Review:

on 2011-03-12 CharlesMartel Said:

This is rock and roll legend in the making. There are very few occasions when you get to listen to something which, though the participants do not know it at the time, will eventually go down as iconic for its generation. This, frequently overlooked album, a rarity even now, is one such moment. The album was the last live performance of the Yardbirds, at the Anderson Theatre in New York in 1968. Little did the participants know at the time.

The principal reason for its iconic status is because this album sees Jimmy Page doing his stuff live before the birth of Led Zeppelin. Page uses some of the chord sequences and guitar techniques which he was to do later with Led Zeppelin. For instance, on "I'm Confused", an early version of "Dazed and Confused", he uses a violin bow on his guitar. And in the rousing final song on the album, a cover of Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy" called "I'm a Man", you can hear so much of what became Led Zeppelin it is almost uncanny.

This represents, in some ways, the genesis of the new generation of rock music, a step forward from Cream and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. This is nostalgia mixed with a foretaste of the greatness that was Led Zeppelin still to come. Early versions of "White Summer" and "Dazed and Confused" (this time with Jake Holmes' original lyrics) are among the tracks included here. Yet this was still unmistakably the Yardbirds. It is Keith Relf, not anyone else, who is the star of the show, and while his voice seems a little cracked and weary at times, tired of the rock circus and the whole damn show business thing, he is still clearly the force driving the band forward.

Yet this album is something of a rarity. Shortly after it was issued, it was slapped with injunctions by Jimmy Page and Peter Grant on behalf of Led Zeppelin for a variety of reasons, all of them probably spurious. They, probably rightly, saw this as an attempt to cash in on the growing fame of Led Zeppelin, but that is hardly the point. Grant and Page may have owned the remaining rights to the name (Led Zeppelin's first European tour was as the New Yardbirds to fulfil contractual obligations) but threats of legal action were no way to resolve these matters. In any event they were fruitless - the album got out anyway.

The album resurfaced in a variety for forms over the years. I managed to purchase during one of those brief moments in between legal wranglings when it went on sale, albeit briefly. I can still remember a mate from school coming round to my house one Saturday morning to tell me he had seen it in a shop - I rushed out to buy it there and then.

Many of the band's best songs over the years are on the album, such as "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" and "Shapes of Things". There are also some relatively new ones like "My Baby", as well as the classic covers like "I'm a Man". The only bad thing about it is the sound quality. The chitter chatter of the audience comes through all too often as an irritating chirping in the background. Once the music starts though, all that is forgotten. From one of the best outfits of the sixties, this, their last output, had to be one of the best.
Rating: 7/10