Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page
| Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page | ||||
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| Live album by the Yardbirds | ||||
| Released | 25 August 1971 | |||
| Recorded | 30 March 1968 | |||
| Venue | Anderson Theatre, New York City | |||
| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 44:48 | |||
| Label | Epic | |||
| The Yardbirds' Epic chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page is a live album by English rock group the Yardbirds. It captures their performance at the Anderson Theatre in New York City on 30 March 1968. At the time, the Yardbirds had been performing as a quartet with Jimmy Page on lead guitar since October 1966. Although the group objected to a release of the recordings, after Page became famous with Led Zeppelin, Epic Records issued the album in 1971.
Live Yardbirds includes several familiar Yardbird songs, but often extended with longer instrumental solos. "I'm Confused," based on Jake Holmes' "Dazed and Confused", is a highlight of the album. Using some different lyrics, Page re-recorded it with Led Zeppelin for their debut album later in 1968.
Although a live album, Epic Records overdubbed crowd noises from bullfights and other sound effects onto the original tracks against the band's wishes, in part because the live recordings were considered lacking in sound quality. This was a result of the general inexperience of the engineers in recording live rock music. For example, only single microphone was deployed for the drums, hung above the kit. This resulted in the loss of much of the lower-range percussion in the recording.
The Yardbirds rejected the album as a candidate for release upon its original completion in mid-1968, but Epic released it in 1971 in response to Led Zeppelin's success in the marketplace. Jimmy Page threatened legal action against the label for releasing Live Yardbirds without authorization and Epic quickly withdrew it. Epic parent CBS' Columbia Special Products (CSP) label subsequently reissued the album in 1976, but this was again legally challenged by Page, and the album again quickly withdrawn. Yardbirds' chronicler Gregg Russo notes that
Jimmy Page had Epic Records destroy the masters, parts and lacquers on February 15, 1977. All of the tapes from this concert were "returned to client" (Jimmy Page) in the early '80s.
Authentic Epic and CSP copies of Live Yardbirds are thus quite rare, and the album has often been counterfeited (sometimes in black-and-white covers claimed to be promotional copies) as a result. The album's cover art was designed by James Grashow, a woodcut artist who had earlier created the artwork for Jethro Tull's 1969 album Stand Up.
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