Which Yardbirds song was covered by Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart?
For many, legendary guitarist Jeff Beck is synonymous with the Yardbirds, the band he joined and transformed soon after fellow guitarist Eric Clapton had left them. But there was over 50 years’ worth of Beck’s music to come when he himself was through with the group in 1966, beginning with his first solo album Truth in 1968, which was recorded with a young singer by the name of Rod Stewart.
Beck had quite literally been instrumental to much of the Yardbirds’ sound while he was in the group, with his extensive use of guitar feedback, which was a revolutionary development in rock music at the time. When it came to his own musical projects, however, he could push things so much further still. Nothing demonstrates the differences between Beck’s Yardbirds and his solo work more than the song he took with him from his time in the band and completely reworked. The song appears on Truth, with Stewart’s razor-sharp vocal, Ronnie Wood’s fuzz-tone bass and Micky Waller’s explosive drumming, turning it into an entirely different beast.
Its master, the sole guitarist on the track, has gone from feedback merchant to full-guns-blazing metal guru, undertaking a six-string assault on the eardrums that Jimi Hendrix would have been proud of. Hendrix’s music is deliberately invoked, in fact, but that’s far from the end of the story.
In successive staccato power chords followed up by dizzying Waller drum fills, we hear the basis for Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath alike. The hooks for ‘Good Times Bad Times’ and ‘War Pigs’ are straight-up lifts from the song. And in Wood’s descending bass riff, played in double-time downward strums, we hear the distilled essence of punk rock, from the Saints’ landmark 1976 single ‘(I’m) Stranded’ to The Clash’s ‘Garageland’ and ‘Clampdown’.
So, what’s the song called?
The Yardbirds track that Beck chose to include in his debut solo album is ‘Shapes of Things’, which had been one of the band’s biggest hits. It was written by three of the band’s founding members, Jim McCarty, Keith Relf and Paul Samwell-Smith, but even their original version had Beck’s unmistakable imprint on its arrangement. The song opens Truth in style, demonstrating both just how important Beck was to the Yardbirds and that he’s cast off the shackles of his former band. ‘
Its name is also fitting, given that few recordings before or since the Jeff Beck Group’s reimagining of the song have predicted the shape of things to come in rock and roll quite as effectively. Ever the innovator, Beck made sure his take on the song didn’t just sound like 1968 but the entire decade of music ahead. All in all, there are few better examples through his entire career of what he could achieve both as a guitar hero and bandleader.
