Roger the Engineer (The Yardbirds, 1966)

If I seemed a little disappointed when I reviewed Little Games earlier this year, this album is to blame. While it's easy to pinpoint the problems of Little Games, I'm not sure why Roger the Engineer is so good. So, here, I will attempt to rationalize my feelings.

The Yardbirds are one of six core bands that constituted the British invasion (the others being the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Who, and the Kinks....sorry Dave Clark!). Each band staked out their own image and sound, some, thanks to better management, better than others. While incredibly influential on a number of bands in the United States, the Yardbirds themselves tended to shoot themselves in their collective foot in the "image" and business departments. At the heart of it was a fundamental inability to write consistently good songs. A number of their hits were actually penned by others. While that sustained the band through the potentially disastrous loss of Eric Clapton, the notion of creating an entire album of original material was utterly daunting. However by 1966 most bands were switching from R&B and blues covers to original material, much of which picked up a distinctly psychedelic flavor and advanced the sound of decade. So, disregarding their paucity of original material to date, the Yardbirds set out to create an album of 12 original songs.

In theory, Roger the Engineer should have a train wreck. Realistically, only the first two songs are capable of standing on their own. "Lost Woman" represents the culmination of everything the band had been doing during their rave-up period, a feedback drenched masterpiece. "Over Under Sideways Down" is one of their most respected songs, brilliantly retro and progressive all at once. Among the other ten, two of the songs are just blues covers with new lyrics (something Led Zeppelin would famously get wrapped up in). A number of the songs are much more concerned with voice arrangements (think "Still I'm Sad") than a full band effort and beginning to show Keith Relf's growing detachment from the old sound. However, put together, the album is a surprisingly coherent listening experience, albeit a bit unexpected from the band that started life more bluesy than most of its peers. And just to make things a little sweeter, the version I have includes two bonus tracks recorded slightly after the rest of the album. When bassist Paul Samwell-Smith quit the band, they moved incredibly fast to replace him...with Jimmy Page. So if you think Page should have been a bass player, check out "Psycho Daisies" (which will probably have you reconsider). He was quickly moved into a more comfortable role as co-lead guitarist (with Jeff Beck) for the next song, "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago", a song so ridiculously over the top it should have been clear to everybody that things just couldn't get any better (plus bass duties were tackled by some random session player named John Paul Jones).

Obviously the Relf-Beck-Page-Dreja-McCarty lineup was totally unsustainable, with Beck storming out of the band (check out "Stroll On" - the only other song recorded by this lineup before he left), and the band converting to a four-piece with Chris Dreja retrained on bass. Also the band management situation, never good to begin with, remained a complete mess. The story continues with Little Games, but the best years of the band were now behind them.

Little Games (The Yardbirds, 1967)

This album, the only full album to feature Jimmy Page on guitar, usually ends up disappointing just about everyone. Fans of Jeff Beck era Yardbirds stuff like Roger the Engineer are left scratching their heads wondering what happened. Meanwhile, people like my younger self track it down in hopes of discovering the mythical Led Zeppelin 0 and are more than a little bummed out. Let's address each perspective.

(1) It's not the Yardbirds. Well, it says so on the cover, so what gives? The main problem here is the producer Mickie Most was hell-bent on getting the band some hit material, even if it meant totally stripping their identity. Following the departure of original bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, the band rebounded fantastically by finally landing the services of Jimmy Page, first as emergency fill-in bass player ("Psycho Daisies"), then as co-lead guitarist with Beck for a pair of songs ("Stroll On" and "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago") and some guy named John Paul Jones providing the bass until Chris Dreja could properly switch instruments. Alas, it turned out to be a "jump the shark" moment for the band. They just couldn't top this. Not to mention none of this stuff was particularly lucrative for the band, as much as it is appreciated way out here in the future, so they turned to Most to get a really commercial album out and restore their financial fortunes.

Mickie Most was best known for stuff like Herman's Hermits and the Animals. In the case of the latter, the band got much better once they severed ties with Most, and the Yardbirds proved the reverse of this. He effectively split the band into Jimmy Page and Keith Relf on one side, who would play on all the tracks, and Jim McCarty and Chris Dreja who would be mostly left off the album, with their roles filled by session musicians. Consequently the only real link between this album and the previous one is Keith Relf's singing and he himself was clearly getting tired of the whole scene ("Only the Black Rose" illustrates the direction he was heading). Oddly enough the songs sounded a lot better and more energetic when performed live, since the whole band was involved. In fact the Little Games tracks played at the BBC are among the best of the set.

(2) It's not Led Zeppelin. A lot of fans of proto-metal mistakenly assume that anyone who was a part of Led Zeppelin played that way all the time and/or everything they were a part of was automatically something special. Although John Paul Jones was around for a lot of the sessions, you really can't call anything Zeppelin if Robert Plant and John Bonham are nowhere to be found. There are little glimpses (no pun intended) into Page's future throughout Little Games, but nothing here really screams "we're turning into Zeppelin!!!". Examples of these glimpses include the manic solos on "Smile On Me", the bowed guitar on "Tinker Tailor Solider Sailor", and of course "White Summer" which survived into the Zeppelin era. Also interspersed among some truly ridiculous songs like "I Remember the Night" are gems like "Think About It" and "Puzzles". Those songs, as was Most's strategy, are relegated to B-sides (bonus tracks here) to stuff like "Goodnight Sweet Josephine" and other inferior work.

In the wake of this album, the band sort of split along the lines of Page and Dreja on one side and Relf and McCarty on the other. When the second faction left to pursue a folk-rock career with bands like Together and Renaissance, and soon after Dreja quitting to go into photography, Jimmy Page had a chance to remake the Yardbirds to his own specifications. A "New Yardbirds" emerged with John Paul Jones, and Band of Joy members Plant and Bonham. Of course, there was a name change after just a few performances by a band that really had no strong ties or obligations to any band called the Yardbirds....