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By Root 1099 0

about making records. I was developing a very purist attitude toward music, and thought that it really ought to be just live. My theory was that making records, first and foremost, was always going to be a commercial enterprise and therefore was not pure. It was a ridiculously pompous attitude, considering that all the music I was learning from was on records. In truth, I was just embarrassed because, in the studio, my own personal inadequacy was there for all to see. But it wasn’t just me, and as exciting as it was to be actually making a record, when we listened back and compared it to the stuff we were supposedly modeling ourselves on, it sounded pretty lame. We just sounded young and white, and even though our second single, a cover of a rock version of “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” sounded much better, I still felt that we were falling far short of the mark in some way. This was not something I felt just about the Yardbirds, but about other bands that I admired, like Manfred Mann, the Moody Blues, and the Animals, all of whom were far better live than they were on recordings.

We too were much better live, a fact borne out by the release of our first LP, Five Live Yardbirds, which, in the absence of many other live albums, proved to be quite a groundbreaking record. It had a much rawer sound, which I was happier with. What singled us out from most other bands was the way we were experimenting with band dynamics, a direction we were taken in by Paul Samwell-Smith. We became quite well known for the way in which we improvised, for example, taking the frame of a blues standard, like Bo Diddley’s “I’m a Man,” and embellishing it by jamming in the middle, usually with a staccato bass line, which would get louder and louder, rising to a crescendo before coming back down again to the body of the song.

While most other bands were playing three-minute songs, we were taking three-minute numbers and stretching them out to five or six minutes, during which time the audience would go crazy, shaking their heads around manically and dancing in various outlandish ways. On my guitar I used light-gauge guitar strings, with a very thin first string, which made it easier to bend the notes, and it was not uncommon during the most frenetic bits of playing for me to break at least one string. During the pause while I was changing my string, the frenzied audience would often break into a slow handclap, inspiring Giorgio to dream up the nickname of “Slow hand” Clapton.

Giorgio worked us incredibly hard. With Keith Relf’s father, Bill, as our roadie and driver, we were out on the road most nights, touring the Ricky Tick circuit and other venues in the south of England, with a trip to Abergavenny and a couple of gigs at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester thrown in for good measure. To add to our earnings, and his, he once even hired us out to an advertising company to promote shirts on TV. We had our photograph taken wearing white business shirts while a jingle announced “Raelbrook Toplin, the shirt you don’t iron!” Even then, I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable about promoting something that had nothing to do with the music, but these were the days in which musicians still had little say in what went on in their careers, and did what their managers told them.

By the time we played the fourth Richmond Jazz and Blues Festival, on August 9, 1964, it was our 136th gig of the year. The opening act of the weekend had been the Rolling Stones, and we closed things on Sunday night. Giorgio now pulled a bit of a fast one, a not unusual occurrence. He told us that we badly needed a holiday, and we should pack our things, as we were off the next day for two glorious weeks in Lugano, the Swiss town on Lake Maggiore where he had once lived.

So off we went, in a couple of Ford Transit vans, one of which was filled with a gaggle of female fans, girls who really loved us and would come to the CrawDaddy every week to see us, only to find that when we finally arrived at the hotel after a hair-raising journey over the Alps, it wasn’t even properly