Perhaps The Yardbirds are less famous for what they achieved musically than for the technological advances they hatched in the 1960s and for the super guitarists they incubated: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Who knows what might have happened if the group had stayed together?
But then, there would never have been a Led Zeppelin.
The New Yardbirds:
Birds of a Different Feather
When his fellow Yardbirds flew the coop, Jimmy Page was left with an empty nest just when the group’s popularity had started to soar. Should Page return to the session work that was stifling his creativity? Should he embark on a solo career? He had already proven to himself and the world that he was one of the best guitarists on the concert stage. Maybe he should return to art school? Or focus on honing his already considerable skills as a record producer.
He loved playing in a group format where he was musically comfortable. All the hassles associated with touring were somehow worth it, when a band clicked musically. Fate was to help him decide.
The Yardbirds had a number of outstanding dates and were contractually committed to a short Scandinavian tour in September 1968. It was only weeks away. Page had to do something and do it fast or risk potential legal action. With phoenix-like resolve, he rose from the ashes of The Yardbirds and started to build a new band from scratch.
Jimmy Page would fulfill The Yardbirds’ contract with a new line-up of talent: Robert Plant (vocals), John Bonham (percussion), John Paul Jones (keyboards/bass guitar) and himself (lead guitar). The Yardbirds were extremely popular and they had already been advertised as appearing in Scandinavia under that name. So, in order to take advantage of the equity in the group’s name – and because he had dearly loved his association with that band, Page and his manager, Peter Grant, decided that the new group would tour Scandinavia (and at least one known venue in England) as The New Yardbirds.
Like the band itself, the logistics of touring were put together in a hurry. Richard Cole was its permanent tour manager and a small crew of people helped with equipment on the road. When Led Zeppelin toured Scandinavia as The New Yardbirds, Jerry Ritz – who worked for promoter, Bendix Records – assumed the many duties of tour manager and escorted the group on its first-ever tour.
Led Zeppelin:
Raised and Airborne (1968)
The New Yardbirds were a sensation in Scandinavia that September of 1968. Audience response was overwhelming throughout their short tour. All four members realized that the new group they had formed was a completely different animal from The “New” Yardbirds. They needed a new name of their own. They considered several, including The Mad Dogs and The Whoopee Cushions. But none seemed suitable.
Jimmy Page recalled a name that Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, had suggested in jest: Lead Zeppelin. It referred to a common English joke then in vogue that bands would bomb or go over like a lead Zeppelin (or, as we say in North America, a “lead balloon”). Peter Grant decided to drop the “a” in order to avoid mispronunciation of the new moniker. And so, Led Zeppelin took flight.
Led Zeppelin’s name suited the group for other reasons. It embodied the “light and heavy” connotation that is metaphorically associated with the band’s music. Jimmy Page’s short and long-term plans which had materialized within weeks after having formed the group were going extremely well. Next on the agenda was to record an album – and as soon as possible.
With the band hot off its Scandinavian Tour of September 1968, the group was well rehearsed and prepared to make such a recording. They had performed live many of the numbers they intended to record in the studio. Led Zeppelin went into Olympic Studios, Barnes, London, England and recorded their self-titled debut album Led Zeppelin in September/October 1968. Jimmy Page personally financed its recording, at a cost of approximately 1,800 pounds. What a great investment that turned out to be!
We’ve just taken a brief look at Jimmy Page’s musical career, from its 1956 genesis with the James Page Skiffle Group to the formation of Led Zeppelin in August 1968. Now it’s time to take a much closer look at the early days of The Yardbirds, The New Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin itself. This book contains previously unpublished, primary source interviews with the people who were there or who are involved with the super group’s ongoing musical legacy. You’ll learn things you never knew before – not only about Led Zeppelin – but about the popular music scene in the late 1960s.
Ready for take-off? Let’s fly!
WHAT IS AND WHAT WILL ALWAYS BE
by Jeffrey Morgan
I was 14 when I first heard Led Zeppelin, as were all my friends. The funny thing is, I don’t recall any of us ever actually going out and buying it, we all just had it. Back then, you could buy selected new albums for 99 cents on the first weekend of their release, so we’d go out and get as many records as we could, purely on a whim, without having to spend that much money. So I imagine we got it because either the cover looked cool, or it was dirt cheap to buy, or because someone at Northern Secondary already had a copy and the word just got around.
One thing that I know for sure—to coin a later lyric—is that Led Zeppelin wasn’t the must-have pop culture artefact that Led Zeppelin II would instantly become later that year. Which isn’t to say that Led Zeppelin wasn’t immediately popular, but in many ways it was a below-the-radar recording that had an underground patina about it, just like the first Led Zeppelin bootleg Blueberry Hill would soon have. Anyone who listened to that debut album when it first came out was in an elite corps of cool.
One of the great things about hearing it for the first time at the age of 14 was that you weren’t old enough to analyze it; just young enough to hear it with an open uncritical ear and intuitively get it for what it was: something very loud and extremely heavy. Not that we were a stranger to heavy: we were already listening to Blue Cheer, Iron Butterfly and Grand Funk, so Led Zeppelin naturally fit into that loud and heavy mould. It had a beat, you could groove to it, we gave it a ten.
Looking back with the forced perspective of being a hoity-toity CREEM rock critic for over thirty years, it’s now easy for me to connect the dots and see what came from where. But even after a recent listening to Jimmy Page’s perfunctory playing on early sessions like the All Stars’ L.A. Breakdown and Nico’s cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s I’m Not Saying, it’s well-nigh impossible to hear any shred of future greatness there. Page may have been infinitely more adept than his peers on tracks like The Lancastrians’ She Was Tall but there wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination any sonic foreshadowing whatsoever that within five years he’d be well on his way to becoming arguably—and let’s face it, there’s always an argument—the world’s greatest rock’n’roll guitarist.
Any four year old watching Blow Up on a grainy black and white television could hear how Page’s work with The Yardbirds was a majestic quantum leap in quality that would eventually lead to something. Nevertheless, blues purists will always prefer Clapton’s tenure there, just as hard core rockers like myself will always be partial to the psycho Beck era. But even if you never cared for guitarist number three, you still have to begrudgingly admire how Page took an influential pop band on the wane and reshaped it into his own vision of what a real rock’n’roll band should be - one which he would operate on his own terms, without any external inferior influence.
Having sonically suffered at the hands of many a house producer over the years, Page’s determination right from the very beginning to properly produce his own music would ultimately prove