The artists The Edge claimed “invented” the rock band: “They were a very pivotal group”
Rock and roll has always been a bit of a shallow genre when you break everything down. Although the real artists are the ones on the fringes of society looking to explore pieces of music that no one had ever heard, others are in the spotlight, only looking to make the absolute bottom line of music in the hopes that someone will accept them for who they are. While U2 can’t really be considered underground by any stretch of the imagination anymore, The Edge admitted that the rough and tumble sounds of rock and roll came the moment The Yardbirds hit the scene.
Then again, that leaves out a huge chunk of the British invasion in their wake as well. When you look at the beginnings of rock and roll in England, things didn’t really get started until The Beatles got a foothold in modern culture, eventually turning the entire country inside out with bands popping up left and right.
Let’s not forget The Rolling Stones in this conversation, either. There were a handful of artists that had paved the way for rock and roll songs that could be played on the radio, but The Stones ushered in an element of danger that no one had seen coming before, as if every mother was running scared at the thought of their daughters bringing home someone like that.
As much as those bands were rock stars, they were still that: stars. When compiling The Yardbirds, everyone adopted a certain workman-like mentality to everything they played. Even though it wasn’t exactly the most commercial thing in the world, they approached the blues in a way no one else had touched, featuring Keith Relf’s raspy voice pushing everything along.
For The Edge, seeing this gave him a road map for what a rock band should be, telling The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “They really were a very pivotal group. I know it is standard practice to say that kind of thing, but in this case, it is. It could be said that they invented what we today know as the rock band. Before then, bands were EMI recording artists of whatever, but after them, bands were bands.”
If there’s anything that The Yardbirds should be applauded for, though, it’s giving the world three of the greatest guitarists to ever walk the Earth. Outside of Eric Clapton breaking down the door for blues virtuosity, having Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck turn the six-string inside out every time they played was something that no one else not named Jimi Hendrix was thinking of.
Despite looking like a shoo-in for the greatest guitarist gig that anyone has ever gotten, it’s interesting to see how the band spread out across every player’s style. They may have been a straight-ahead blues outfit with Clapton, but once they started moving towards stranger sounds with Beck and Page, you can hear both of them honing their own styles, from Page’s wildman persona to Beck’s way of communicating with his instrument.
The Yardbirds are certainly not the first band that everyone brings up in terms of the game-changers in rock and roll, but if you look at history, everything would look very different without them. They were fine for what they were, but without them, you wouldn’t have Cream, Led Zeppelin, or even the guitar solo on The Beatles’ ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’.
