The transition from Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck sent the Yardbirds hurtling from classicism to the very edge of experimentalism in the blink of an eye.
“Well, Eric was sort of a local character — a local blues player that had a bit of a reputation,” the Yardbirds’ Jim McCarty says in a newly posted interview. “He’d been in a couple of bands, and he’s also been to art school with [fellow Yardbirds co-founders] Keith Relf and Chris Dreja. So, they knew him. He came in and immediately went for it, and we said — ‘this is the guy.'”
That is, until they found a new guy in Jeff Beck. Clapton’s replacement joined the group just two days after his departure, even as McCarty and Co. made a few tentative steps away from straight blues with the Graham Gouldman-penned 1965 pop hit “For Your Love.”
What could have been a scary, band-imploding lineup shift instead — and this would become the platform for the Yardbirds’ legend — elevated them to the next level. Beck provided the jetfuel for a period of furious invention to follow.
“He had so much more of an overall feeling for not just blues but he would be influenced a lot by Les Paul and a lot of the electronic side of the guitar,” McCarty says in the same talk. “So, he’d be really interested in getting really futuristic sounds. It just seemed to be a much greater variation of sounds that he would get. It was totally off the wall, you know. It was totally mind blowing, sometimes.”
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