For your, well actually, my viewing pleasure I present Yardbirds footage that either I’ve never seen before (from European TV) or haven’t seen since I was a tyke. I got bored today and put Yardbirds into the YouTube search box and sure enough there’s some new stuff since I last checked about a year ago. I love the Yardbirds and assume most of you do too. So much has been written about the Yardbirds over the years that I have little to add, except that I still listen to them constantly.
It’s been a longstanding love affair, after buying the 45 of Heart Full Of Soul b/w Steeled Blues (I didn’t really like their first U.S. hit For Your Love), I managed to acquire their first two LP’s– For Your Love and Having A Raving Up With The Yardbirds in 1966, having traded a copy of Beatles ’65 with a neighbor. I still think I got the best of the deal. I was seven years old and I can distinctly remember being aware of how the sound of the guitar was changing– from the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” to the Stones’ “The Last Time” and then the first side of Having A Rave-Up (in my opinion the peak of Jeff Beck’s style), the guitar was becoming a rather ominous sounding instrument (of course I was unaware at that time of earlier purveyors of guitar noise like Link Wray and Johnny Guitar Watson). I eventually bought every single second of music the Yardbirds have ever recorded and still get excited when anything new surfaces, especially from the Beck period (Aug. ’65– Oct. ’66).
Louise (bottom) is the only footage I’ve ever seen with Clapton on guitar (my least favorite of the three). There’s an interesting version of My Gal Sloopy and I Wish You Would that I’ve never seen, unfortunately the embedding has been disabled so I can’t run it here, but you can catch it here, it looks like Jim McCarty himself provided the footage. The CD re-issues of For Your Love, Having A Rave-Up and Over Under Sideways Down, along with non-LP’ singles, bonus tracks and outtakes are essential.