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from his experience on the A Degree of Murder soundtrack, which was very much part of the ‘progressive’ new musical order in his eyes, Page was keen on leading the Yardbirds in a similar heavier and more experimental direction. Later in 1967, this would include the group’s rendition of a new song, sometimes known as ‘I’m Confused’, but more reliably as ‘Dazed and Confused’.

      On 25 August 1967, the peak of the year’s alleged Summer of Love, the Yardbirds played two shows at the Village Theater in downtown Manhattan. They were supported by the Youngbloods and by Jake Holmes, a singer-songwriter who spun a twist on the folk tradition by working with a guitar and two bass instruments but no drums. Watching from the wings, Jim McCarty was impressed by Holmes’s song ‘Dazed and Confused’, with its descending riff, as was Page. The next day they went and bought The Above Ground Sound of Jake Holmes, his debut album, on which ‘Dazed and Confused’ was featured. Adapting the song, but only to an extent, with Keith Relf altering the lyrics, ‘Dazed and Confused’ became a stand-out performance in Yardbirds live shows for the last ten months of the group; Page’s dramatic and highly effective flourishing of a violin bow on his guitar during the performance was an undoubted highlight. ‘Dazed and Confused’ became a showcase tune on the first Led Zeppelin album.

      In the UK the Yardbirds were beginning to seem increasingly irrelevant, but in the United States they remained a substantial concert attraction. Yet even there, the hits didn’t keep coming, largely because – as with ‘Ten Little Indians’, which would be released later that year in the US – their selection made almost no sense.

      The Yardbirds’ Greatest Hits was released in March 1967 in America, and made number 28, their biggest-selling US album. But whereas the Yardbirds’ three biggest singles had been written by group members, from now on Mickie Most brought in – as he had done with their first hit ‘For Your Love’ – songs by established hit-making teams.

      Accordingly, the choice of some of the 45s released seemed baffling. Written by Harold Spiro and Phil Wainman, ‘Little Games’ was released in March 1967 in the US and a month later in the UK. It only reached number 51 in America and didn’t even chart in the UK. As the title track of the next Yardbirds album, released in mid-July only in the United States – a mark of their dwindling UK status – the single was intended as a trailer for the LP.

      There were further odd decisions. ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, for example, had been a Top 5 hit in the UK for Manfred Mann, but had failed to gain any chart movement whatsoever in America. Most persuaded the Yardbirds – or, more accurately, Keith Relf plus session musicians, including John Paul Jones, who arranged much of Most’s material – to record the song and release it in the States. In July 1967 ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, not featured on Little Games, staggered up to the number 45 slot in America. The breezy pop tune was an extraordinary choice for the Yardbirds to release, utterly inappropriate for the market they were trying to build in the States. But the B-side was another matter altogether: the explosive ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’, written by Page and Jim McCarty, with a bass-line like a relentless train rolling, featured the first recorded instance of Page using a violin bow on his guitar.

      The Little Games album – derided by Page as ‘horrible’ – did contain some interesting moments: ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor’ itself, and ‘Glimpses’, a suggestion of the way Page’s compositional mind was developing. ‘It featured the violin bow, and when it was played in concert I had tapes that played all this stuff – the Staten Island Ferry, locomotives, shock sounds – with textures from the bow. But we didn’t get a chance, with the Yardbirds, to take it far enough,’ he told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke; and ‘White Summer’, a mesmerising instrumental piece that he would perform live, both with the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin, on his 1961 Danelectro 3021 or his 1967 Vox Phantom XII 12-string guitar.

      ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’ was the Yardbirds’ last single, released in March 1968. Written by Tony Hazzard, who had also composed ‘Ha Ha Said the Clown’, it was about a man-eating groupie who lived in Clapham in south London – where Hazzard himself was based. Uncertain whether to commemorate its clear music-hall origins or celebrate its implied cultural comment, it did neither and ended up truly awful – a shockingly bad record. First recorded at the end of 1967 at Advision Studios in London, with Mickie Most producing, the Yardbirds disliked the final result so much that they insisted on doing a further version, on 6 February, at De Lane Lea Studios. It was no help, however; the single was the worst they ever released, and the group quickly asked for it to be recalled, reissuing a further version in the United States and Australasia. On the other hand, the single’s B-side ‘Think About It’ had much more going for it – a shredding solo midway through that Page would take in all its glory into Led Zeppelin’s version of ‘Dazed and Confused’. With his assiduous thoroughness, the guitarist had grabbed the production of the B-side from Mickie Most.

      On 6 March 1968 Page gamely went to plug ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’ on the long-running BBC radio show Saturday Club – the show had been a Saturday morning feature of the Light Programme before the station was transformed into Radio 1 the previous autumn, a supposed substitute for the now-banned pirate stations. Interviewed by the ever-avuncular Brian Matthew, the self-styled ‘old mate’ of his audience, Page described the troubles around making the record in his boyish, accentless voice and concluded, ‘It’s quite a good product now.’

      However, Jeff Beck’s summary was more to the point. ‘When I heard “Goodnight Sweet Josephine” I thought, Thank God I left the Yardbirds.’

      Three days after that Saturday Club performance the Yardbirds were in Paris. They played at the Assas Faculte du Droit, supported by the Brian Auger Trinity, featuring Julie Driscoll, and recorded the Bouton Rouge television show, performing ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’’, ‘Dazed and Confused’ and ‘Goodnight Sweet Josephine’.

      The next day, 10 March, the Yardbirds played at Paris’s legendary Olympia venue. Afterwards the group moved on to a private party thrown by Eddie Barclay, who ran the renowned Barclay Records. Among the celebrated guests was Brigitte Bardot, dressed in leather motorcycle gear. She looked ‘hot’, noted Page.

      Back in London on 15 March, Page played a session for Joe Cocker, for his ‘Marjorine’ single and its B-side, ‘The New Age of the Lily’. (Later in the summer he would play on Cocker’s epochal version of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, the song that made Cocker’s career.) The next day he was again in Paris with the Yardbirds for a show.

      A week later, following a concert at Retford College in Nottinghamshire on 23 March, the Yardbirds flew to New York for the start of their American tour. The opening date, 160 miles from Manhattan, was at the Aerodrome in Schenectady in New York state, a venue with a famously tremendous sound system, the kind favoured by Page for the more complex sound he was developing on tunes like ‘Think About It’, ‘White Summer’ and ‘Dazed and Confused’. But such aural developments would not be employed for much longer with the Yardbirds, as the band knew before they even set off that this was to be their final ever tour.

      Inspired by the prevailing softer sounds of the likes of – curiously – the Turtles and Simon & Garfunkel, and by LSD, Keith Relf and Jim McCarty had concluded that they no longer wanted to be part of the Yardbirds and would form a more folk-influenced outfit instead.

      Two nights later, at Manhattan’s Anderson Theater, the Yardbirds played a pair of shows that Epic Records recorded for a live album, which would eventually be released in January 1971 but quickly withdrawn after Page protested that it was a cash-in on the success of Led Zeppelin. ‘We knew the American tour was going to be the last one, and all the pressure was off,’ said the guitarist. ‘We played well and had a really good time. We even managed to play consistently good venues; it was almost entirely universities and psychedelic ballrooms. The only low point was the Andersen Theater gig in New York, which was recorded for a live album. The rats at Epic had got wind of the break-up and decided to get the last drop of potential profit out of us. It was pure convenience for them, being based in New York, where we didn’t like playing anyway. It should have been done at somewhere like

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