The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [103]
Were the Yardbirds’ gigs with Sonny Boy Williamson the first chance you had to play with an American bluesman?
Yes, and I think that’s when I first realized that we weren’t really being true to the music—when Sonny Boy came over and we didn’t know how to back him up. It was frightening, really, because this man was real and we weren’t. He wasn’t very tolerant, either. He did take a shine to us after a while, but before that he put us through some bloody hard paces. In the first place, he expected us to know his tunes. He’d say, “We’re going to do ‘Don’t Start Me to Talkin’ ’ or ‘Fattening Frogs for Snakes,’ ” and then he’d kick it off, and of course, some of the members of this particular band had never heard these songs.
There was a certain attitude in the band, a kind of pride in being English and white and being able to whip up a crowd on our own, and there was a sort of resistance toward what we were being asked to do—why should we have to study this man’s records? Even I felt a little bit like that, because we were coming face-to-face with the reality of this thing, and it was a lot different from buying a record that you could take off when you felt like it. So we were all terrified of him, me most of all I think, because I was really making an attempt. Years later, Robbie Robertson of the Band told me that Sonny Boy had gone back to the South and hung out with them and had said he’d just been over playing with these white guys who didn’t know how to play anything at all.
Yeah, Robertson once told me that Sonny Boy had said, “Those Englishmen want to play the blues so bad—and they play it so bad!”
Right. At the time, I thought we’d done pretty well. But by that time, the momentum of the band was toward becoming a pop group, and this man arrived and took it all back down to the basic blues. And I had to almost relearn how to play. It taught me a lot; it taught me the value of that music, which I still feel.
What caused you to leave the Yardbirds just when they were on the brink of success? You’re supposed to have been grossed out by that first pop hit, “For Your Love.”
Yeah. At a certain point we started getting package tours, with the Ronettes, Billy J. Kramer, the Kinks, the Small Faces, lots of others, and we lost our following in the clubs. We decided to get suits, and I actually designed suits for us all. Then we did the Beatles’ Christmas show, and at that point we really began to feel the lack of a hit. We’d be on for twenty minutes or half an hour, and either you were very entertaining or you did your hits. A lot of times the raveup bit got us through, and a lot of times it didn’t. It became very clear that if the group was going to survive and make money, it would have to be on a popular basis. We couldn’t go back to the clubs, because everyone had got that taste and seen what fun it would be to be famous.
So a lot of songs were bandied about, and Giorgio [Gromelsky, Yardbirds manager] came up with a song by Otis Redding. I thought that would make a great single because it was still R&B and soul, and we could do it really funky. Then Paul [Samwell-Smith, Yardbirds bassist] got the “For Your Love” demo, and he heard it with harpsichord. Whoa, harpsichord. Where does that leave me? Twelve-string guitar, I suppose. So we went in the studio to do both songs, but we did “For Your Love” first. Everyone was so bowled over by the obvious commerciality of it that we didn’t even get to do the Otis Redding song, and I was very disappointed, disillusioned by that. So my attitude within the group got really sour, and it was kind of hinted that it would be better for me to leave. ’Cause they’d already been to see Jeff Beck play, and at the time he was far more adaptable than I was. I was withdrawing into myself, becoming intolerable, really, dogmatic. So they kind of asked me to leave, and I left and felt a lot better for it.
Is this the time when you did nothing but practice every day for a year? Or is that