Yardbirds - Shapes of Things

Interesting story ... we had bought my son the Green Day 'American Idiot' CD for his birthday, but a friend gave him that at his party so we needed to change plans. So I had returned the CD, and was going to get him The Killers 'Hot Fuss'. I was in the mall, and wandered into the music store (the type where you almost never buy stuff because it is usually $17+), and on my way out saw the name 'Yardbirds' in the bargain bin. So I looked, and found three CD's - 'BBC Sessions', 'Roger the Engineer' and '25 Greatest Hits 1964-1966'. There was definite overlap, but at $5 each, I just grabbed all three.

The Yardbirds were a group I loved, largely for Jeff Beck. I always found him preferable and more innovative than Clapton, and never had much use for Page (not saying he isn't a fine guitarist, just that he never rose above the 'hey, he's a really talented guitarist' level for me). But my exposure to them was happening while I was also beginning to explore fusion, so I only ever got a single recording - a double-album collection called 'Shapes of Things', which had stuff featuring all three guitarists. I recorded it to tape (which broke) and digitized then downsampled to 64kbps WMA format (early days of MP2, on a Pocket PC when Compact Flash was expensive) ... and so by today the only decent song I still had from that group was 'Shapes of Things'.

So I dumped all three into iTunes, and combined them to get rid of duplicates, then did some listening. I found the BBC sessions to be interesting, but more of a curiosity. I decided that it would be one of those CD's I'd have on the shelf for occasional use, and so deleted it from iTunes, as my Powerbook laptop is filling up (something about using it for digital photos, music AND video!). Then I made a single playlist and got rid of everything I didn't care to keep, which left me with 16 songs. That would have been $16 if I could have done it by-song in iTunes, so I came out about even.

Some of my faves:
- Heartful of Soul
- Evil Hearted You
- I Ain't Got You
- Train Kept a'Rollin'
- Over, Under, Sideways, Down
- I'm a Man
- Mister You're a Better Man than I
- and my fave is still Shapes of Things