712 The Yardbirds - Roger the Engineer (a.k.a. Over Under Sideways Down) (1966)

Studio Album - Psychedelic Rock

About the Act:

The Yardbirds were a British Blues-Rock band that turned into a Psychedelic band, and then turned into Led Zeppelin.

They were formed in 1963, and were active until 1968, initially, and were famous for having four lead guitarists, three of whom were Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. They were initially part of the British invention of Blues Rock, covering songs by people like Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley, and adding a rock sensibility. In this period they became well known for their lengthy instrumental sessions called "rave ups" which involved doubling the rythmn tempo and building to a crescendo.

In 1965 Eric Clapton lest the band abruptly when they started to go in a less blues-oriented direction, and was replaced by Jeff Beck, with whom they became part of the emerging Psychedelic sound. This continued, and there was a confusing period of musical chairs (well, musical instruments, with people swapping instruments, but that is inherently miselading), at the end of which they had dual lead guitars of Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

In 1968 they fell apart, and half of the band saw this as an opportunity to reform. The people that were eventually settled on were Jimmy Page and three new people, John Bonham, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant. They played a few gigs as The Yardbirds, some as The New Yardbirds, and made a decision to effectively close the Yardbirds saga and re-invent themselves with a new name. They wanted something like Lead Balloon, and so chose Lead Zeppelin, but changed the spelling to Led so as to get the right pronunciation.

In 1992 there was a reformation, with two of the earlier members. Only one of those is left, but they are still going.

About the Album:

This was the bands only UK studio album, and third US studio album. It has several names, but informally and increasingly is called "Roger the Engineer". This is because the cover features a caricature drawing of the engineer for the album, Roger Cameron.

My History with this Album:

None

Review:

I try to review albums out of context, in the sense of "how will somebody who doesn't know the context react to hearing this album for the first time". Sometimes this is well nigh impossible. On this occasion, context has affected my opinion both positively and negatively. The negative is that only a few albums ago I reviewed their previous album to this "Having A Rave-Up With The Yardbirds", which I liked quite a lot, and this is very different, so I immediately liked it less. The other part of this is that I have only just looked up the year it was released, 1966, and as a result want to cut them some slack.

It's a psychedelic album. The slack I want to cut them is that it is quite early on in the explosion of psychedelia, and so the fact that I think it's "not properly psychedelic" or even "they have tried to be psychedelic and got it wrong", these thoughts are less valid, because this is the point where precedent was being set.

It's all their own tracks. On the last album, their single self-written track was very different to the Blues covers they had been doing. They had changed guitarist from Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck, and Jeff was open to, and encouraging them to leave behind the blues stuff and be more experimental. And this album is all that, experimental in different ways of bringing different influences in, from eastern music and other music traditions, and folk songs, and kind of music hall and pub songs, and even Gregorian Chant stuff. So musically it is interesting, it's kind of dipping the toe in new areas, much of which will be developed by other bands. Musically, though, even in this context, I find it less infectious than the blues stuff. What can I say? I love Blues.

Subject matter is diverse and at times studiously banal - this was a feature of psychedelia, to find deeper meaning in seemingly banal and often childish things, with a deliberate naivety. Again, this album is moving in that direction, but not quite there. Ultimately, even in context, I think they were considerably better as a blues band than as a psychedelic band. Maybe I'm biased, but I do like Blues and Psychedelia, and for me they do a better job in the Blues market.

So that's it. It didn't really light me up. I can see it was probably an important album at the time. The best track (for me) was Jeff's Boogie, which is a track that followed him around for a few years, so I know it fairly well. Guess what? It's more bluesy than the other tracks.

6.3/10

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/3s6wTRMDispMa4gCd26FPc

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLL-NbN8uTOiiUO33PVUqKhTyDgLNLNGP-

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_the_Engineer