The Yardbirds Little Games Mono LP VG+

$

26

Beautiful Mono Original Pressing
of the one and only Jimmy Page Yardbirds album.

Cover and disc are VG+ both with very light superficial visual wear Plays Strong. Hard to find this one in good shape!




Little Games is the fourth American album by English rock band the Yardbirds. Recorded and released in 1967, it was their first album recorded after becoming a quartet with Jimmy Page as the sole guitarist and Chris Dreja switching to bass. It was also the only Yardbirds album produced by Mickie Most.

Although the new lineup was becoming more experimental with longer, improvised concert performances, the Yardbirds' record company brought in successful singles producer Most to coax out more commercial product. However, neither material that properly presented their new approach nor hit singles were forthcoming. Little Games became the Yardbirds' final studio album, although Most continued to produce singles for the group. These were later collected and released with the original album along with outtakes and alternate mixes on an expanded edition titled Little Games Sessions & More in 1992.


Recording and production

The first Mickie Most-involved recordings took place at Olympic Studios in London on 5 March 1967. This session produced the single "Little Games" backed with "Puzzles". Although Dreja and drummer Jim McCarty were present to record "Little Games", Most used studio musicians John Paul Jones (bass and cello arrangement) and Dougie Wright (drums) for their parts to cut down on studio time. The remainder of the songs for Little Games were recorded during a three-day session at London's De Lane Lea Studios from 29 April to 1 May 1967 and session musicians were used, including Jones (bass on "No Excess Baggage") and Ian Stewart (piano on "Drinking Muddy Water"). One song, an acoustic guitar instrumental titled "White Summer" is a Jimmy Page solo piece. It uses a "DADGAD" guitar tuning, giving it an Eastern music sound, which is enhanced with Indian-percussion tabla played by Chris Karan and an oboe melody line. Another instrumental, "Glimpses", features guitar parts with Page using a wah-wah pedal and sampled train station and children's playground sounds after a voice-manipulated reading of a poem. Page's guitar is also prominent on "Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor", where he introduced his guitar-bowing technique; "Drinking Muddy Water", which uses a slide-guitar part to follow the vocal line (later used to greater effect on Led Zeppelin's "You Shook Me"); and the instrumental breaks on "Smile on Me", including a wah-wah guitar coda.

The recording schedule was so hurried that the group often did not even hear the playbacks. Page recalled, "It was just so bloody rushed. Everything was done in one take because Mickie Most was basically interested in singles and didn't believe it was worth the time to do the tracks right on the album".[7] Yardbirds' chronicler Gregg Russo notes the result was that "many [of the songs] have a demo quality that time shortages would not allow them to change".[8] In fact one song, the pop-ish "Little Soldier Boy" was issued with McCarty's rough vocal guide providing the part intended for a trumpet.

The three subsequent singles recorded by the Yardbirds and later released on the expanded Little Games Sessions & More were given a similar treatment. Only singer Keith Relf appears on the cover version of "Ha! Ha! Said the Clown" (with Al Gorgoni on guitar, Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen on organ, Joe Macho on bass and Bobby Gregg on drums, recorded at Columbia Studios New York on 13 June 1967 and Abbey Road Studios on 19 June 1967). Two more cover songs, "Ten Little Indians" (Jones on bass and orchestral arrangement and Clem Cattini on drums, Olympic Studios on 25 September 1967) and "Goodnight Sweet Josephine" (Nicky Hopkins on piano, Jones on bass and Cattini on drums, De Lane Lea in March 1968) also use session musicians. Only the B-side to their last single, the proto-heavy metal "Think About It", was recorded by the entire group. The song includes a guitar solo that Page had been using in the group's concert performances of "Dazed and Confused" (which he carried over, with some different lyrics, to Led Zeppelin).
Writing and composition

Unlike the Yardbirds' three previous charting singles ("Shapes of Things", "Over Under Sideways Down" and "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago"), "Little Games" was not written by group members. Composed by Harold Spiro and Phil Wainman, its lyrics are echoed in Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times". Another pop song recorded was "No Excess Baggage", by the Brill Building songwriters Roger Atkins and Carl D'Errico, who composed the Animals Top 40 hit "It's My Life". Page adapted "White Summer" from Davy Graham's version of the Irish folk song "She Moved Through the Fair".[9]

The remaining album songs are credited to the band members and include "Drinking Muddy Water", an interpretation of the blues classic "Rollin' and Tumblin'" and nominally a tribute to bluesman Muddy Waters, and "Smile on Me", a re-working of Howlin' Wolf's "Shake for Me" (which Wolf later re-worked for his "Killing Floor" which Led Zeppelin adapted for "The Lemon Song").[9] The Yardbirds also recorded "Stealing Stealing", a jug-band-style song that has been traced back to Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers and the Memphis Jug Band.[9]

Russo describes the four and a half minute instrumental collage "Glimpses" as a "brilliant piece of psychedelic imagery [that] revealed the Yardbirds at their most experimental and inspired".[10] It features multiple-guitar tracks, with effects and bowing, and an electric sitar-backing propelled along by a 6/8 beat and bass riff by McCarty and Dreja. Relf adds several tracks of chanting vocals, reminiscent of the Yardbirds' 1965 song "Still I'm Sad". A barely-understandable truncated mechanical-sounding voice recites:

    Glimpses of clouds in a forest
    Can review well within us
    And never to linger on one is life
    Energy radiates from the source
    The life around us is but a reflection of our own
    Flowing within never-ending boundless infinity
    Time is just a cumular limit
    Which with one glimpse can overcome
    Can overcome

The psychedelic folk-style song "Only the Black Rose" is credited to Relf and features his vocal with acoustic guitar accompaniment by Page and some subdued percussion effects. Described as "reflective" and "emotive" by Russo, it foreshadows the future Relf/McCarty acoustic folk collaborations Together and Renaissance.[10]

As with "Little Games" and unlike their previous hits, the Yardbirds' subsequent singles were written by others: Tony Hazzard composed "Ha Ha Said the Clown" (a pop hit for Manfred Mann) and the similarly pop-ish "Good Night Sweet Josephine" and Harry Nilsson supplied "Ten Little Indians", written in the style of a nursery rhyme.