A group I remember us discussing was The Yardbirds and how they had three guitar greats. It hardly mattered at all that (a) I couldn't stand Eric Clapton's music, (b) Jimmy Page had also been a member of Led Zeppelin, a band who in my mind represented the epitome of macho rock bullshit that I've always despised, or (c) that I didn't have the faintest idea who Jeff Beck was. Three guitar gods toiled for the same English group from the sixties and this was a fact that impressed us all very much. Little did any of us know that only one of them appears on their signature hit and only for a fleeting bit of rudimentary playing. Session musicians stepped in to play harpsichord and bongos, instruments that were evidently beyond the talents of a trio of celebrate axmen.
Eric Clapton had previously played guitar with famed blues rock finishing school John Mayall's Bluesbreakers before joining The Yardbirds at the end of 1963. The group had come out of the same south London scene as The Rolling Stones so it would have been logical to have them follow a similar path to the charts. This evidently didn't sit well with Clapton, who disapproved of their shift from blues to pop-rock. That's right, the man who would go on to put out such intense 4-bar workouts as "Anyone for Tennis?" and "Wonderful Tonight" didn't want to have anything to do with such crass commercialism.
For all that is made of the presence (largely at separate times) of Beck, Clapton and Page, The Yardbirds had two big knocks against them that put them at a disadvantage next to the stiff competition of The Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks. First, they lacked songwriters. Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham famously locked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a room until they had finished writing a song but nothing similar seems to have been undertaken between lead singer Keith Relf and, say, guitarist/bassist Chris Dreja. (In fairness, during the Beck-era the quintet began composing together) A young Graham Gouldman, still a good half-decade away from establishing himself as a pop star in his own right with 10cc, began giving them material to commence their run of UK Top 10 hits., the first of which was "For Your Love".
The group also seemed to lack musical curiosity. Perhaps Clapton had been correct all along since they appeared unwilling or unable to search beyond their blues rock roots. Brian Jones had been a staunch blues purist but his facility with any old random instrument he would find made him an invaluable piece of the Stones' early creative peak on albums such as Aftermath and Between the Buttons. Of course, finding a talent like Jones is easier said than done which is all too apparent with "For Your Love" being mainly the product of a London-based studio session crew. Along with Relf's howling of the chorus, it is the harpsichord played by a young Brian Auger that is the most memorable thing about it.
"For Your Love" has long been considered a classic of mid-sixties' pop-rock, one of many key singles from this time which hints at a newfound maturity and desire to push boundaries. Yet, it also has a foot in the old ways of music industry practices like relying on staff songwriters and studio session cats. The fact that it works as well as it does is something of a miracle, all things considered. The polished and almost graceful verses are complemented by the raw energy of the chorus, a trait which The Rolling Stones wouldn't fully master until the following year.
The mythos of The Yardbirds and their three deeply influential guitar players is such that most wouldn't even be aware that they were as close to Herman's Hermits as they were to Cream. Uppity rock fans might object to this claim but I think it makes them more interesting: they would eventually evolve into Led Zeppelin but they could just as easily have been doing the cabaret circuit with the likes of Cilla Black had things been just a little different. Maybe it ended up happening in a rock 'n' roll parallel universe out there.
Score: 8
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