“Pretty awful”: The Yardbirds cover Jeff Beck always regretted
In an age of guitarists who do less with more, Jeff Beck still provides a glorious example of refinement. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ by The Beatles, ‘Born on the Bayou’ and ‘Run Through the Jungle’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Talking Heads all prove that one chord is all you need to create a classic. Everything else is just showing off. The world of rock ‘n’ roll was built on the sage folk tenet of four chords and the truth, and modern pop has never lost sight of that.
Even though he knew every song in history front-to-back, Ronnie Wood says he never lost his enthusiasm for showing off new things. He frequently said to him, “Hey, can you do this?” to which Wood would exclaim, “No!” So, while his chops enabled him to do everything, he knew that a great song needs barely anything to be beautiful. This outlook always had him coming back to the blues—the old emotive basics of modern pop.
However, the flip side of that was equally apparent in Beck’s work: the blues isn’t going anywhere, so you may as well add something new to it. So, when he found himself in The Yardbirds in 1965, they decided to reinvent an old classic. “We did that with Sam Phillips at Sun Studios in Memphis on our first tour of America,” he told Louder Sound of their cover of ‘Train Kept a Rollin”.
The British invasion was underway, and bands needed to roll out the hits rapidly to keep pace with the raucous frontier. So, even in the midst of their first major tour, they had to plead to squeeze in some studio time. “Giorgio Gomelsky, who was in charge of the band at that time, phoned him up, and Sam said: ‘It’s Sunday. We’re closed’. Giorgio told him he was missing a great opportunity to record a happening band, and eventually persuaded him,” Beck recalled. “So we went down and recorded a couple of tracks.”
They truly were a happening band, but up against it and road weary, they perhaps weren’t at their best. It’s a bold move to try such a classic when you’re not at your best, and, in truth, Beck rued it. “To be honest, our version of Train Kept A Rollin’ was pretty awful, but it was different,” he said. As fate would have it, the last part of that was more important than the first. Almost by their hurriedness, the band brought something original to this staple track—that could’ve been sacrilege, but instead, it helped to assert the new message of rock ‘n’ roll.
All the same, Beck still thought it fell short. “I’ve studied the Johnny Burnette Trio version since and it’s still the most amazing track ever,” he claimed. However, that certainly doesn’t mean that The Yardbirds’ take doesn’t have its own place in the chronology of rock’s evolution, inspiring the sound of many bands to come. “It’s also kept Aerosmith going for quite a while. In fact, it backfired for me when I put it back in the set, and people would come up and say: ‘I loved that Aerosmith track you played’,” the late Beck joked.
While he might have held the Johnny Burnette Trio’s take in far higher esteem, Beck always recognised that this was pivotal in defining his sound, outlook, and casual swagger as a musician.
