Even after six decades, Jim McCarty never gets tired of being a Yardbird.
“The songs never really lose their magic somehow,” says the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame drummer who helped to form, and has sustained, one of the British Invasion’s most influential bands. “People seem to appreciate them, and that helps.” McCarty promises all the classics, and more, when he and the reconstituted band take the stage of the Tin Pan on March 3.
The Yardbirds deserve their legendary status. Live, the group was considered the fiercest of the U.K. outfits performing American R&B and blues, all while enjoying memorable pop hits (“For Your Love,” “Heart Full of Soul”). They shaped blues rock and psychedelic music and set the stage for heavy metal, serving as the training ground for three of rock ‘n’ roll’s most celebrated lead guitarists, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.
Calling via Zoom from his home in France, McCarty, the band’s founding drummer, says that The Yardbirds’ latest touring show will feature their best music with a little bit of looking back. “We incorporate the history of the group and have a bit of back projection going on, and then we play the songs. I think it’s quite interesting for people.”
Raised in Teddington, a suburb of London, budding skinsman McCarty hooked up early with bassist Paul Samwell-Smith. “We were in the same year and used to be in school groups together playing early rock and roll [like] Buddy Holly, Elvis and Gene Vincent.” The two lost contact, but soon Samwell-Smith began performing in the Metropolitan Blues Quartet with a singer and harmonica player named Keith Relf. “I didn’t know Keith,” McCarty says, “but I went down to see them and I thought, ‘oh, what a great front man he is,’ and he looks really good.”
The original band came together in early 1963 at The Crown, a local pub in Kingston where musicians and art students would hang out. Relf, original lead guitarist Anthony “Top” Topham, and rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja were all in art school, while McCarty and Samwell-Smith attended Grammar school. The quartet bonded over Black rhythm and blues. “It was very sort of underground. Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley… It all appeared at one time and was very exciting.”
There were plenty of R&B-styled bands emerging, with names like The Rolling Stones and The Pretty Things. “Oh yes, we noticed what the Stones played,” McCarty laughs. “We didn’t play the same Chuck Berry song that they played or the same Howlin’ Wolf song. We made sure our repertoire was different.” Top Topham’s father had a great blues record collection too. “That was very useful.”
But dad didn’t want Top in the band and so he dropped out, paving the way for Eric Clapton to assume lead guitar duties in October 1963. It was like adding a different ingredient, McCarty says, although at first, he didn’t like him. “Eric showed up at rehearsal a bit cocky, sort of a showoff, had the latest Ivy League crewcut, and his clothes were smart,” McCarty told Forbes Magazine last year. “I thought, ‘He’s a bit of a bighead, this guy.’ After a while, when we got to know each other, it turned out he was a good lad, so we went with him.”
The unit’s first break came from playing in another Richmond, a suburb ten minutes from London. “We heard about The Rolling Stones leaving their residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond. Keith and Paul went to Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter of the club, and told him, ‘why don’t you come and see us rehearsing?'”
He not only gave them the gig, Gomelsky became their first manager and got them signed to Columbia Records. Their debut album, Five Live Yardbirds, was recorded in March 1964 at the Marquee Club in London. It took a little while for the group to embrace the recording studio, McCarty says. “We tried things like ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,’ things we played live, and they sounded a bit tame. So we said, let’s do a live album and we’ll also [capture] the atmosphere.”
The group was considered authentic enough to back up blues harpist Sonny Boy Williamson on a British tour (and later album). “We had almost nothing in common but he was a lovely man,” McCarty recalls. “He liked his Jack Daniels.” But time in the band wasn’t long for the man nicknamed “Slowhand.” The story goes that blues purist Clapton quit after the Yardbirds’ recorded a Graham Gouldman song, “For Your Love,” that he considered too pop. Adorned with a harpsichord — a suggestion from Samwell-Smith — it became the band’s first big hit.
“The story is 50% true,” McCarty says. “He was [also] having issues with the rest of the band. Really, I think he was destined to become his own man.”
At first, the group asked Jimmy Page — then a hot, in-demand session player — to take Clapton’s place. Page instead recommended his protegee, Jeff Beck. McCarty didn’t know it at the time, “but they’d been friends since they were teenagers.” It’s not blasphemy to say that Jeff Beck’s guitar transformed the band. His playing was wild, rude and dangerous. “He could just play off the top of his head,” the drummer says. “Totally unpredictable.”
Most of The Yardbirds’ hits came during the two years Beck was in the band. They began honing a collaborative sense of songwriting, and McCarty himself, along with Samwell-Smith, wrote “Still I’m Sad,” a haunting tune that can only be described as “Gregorian chant rock,” certainly ahead of its time in 1965. “It was one of those magic ideas really. We always liked different types of music, we had a broad spectrum of taste.”
One momentous recording session was held in Memphis, Tennessee, at the legendary Sun Studios with none other than producer Sam Phillips, the man who originally recorded Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, as well as many of the boys’ blues heroes, like Howlin’ Wolf. “It was Georgio’s idea to go into Sun. We went there at six or seven in the evening and Sam wasn’t there. He was out fishing somewhere. When he came back around 11 p.m., we’d all had a few drinks because we’d been in the bar next door waiting for him. Keith had a bit more to drink than the rest of us. He really couldn’t sing.”
After the U.K. musicians recorded “Train Kept a-Rollin'” and “You’re a Better Man Than I” at Sun, Sam told McCarty that he liked the band, “everyone except the singer. He [wanted us] to get rid of him. He didn’t have any idea of who we were, I don’t think.” Relf re-recorded his vocals several days later in New York.
McCarty can only guess why the group was always more popular in the states than in their home country. They never played Richmond — the closest they got was two Hampton Roads shows in 1966 at the Peninsula Auditorium in Hampton and the Virginia Beach Dome — but they toured often in the U.S. Maybe too often. The gig grind eventually got to bassist Paul Samwell-Smith in Summer 1966, and he quit the band, eventually becoming a successful record producer known for his work with Cat Stevens. “It’s a shame he couldn’t take it,” McCarty says. “He was influential and part of the chemistry.”
The band asked Jimmy Page to fill in on bass and this time he said yes. After a time, Chris Dreja switched to bass from rhythm guitar — “Chris was the reliable one,” says McCarty — which led to the twin guitar attack of Beck and Page. This historic and explosive lineup can be seen performing in the 1966 film, “Blow Up,” but it didn’t last long.
“There was a lot of competition going on between the two of them,” the drummer says. “Even though they were great friends, they were still trying to outdo each other. When it came to the live show, there was a battle going on. And, of course, Jimmy was always gonna win because he was poised to play the same thing and be very professional… the opposite to Jeff, where it depended on his mood.”
The real blow-up happened in Texas during a Dick Clark Caravan of Stars Tour, McCarty recalls. “Jeff, just said, ‘I’ve had it.’ He smashed up his guitar in the dressing room and just walked off in the middle of Texas somewhere.” Beck would have a long and varied career in rock and jazz, and was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall as a solo artist as well as a Yardbird. He passed away in 2023.
Page took over the band when Beck left, and McCarty thinks that the band still had the goods onstage, but something was missing. Their final album, “Little Games,” the only one with Jimmy, was helmed by Mickie Most, who was more of a pop producer (his biggest successes were Donovan and Herman’s Hermits). Most watered the band down, McCarty says. “He was giving us some terrible songs to record.”
In some ways, Page was using the Yardbirds to try out songs and ideas he would later hone in Led Zeppelin. “We picked up the song ‘Dazed and Confused’ by playing with the writer [Jake Holmes] one night in New York, and we did our version of the song.” It became a live favorite, a welcome boost at a time when the Yardbirds were at a low ebb. “The creative side of the band wasn’t so strong, so we didn’t really write so many great songs.”
When the band dissolved in 1968, Page, originally with Dreja, went on to form Zeppelin with Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham — for a time, they were “the New Yardbirds.” Meanwhile, McCarty and Relf began exploring softer sounds by forming Renaissance. “Keith and I were writing songs and listening to Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, more folky things. We wanted something a bit quieter and more gentle.” Their producer was Paul Samwell-Smith.
Relf would pass away in 1976, the victim of a freak electrocution at his home. McCarty is one of many who think he’s underrated as a vocalist and performer. “He was terrific, a very, very creative guy. When we did a show, he always really went for it, even if he didn’t quite have the physical capability to do it because he only had one lung by the time we’d finished the group. He was playing harmonica and all that, so his breathing was always very labored, and he was suffering, you know? But he was such a great guy, and a really good friend.”
In 2017, Page would take the group’s final, unreleased session, and a live show recorded at New York’s Anderson Theatre during their last U.S. tour, and create “Yardbirds 1968,” a compilation that is everything that “Little Games” was not: A fitting, rocking coda to the original band’s career.
McCarty kept playing in groups such as Shoot, Pilgrim and a sort of Yardbirds reunion, Box of Frogs. Over the course of his career, he’s also released three solo albums and authored two books. He reformed The Yardbirds in 1992 with Dreja, who passed away last year, soon after the band’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction.
The current lineup features guitarist and singer John Idan, harpist Myke Scavone, lead guitarist Godfrey Townsend and bassist Kenny Aronson, who has worked with everyone from Bob Dylan to Joan Jett. “These are older guys and they were fans of The Yardbirds,” McCarty says. “They were brought up on that music.” For a time, bringing the saga full circle, original guitarist Top Topham joined the reconstituted band.
McCarty, 82, can still kick start a Yardbirds-style rave up, but how long can he continue drumming and keeping the Yardbirds aloft?
“I’m not really planning,” he says. “I’m just playing, I’m in the present all the time. I seem to be able to do it physically.” The only tricky thing is the grind of travel, he laughs. “Jet lag is not so well taken at my age.”
The Yardbirds will appear at The Tin Pan on March 3. For more information and tickets, go to https://tinpanrva.com/
