“Classic Rock Crate Digger” is a column I write for the Rhapsody Blog.

Since the Crate Digger is a hopelessly incorrigible music addict, some of my fondest childhood memories are of the hunting-down-the-jams variety. My first bona fide obsession, that thing called the British Invasion, hit me in the sixth grade. I can’t recall particulars, but my conversion into an Anglophile feels like it happened overnight. I think it was a byproduct of writing a paper on The Beatles in Mrs. Pennock’s music class that year. She was a little nerdy but really quite cool when I look back. She dug The Beach Boys and bought me ice cream after school once.

I was all about collecting cassettes back then. Of course, my interest in the British Invasion began with its first-tier bands: the Fab Four, the Stones, The Who and The Kinks. Seeing as how they’re all platinum-clad rock legends of the highest order, their respective discographies were more or less easy to track down.*

After devouring the Big Four I commenced exploration of the movement’s second tier, which I actually wound up liking more than the first. This included The Yardbirds, the Small Faces, The Zombies, the criminally underrated Dave Clark Five, The Pretty Things and my all-time fave British Invasion band, The Move.** Considering these groups were pretty darn popular, all of them racking up hits and moving serious units back in the day, I assumed I would have very little trouble finding their tapes. Over the course of a few months I would do what I did before: make weekly pilgrimages to Cavages, the mall record store, and with money earned on my paper route, snap up every record on a list I kept in a little spiral-bound notebook.

But 12-year-old me was mistaken.

Most of their original albums didn’t appear to be in print. The cassettes I did find kind of sucked, fitting into one of two categories: (1) budget-priced greatest-hits packages that contained no more than eight or nine songs or, (2) quasi-legal releases with bad artwork and even worse track listings, usually a mishmash of crappy live recordings and weird stereo mixes of later-period singles. What’s more, a lot of these titles, released on a dizzying array of labels, looked like different releases but were in fact one and the same record, the only differences being cover art and a slightly altered song order. There were times when the rocker dude behind the counter tried to aid in my search. He’d open up his one-stop catalog and order something I was desperately in search of. But more often than not I received a phone call several weeks later, informing me my order couldn’t be filled. Not even Rhino Records, just about the only killer reissue label operating in the mid- to late 1980s, seemed capable of producing anthologies for these groups.

As I read more and more books about the British Invasion, as well as 1960s rock in general, I started to spot a trend. Just about every group whose music I had trouble obtaining shared one thing in common: BADNESS. As in bad management, bad labels, bad contracts, bad licensing. It was amazing to realize business deals gone wrong in the mid-1960s could prevent a kid 20 years later from purchasing a band’s cassette.

The Yardbirds are a prime example of a band’s catalog getting horribly abused through the decades. It’s really kind of a mess. Now, you’d think the age of everything-and-your-mom-is-available-via-the-Internet would’ve corrected all this, and it has to a large extent. However, these issues continue to haunt those rare sixth graders out there who actually prefer second-tier British Invasion groups to the latest crop of Billboard pop tarts. In the last several years, I’ve seen the Yardbirds’ discography disappear from Rhapsody’s catalog on more than a few occasions. One day I’m listening to the group’s 1966 masterpiece, Roger the Engineer; the next I’m forced to spin Blow by Blow to get my Jeff Beck fix.

As a Rhapsody subscriber, you’ve probably experienced this phenomena at some point. Trust me — it’s not our fault. You see, we don’t own the jams in our catalog. We sign and maintain contracts with the labels and digital distributors whose music we offer. However sound in and of themselves, these contractual agreements are extremely dependent on those that came before them. It’s a sense of interconnectedness that’s a lot like a house. You can build the sturdiest roof in the world, but it won’t mean a thing, if you didn’t erect a solid foundation. The foundation in this instance are all the contentious contracts and licensing agreements the Yardbirds apparently entered into when they were just young musicians wanting to make rock music. So yeah, Rhapsody is really no different from that Cavages record store in the mall: the same issues sometimes impede our ability to deliver music to our customers.

Fortunately for all of us, Rhapsody at this very moment offers a fantastic selection of albums by The Yardbirds. We didn’t just a couple months back, so I’m really stoked about their reappearance. So much so, I want to share with you five killer releases from the group’s catalog.

Remember, in addition to launching the careers of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, The Yardbirds helped invent blues rock, psychedelia, garage rock, world music and heavy metal. Thus, their influence on classic rock is beyond immense, really.

Roger the Engineer (aka Yardbirds aka Over Under Sideways Down) (1966)
The Yardbirds’ magnum opus went by different names (and contained varying track listings and mixes) depending on the country in which it was released. How’s that for overly complex licensing? The version Rhapsody offers is an expanded reissue that tries its best to reconcile all these discrepancies. It succeeds, in my opinion. If for some reason you’ve never heard this record, then stop everything you’re doing right now and crank it. Roger the Engineer is one of the British Invasion’s greatest gifts to rock, easily the equal of the Pretty Things’ Parachute, the Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake and yes, the iconic Revolver. In addition to a ton of bonus tracks, it contains the insanely psychedelic “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago” / “Psycho Daisies” single, also released in ’66. These two songs will blow your mind.

Little Games (1967)
By the time 1967 rolled around, The Yardbirds were in disarray. The relatively stable lineups of 1965 and ’66 gave way to a core of musicians augmented by a rotating cast of hired hands. Plus, the band’ recording sessions were not well chronicled. It’s amazing the band even released Little Games (whose original liner credits were riddled with errors). Producer Mickie Most, who also worked with Donovan, joined the fray, attempting to nudge the group into more of a saccharine psych-pop sound. Page, on the other hand, had become the group’s primary artistic force after Beck’s departure in ’66. He was in full-blown proto-Zeppelin mode and very much wanted The Yardbirds to get heavy and get Druish. As a result, the album lacks cohesion, even if it is packed with some truly amazing songs. The version Rhapsody has contains 15 bonus tracks that do a decent job of summing up The Yardbirds’ sound post-Little Games. At disc’s end is a deliriously thunderous heavy-metal interpretation of “Dazed and Confused,” one that predates Zep’s by a good 12 to 18 months, I believe.

Five Live Yardbirds (1964)
Before Beck, before Page, before psychedelia, before proto-metal, The Yardbirds were Clapton’s band, and they were smoking blues freaks making the London scene. Sacrilege, yes, but I think this could be Slowhand’s peak as a guitarist. That sure sounds strange, considering he would go on to record with John Mayall, Cream and Derek & the Dominoes. But his playing is unhinged and manic and fiery in ways it would never be again. You can totally hear why folks worshiped the guy.

The Ultimate Collection 1 and 2 (2006)
Listening to the original albums just isn’t enough. To fully appreciate The Yardbirds’ many innovations in the mid-1960s, you need a quality anthology that collects the groups’ myriad singles. Every few months the group dropped a 45 that basically rewrote the pop-song rulebook. In a 12-month stretch (March ’65 to March ’66), The Yardbirds released “For Your Love,” “Heart Full of Soul,” “Still I’m Sad,” “Shapes of Things” and “Evil Hearted You.” These five songs influenced so much that followed them. It’s mind-blowing, really. I sometimes think The Yardbirds’ catalog woes led to their impact on rock history getting swept aside. The band was very much a distant memory by the end of the 1970s.

The Yardbirds Story, discs 1, 2, 3 and 4 (2002)
Here’s proof of how management, record labels and licensing deals can get in the way of proper documentation. I love The Yardbirds Story; I just have an issue with its title. It’s inaccurate. This boxed set contains every recording the band released between 1963 and ’66, when Giorgio Gomelsky managed them. It’s also packed with lots of cool alternate takes and rarities. A wonderfully thorough listening experience for sure, it charts the development of the band’s sound from blues purists to psychedelic architects. However, with no Roger the Engineer, no Little Games, no “Psycho Daisies,” this isn’t The Yardbirds’ story by any means; it’s more like Cliffs Notes half-eaten by the family pooch.

Notes:
*Though the Kinks are a first-tier British Invasion band, their discography was a tad harder to track down than those of The Beatles, the Stones and The Who.

**I know folks will take exception to my second-tier classification. Yes, I rank The Dave Clark Five over both The Hollies and The Animals. I just do. I’ve never been a big Eric Burdon fan (he’s a terrible blues singer), while I’ll take “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces” over “Bus Stop” and “Just One Look.”