And some guys he knew from school needed a guitar player so, hey, why not? And they almost immediately became a breakout success. That’s right, Topham’s classmate was Eric Clapton.īefore he decided to build his career on cultural appropriation, Clapton was just some teenager outside London. His parents strongly disapproved of the band so he stuck with art and left the young Yardbirds without a lead guitar player.įortunately, a guy from Topham’s art school was pretty good. Topham was left with a dilemma: he could continue his art studies, or he could continue with the band. Relf played harmonica and sang, Dreja played rhythm guitar, McCarty was drummer, Samwell-Smith played bass and Topham was the lead guitar player.Īfter a couple months they got offered a residency at a small music venue called the Crawdaddy Club. In 1963, in the suburbs of London, high school friends Keith Relf, Paul Samwell-Smith and Jim McCarty met another pair of high school friends, Tom Topham and Chris Dreja. If you’ve heard a Yardbirds song it’s almost definitely this one. and charted multiple times in the U.S., this was their big hit on this side of the Atlantic. While the Yardbirds are an influential band that had quite a few hits in the U.K. So, welcome to the third edition of RIFF Rewind’s deep dives into bands you should know more about! Recently that piece of information popped back into my head and I discovered that the improbably star-studded history of an otherwise unremarkable band isn’t widely known. I’m getting to the music part, stay with me here.ĭuring that folk religion class, for reasons known only to the professor and possibly his psychiatrist, we were required to memorize the guitarists for The Yardbirds. The professor pointed out, for example, that sports fandom could fill most definitions of folk religion there are ceremonies, superstitions, costumes, shared behaviors and it serves as the central point for a community. That’s basically unorganized religion a system of beliefs and customs that don’t have any sort of official church structure but fill the same role in a society. One of those classes was on folk religions. For a year most of them focused on different belief systems and concepts of religion, because I’ve always been basically like this. Way, way back in the early ’00s, when I was at Diablo Valley College (that’s in the East Bay), I took a lot of random and unnecessary classes to keep my course load high enough to stay on my parents’ health insurance. Left to right: Jeff Beck, Chris Dreja, Jim McCarty, Jimmy Page and Keith Relf.

Eric clapton yardbirds