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Fact #120951

When:

Short story:

The Yardbirds release their third single, For Your Love, in the UK.

Full article:

Eric Clapton (guitarist, The Yardbirds] : A lot of songs were bandied about, and we came up with a song by Otis Redding. I thought that would make a great single, because it was still R'n'B and soul, and we could do it really funky.

Graham Gouldman : My manager, Harvey Lisberg, said, "This (For Your Love) is such a great song, let's play it to The Beatles". And I said, "I think they're doing alright in the songwriting department, actually". But he still mentioned The Beatles idea to a publisher friend, who suggested that instead he should offer it to The Yardbirds, who were playing with The Beatles at a Christmas show at the Hammersmith Odeon.  I played Bus Stop to Graham Nash in the bog, because that was the only place that was quiet. He asked me to send him a tape of it, and I did - and that was another hit (for The Hollies).
(Source : http://www.kirstymaccoll.com/information/conn/g.htm)

Eric Clapton : Then Paul [Samwell-Smith, bassist] got the For Your Love demo, and so we went into the studio to do both songs, but we did For Your Love first. Everyone was so bowled over by the obvious commerciality of it that we didn't even get to do the Otis Redding song, and I was very disappointed, disillusioned by that.

Giorgio Gomelsky (manager, The Yardbirds] : Of course, doing For Your Love was a break with pure blues. But I kept thinking, 'The Beatles opened up a vast opportunity for English artists, we can't afford to miss out here. Reaching a wider public is important – once we have access we can tell them about the blues and real music.'

Everybody else that came from the blues was making pop records – The Stones, The Animals, Spencer Davis. We had gathered an audience, but we couldn't get past the radio. And in England, remember, there was only one radio station, with only like one pop program a week. Until [pirate] Radio Caroline came along and really changed everything. So we had to figure out a way of getting in there. We all had done blues songs as singles – The Stones had done Come On, we had done Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl. But we forgot that in England there wasn't really a blues audience that bought singles – they bought albums. By the way, that's why I recorded the Five Live Yardbirds album before they had a single hit record.

And then there was the commercial music scene, as bad in the UK as in the U.S. – worse really, because of a lack of regional markets and independent labels, and radio producers controlling what and who went on the air. They were working hand in hand with the music publishers, and if they didn't have some kind of a financial interest in it, you wouldn't appear. So one day Ronnie Beck, who was a nice, young, pretty hip 'song plugger' for a major publisher, came with this song, For Your Love.

As soon as I heard it I said, 'Ah, we could use harpsichord here.' And on the demo there was a bongo drum and I said, 'Oh, interesting. We'll do a pop song, but we'll inject some stuff in there that will indicate to people with ears that we're doing this a little bit tongue in cheek, but we're also doing it as an opportunity to reach a bigger audience and put in some experimental stuff.' Which we did, and it worked. Same with sitar and tablas-like sounds on Heart Full of Soul, Gregorian chants on Still I'm Sad and a jazzy walking bassline on Shape of Things.

Eric Clapton : So my attitude within the group got really sour, and it was kind of hinted that it would be better for me to leave. 'Cause they'd already been to see Jeff Beck play, and at the time he was far more adaptable than I was. I was withdrawing into myself, becoming intolerable, really, dogmatic. So they kind of asked me to leave, and I left and felt a lot better.