Recorded at "Marquee Club", London, 1964
The blues is a distinctly American form of music, more specifically a black American form of music. When white people play the blues, they may have the pain and suffering required to make the music honest, but they try to emulate a culture they're not as familiar with, which leads them to having a distorted result. If it's not watered down blues, then it's something that's similar to the blues but is something of its own, like rock 'n' roll and early heavy metal. Those things aren't bad at all; I'm just saying, for the most part, white people don't play straight-up blues. Throw in the fact that the Yardbirds were all British, and suddenly we have a group that's two cultures removed from the music they're playing. But in spite of that, they're as close to real blues as Whitey's going to get. I've never thought a whole lot of Eric Clapton as a guitarist, but he rocks the house here. (I find it ironic that he left the Yardbirds because they were abandoning their blues roots, and then he wrote a song like "Wonderful Tonight".)
