Giorgio Gomelsky on His Yardbird Days

As a mere historical curiosity the Yardbirds would be noteworthy enough, since during their five-year history they employed the youthful talents of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. But the band also changed the face of rock with innovations such as the fuzzbox, the extended guitar solo and the live album. Yardbirds manager and producer Giorgio Gomelsky, who'd previously sort-of managed the Rolling Stones and would go on to work with the Animals and Soft Machine (among many others), was as important a part of the Yardbirds' sound as the blistering guitars. To hear him tell it, the Yardbirds were the exact point where rock broke away from pop and headed toward the territory of art.

I sat down recently with Gomelsky in his living space above the legendary "underground" Green Door nightclub in Chelsea. The occasion was Rhino's release this summer of a two-CD Yardbirds collection titled Ultimate! "After the Stones I wanted to find a band that would be able to stretch the blues structure into the improvisational aspect," Gomelsky recalls. "I wanted to find a band that would play not just songs, but pieces." Gomelsky had sent his friend Hamish Grimes on a mission to find a band that could incorporate that "improvisational aspect" into a rock format. When Grimes reported back that he had a hot prospect, Gomelsky found himself making his way to the Yardbirds' tiny practice space.

"I heard them as I walked up the stairs and I knew instantly I had found what I was looking for," he says. "What they were doing was the rave-up, and it was a good framework to expand the music." By "rave-up" Gomelsky means the point in a song when the band would speed up the tempo and transform its usual blues into a frenzied cacophony. It became the signature statement of every Yardbirds performance (hence the title of the classic LP, Having A Rave-Up with the Yardbirds). Unfortunately, true rave-ups were never really recorded. There are truncated suggestions of them on Ultimate!, in such tracks as "Here 'Tis," but as Gomelsky explains, "You don't see the rave-up on a record because they typically took about 15-20 minutes and that meant no radio play. They became a kind of ritual, and we would finish our sets with them. The result was that people would go home drunk, happy and exhausted."

Gomelsky remembers how the Yardbirds' original 16-year-old guitarist, Anthony "Top" Topham, was forced to resign because his parents did not want the youth dropping out of school in pursuit of some fleeting rock 'n' roll dream. Eric Clapton applied for the vacant spot. Did Clapton get the gig because he showed evidence of future prowess? No, according to Gomelsky?Clapton was recommended because he had been a DJ at Gomelsky's famous Crawdaddy Club, where the Stones got their start, and a part of the scene. "He had obviously done his homework and fit in quite well." Soon the band was playing every week to increasing numbers of fans.

The Yardbirds backed Sonny Boy Williamson during an English tour. The blues legend returned to the States and announced to his peers that, on the basis of what he'd experienced, they had no reason to fear competition from across the Atlantic. Still, the Yardbirds' popularity was not undermined because they weren't the real deal. Part of their early charm lies in the fact that they weren't trying to be, and could render "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" in a manner that would not seem out of place at the local high school hop. The blues was only a vehicle, not an end in itself, and it was increasingly Keith Relf's histrionic vocals and Clapton's extended solos that began to distinguish the band.

Five Live Yardbirds was not the first effort of its kind, but it was the first to get noticed. Even though it was a commercial flop, the recording proved the attraction of a guitar solo that ran more than eight or 16 bars, as well as that of revealing a band in its raw state. But by then the Beatles dominated, and merely being a wildly innovative club band did not cut it anymore. Gomelsky had the band listening to everything from sitars to harpsichord music. "I got them to stretch things out. I thought, if we are going to do commercial singles we have to invent something to add to the process." The result was "For Your Love," with its harpsichord intro and bongo finale. The song went to number two in England and number six in the States, but legend has it that Clapton considered it the worst kind of pop sellout and quit the band rather than be sullied by a continuing association.

Not so, says Gomelsky. "Eric had no part to play in 'For Your Love'?there is no lead guitar part. So he was just lying on his back in the studio. The real problem was that [bass player] Paul Samwell-Smith was becoming the musical director of group. He was an obnoxious sort of guy and Eric didn't get on with him... It was not a question of the blues being abandoned, it was about character differences." Gomelsky stops for a moment, laughs and continues. "Look what he did later on. I mean for someone who did not want to go commercial?" Jeff Beck replaced Clapton and by the middle of 1965 had recorded the band's fuzztone classic, "Heart Full of Soul."

"Back then everybody was looking for sustain, and once when Eric was recording he took a break and leaned his guitar next to his amp. Of course, the thing let out a shriek and Keith Grant, the engineer, got interested. The next day he talked to somebody who knew the guys at Vox, and before long we had the fuzzbox. I loved it because I was always looking for clean distortion. I wanted a guitar to sound like a saxophone, screaming out these notes, then holding them and waving them into the distance."

There was more sonic experimentation of an unexpected sort. "We had a big problem with drum sound. Nobody knew how to get a nice, warm, big, punchy sound on record. So everybody was playing louder and louder. The sound I particularly liked was the one I heard on stuff from Sun Studio, and I decided that when we toured the States in '65 I would find out how Sam Phillips did it.

"When I organized the tour, I made sure we would have enough time to spend 24 hours in Memphis. We did this show in Little Rock on a Saturday night and were almost beaten up by rednecks who objected to the long hair. So we ran out of the place and jumped into a station wagon and drove all night to Memphis. The record company had sent Sam a message but he had never answered it, so I was not too surprised that he was not in when we got to Sun. He had an apartment on top of the studio, so we parked and just waited." And waited. By the afternoon the band was desperate, so they called a DJ friend who sent the call out to Phillips over the airwaves?to no avail. It was near midnight and the Yardbirds had almost given up hope when a car pulled up with a lot of fishing poles piled on top of it. A very drunk Sam Phillips was at the wheel.

"Sam just fell out of the car. I helped him up and tried to explain who I was and why we were there. He just growled at me and said, 'I don't deal with limeys!' Fortunately, I had $600, and when he saw the money he decided to open up the studio. I knew that his ears would pick up when he heard the band, and Jeff's playing completely sobered him up. Early that morning we recorded 'You're a Better Man than I' and I got the drum sound I was looking for."

After that first American tour things started going bad for Gomelsky and the Yardbirds. Beck freaked out on their second tour of the States, and Gomelsky wanted to replace him with a keyboard player. "I wanted to change directions and explore more of the harmonic possibilities, much like Yes and Genesis did a few years later," he says. The Yardbirds were not willing to stretch quite that far, and Samwell-Smith (egged on by his girlfriend, who claimed that Gomelsky was exploiting them) convinced his bandmates to fire their Svengali. Jimmy Page replaced Beck and the Yardbirds continued to produce seminal sonics until they ran out of steam?under the stewardship of Peter Grant, a producer whose undeniable talent for recording hit singles proved a poor mix with the band.

Gomelsky sums up the Yardbirds' place in history as follows: "The Beatles were great songwriters and songsmiths and had that popular appeal. The Stones were their counterpart in a rebellious form. The Animals were a heartfelt contribution from the North of England to the South of the States. But the Yardbirds were cosmopolitan, they were a big-city band, so the synthesis was different and more complex. Not to be vainglorious, but the reason why we did what we did was that nobody else was."