A Year of Blind Spots: Roger the Engineer

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die:

The Yardbirds finally unleashed their first studio LP in August 1966, by which time the band featured the incendiary guitar soloing of Jeff Beck (who replaced Eric Clapton). The album was much delayed by heavy touring of Europe and the U.S. (where the Yardbirds became a primary inspiration to the myriad garage and psychedelic bands springing up), and was eventually written and recorded in just one week at Advision Studios in London.

Roger the Engineer mixes up supercharged blues, prototype psychedelia, feedback, and Gregorian monk chants to great effect. Anticipating the heavy blues-rock of Cream and Led Zeppelin, the searing "Lost Woman," "the Nazz Are Blue," and "Rack My Mind" reflect the way the band built fiery workouts from traditional blues riffs and licks (Snooky Pryor's "Someone to Love Me," Elmore James's "Dust My Broom," and Slim Harpo's "Baby Scratch My Back," respectively), in the process showcasing Beck's astonishing talent (he makes a sustained one-note solo exciting on "The Nazz Are Blue"). Hit single "Over, Under, Sideways, Down" is based around the bassline to "Rock Around the Clock," yet manages to sound positively futuristic with the addition of Beck's winding guitar, the stop-start structure of the song, and the rabble-rousing calls of "Hey!"

Reissues include "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," a storming rave-up featuring the dream-team of Beck and Jimmy Page, and its B-side "Psycho Daisies."

Joe:

I love listening to any "proto-" version of a genre. The prefix, at least as I use it here on the blog, means that this music sounds like a genre that wasn't officially formed until after that particular artist made those particular sounds. It's another way of saying what 1001 Albums said above: "Anticipating the..." It means that the artists were ahead of the game. I like it from an anthropological perspective. It's not that I like the Yardbirds more than Led Zeppelin, but I do think that the Yardbirds are more interesting than Led Zeppelin. And that's mostly why we're here, exploring the Blind Spots. I don't need to find an album that I love (though that happens sometimes too). I just need something to pique my interest in the story of music.

This isn't the first time we checked in with the Yardbirds, a band famous for the guitarists involved who would become much more famous afterward. With Having a Rave Up with the Yardbirds, we heard a lot of Eric Clapton. Roger the Engineer is mostly Jeff Beck. The blurb above mentions Jimmy Page, because he's an important part of this band's story too, but he's not on this album in its proper form. So I'm not claiming that Led Zeppelin ported the sound directly from this album. It's more like that they are just part of the same scene, and the Yardbirds were the genesis of the off-shoot of that scene. Does this mean that they are coming from garage rock and added blues back in? Or the other way around? I think an interesting theory to think about would be that Clapton come from blues first and Beck comes from garage rock first, and the juxtaposition of that is what made the Yardbirds so revelatory. And then maybe Jimmy Page felt that when he joined up and took it to the next gig, etc.

The balance is close to perfect on Roger the Engineer. Something like "He's Always There" hits the psych-adjacent garage rock tones that you hear all over Nuggets. Occasionally, it veers to far into the psych territory, like in "Hot House of Omagararshid," with its bubbly sounds, and the Gregorian chant nonsense in "Turn into Earth." But that evens out with something like "Over, Under, Sideways, Down," which is probably the song you're gonna recognize if you listen to this album. And for good reason, it's a badass tune. And "What Do You Want" feels like an electrified, hippie-fied Muddy Waters song.

None of this is revelatory if you're listening in a vacuum. It's all the kind of stuff you've heard before. But that's why we place it in its proper spot in history. It becomes revelatory when you understand how music exploded from this point. The Yardbirds were a detonator. Not the detonator, but one of them, and an interesting one, one worth checking out. I know that you can find shit that sounds like this in a lot of other places. I think the reason I'm drawn to the Yardbirds specifically is because of the Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin piece. Zep is a band very near and dear to my heart, so it's a lot easier to understand how the Yardbirds could be the "proto-" version of that band because of how important they are to me. If I was enamored with Cream, I'd be saying the same thing. If you're gonna show me a band that greatly inspired, I dunno, fucking Deep Purple or something, then I'd be far less interested.

I think that's okay, to know where you came from, so you can know where something else came from too. It's all subjective anyhow.