LITTLE GAMES SESSIONS & MORE includes a 28-page booklet with extensive liner notes, photos, track annotations and discography.
The Yardbirds: Keith Relf (vocals); Jimmy Page (guitar); Chris Dreja (bass); Jim McCarty (drums).
Producers: Mickie Most, Paul Samwell-Smith.
Compilation producer: Ron Furmanek.
Recorded at De Lane Lea Studios, Olympic Studios and Abbey Road Studios, London, England in 1967 & 1968. Includes liner notes by Greg Russo.
All tracks have been digitally remastered.
The 1996 rerelease of LITTLE GAMES includes the entire original album as well as 16 extra tracks, principally from the LITTLE GAMES recording sessions.
The Yardbirds: Keith Relf (vocals); Jimmy Page (guitar); Chris Dreja (bass); Jim McCarty (drums).
Recorded between 1966 and July 6, 1968. Includes liner notes by Greg Russo.
Digitally remastered by Kevin Reeves in April 1996 (Capitol Recording Studios, Hollywood, California).
If almost any group other than the Yardbirds had released Little Games, it would be considered a flawed but prime late-'60s psychedelic/hard rock artifact instead of a serious step backward, and even a disappointment. Not that it's a bad album -- it just lacks the cohesion and polish of the group's preceding album, The Yardbirds (aka Over Under Sideways Down aka Roger the Engineer). And well it should -- although they were nominally the same group they'd been a year earlier, in reality the Yardbirds had undergone a massive shift in personnel since the release of The Yardbirds. The departure of original bassist Paul Samwell-Smith in June of 1966 set off a sequence of personnel shifts, bringing guitarist Jimmy Page into the lineup, first on bass and then on lead guitar in tandem with Jeff Beck (while rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja switched to bass), until Beck's exit in November 1966 for a solo career left Page as their lone guitarist. At the same time, the band was forced -- by the failure of its single "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" -- to accept a new producer in the guise of Mickie Most, who was currently enjoying huge success with Donovan and had a formidable string of hit singles to his credit with Herman's Hermits, the Animals, et al. The Yardbirds' blues roots and progressive tendencies clashed with Most's pop/rock preferences, and the two sides never did reconcile, much less mesh for more than a few minutes on the finished album. To top it off, the bandmembers were finally seeing some serious money for their live performances (ironically, just as they were hanging on by their fingertips to a recording contract), courtesy of their new manager, Peter Grant, and so were committed to lots of stage work. The overall result was a hastily done and uneven LP with flashes of brilliance. Apart from the title single -- one of the better compromises between where the group had been and where Most wanted to take them -- the two best cuts were "White Summer" and "Drinking Muddy Water," excellent showcases for the experimental and bluesy sides of the band, respectively; both, curiously, were also virtually thefts, "White Summer" lifted from Davy Graham's arrangement of the 300-year-old "She Moves Through the Fair" and "Drinking Muddy Water" a rewrite of "Rollin' and Tumblin'," a blues standard usually attributed to McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters). The best of the rest included "Only the Black Rose," a strangely beautiful, moody acoustic psychedelic piece; "Stealing, Stealing," an unusual (for this band) pre-World War II-style acoustic blues complete with kazoo; and "Smile on Me," a hard, bluesy number that could have come from any part of the group's history. The attempt at a catchy rocker, "No Excess Baggage," however, needed more work and better involvement from vocalist Keith Relf; the power chord-laden "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor" was a great piece of psychedelic pyrotechnics, but it also sounded more like the Who than the Yardbirds, though it did introduce Jimmy Page's violin bow discourses on the guitar; and "Little Soldier Boy" was a silly psychedelic pop piece more appropriate to the Monkees than the Yardbirds. The album was unintentionally revealing, in hindsight, of the growing schism within the band, as Relf and drummer Jim McCarty's growing embrace of flower power and hallucinogenic drugs came to be reflected in the trippier numbers such as "Glimpses," whereas Jimmy Page was starting to take his blues slower and flashier, and into wholly new territory with that violin bow. One more album or a proper concert might've sealed the deal for the Yardbirds, but instead one more tour sealed the fate of the band. Little Games has been reissued in vastly expanded form several times, starting in 1992. ~ Bruce Eder
This two-CD set assembles the complete Little Games album and all of the usable rehearsals, unmixed backing tracks, and alternate takes associated with it in one place, along with a few Yardbirds-related holdings in the EMI vaults. For a variety of reasons (not all the fault of the band), Little Games was the Yardbirds' least successful album, but it was also their only full-length studio recording featuring guitarist Jimmy Page, who seems to have hung back here in exerting his musical inclinations, in keeping with the desires of producer Mickie Most's quest for a pop/rock tone to the album. The odd B-sides, outtakes, alternate takes, and bonus tracks reveal a high level of virtuosity that Most failed to exploit -- the unanthologized B-sides "Puzzles" and "Think About It," the acoustic version of "White Summer," and the punchier mono mixes of "Little Games" and "Drinking Muddy Water" are superior to much on the finished album; other tracks like the instrumental backing track for "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor" and an alternate version of "Glimpses" merely fill in holes for Page completists. Keith Relf and Jim McCarty's post-Yardbirds acoustic duo, Together, which evolved into the original Renaissance, is also represented on three tracks, doing the brand of folkish soft rock that they favored, even as Page had moved on to setting the rock music world on fire with Led Zeppelin. Fans of the Yardbirds, and anyone who could appreciate the original album, will prefer this pricier alternative for the bonus tracks, Led Zeppelin fans will love large parts of this set, and British psychedelic enthusiasts will consider it essential. ~ Bruce Eder
By the time Jeff Beck left the Yardbirds in late 1966, the group was down to a four-piece, with former session-man Jimmy Page left to handle the guitar duties. As the group disintegrated over the next year and a half, Page would end up taking the remnants of this group and turning it into Led Zeppelin.
This two-disc set includes LITTLE GAMES, the final Yardbirds project, as well as outtakes, and a few singles by Together, a group featuring Jim McCarty and Keith Relf. Despite the commercial problems facing the Yardbirds at the time, LITTLE GAMES showed a good deal of experimentation--with psychedelia ("Glimpses"), social commentary ("Little Soldier Boy") and with the group's beloved blues ("Drinking Muddy Water"). Page's influence resonates throughout, particularly on the acoustic "White Summer," which later had parts recycled in the Zeppelin classics "Over The Hills And Far Away" and "Black Mountain Side." The historical importance of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor" lay in the fact that it was the first time Jimmy Page employed the bowing technique which he became renowned for later in his career. minimize