Scored! Yardbirds live LP recorded at Gomelsky’s Crawdaddy
first ever recording of the band in 1963 shows spark that ignites rock explosion to come
Given the current times (pandemic), there was a joyous event a couple of weeks ago at my local venue Winter’s Tavern in Pacifica. It was an outdoor “rock & roll” flea market that included live bands and many vendors, including Alternative Tentacles, Jello Biafra’s label. The coming together of a like minded community, or any community, is rare these days, but on this day there was plenty of socializing even while wearing masks. An amazing collection of vendors were on display in the cramped parking lot and several were selling vinyl, my main addiction. I had thumbed through most of the bins when I came upon one near the exit. Within a few seconds I pulled out this album that I knew was another gem in the Gomelsky pantheon of recordings. But didn’t I already have this? The cover was not familiar, but the songs and the story on the liner notes were. I set it aside for a few minutes while I talked to the vendor about Gomelsky, He knew nothing about him. I gleefully pointed out to him that neither had I until a few years ago, even though his name is all over my record collection. I mentioned some of the other bands Gomelsky recorded early in their careers including Soft Machine, Gong, Magma, and even the first solo record by John McLaughlin. The vendor poked through his bins and pulled out a Daevid Allen record I’d never seen before. He was the cofounder of Soft Machine and founder of Gong. It looked very interesting and I was tempted to buy it but the Yardbirds was a must-have for me and it already broke my budget. There was no mention of Gomelsky on this Daevid Allen solo record, which was released at a time when I knew Gomelsky had likely moved on from his days of working with Gong in France and was headed to NYC to discover and mentor Bill Laswell, helping him form a band which would first become NY Gong and then Material. Thus my interest in this Yardbirds record. It is yet another link in the Gomelsky recordings from the Yardbirds in 1963 to Material in 1980 that shows his immense influence on the avant-rock music of that time (to be fully documented in my book on The Gomelsky Recordings).
Back at home I went to my collection and found the other Yardbird recordings of the same songs. One was a 1980’s reissue that included more music from that night’s live session. The other was a later release on a CD box set that included notes by Gomelsky on this very recording. But the album I had just purchased was the original, released in 1966, almost 3 years after it was recorded. Why the delay? And why is this recording so important to the history of rock and roll?
The answer to the first question is quite straight forward. The recording was made as a demo of the band to be shopped around to record labels. Three years later the band had a few hits and these “demo” recordings gained financial interest for release.
The historical significance requires a bit more background. It’s 1963 in London. Rock and roll in London is about to ignite a chain-reaction that will explode exponentially for years to come. The month is December, which is extremely important for you to understand the context of this event. Just a month prior, JFK was assassinated and the whole world watched in horror. The Beatles were the biggest band in England and they would soon take over America with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in two months. The founders of rock and roll, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and others had long since been watered down by Hollywood, or idled completely by the law, so much so that in 1959 soon-to-be Yardbird Jeff Beck thought that rock was dead (see my earlier blog post). In these intervening years a new youth movement near London would arise out of the swamps of the American south that was the home of the blues. These youth were translating this music to the electric guitar through whatever records they could get their hands on. By the early 1960’s there was an audience in England and Europe to hear these original American blues players and they started trickling over for live shows. By 1962 there was an American Folk Blues Festival showcasing these American artists playing gigs mostly in Germany. In 1963 this festival had over 2 dozen shows in various cities, the last of which in Frankfurt was canceled because of the JFK assassination.
Above photos from:
American Folk Blues Festival discography
https://www.wirz.de/music/afbf.htm
Soon after, one of the most popular performers on the festival came to England to extend his tour before returning to America. His name was Sonny Boy Williamson (he seems to be the second blues man to use that name) and he would do several of these gigs with the Yardbirds.
Gomelsky was managing the Yardbirds and running the Crawdaddy Club where he featured the band regularly. Prior to the Yardbirds he was doing the same for another unknown band at the time called The Rolling Stones. By the time of the Sonny Boy recordings the club had been open almost a year and seen their audience grow from about 3 people who witnessed the first Stones show, to hundreds who were coming for the “rave-ups” performed by the Yardbirds. These fans were not the screaming teens that the Beatles and Stones would soon be mobbed with. This was more of a cross section of older and younger serious music fans that came to hear this new sound. And they were ready to rock. The typical Yardbird set would include longer songs with extended jams where the tempo would keep speeding up until the crowd got whipped up into a frenzy with some fans taking their jackets off and literally swinging from the rafters of the Crawdaddy. Has anyone written a book on the history of “mosh pits”? This has to be a proto mosh pit, but I’ll leave that for the musical anthropologists to debate.
Through his connections with the Blues Festival, Gomelsky not only landed the Yardbirds some shows with Sonny Boy, he also got the festival producer to pay to record their live show at the Crawdaddy. In 1963 doing live recordings was no easy task. The equipment was bulky and the venue acoustics and amplification were less than ideal. The recording engineer for this gig made a comment during the setup that he hoped the room was full of people or there was little chance he could record anything useful. Gomelsky and his partner took the risk anyway, hoping this demo would at least capture the band’s energy to win over the record labels.
And here’s what the true historical significance of this record is all about. It captures a moment in time that is pivotal in rock music. The Yardbirds were not the only young band in London trying to play the blues of the masters they had been emulating. And they weren’t the only young band that got a chance to meet and play some gigs with some of these masters. Plenty of other bands got to do these things and many of them became better blues players than the Yardbirds. And these blues purists would make their own fine recordings and that’s what it would always be … the blues. But the Yardbirds, and other not-so-purist bands, would take these experiences with the blues and create something completely new. It would not be called the blues. It would be called psychedelic rock, hard rock, and maybe even heavy rock. The Yardbirds were willing and able to do this, AND got its birth recorded. “Sonny Boy Williamson and the Yardbirds”, recorded in Dec of 1963, allows us to witness the baton being passed to a younger generation. We witness R&B becoming rock, and we now know rock and roll was changed forever.
