I've been reading Eric Clapton's newly released autobiography. When everyone talks about bands from the sixties they take sides - Beatles or Stone. I take neither. My favourite was always the Yardbirds. What's really cool about the book for me is reading the relatively humble beginnings of the band and the English music scene on a whole.
When we started bands (in the mid-seventies) we had to plug all of the guitars and the vocal mic into one amp. Clapton and his cronies started out the same way. he learned to play guitar by painstakingly listening to his favourite records and copying them note for note, practising until he got it a close to perfect as possible. That's the way we learned to play guitar too. I would play along to KISS, Aerosmith and Ted Nugent until I could hit every note and then would practise throughout the night with headphones on so that my parents wouldn't know that I was still awake.
The Yardbirds gave birth to Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. Why did they make it and not us? TALENT!
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