An incredible situation for the Yardbirds — having both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page as guitarists beginning in 1966 — also signalled the beginning of the end of the group.
A clash of egos between two artists destined for Hall of Fame careers away from the Yardbirds eventually led — at least in part — to Beck’s departure. After just one post-Beck studio album in 1967, founding members Keith Relf and Jim McCarty were gone, too.
“There was an awful lot going on,” McCarty tells Pete Feenstra. “There was lot of talent in the band, and there wasn’t very much space. There was also a lot of egos, as well you know — a lot of competition, particularly between those two, and they were competing against each other. Sometimes it really worked well, but most of the time it was pretty hairy, I would say.”
Page would go on to co-found Led Zeppelin in 1968, an all-together more expected turn of events than what happened with McCarty and Relf. They instead helped launch the more folk-oriented prog group Renaissance. Looking back, though, McCarty says the impetus for that decision existed within the Yardbirds for years.
“I think we wanted a change,” McCarty says. “We’d been playing that stuff for a long time, night after night on the road. Keith and I started to listen to other material and lots of different eclectic stuff, and we quite liked it and wanted to do something a bit broader. There was always two sides in the band anyway — the ‘Smokestack Lightning’ side and there was the ‘Still I’m Sad’ side — so there was also that mystical side of things going on, too.”
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