Selling Out A Heart Full Of Soul

The Yardbirds, or so do the almighty critics tell us, was the band that gave us the talent of some of the first guitar “virtuosos” in rock music, spawning no less than Eric Clapton (he of Cream, Derek and The Dominos and solo fame), Jeff Beck (he of...uh, the Jeff Beck Group fame and the main inspiration for Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel) and Jimmy Page (he of Led Zeppelin fame). Yet they are wrong if they think that’s all the Yardbirds were about.

Just listening to their music you get a feeling of exhilaration that few bands from that era gave, they possessed a sense of desperation and energy that made you smash your head to the wall or dance like a lunatic; sure, they had a very refined perfection to their playing but that counts for squat if it wasn’t for the way they played, like they meant it and with everything they had. No wonder most garage took upon their sound and it wasn’t until the slash-and-burn excesses of Blue Cheer, the Stooges and the MC5 that those levels of energy were exceded.

Not only were the guitar players excellent in this band, they were all a classic case of the “sum is better than the individual parts” that most great bands have; one of their greatest achievements was the so called rave up part of their songs, a section where they would concentrate into playing harder and more intense until the sound exploded just to go back to where they left off and finish the song (almost 30 years before Daydream Nation), Keith Relf sang with such bravado and intensity but hardly ever letting his voice get out of control, he was not just making the blues standards they used to cover jump, he made them scream! I call bollocks on the reason why Clapton left the Yardbirds, he wasn’t offended by them abandoning their purist roots since they would inject those pure blues numbers with so much adrenaline that they turned them into something else, something that was almost beyond rock back then, something original and all their fucking own.

But yes, the Yardbirds sold out.

Clapton, then nicknamed “Slow Hand” and a little later being the subject of many a “Eric Clapton Is God” graffittis, quit the band as they hit the charts with “For Your Love”. The reason i think Clapton quit is because of this song, namely a) the song’s lead instrument is not the guitar and b) it was a smash hit, unlike all the blues songs Clapton favored; but “For Your Love” is anything but a poppy bland attempt at mass comercial success; in fact, it’s one of the best damn songs to ever be recorded in this Earth; seriously, from the first chords of the harpsichord to the backing vocals to Relf’s delivery to the impossibly heavy breakdown in the middle to the grand last chorus, it retained the rave up quality of their blues adaptations but did it in a picture perfect song format.

Replacing Clapton wasn’t hard, since he recommended a friend of his, Jimmy Page who was then, a studio session player who enjoyed his job and had good pay so he preferred not to join them, instead telling them about his friend Jeff Beck, who had played in minor garage bands in which he experimented with feedback, noise and distortion, something that expanded the band’s sonic palette tenfold coupled with their new found song oriented material, gave the world such blazing recordings such as “Shape Of Things”, “You’re a Better Man Than I” and “Heart Full Of Soul” (the later’s riff originally intended to be played by a sitar), as well as more blues versions like the absolute expressway to their skulls climax of “I’m A Man” that always gives me the chills.

Bassist Paul Samwell-Smith left the band some time after, giving them an opportunity to invite Page again to the band, with the extremely underrated talents of Chris Dreja leaving the rhythm guitar for the four string to have room for Jeff and Jimmy to really let loose. Problem was, there was almost no time since Beck fell sick and was soon after being falsely diagnosed, he was fired while on the road, ending a truly magical era of music when rumours would fly about him slashing his speakers or loosening the tubes in his amp to get his distortion and when bands, sometimes spearheaded by the very own Yardbirds, would experiment with raga forms or gregorian chants.

The band went on to have minor hits with Page but they mostly exploited their experimental side, extending their songs and obliterating them to noise onstage, using the studio as an instrument and not caring about the results or having fear; Jimmy introduced the band to his freak folkish song “White Summer” and the prog noise metal of “Dazed & Confused”, developed by Relf and the rest of the band, although they wouldn’t last very long after.

Today i listen to this band with immortal melodies, daring ideas and incredibly exciting executions and i wonder about what would it have been to be around when they were around and perhaps watching them live with anyone of their brilliant lineups. Often, people look at me funny when i talk about Clapton and Beck and Page and assure them i positively despise Cream, don’t feel like listening to Led Zeppelin most of the time or that i’m not terribly excited to look into the instrumental work of Beck, rather i refer to their early to mid-60’s selves, as much as Bob Dylan felt old newspapers were more relevant in the sixties than the rags of the day; those were the days when a simple blues standard could make you want to slamdance before you could even think about stuff like that, it was music that makes you feel alive over under sideways down, i’m not sure if then but i’m completely positive that they do now, to me at the very least, with a sip of muddy waters, a fuzzed out sitar line and a heartful of soul to make me feel alive.

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The Yardbirds - Too Much Monkey Business (Five Live Yardbirds).mp3
The Yardbirds - For Your Love.mp3
The Yardbirds - Heart Full Of Soul.mp3
The Yardbirds - The Train Kept A-Rollin'.mp3
The Yardbirds - I'm A Man (live 1968-Mar-30 Anderson Theater, NYC).mp3
The Yardbirds - Jeff's Boogie.mp3
The Yardbirds - Over Under Sideways Down (live 1968-Mar-30 Anderson Theater, NYC).mp3
The Yardbirds - Happening Ten Years Time Ago.mp3

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XBXRX, February 1, Centro Cultural Español.

First of all, i would like to take this opportunity and thank the promoters and organizers of this show for daring to take a risk and bring a band with virtually no presence in Mexico and have them play a free show, just doing it because the band is awesome. Everybody give a big round of applause to them.

One of my favorite things about gigs hosted on the Centro Cultural Español, besides that it's a nice place with art and fine architecture instead of the ratholes that usually host rock shows (which also have their charms, but i do think that the occasional change in setting is actually a good thing), it's that it has such a casual vibe that you can come early, hang around for the soundcheck and no one tells you anything: i arrived just as XBXRX were doing their soundcheck and saw that they were having some problems, like not having a proper drum stool and trying to fix it by having a chair with some bags on it so that the height could be compensated. The band were in their civilian clothes, with the vocalist wearing a blazer and a scarf and drummer Weasel Walter wearing an Immortal long sleeve shirt. The place was getting crammed with people (almost literally) and, actually, kind of started thinking that the people who actually attend shows at the Español are some kind of hybrid between hipster and emo kid, maybe some mutation going on although not everybody present was a poseur; when people started to arrived, they started to play Supergrass' greatest hits thru the P.A.which seemed weird, i would have thought that it would be more appropriate to put something like the Locust or the Blood Brothers or some Load or Skin Graft release, then a DJ got up and started to put a mixture of indie pop stuff that contrasted even more than Supergrass (i still think the idea was to contrast and not because they didn't know what kind of band XBXRX are...or perhaps they just judged them because of their hairstyles?). The DJ played everything from bossanova to i don't know what to call it anymore but very light and bland stuff, of which i only recognized a song from the new Of Montreal album, afterwards they started to play old but still lighter punk shit like the Clash's "Spanish Bombs" and the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" to give way to the more predictable Joy Division and Smiths selections; the song i liked the most that got played was, without a doubt, "No Fun" by the Stooges, i'm beginning to think that the new super cool classic if you don't pretend to like them you're a tool and, therefore, they are going to get overburned by people (kinda like with the Ramones and the Misfits) are the Stooges, what with them releasing a new album in April; if that does happen, i'm willing to do a test to find true fans as opposed to poseurs by having them listen to "L.A. Blues" and see how they get horrified, without telling them who plays the song.

The first band to play were X=R7 who are from Mexicalli and, i understand, are a side project of Maniqui Lazer, who are pretty cool. X=R7 (i can't stop thinking how derivative their name is) are a drums n' synths duo, they played a really long set (or so it seemed to me) which consisted of monotonous riffs with simple drumming being repeted for 2 minutes at a time, i also can't stop thinking they sounded like if the drummer and the keyboardist from the Locust decided to come up with riffs one at a time and being incredibly lazy in the process; the band was enthusiastic but, throughout their set i kept wondering how many spazztic bands does it take before they all start to sound the same. I love Plague Soundscapes a hella lot too but you have to try and add something new to the mix and not just try to approximate that sound just because it's so crazy.

The next band to play were the much awaited XBXRX, already in uniform with pastel blue bowling-like shirts, who right from the beginning started to do as they usually do, with the singer dude and the guitarist going into the slam dancing with the crowd, without missing a note in any of their instruments; at around the fourth or the fifth song, they did the one where they ask the crowd to get down which title i'm forgetting at the moment, the crowd in front of the stage kind started to follow suit but were still not very convinced, even the singer got off the stage to pull people to the floor; the fact that there was so many hipsters trying as hard as they can to look uninterested didn't help, but, eventually, most of the crowd on the front of the stage (including me) was on the floor, the vocalist said that when he said thrice, he wanted everyone to jump up and down and scream but Weasel signaled him to count to four with his hand and corrected; when he counted to four, the pit exploded to all sides, i even got into the slam action (which i haven't gotten into for a long time now) and the truth is that it was pure classic slamdancing, no Kung Fu-like kicking or any of that shit, it was chaos, it was, like Exodus used to say, "good, friendly, violent fun"; i got into the floor until i got tired and returned to the calm flank (i did return to the pit towards the end). Their set successfully combined material from their latest Sixth In Sixes with their older songs, displaying a slight sofistication on their most recent stuff as opposed to their rawer, earlier shit, even though the difference was just a hair. The band, after hurling themselves to the Mexican crowd, getting on the bass drum, striking the structures over the stage with their guitars and spazz around onstage in general, ended their performance after some 25 minutes since they started, they didn't do like on videos i've seen of them from past shows, destroying drums and guitars in an orgy like the Who on crank, they just finished playing, high fiving and smiling to the crowd who congratulated them for a brilliant, if very brief, set.

In between XBXRX and the next band, my editor Marcelo pointed me to a celebrity among us, it was Chino Moreno from the Deftones (ED: as i was typing "Deftones" i started typing it as "Deer" and i made me think, what if there was a tribute band called Deertones? or how about Defhoof? they would play something like "Dog on the DRIIIIIIIVE/Away/I don't care where just on the sidewalk" or "COOOOOOOOOOME!!/PANDA PANDA PANDA!!!"), Most likely trying to score himself some indie points with his attendance, although he wasn't on a rockstar trip or anything, he was really laidback, talking to people and stuff. He's also lost tons of weight recently, so much so that he can't get confused with the guitar player anymore; well, that's the celebrity gossip part of this review.

Afterwards, Roc & Robots got up onstage, some dudes wearing garbage bags, angular haircuts and keytars (you know, those synths you strap on like guitars); they played a mixture between Wire or Magazine-style post punk and Devo-like new wave, with songs ranging from faithful renditions to the style to stupid shite. Listening to them, i couldn't stop thinking how this was a free show and that it was a good soundtrack for drinking a beer, but they didn't really offer anything, the had nothing going as far as a show was concerned and, had the band gotten together 28 years ago, they most likely would be afraid to try to play this style of music, it's just that now it's fashionable and retro; we actually walked out from the place before they finished playing, we then got to listen to the time-defining classic Ass Cobra by Turbonegro, on the way back home.

Bands like XBXRX don't come play here every other day and it's even better that there's support for gigs like these and we hope to see more of these, that XBXRX come back soon to play a longer show and that, fingers crossed, Weasel Walters decides to bring the Flying Luttenbachers here to give some lessons, because people here need to learn.