his guitar towards the amps to get feedback, and Dennis and Mike were going to pull the plugs out. They thought the Yardbirds were harming the equipment. I had to stop them and explain what was happening. They were getting really mad. That month also saw the release of two singles, both co-produced by Simon Napier-Bell and Paul Samuel Smith, after Napier-Bell had taken over the Yardbirds management from Giorgio Gomelski, who, as his settlement, got all the rights to their recordings up to that point, meaning the group would never see any future royalties from their early recordings, which had been repackaged ad infinitum by every budget label in existence. The first was Keith Rolfe's solo single, part of the same push for the band members to record solo that had led to Bex Bolero, a version of the Bob Lynn song, Mr. Zero. With white letters on black iron sides And wild rushing water that all rolls away And little Miss Someone does not want to stay Everyone's moving with places to go And Mr. Zero, he sadly stands still As the water goes one way, the train goes another Sadly for Elf, though, Domelski had been aware of his plan to record the song, and produced the version by another singer, Susie Klee, which was released the same week. Neither made the top 40, partly as a result of the competition. The other Yardbirds-related single released in May 1966 was Over Under Sideways Down, which made the top 10. That's where I'm, I'm one I'd like to be Hey! I'm going to slide my down Hey! I'm going to slide my down Hey! I'm going to slide my down When will it end? When will it end? Hey! Hey! That would also turn out to be their last UK hit single. That record was also notable because Jeff Beck played everything but the drums on the session. Chris Dreyer, the group's rhythm guitarist, only did backing vocals, while Paul Samuel Smith was in the control room, by this point more interested in being a producer than in performing. Over Under Sideways Down was the single from the group's only UK studio album, titled just Yardbirds, but usually known as Roger the Engineer, after the caricature of engineer Roger Cameron by Chris Dreher on the cover. For half of that album, which Samuel Smith co-produced and which took only five days to record, Samuel Smith didn't play at all, being replaced by a bass player named Mick Fitzpatrick, who played with Simon's Triangle, a backing band that Napier Bell had put together to back the duo of Diane Faraz and Nicky Scott, who he had been managing before the Yardbirds. As the album was recorded so quickly, even though it was made up entirely of supposed at originals, most of these were jams on blues and R&B standards like Dust My Groom given different lyrics. So for example What Do You Want is very obviously derivative of Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love. The album was decent enough, but it was released in July 1966, right in the middle of the eight-week period that saw Pet Town's Blonde on Blonde, Freak Out, the first incredible string band album, The Birds Fifth Dimension, Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, and then along comes The Association and Revolver, all the least. Decent Enough was not really going to do it when up against competition like that, although the album did make the UK top 20. Given the lack of interest on Samuel Smith's part in playing bass anymore, and the disinterest in touring in general which was getting him down, it was unsurprising when, after a gig where Keith Ralph had gotten increasingly drunk, insulted the audience, and fallen into the drum kit, Samuel Smith decided he'd had enough of this pop-style lark and was going to quit the band and just become a record producer. Handily, Beck's friend Jimmy Page was also at that gig, and unlike the rest of the band, he had thought that Ralph's drunken antics were great. He agreed to join the band on bass as a permanent replacement for Samuel Smith, who went on to a very successful career producing records mostly in the sensitive singer-songwriter vein. Samuel Smith produced almost all Cat Stevens' big hits, and records for Carly Simon, Krista Berg, Paul Simon, and Renaissance, among many others. Page joined on bass, even though that wasn't his instrument. But that wasn't the main problem with his joining the group. That was, rather, the enmity between him and Sam and Napier Bell. Napier Bell later described the meeting the two had after Page joined the group, saying, When he arrived, he had an enormous swollen lip. Nobody knew who'd done it. He said some people had stopped there in the street and hit him. I remember thinking that if you're Jimmy Page, that could happen to you because of your sneering. Jimmy's superciliousness was hard to take. When Jimmy Page looked as nice as he does, maybe he thought he could get away with it. He came into the group. I said, We don't really get on. You're my manager. I want to see the contract, he said. I said, You won't. I'll take my percentage at four-fifths of the money and I won't manage you. Because I knew he would want to pull a stunt and say the contract was terrible. As I've said before about Napier Bell, he's someone who is more of a raconteur than a trustworthy source. But it does seem likely both that Page and Napier Bell didn't get on from the start. and that Page, who had vastly more experience of the music business from the business side than the other Yardbirds, would have found entirely reasonable fault with whatever contract Napier Bell had them under. Page seems largely to have given up on session work after joining the Yardbirds, though it's difficult to know for sure because some tracks he recorded earlier were released afterwards. For example, Sunshine Superman by Donovan, on which Page played lead guitar on an arrangement by John Paul Jones, produced by Mickey Most, was not released until December 1966, though it was recorded a year earlier. There's also some question over exactly which sessions by which performers Page played on. Page himself, for example, always claimed to have played on Donovan's Hurdy Gurdy Man from 1968, and Donovan has sometimes backed him up on that. But apparently the session logs for that track don't have him there, and Jones, who was on that session as well, says it was Alan Parker. and he would occasionally turn up for the odd session just to keep his hand in. For example, it's definitely Page doing some relatively rare session lead work on Joe Cocker's hit version of With a Little Help From My Friends from 1968. But in Jemble, Page was now putting session work behind him, and going back out on the road with the band, just like in the old days with Neil Christian. Some have suggested that Page's sudden changing career might have been caused by trauma. Around this time, his parents split when it turned out that his father had for years been keeping a second family in secret. And certainly Page seems rather quickly to have turned from being a polite introvert to being the kind of provocateur who wore an iron cross on stage, as did Beck around the same time. And here it's possibly worth noting that Chris Farlow, Page's long-time friend, ran a stall that sold Nazi memorabilia and only Nazi memorabilia as a sideline from his day job as a pop star. It's likely though that even though he was no longer a session player Page was still keeping up with the records that were being released. He had been unusual among session players for doing that while he was one. He would say that one of his selling points to record producers was that as he was younger than many players he knew how to get the sounds on the records that teenagers were listening to in a way that men in their 30s didn't. but even among other players of his generation someone like John Paul Jones would say later that at the end of the 60s he only owned two rock albums Pet Sounds and Revolver with the rest of his listening being to soul and jazz Page almost certainly for example listened to Making Time by The Creation produced by his old friend Shall Tell Me which featured Eddie Phillips playing his guitar with a violin bow Page soon started doing the same himself, though he always claimed that he had got the idea not from the creation, but from David McCallum Sr., the violinist father of the Man From Uncle Star. Apart from a handful of gigs, Page's first major work with the Yardbirds was on their next single. There's some confusion about exactly when the basic track for Happenings Ten Years' Time Ago was recorded. But the most likely date is sometime between the 26th of July 1966 and the 3rd of August, when the group went on their first US tour with Page on bass. But Page wasn't on bass for the session. Chris Dreher had largely stopped playing guitar in the studio by this point, used to having Beck play both parts, and he is not on the track at all. The initial sessions consisted of Keith Velf and Jim McCarty, who, according to most accounts wrote the song, though it's credited to all five band members and Beck later sometimes said it was mostly his work, on lead vocals and drums and harmonies respectively, with Paige on guitar and Paige's session player friend John Paul Jones on bass. Beck wasn't at this initial session because he was ill with tonsillitis, an illness that also led the group to pull out of a festival appearance. The same festival where Cream, with the Yardbirds former guitarist Clapton, made their debut, and this was widely seen as the Yardbirds being scared of the competition. Samuel Smith and Napier Bell produced, and Beck added guitar and spoken word mutterings under his solo after the group returned from their tour, and the result is often considered the group's greatest single and one of the classics of British psychedelia. We'll be right back. One possible influence the track may have had that I've not seen anyone else suggest is the start of Jeff Beck's guitar solo, where he imitates a police siren. A year later, John Lennon would base the melody of I Am The Walrus around a similar siren imitation, and while it's entirely plausible that he was independently inspired, I can't help wondering if he had this track in the back of his mind. Come on, Drew, are you? There you go, make your money. Come on, Drew. Say you'll go with a long hour. Happenings ten years time ago doesn't sound revolutionary now, but that's because we're hearing it out of the context of the time. It sounds exactly like a lot of singles released in 1967, but it was released in late 1966, several months ahead of its time. Possibly too much ahead of its time. It didn't make the top 40 in the UK, and it was only a moderate hit in the US, though its influence has been cited by hundreds of bands since. In between recording the basic track and the guitar overdubs, the group toured the US. Beck's health problems kept recurring. Supposedly he had his tonsils out at one point on the tour, though in later years he admitted that along with the actual physical illness he was also dealing with mental health problems and a general weariness with being in the band. With Dreyer clearly not able to fill in for the band's resident guitar god, and with audiences primed to expect feedback-based musical pyrotechnics, the only solution when Beck was too ill to play many dates he ended up flying home with 12 shows still to go on the tour, was for Page to switch to lead guitar and play Beck's lead part, and for Dreher to switch to bass on those dates. Soon that became the band's standard line-up, and on the dates when Beck could play, rather than Page playing rhythm guitar, the two played the lead lines in stereo and then played dueling solos. Very few recordings of this dual lead version of the band exist, but one that does is one of the group's most famous, and it exists because of a trick Simon Napier-Bell played on a friend. Michelangelo Antonioni wanted to include footage of The Who performing live in his film set in Swinging London, Blow Up, and particularly wanted Pete Townsend smashing his guitar to be included in the film. But Napier Bell was friends with The Who's co-manager Kit Lambert and told Lambert to ask for a ridiculously large fee and for the band's management to have control over the editing of their section of the film. Antonioni, of course, refused, and then Napier Bell offered his own band as a cut-price rate to get them this valuable exposure. Beck objected to having to smash a guitar, partly because that was Townsend's stick, and partly because he was someone who cared a great deal about his instruments. But he eventually did it for the film, and once he did, it became a regular part of the act for a while. The song recorded for the film was titled Stroll On, and the songwriting was credited to the Yardbirds. But it's just their cover of the Johnny Burnett Rock and Roll Trio's version of Train Kept a Rolling, with the lyrics altered so they could claim the credit for themselves. I'm going home. Why do you really love me? I'm going home. You'll be a girl to cry. I'm going home. You're with yourself a lot. You're going to get me mine. Ain't going to run and I'm all my time. To promote the release of the Happening's 10 Years Time Ago single, the group went on a brief tour of the UK. Unfortunately for them, the bill they were on put them between the Rolling Stones, as and the Icontina Turner review, possibly the most exciting act then performing. They were never going to go down well in that position, and according to Andrew Oldham, that was deliberate. As we heard in the Sympathy for the Devil episodes, Oldham said, Mick Keith and I had decided they were cocky little upstarts that had one more hit than they deserved, and this sandwiching between the headliners should put pay to their career. It didn't help that the group's performance in London, at the Albert Hall, which had legendarily bad acoustics for certain types of music there's an old joke that it's the only venue where a composer could be guaranteed to hear their work twice was both the one that got reviewed and the one that was, by all accounts, their worst of the tour. The Yardbirds were, by the consensus of the British press, yesterday's news. Happenings ten years' time ago was them trying to hop on this new psychedelic bandwagon that was so fashionable but was clearly just a novelty record. After that, they went on another American tour, this time mostly as part of a Dick Clark package tour, with a bunch of ill-matched acts, including Brian Highland and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. They did, though, also play some shows outside of the package tour, including one notable one in early November, when they were supported by the Velvet Underground, with Paige's old acquaintance, Nico. The group were particularly fascinated by the song I'm Waiting for the Man, and depending on which version of the story you read, they either got hold of the band's debut album as soon as it came out, or actually asked Lou Reed for the chords and lyrics, and were soon incorporating it into their live sets, often as part of extended versions of I'm a Man or Smokestack Lightning. Before the tour had been going long, Beck's illness returned, and on top of that he was sick of touring for little money, and he was increasingly resenting Jimmy Page was playing. At first Beck had wanted to play with another guitarist of equal skill, but now he was finding it was impossible to be the sole star of the group. He once again pulled out of the tour and went off to rest. And this time the rest of the group decided they'd had enough and sacked him. This meant also losing their management. Napier Bell decided that Jeff Beck was the only one of the band he actually got along with, and also the real talent. He kept Beck on as a client, and handed the rest of the group over to Mickey Most's organisation to manage. At first it seemed like Napier Bell had made the correct decision. Most became Beck's producer too. Most was a proven hitmaker, having produced hits for Donovan, Herman's Hermits, The Animals and many others. Beck had some trouble putting his own band line up together. It would change quite often over the next few months. But as far as most was concerned, if you made a record, you just took the star and put him in front of a bunch of session musicians and gave them a song by a hit songwriter. So the first single by the Jeff Beck Group, which used Beck's bolero as its b-side, had Beck with John Paul Jones on bass and string arrangements, and Clem Cattini, the former drummer with the Tornadoes, turned top session drummer. Beck wasn't a singer. His new band had a lead singer, in fact. But most didn't care. If the single set Jeff Beck on the label, Jeff Beck was going to be the singer, no matter how badly he sang. And his lead singer could just add backing vocals. Saying everything is moving When you're tired of planning High ho silver lining And away you go now, baby I'll see your honey shining But I will make a fight Though it's obvious Most commercial instincts worked. High ho silver lining made the top 20. The Jeff Beck Group would go on to have three more hit singles, one more with Beck on lead vocals, an instrumental, and Goo Goo Barabajaggle Love Is Hot, credited to Donovan and the Jeff Beck Group, with Donovan on lead vocals. Rod Stewart would get to sing lead on album tracks, but he'd never get to sing lead on a Jeff Beck Group single. By that point, though, Napier Bell had stopped managing Beck too. He said later, What I hadn't allowed for was that Jeff didn't really rehearse his first group properly. He formed a group with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood, and I thought they couldn't go wrong. They opened up for the small faces on tour at the Astoria in Finsbury Park, and it all went wrong. Rod came on stage with his flyers undone, and the curtain fell on top of the guitarist, and then somebody from the small faces pulled the plugs out so the power went off. It was a dismal concert, and I couldn't snap my fingers and come up with a solution. The real problem was they hadn't rehearsed. The trouble was, I was the same age as them and felt too intimidated by them to tell them what to do. Napier Bell decided to get out of the management business altogether. Most organisation therefore ended up with both the Yardbirds and the Jeff Beck Group, but while he produced their recordings, for management he put someone else in charge, his colleague Peter Grant. Grant had known most since the two of them had worked at the Two Eyes back in the 1950s. The two eyes had been the hotbed of the early British rock and roll scene and most of the first wave of British rock stars had been discovered there Most had been working as a waiter and Grant as a bouncer before most moved to South Africa and became a pop star there before returning to Britain as a producer In the meantime, Grant, a very large, physically imposing man had had a brief career as a professional wrestler including some televised bouts and had tried to get into acting but had never got much beyond bit parts a couple of lines in The Saint or Dixon of Doc Green a tiny role in Cleopatra a job working as Robert Morley's stand-in but he used the earnings from these jobs and his showbiz connections to get another role in the industry he bought a minibus and started driving people like the Shadows or the comedians Mike and Bernie Winters to their gigs from this he got a job as a tour manager with Don Arden the gangster who was one of Britain's biggest managers and promoters Grant's job was to drive American stars touring the UK to their gigs, keep them sober enough to go on stage, and get the money from the venues, with violence if necessary. Sometimes this required a certain amount of imagination. Gene Vincent, in particular, was by this time totally out of control. Grant later said, He used to drive cars at me, and he was well known for threatening people with knives and guns. He would daub racist graffiti on the dressing room doors of Black Act on the same bill. and he was badly alcoholic. One show, he also hurt his one good leg and couldn't stand up, but Grant knew that the contract said that he had to go on stage and sing. So at showtime, the curtain drew back, and there was Gene Vincent, singing his opening song, Be Bop-a-Lula. Except he only got that far, then swore and collapsed, falling onto his face and being carried off unconscious by roadies. Grant had propped him up by sticking a mic stand up his jacket. They got their money. But while Grant sometimes resorted to these measures, less difficult acts in turn found him a pleasure to work with. The Everly Brothers, for example, said in the 90s that he was the best road manager we ever had, and he would be fiercely loyal to his acts. Soon he branched out. He started working with Mike Jeffries and Mickey Most on the animals' career, becoming effectively their co-manager. He toured the US with the animals and with Herman's Hermit, another of most acts. He also became sole manager of a handful of acts, like the Sheafinity, one of the first all-female rock groups to play their own instruments. And, rather more successfully, the new Fordville band, who started out as a studio creation of Jeff Stevens, with John Carter of Carter Lewis and the Southerners singing lead, but then had a touring band with a different lead singer assembled by Grant after their single Winchester Cathedral became a massive worldwide hit. The new Baudrill band were briefly an international phenomenon. Famously, Winchester Cathedral won the Best Contemporary Rock and Roll Recording Grammy, beating out the other shortlisted entrants Last Train to Clarksville, Eleanor Rigby, Good Vibrations, Monday Monday and Cherish. For a while, the band were touring America enough that Grant had to take on an assistant, Richard Cole, specifically to manage US touring operations. Eventually, Most and Grant had decided to pool their resources and form a management and production company, R.A.K., which wasn't really much of a company. It was a shared office space which the two men both used to work on different acts. On the top floor were her building in Oxford Street in London. On the bottom floor were shops, then on the first floor was Chrysalis Records, whose publicist, John Lennon's old friend Bill Harry, would also become RAK's publicist simply because he was working in the same building and they were in and out of each other's offices so often. And on the second floor was Island Records. As Grant later described it, RAK Music Management was the name of the company, but names are not important in this business. People don't say, let's get in touch with RAK. They say, let's go see Peter Grant. It's the personal bit that matters. At one point, just Mickey Most, myself and three girls worked in those offices, and yet we had four LPs in the top 20. As Most was far more interested in the production side of things than in management, Peter Grant now became the de facto manager of The Yardbirds, as well as of Jeff Beck, where Page had been Napier Bell's least favourite member of the group. For Grant, he was the one who really mattered, the obvious leader of this line-up of the band. Most's first priority was for the group to record a new single to get them back on the charts. Or, at least, for Jimmy Page and Keith Ralph to. Most's technique was to get the records made as quickly as possible, with the stars performing material that most had picked for them. They could choose the B-sides themselves if they behaved. And so the first single he produced for them, Little Games, was a song written by two songwriters for hire at the start of their career. Harold Spiro went on to co-write hits such as Long Live Love and Nice One Civil, while Phil Wainman would later go on to produce hits with the Bass-Hitty Rollers among others. But their other most prominent credit in 1967 was two songs for a children's album by Mike and Bernie Winters. Only Ralph, as the lead vocalist, and Page, with his session experience, were trusted to play on the single. Rather than Dreher and McCarthy, the rhythm section was Dougie Wright, the former drummer from the John Barry Seven, and on bass, the man who was, at the time, working as most musical director. session player John Paul Jones, who also wrote the arrangement for the cellos on the track. Little games are for little boys I'm growing up and changing all my toys Aeroplanes, motocards, no fish and no jam jars I just don't play these games no more Little games are for little boys Loving games are for bigger boys Parties in Chelsea Blacks mixing with kinky cats Most hopes for a renewed chart success were in vain though. It didn't hit the top 40 in the UK or US, though it and subsequent singles hit the lower reaches of the charts in some other countries. This, and the lack of success of their subsequent singles, would shape Peter Grant's thoughts about how to run a band. According to Napier Bell, who remained in touch with Grant and asked him occasionally how his old charges were doing. The funny thing was, with Mickey Most, chart success with singles was all important. Yet Peter thought that if you put a single out, you were competing to get into the chart. And if you don't get into the chart, you are then a failure. If you don't put a single out, you can't be a failure. Maybe working with Mickey had made him think about this, because charts ruled Mickey Most's life. Or perhaps Jimmy Page had given him the idea. Either way, he and Jimmy worked very well together. Peter always thanked me for giving him Jimmy Page and earning him £200 million. After the Little Games single was released, but before it became obvious that it was not going to be a commercial success, most took the group into the studio to record their second and final studio album. Little Games, the album, was recorded in three days, and this time the group were allowed to play on their own record, as most didn't care at all about albums. As far as he was concerned, albums didn't matter, and singles were the only things pop bands were good for. Almost all the tracks on the album have the songwriting credited to some or all of the band members. Almost none of them are actually written by the band members. Compare, for example, Muddy Waters' version of the blues standard Rolling and Tumbling. To Drinking Muddy Water, credited to McCarty, Dreya, Page and Ralph. I've been moving on high, trying to lose my mind. There's still a few times, there's a move on. Or compare Davy Graham's radical rearrangement of the traditional song, She Moved Through the Fair, titled in his version, She Moved Through the Bazaar Slash Blue Raga. Thank you. With the instrumental White Summer, credited solely to Page, and featuring no other yardbirds on the track, though it also features an uncredited oboe player, the percussion is played not by McCarty, but by Dudley Moore's drummer Chris Callan. And so on. It's particularly fitting that one of the tracks credited to the Yardbirds as songwriters, a recording of an old Memphis Jug Band song, is titled Stealing Stealing. Little Games is both the strongest of the Yardbird's small number of albums and one that the group themselves always dismissed. Page, who had always been happy working with most in his session days, felt differently about him as a producer when Page was one of the credited artists. Suddenly, most's habit of just cutting one take of a track and declaring it good enough was less enjoyable. Most attention to detail on album tracks led to things like the last track of the album, Little Soldier Boy, featuring not the trumpet solo that was planned but Keith Ralph scattering an idea for the part that the trumpet player was meant to overcome. The floor was trooning Vixper and stopping buildings hit The soldier boy was feeling high Snow clouds rolled across the sky Gave a last triumphant cry and fell into the fire The record company decided not to even bother releasing the album in the UK, because as far as they were concerned, the Yardbirds, who a year earlier had been having regular top ten hits, were now past it. It was released in the US, where the band still had a reputation, but it went no higher than number 80 on the album charts. Jeff Beck, with his recent Top 20 hit was interviewed by Hit Parader and said With all the good groups that there are about now you've got to make the move one step ahead rather than sticking it out and going down with a sinking ship and that for me is what the Yardbirds are It's really amazing to think that only a year ago all the sickening DJs and writers were raving about the fantastic Yardbird sound It was all Jeff Beck this and Keith Welfe's great harp playing that and then it just goes zonk right down the drain Undeterred, the group went on tour in the US again And on one show, they were supported by Jake Holmes Who closed his set with his song Dazed and Confused A song about which he later said I didn't think it was that special But it went over really well, it was our set closer The kids loved it As did the yard birds, I guess I'm dazed and confused Since days ago Am I being choosed? Well, I'd just like to know Give me a clue as to where I am at You feel like a mouse and you act like a cat I'm dazed and confused Hanging on by a thread Jim McCarty was impressed enough by the track, which Holmes had released as a single the month before the gig in question, but he and Jimmy Page both went out and bought copies of Holmes' album. The song was soon added to the R-Birds live set, and became a highlight of it. I'm raised and confused as it stay as it go Give me a clue, I just want to know Give me a clue as to where I am at Feel like a mouse and you'll act like you can But by now there was a split between the Yardbirds on record and Mickey Mouse's pop band and the Yardbirds on stage who were stretching out more, inspired by West Coast records like Love's Da Capo, an album Ralph raved about and which was itself very obviously influenced by the Yardbirds themselves. There was also, though, a growing split between Ralph and McCarty, who were becoming increasingly influenced by softer music like Simon and Garfunkel, and who were both big users of cannabis and LSD, especially Ralph, and Paige and Drea, who didn't use any drugs at this time, and were more interested in making louder, heavier music, adapting the Yardbirds old freakout style to the new world of power trios and louder amplification. The Yardbirds didn't record another album, though there were various attempts at sessions over the next year or so. Ralph said of this period, in the end we were just a group being sent out to promote Mickey Mouse's records. And there were sometimes not even Mickey Mouse's records. The group's next single was a cover of Manfred Mann's hit, Ha Ha Said the Clown, which had been a hit in the UK, so the Artbirds version was only released in countries where that hadn't been released. Ralph was the only member of the group to appear on the record, the backing track for which was actually recorded by session musicians in New York at the end of a session for The Circle, the group best known for Red Rubber Ball. The keyboard player on the track is supposedly Rick Nielsen, later of Cheap Trick, though at the time Nielsen was based in Chicago while the track was cut in New York, so it seems likely it's another musician of the same name. That backing track was left over from the Circle Session. and the producer sent it over to Mickey Most, who overdubbed Ralph's voice on it and stuck it out as a Yardbirds single. The producer in question was Charles Carlello. The group's third single of 1967 was a Most production, and at least had two Yardbirds on it. Their version of Harry Nilsson's Ten Little Indians, a rewrite of the old nursery song with lyrics based on the Ten Commandments, featured Paige on guitar, Ralph on vocals, Clem Cattini on drums, and John Paul Jones on bass and orchestral arrangements. There it was. That was another one that didn't get a UK release, and once again didn't chart in the US. The group returned to the US yet again to tour to promote the single, but McCarty had a breakdown and couldn't take going on tour again. The group cancelled the gig, got in a substitute drummer for a few more, and then McCarty flew over but was soon hospitalised. By that point, the group had pretty much decided to give up. McCarty and Melf wanted to make gentle music like Simon and Garfunkel. Ralph was increasingly annoyed with Paige. None of them wanted to continue working with Mickey most. But there were contractual obligations to fulfil. The group put out one final single, Goodnight Sweet Josephine, a song about a sex worker by the same writers as Ha Ha Said the Clown, with Ralph singing and Paige, John Paul Jones, Clem Cattini and piano player Nicky Hopkins providing the backing. Good night. once again a flop, but the group once again went on a US tour to promote it. Knowing that this was likely to be the group's last tour, the record label arranged for a recording of one of the final shows for a prospective live album. The group refused to allow it to be released, but it eventually came out on Page's own record label in 2017. I've been trying to grant You're out to get me You're on it After that tour, there were some desultory attempts at recording something to replace the live album. They recorded a handful of tracks included on that 2017 release with Paige producing, but none were complete. Interestingly, there was one song, Knowing That I'm Losing You, for which the 2017 release didn't contain any vocals, which is very odd, because there definitely was a lead vocal recorder for that track with a full lyric, one which Dreya, McCarty, and Keith Ralph's sister Jane all say that Ralph, and not anybody else, definitely wrote. Luckily for us, there were versions of that track with the vocal uploaded on YouTube. In the summer's day, you'll only find a tip away to grave. The hours will burn you pain. Hmm. But while the Yardbirds were trying to figure out how, or even if, they could make their lifestyle work in the studio, their thunder had essentially been stolen by their old guitarist, whose first album came out and made the top 20. Truth was produced by Mickey Most and featured Bex Bolero and a few nods to Bex's past with the Yardbirds starting out with a remake of Shapes of Things It also featured Page's older players Carter Lewis on one track and several tracks featured John Paul Jones on organ like this cover of a Willie Dixon song You shook me You shook me all night long This journey You know that you shook me You shook me all night long Beck had proven the commercial viability of Page's vision of what the Yardbirds should be, but he'd also got there first. The group split into two halves. Ralph and McCarty formed a duo together recording a couple of singles in their gentle music style produced by Samuel Smith Henry's coming home wonder if he found it he just telephoned think he must have found it he wants to live in the village When he started out, he knows what life's to have in this city. They then went on to form the progressive rock band Renaissance, along with Rolf's sister Jane, with Samuel Smith again producing their first album. The moon sends the darkness away in the night. I know that it's waiting. I know there's a place made for me. Both quit that band during the recording of its second album, though. They went on to various other projects, with McCarty eventually joining as semi-reformed Yardbirds in the 80s, which he continues with to this day as the only remaining original member. Ralph sadly died in 1976, getting electrocuted by an improperly grounded guitar. But with Ralph and McCarty gone, Paige and Dreher, and their manager Peter Grant who saw Paige as the real talent of the group, were left with the Yardbirds name, Paige's vision for a heavier rock band, and, crucially, a bunch of gigs had already been booked to play. There was only one thing for it. Paige and Drea were going to have to form a new Yardbirds. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on. Boom Banga Bang by Lulu. Visit patreon.com slash andrewhickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. A book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500songs.com That's 500, the numbers, songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. 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