The Yardbirds: Roger The Engineer : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Jeff Beck was the Yardbirds' lead guitarist for less than two years, but that was enough time for him to come up with a career's worth of mean, ungodly guitar screams. With Beck on board, the Yardbirds were an eruption of Swinging London noise, ripping all the country out of the blues for pure urban flash, sinister and slinky at the same time. The Yardbirds' previous guitarist, Eric Clapton, had been their blues conscience, quitting in disgust after their 1965 pop hit "For Your Love." Barely out of his teens, Beck replaced him but didn't even bother trying to duplicate Clapton's blues scholarship; Beck had his own sound, and he got it all onto the Yardbirds' 1966 classic Roger the Engineer, unreeling his brilliant pyrodelic riffs.

Most English rockers sank themselves by imitating the sinuous midtempo pulse of Chicago blues until the beat just turned into vanilla fudge. Beck's 'Birds stayed out of that trap by pushing the rhythm to its outer extremes, speeding up the fast ones into manic garage-band rush while slowing down for ominous garage-Gregorian psychodirges. The dynamics were intense: Check out the way "Lost Woman" starts out loud, simmers down and then bursts into a screech-freak feedback crescendo before melting down to primal rock & roll, all in just over three minutes. Behind the guitars -- Beck on lead, Chris Dreja on rhythm -- drummer Jim McCarty and bassist Paul Samwell-Smith raced the engine, and singer Keith Relf's medieval fountain-of-sorrow brooding was one spooky sound.

Only the weaker tracks on Roger the Engineer are straight blues. "Over Under Sideways Down" is a spacey guitar adventure over tough frat-rock bass, the guys yelling "Hey!" on the one while Beck plays his vaguely Arabic lead riff. "He's Always There" is a bizarre love triangle of fuzz guitar and bossa nova, while "Turn Into Earth" and "Farewell" are prescient riddles about the dark side of psychedelia. Beck was gone by the end of 1966, but you can see him rip it up with the Yardbirds in the Antonioni film Blow Up. They're obviously intended as symbols of modern urban decadence and alienation, but they're the only sign of life in the movie -- rock & roll as a passionately human romance with the machine.