First concert I ever went to was a group called The Yardbirds. Eric Clapton is the lead guitarist.
Everyone wanted to play like Eric Clapton in the early to mid-'60s.
When I was still in the Yardbirds, our producer, Mickie Most, would always try to get us to record all these horrible songs. During one session, we recorded 'Ten Little Indians,' an extremely silly song that featured a truly awful brass arrangement.
The Yardbirds folded in 1968, and within a handful of months, Led Zeppelin was not only a band but also a very successful one.
I recently realized that Television has influenced a lot of English bands. Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, Teardrop Explodes - it's obvious what they've listened to and what they're going for. When I was sixteen I listened to Yardbirds records and thought, "God, this is great." It's gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.
I would say seeing the original Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page at the old Fillmore was a pretty powerful influence on me.
I know he played on the last record but I don't wake up in the middle of the night thinking of Eric Clapton.
The only criterion we used in doing cover material was we wanted to do songs that we wished bands would play when we went out. We were doing Yardbirds and Rolling Stones cover songs-which is not any big deal, but where we were from, all we were getting were Top 40 bands.
I can't remember the first song I learned to play on bass, but the first song I learned to play on guitar was 'For Your Love' by the Yardbirds. That kind of was the beginning for me. I thought it was a great song and I loved the open chord progression at the beginning of that song.
I played guitar all my life, all the way through the Yardbirds, but I knew that for me, this was going to be a guitar vehicle, because that's what I wanted it to be. There is no way I would play guitar like a tour de force like I did in Led Zeppelin.
We weren't making money in the Yardbirds.
Eric Clapton always wanted to come out onstage with a stuffed parrot on his shoulder.
The Yardbirds came in to the Crawdaddy Club a week after the Stones finished their Sunday night residency. They had done it for almost a year, I think, and then we did it for a year. It was better when they were playing there because when they went they took half the crowd with them and it took us quite a while to build up our own following.
It's like this - these five members have been influenced of course by other groups, because that's where this generation's groups came from - an environment like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and The Who. People like that.
My dad is a guitar player with huge vinyl record collection. I loved listening to his albums, especially Cream and The Yardbirds.
The best was The Yardbirds. I still love The Yardbirds and The Zombies.
