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ENGLISH AXID ROCK
The Animals were a British rock and roll band of the 1960s, formed in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Comprising Eric Burdon (vocals), Alan Price (organ), Hilton Valentine
(guitar), John Steel (drums), and Bryan 'Chas' Chandler
(bass) their moderate success in their hometown motivated them to move to London in 1964, in time to be grouped with the British Invasion. They performed fiery versions of
the staple rhythm and blues repertoire (Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, etc) and
were early fans of Bob Dylan, on whose first album they found their first two
singles. A rocking version of the standard "Baby Let Me Follow You
Down" was followed by the huge transatlantic hit "The House of the Rising Sun". Burdon's howling vocals
and Price's dramatic arrangement created arguably the first folk rock hit.
Their two-year chart career, masterminded by Mickie Most, featured intense
covers such as "Bring It On Home To Me" (a hit for Sam Cooke) and "Don't Let Me Be
Misunderstood" (from Nina Simone)By 1965 however,
the group was on the verge of splitting. Price left to reappear as a solo
artist, recording a hit version of Randy Newman's "Simon Smith And
The Amazing Dancing Bear." The group carried on under the name
"Eric Burdon and the Animals" in 1966, and changed direction. The hard-driving
blues was transformed into Burdon's version of psychedelia, as the former
hard-drinking Geordie relocated to the
Roger Keith Barrett (born January 6, 1946 in Cambridge, England), known as Syd, was one of the
founder members of the 1960s psychedelic rock group Pink Floyd.
Arthur Brown, born in
First coming to public awareness
in the late 1960s, Brown quickly became known for
his outlandish performances, which included setting his head on fire (actually
a burning helmet) and performances in the nude. His debut album, The Crazy World of Arthur Brown (1968) was a surprise hit on both
sides of the
Though Brown never managed to
release another recording as commercially successful as "Fire," he
did release three noteworthy albums as Kingdom Come in the early 1970s. (Arthur
Brown's Kingdom Come should not be confused with the hard rock/glam band of the
same name from the 1980's.) The Kingdom Come albums featured a wild mix
of progressive rock and demented theatrics. The third
and final Kingdom Come album, "Journey," is noteworthy for being one
of the first (if not the first) rock albums to feature a drum machine. In later years, Brown released
several solo albums and also contributed vocals to the song "The Tell Tale
Heart" on the Poe-based concept album "Tales of Mystery and
Imagination" by the Alan Parsons Project.
Arthur Brown has a large vocal
(several octaves) and often appeared on stage with a headpiece that was alight!
The Yardbirds were an early British rock band, noted for spawning the careers of
several of rock music's most famous guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page.
Formed originally as the
Metropolitan Blues Quartet in 1962Ц63 in London, the Yardbirds first achieved notice on
the burgeoning British blues scene (or "rhythm and blues," as the British music press
alluded to it) when they took over as the house band at the Crawdaddy Club in
LondonЧsucceeding the Rolling Stones. With a repertoire drawn more
from the Delta-soaked Chicago blues titans Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Elmore James than the more commercially-minded
Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed influences of the Rolling Stones, the
Yardbirds began to build a following of their own in London before very long.
Their inexperience and their less-than-stellar musicianship was obvious but
their commitment was just as powerful, as they hammered away at versions of
such blues classics as "Smokestack Lightning," "Got Love If You
Want It," "Here 'Tis," "Baby What's Wrong," "Good
Morning Little School Girl," "Boom Boom," "I Wish You
Would," "Done Somebody Wrong," and "Rollin' and
Tumblin'."
They made their first significant
lineup addition when singer/harmonica player Keith Relf, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja, bassist
Paul Samwell-Smith, and drummer Jim McCarty, replaced original lead guitarist
Anthony (Top) Topham with a very boyish-looking art student named Eric Clapton in late 1963. Clapton already knew what he was
doing with his instrument; his solo turns, while far enough from the gripping
little gems for which he became famous enough soon enough, already set him
apart from most of his peers among the British blues clubbers. Between his
sleek guitar playing and Keith Relf's
improving harmonica style, the group could at least
boast two attractive players that made listeners overlook their
still-incomplete rhythmic attack. And, of critical importance, Crawdaddy Club
impresario Giorgio GomelskyЧwho had all but discovered the Rolling Stones but
thought it beyond his range to become their managerЧlearned enough from his
previous miss to become the Yardbirds' manager and, as it turned out, first
producer.
Under Gomelsky's guidance, the
Yardbirds got themselves signed to EMI's Columbia label in early 1964; they set a precedent of a sort
when their first album turned out to be a live album, Five Live Yardbirds,
recorded at the legendary Marquee Club in London. The group was well enough reputed that
none other than blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson himself invited the group to
tour England and Germany with him, a union that survives
to this day on a live album memorable for Williamson's trouper-like adaptation
of his deep troubador style of blues to the Yardbirds' raw, unpolished rock and
roll version. ("Those English kids," Williamson said famously of the
Yardbirds and other British blues groups like the Animals and the Stones,
"want to play the blues so badЧand they play the blues so
bad," though he had a personal affection for the Yardbirds' members and
even thought of moving to England permanently, until the illness that resulted
in his early 1965 death.)
The quintet went from there to cut
several singles, including "I Wish You Would," but it was "For
Your Love," a Graham Gouldman composition that was anything but the blues,
which put the band to their highest chart position yet in EnglandЧand their
first major hit in the United States, when it was released there in 1965. It also prompted Eric ClaptonЧat the time a no-holds-barred
blues puristЧto leave the group and join with John Mayall's Blues Breakers. The loss could have been devastating
to the Yardbirds; Clapton had already shown the striking, stabbingly virtuosic
style he would later expand and deepen with Mayall and unfurl as a full-fledged
virtuoso statement with the improvisational Cream. Clapton recommended Jimmy Page, a studio guitarist he had known
(and with whom he would soon cut a series of stirring blues guitar duets,
including "Tribute to Elmore" and "Draggin' My Tail"), as
his replacement, but PageЧuncertain at the time about giving up his lucrative
studio workЧrecommended in turn one Jeff Beck, whose fleet-fingered style and bent
for experimentation pushed the Yardbirds to the direction from which they
became widely credited for opening the door to "psychedelic" rock.
The Yardbirds in 1965 and 1966 issued a pair of albums in the
U.S., slapped together somewhat haphazardly from their British recordings, For
Your Love (which included a delightful early take of "Hang On,
Sloopy"Чthey'd gotten hold of a demo of the song before the McCoys had
their chartbusting crack at it a year later, and their patented doubletime
"rave up" version is a treat) and Havin' A Rave Up With The
Yardbirds, half of which came from Five Live Yardbirds.
Beck's tenure in the group, meanwhile,
produced a number of memorable recordings, from single hits like "Heart
Full of Soul," "I'm A Man," and "Shapes of Things" to
the Yardbirds album (known more popularly as Roger the Engineer, and first issued in the U.S. in
a bowdlerised version called Over Under Sideways Down), and established
him as a top-rank guitarist whose experiments with fuzz tone, feedback, and distortion
jolted British rock forward with a bold drop kick. In addition, the Yardbirds
began serious experiments with things like adapting Gregorian chant
("Still I'm Sad," "Turn Into Earth," Hot House of
Omagarashid," "Farewell," "Ever Since The World Began")
and various European folk styles into their blues and rock rooted music, and
this gained them a new reputation among the hipster underground even as their
commercial appeal had begun already to wane.
It was prior to the sessions that
produced Yardbirds that Paul Samwell-Smith decided to quit the group for
touring purposes and move behind the boards to co-produce them with new
manager, Simon Napier-Bell (a former assistant to Beatles manager Brian Epstein). Jimmy Page re-entered the picture here, playing
bass until rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja could become comfortable with that
instrument, and then teaming with Beck for tantalising twin-guitar attacks that
proved short-enough lived: Beck either quit or was fired from the group
in mid-1966, and the Yardbirds continued as a
quartet for the remainder of their career. (Almost the only pronounced examples
of what the Beck-Page tandem could have been came on a single, "Happenings
Ten Years Time Ago," and their half-crazed version of "The Train Kept
A-Rollin'," an even crazier rendition of which turned up in the Antonioni
film Blow-Up as "Stroll On".) Page
was just as bent toward experimentation as Beck, particularly his striking
technique of scraping a violin or cello bow across his guitar strings to induce
a round of odd and surreal sounds, and his dextrous use of a wah-wah pedal. He
also proved an adept fingerstyle guitarist, the shimmering "White
Summer," an Indian-influence instrumental composition, joining his
full-out hard rock grinder, "I'm Confused" as curlicues to the
Yardbirds' unexpectedly forthcoming transmutation.
Increasing chart indifference,
record company pressure (their British home label pressed hitmaking producer
Mickie Most upon them in a failed bid to re-ignite their commercial success),
and drug-related problems meant that by 1967 the Yardbirds' days were numbered. Or
were they? After the failure of their final album (the badly-produced Little Games) and their reduction to small
venues for touring, the group agreed to split in early 1968.
But Jimmy Page, left with both the rights to the
band's name and a touring commitment yet fulfilled in Europe, was compelled to put a new
lineup together to make that commitment. Billed as the New Yardbirds, they made
the tour, found themselves clicking together decently enough, and then repaired
home to England to produce, in a very short time, a very new album by a
somewhat different group, although much of the sound derived from Page's sonic
experiments (and a baby brother composition to his earlier "White
Summer" called "Black Mountain Side"Чnot to mention a polished
rewrite of "I'm Confused," called "Dazed and Confused")
with the last edition of the Yardbirds: Led Zeppelin.
The remaining Yardbirds didn't
exactly go gently into that good grey night. Paul Samwell-Smith, who had gone
on to fame as Cat Stevens' producer in 1970, helped vocalist Relf
and drummer McCarty organise a new group devoted to experimentation between
rock, folk, and classical formsЧRenaissance.
Keith Relf resurfaced in the late 1970s with a new quartet, Armageddon, a
hybrid of hard, thrusting rock and folk that included former Renaissance mate Louis Cenammo. They recorded one promising album before
Relf was killed in an electrocution accident in his home. Meanwhile, Jim
McCarty, Paul Samwell-Smith (who had remained Cat Stevens' producer to the day
Stevens converted to Islam and withdrew from pop music entirely), and Chris
Dreja offered a nucleus in the 1980s for a short-enough lived but fun-enough
kind of Yardbirds semi-reunion called Box of Frogs, which occasionally included
Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page plus various friends with whom
they'd all recorded over the years.
The Yardbirds were inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. All six living musicians who had been
part of the group's heydayЧincluding Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, who had never (contrary to numerous
misidentifications over the years) played in the group together (the confusion
may have stemmed from a 1971 Epic Records anthology, Yardbirds Featuring
Performances By: Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, a set which fell out
of print and became a very expensive collectors' item for many years)Чappeared
at the ceremony. "I suppose," Jeff Beck cracked at the ceremony,
"I should say thank you, but they fired meЧso fuck 'em!"
In 2003, a new album, Birdland,
was released under the Yardbirds name by a lineup including Chris Dreja, Jim
McCarty, and new members Gypie Mayo (lead guitar, backing vocals), John Idan
(bass, lead vocals) and Alan Glen (harmonica, backing vocals). Jeff Beck
reunites with his former bandmates on one track.