{"id":349181,"date":"2026-01-03T02:12:15","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T02:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/349181\/"},"modified":"2026-01-03T02:12:15","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T02:12:15","slug":"eric-clapton-a-very-moody-sort-of-guy-says-yardbirds-drummer-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/349181\/","title":{"rendered":"Eric Clapton “a very moody sort of guy” says Yardbirds drummer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Guitar Player is closing out 2025 by republishing 25 of your favorite stories from the past year. We thank you for spending the past year with us and look forward to bringing you more of the stories you want in 2026. <\/p>\n

As drummer for the Yardbirds \u2014 the only one in the British band\u2019s history, in fact \u2014 Jim McCarty spent six years during the \u201960s staring at the backsides of three of the greatest guitarists in rock history. That, in turn, gave him a front-row seat in the early careers of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s amazing, isn\u2019t it? And with time it gets better and better,\u201d McCarty, who still leads the band, tells us from his current home in France. \u201cGoing back to the time, they were all learning how to do it. They were all part of the team, as I say. We were all trying to play and having good fun playing that sort of music. And they were all very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cVery,\u201d of course, may be a vast understatement, of course, and McCarty not surprisingly has a keen view of each of his former bandmates, as well as others who have played guitar for the Yardbirds during the past 62 years.<\/p>\n

Here he shares his recollections of working with Clapton, who performed with the group from October 1963 to March 5, 1965, the day their first hit, \u201cFor Your Love,\u201d was released. Unhappy with the group\u2019s pop direction, Clapton signed up with John Mayall\u2019s Bluebreakers.<\/p>\n

\u201cEric was coming from a difficult upbringing, because he wasn\u2019t really brought up by his parents,\u201d McCarty says. \u201cHe was brought up by his grandmother, who he thought was his mother. We met her, and she was a lovely woman, very chatty and very friendly. But that gave him a challenged outlook on things, and I think he took the blues up as his personal crusade.<\/p>\n

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\"British\n<\/p>\n

The Yardbirds perform for Lord Ted Willis (seated at left). (Image credit: Jeremy Fletcher\/Redferns)<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was totally dedicated to the blues, and also seemingly very ambitious and very much into fashion and how he looked. He made sure he was dressed in the latest gear, and the coolest clothes. Even when he came to the audition, he was very well-dressed. And he would change. First of all it was an Ivy League style, and he had a crew cut, and then he\u2019d suddenly grow his hair and grow his sideburns and have different clothes and become like a different person.<\/p>\n

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\u201cEric was obviously gonna go somewhere. You knew that yes, one day he\u2019ll be a big star, \u2019cause he was driven to do that, and he was getting a reputation while he was playing with us. He used to copy blues solos \u2014 Matt \u2018Guitar\u2019 Murphy or Buddy Guy<\/a> or somebody \u2014 and copy them note for note before he got his own thing going. But he loved blues and he was very, very serious about it, even though he did actually mess around quite a lot with us in terms of jokes and funny voices and impersonating weird people.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut he was a very moody sort of guy. We\u2019d be traveling in a transit van, going to the shows, and he would sit in the corner and not talk to anybody. The rest of us would be messing about, and he’d be in a little world of his own, obviously quite unhappy with the way it was going.<\/p>\n

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\"ENGLAND\n<\/p>\n

\u201cA very moody sort of guy.\u201d Clapton (lower right) sulks at a 1964 shoot with the Yardbirds. (clockwise from lower left) Keith Relf, Chris Dreja, Paul Samwell-Smith, Jim McCarty and Clapton. (Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were trying to get a hit single. We were quite desperate, actually. We tried some of his ideas for singles, various songs he suggested. I think there was a song called \u2018Putty in Your Hands\u2019 that the Shirelles did, and a Major Lance song which I can\u2019t remember. And \u2018Hang on Sloopy\u2019 was another one he suggested, before the McCoys. [The Vibrations released the original version in 1964 prior to the McCoys’\u2019version, which featured the late Rick Derringer<\/a> on guitar and vocals].<\/p>\n

\u201cThey were all good songs but they weren\u2019t gonna be hits. They didn\u2019t stand out like \u2018For Your Love\u2019 did, and when Paul Samwell-Smith suggested we do it like with the harpsichord and the bowed bass and everything, Eric didn\u2019t like the way that was taken over. He thought we were selling out. But he was seemingly quite happy with John Mayall<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Your Love – Original – YouTube
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Clapton joined Mayall within a month of leaving the Yardbirds, and went on to build his reputation as Britain\u2019s leading blues electric guitar<\/a> player with the release of Blues Breakers With Eric Clapton in July 1966.<\/p>\n

By then, he was already gone, having formed Cream<\/a> with bass<\/a> guitarist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker the prior month. Clapton would bounce from band to band over the next years, forming first Blind Faith, then Derek and the Dominos<\/a>, the one group he thought would last years<\/a>. They broke up less than a year after releasing their studio album, Layla.& Other Assorted Love Songs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Guitar Player is closing out 2025 by republishing 25 of your favorite stories from the past year. We…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-349181","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}