The Yardbirds.
Having been the ‘other guitarist’ to Clapton, Beck and Page, who did he rate as the best?
Chris Dreja: “I enjoyed playing with all of them. They all came with such individual characteristics. Eric was a blues man. With Jeff you never knew what he was coming up with. He was a bloody genius, wasn’t he? But I loved to play with Jimmy. He was full of energy. Go go go! And I liked that. He was very positive. Still is today. He’s a wonderful man.”
Dreja and Page revelled in life on the road in America – “Americans bands and musicians were so creative, such really great people to get to know,” says Dreja. “So many stories… being in a basement with Janis Joplin drinking Southern Comfort, things like that… All the wonderful people you met on the road, you became almost like one big family.”
Jim McCarty: It was like the group was bursting out. It could hardly be contained. It was a very good combination with them both [Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck]. I asked Jimmy the other day, actually: ‘Did you enjoy it with Jeff? ‘He said: ‘Oh yes, yeah!’ But actually it was a bit much sometimes.”
Dreja agrees. “Yeah, a lot of the time it was fantastic, and a lot of the time they’d be playing against each other. It was a bit of a cacophony sometimes. They were quite competitive. Jeff would inevitably suffer, because he was more insecure. But now and then it would work and it would be fantastic.”
McCarty recalls the Beck-Page axis at its best one night outgunning the Stones: “I remember when we were on a tour with the Stones. We had a fantastic evening and the audience was delighted. And that was quite embarrassing for the Stones.”
Another fond memory McCarty has is of the time he visited Page just after Zeppelin formed. “I was still friendly with Jimmy, and I remember when he’d recorded the first Zeppelin album I went down to his house and he played it to me and I was very impressed. But I could see, you know, I could hear the similarities with our sound.
Fantastically flash, inscrutably cool: How the Yardbirds shaped rock'n'roll, by Mick Wall, Louder, 4 December 2019 | Full article here
Related reading:
On the Way to Led Zeppelin: Jimmy Page on the Yardbirds Years. By David Fricke, Rolling Stone, 27 November 2012
