“People thought we’d sold out…” – The Making Of “For Your Love”, by The Yardbirds

Originally published in Uncut Take 262 (March 2019 issue)…

“It was an odd song for us to do after playing Jimmy Reed and Howlin Wolf stuff,” says Yardbird drummer Jim McCarty. “But we liked to be different.”

“For Your Love” was very much a transitional record for The Yardbirds, propelling them from the London club scene to the international stage on its release in early 1965. Remarkably, though, the song wasn’t an obvious success on paper – it was led by harpsichord and featured a vaguely medieval, minor-key melody.

“I had heard the Eartha Kitt song, ‘Just An Old Fashioned Girl’,” recalls Paul Samwell-Smith, the band’s bassist turned producer, “and I loved the harpsichord on it – so different – so I wanted to try that on a Yardbirds song.”

“A lot of the stuff I wrote during that period was minor-key,” says songwriter Graham Gouldman. “‘Bus Stop’, ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, too. I liked minor keys, I responded to them, they’re more soulful, they’re bluer. The band thought it was just right for them, except for Eric Clapton, of course – I think it was the last straw for him. The purist that Clapton is didn’t like the idea of them doing something that wasn’t an old Memphis blues.”

Following the release of “For Your Love”, Clapton departed to pursue a more traditional direction with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, his place filled by the experimentally minded Jeff Beck. For The Yardbirds, this now ushered in a period of increased popularity and expanding musical horizons.

“We had a following before,” explains McCarty, “but it was just on the club scene around London. ‘For Your Love’ opened us up to the whole country. People saw us on TV, we were playing round the whole of the UK, and then Europe and the US.”

“I loved their version when I heard it,” says Gouldman. “I do it their exact way now when I do it, the Yardbirds way.”

KEY PLAYERS

• Jim McCarty (Drums)
• Paul Samwell-Smith (Producer)
• Graham Gouldman (Songwriter)
• Ron Prentice (Bowed bass)
• Top Topham (Early Yardbirds lead guitarist)

JIM MCCARTY: When we started, we were a covers band, really. We were just playing old blues songs. “Smokestack Lightning”, Chuck Berry, Elmore James.

TOP TOPHAM: During the Second World War, my father was down in the American South for several months. He got into the blues, and when I was quite young he took me to some amazing stuff. Around about 1959 to ’60, I got a job and got records sent from America. We were learning how to play that stuff, and the whole thing worked very well. There’s a quality in the blues that sort of heals people.

PAUL SAMWELL-SMITH: We were all a bit suspicious of the pop world with its three minutes or less of playable hit material. We would often play songs for 10 or even 15 minutes at gigs. But commercial radio wasn’t having any of it.

TOPHAM: [manager] Giorgio Gomelsky took us on and he wanted us to play a lot more. My father said, “No, you’re not going to play for 30 days at a time.” That’s when Clapton took over. I was at school with Clapton in 1960, ’61 onwards, so I knew him – he used to come to our house to listen to the blues.

McCARTY: We built up a following quite quickly – but some of our contemporaries, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, they all started to have hits. We felt we needed a hit to keep up. We tried various options, some of our own songs, “I Wish You Would”, “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl”, but we never quite got our sound together in the studio. Either that, or it wasn’t quite commercial enough. The problem was that the sound in the studio didn’t really suit us, because we were quite a heavy R&B band.

SAMWELL-SMITH: The only way to jump from being a lowly local band who occasionally travelled elsewhere to gigs to being a national band with appearances on radio and television, and even abroad, was to have a ‘hit record’. So to progress at all we had to find short, ‘commercial’ material.

GRAHAM GOULDMAN: I hadn’t written that many songs before “For Your Love”. I worked in an outfitter’s shop in Salford. I used to take my guitar there and close the shop up for lunch. That’s when I came up with the song. The chord sequence of “House Of The Rising Sun”, when I heard that, it intrigued me, and “For Your Love” was kind of the opposite of that sequence. I was in a band called The Mockingbirds, and our record label rejected the song, so [Goudsman’s manager] Harvey Lisberg said, “This song is so great, we should get it to The Beatles.” I reminded Harvey that The Beatles were doing OK in the songwriting department, but he said, “Yeah, but they do covers.” I said, “Yeah, but standards, rhythm and blues stuff.” Harvey mentioned “For Your Love” to a publisher called Ronnie Beck, and this gave Ronnie an idea, because he knew that The Yardbirds wanted to have a hit.

“We were all a bit suspicious of the pop world with its three minutes of playable hit material” – PAUL SAMWELL-SMITH

McCARTY: We were playing with The Beatles at their Hammersmith Christmas show in 1964, and this publisher saw us and sent this acetate demo of “For Your Love” round to Giorgio Gomelski. We were a bit of a different group when he saw us, doing odd things like changing tempos in the middle of songs, and I expect he thought maybe this would suit them.

SAMWELL-SMITH: “For Your Love” was first played to me by Ronnie Beck at B Feldman & Co, our publisher – Ronnie was a drinking pal of mine.

McCARTY: We all went round to Giorgio Gomelsky’s apartment in Kensington, listened to it and we all liked it. I thought Graham was a great writer. Eric, of course, didn’t like it, because he was having political problems within the band. He was a bit of a blues purist. He didn’t like the song choice or that Paul Samwell-Smith was going to produce it.

SAMWELL-SMITH: I’d been playing with tape recorders since my teens. My brother was five years older than me so he was able to introduce me to some of the early recording devices. My first was what was called a ‘wire recorder’, because it used thin metal wire and not tape to record the magnetic information. I used to mess with sound effects and primitive guitar sounds.

GOULDMAN: On the original demo, the intro is actually played on an acoustic guitar, so the idea of using the harpsichord was inspired, I thought. There’s something otherworldly about it. The way I played it on the original demo is slightly different, it feels like Em/G/A/A minor, but it’s not quite that, the second chord is more like Em7, which is closely related to G – like G6, almost. Their version is simpler, more direct, and consequently more effective.

McCARTY: We weren’t in there very long. Denny Piercy was on the bongos, he wasn’t a professional musician, he was an amateur, and a presenter on the BBC. Giorgio knew him and asked him to come and play bongos. We did a track with me playing drums, the bowed bass, and Brian Auger played the harpsichord and it seemed to work really well.

RON PRENTICE: IBC was like any other studio – we didn’t used to take much notice of the surroundings, we’d just be at so-and-so at one o’clock, say, and you’d play, get your money and go home. I can see in my diary here, I had a few bookings for Yardbirds Limited then – one on April 28, 6 – 10.30pm, booked by Ron Beck [for a later song, perhaps “Heart Full Of Soul“].

“People thought we’d sold out because ‘For Your Love’ was so different to what we’d played previously” – JIM MCCARTY

SAMWELL-SMITH: I had to order the harpsichord specially for the session, and Giorgio managed to get Brian Auger to play it for us – Brian was in a band that Giorgio also managed, the Brian Auger Trinity. Giorgio also booked Denny Piercy the bongo player and Ron Prentice on bass. It was a strange experience, pulling all these different instruments together, and then having to make it work as a song. Normally you pick up your bass or guitar and play as a band. It all fits together. This was more experimental. As for the bowed bass and congas, I can’t really remember where I got that idea, maybe with Keith [Relf] and Jim, but I do know I was trying to go in a different direction to the usual two guitars, bass and drums.

PRENTICE: It was fairly unusual for me to be playing bowed bass actually. I was a string bass player first, and then I learnt bass guitar after that.

McCARTY: Then we did the middle section as an overdub.

GOULDMAN: That idea for the middle bit was not mine – Harvey Lisberg said, “Why don’t you do something completely different?” So I just went into it!

McCARTY: It was the sort of song that was gonna stand out when it was played on the radio. We always liked it – apart from Eric. He had a little thing going with Paul Samwell-Smith, I don’t know, they didn’t see eye to eye. It was a bit of a class thing. I don’t think Eric liked the way Paul was hyphenated, I guess!

SAMWELL-SMITH: You can see why Eric, quite rightly, was worried about the direction we were going in. It is true that we didn’t really ‘get on’, but don’t read too much into that. It’s normal for two guys who aren’t all that comfortable together, travelling around the country packed in the back of a van for hour after hour, to experience some discomfort, and wonder “Why?” Anyway, I think harpsichord and bowed bass were too big a step in the wrong direction for Eric, so he left the band. I wonder what became of him?

McCARTY: Eric left quite soon after the recording. He wasn’t there when it came out, so it would have been a couple of weeks after recording. It was difficult with him, he was quite a moody guy. The rest of us were quite together, but he’d be quite separate, sitting in the corner of the van sulking. It was a bit of a relief when he left, ‘cos there wasn’t any more moodies. Yeah, “For Your Love” was the main reason, the way it was done and the way Paul had produced it – it wasn’t a bluesy enough song [for him].

GOULDMAN: I saw them play it on Top Of The Pops. I was there because The Mockingbirds were one of the many bands that Top Of The Pops used to hire to play while the audience was coming in, to keep the audience happy before the show started. It was slightly surreal that I had written one of the songs that was being performed on the show. It was a nice feeling – no problem for me at all. At that point, I was happy with the idea that I would mainly be a songwriter.

McCARTY: Some people thought we’d sold out, because “For Your Love” was so different to what we’d played previously. But after a while it just fitted in with our bluesy songs. Jeff [Beck] played his first gig with us at the Fairfield Hall, Croydon, and very quickly it became a huge hit. He’d only just joined, so it was quite nice for him. We had to reproduce it onstage, so Jeff had to play it on electric 12-string. But he liked fuzzboxes and feedback, these weird and wonderful sounds. It made our sound quite different, which is what we wanted.

SAMWELL-SMITH: When I listen to it today, I think how good the band were to not only allow this experiment to happen but to play so well on it. Jim’s drumming is lovely, and of course Keith is a star. None of this would have worked if the band hadn’t come together to make it happen.

FACTFILE

Written by: Graham Gouldman
Recorded at: IBC Studios, London
Producers: Paul Samwell-Smith, Giorgio Gomelsky
Performers include: Keith Relf (vocals), Jim McCarty (drums), Eric Clapton (guitar), Chris Dreja (guitar), Ron Prentice (bowed bass), Brian Auger (harpsichord), Denny Piercy (bongos)
Released: 5 March, 1965
UK/US chart position: 3/6

TIMELINE

1963

The Yardbirds form in southwest London

December 1964

The band perform with The Beatles at a Hammersmith Odeon Christmas show, where publisher Rob Beck gives an acetate of “For Your Love” to manager Giorgio Gomelsky

February 1965

The Yardbirds record the song at London’s IBC Studios

March 5, 1965

“For Your Love” is released, and hits the Top 10 in both the UK and the US