Tag: Shapes of Things

This is the Yardbirds… Jeff Beck edition. Great song that peaked at #11 in the Billboard 100, #3 in the UK, and #7 in Canada in 1966. Beck’s guitar solo in this song is fantastic as he uses distortion, sustain, feedback, and some Eastern influence. This was shortly before Jimmy Page joined the group.

The band recorded this song at Chess Studio in Chicago, their first time there. Chris Dreja said it’s one of the best songs they ever made. Shapes of Things was about the state of the UK during the Vietnam War, so it was an anti-war song according to the band. The song was written by Jim McCarty, Keith Relf, and Paul Samwell-Smith.

The band is best known now because of the great guitarists that were in the band. Eric Clapton joined the band in 1963, but soon quit to concentrate on the blues with Cream.

Jeff Beck replaced him in 1965, and then Jimmy Page joined in 1966 on bass. He soon switched to guitar, and the band had Page and Beck together.

Later, Beck walked out of the band, leaving only Page. The Yardbirds broke up, but Jimmy Page kept the name and played under “The New Yardbirds” with his new bandmates Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham, who would change their name to Led Zeppelin.

Jeff Beck liked the song so much that he used it on arguably his best album Truth. He was able to control feedback and use it to enhance the song. The song is often considered a precursor to the heavier, more experimental rock sound that would emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Jeff Beck: “The way they worked was completely off the cuff: We’d jam, Keith would rush off and write some lyrics in the toilet, it was exactly like that. After four verses, let’s go into this raga thing. I kept changing guitar sounds all the way through. So we did two or three takes of my guitars and blended them all together. But the solo on “Shapes Of Things” was pretty honest until that feedback note that comes in over it. If nothing else, that was the best single.”

Bassist Paul Samwell-Smith: I wrote it in a bar in Chicago. I just lifted part of a Dave Brubeck fugue to a marching beat. It’s a sort of protest song.

Jim McCarty: “With ‘The Shapes of Things’ I came up with a marching type of rhythm that I tried to make interesting. And at the end of each line we’d build up like we used to do with some of our stage stuff – the rave ups. And then the bass riff came on top of that. And the bass riff was loosely based on a Dave Brubeck song, sort of a jazz song, around a doo doo doo doo doo doo, and then the chords came over that. The chords were very basic, came between the two tones, I think G and F, and then resolving it in D, each verse. And then the tune came on top of that. In fact, I remember putting the backing track down, which sounded great. I wasn’t at the session where Keith made up the tune, and when I heard the tune, I thought, Oh, that’s great. It’s a real surprise. He made up the tune, and then we had this sort of ‘Come tomorrow,’ but that was part of the song, anyway, at the beginning. So it was an exciting song to be involved in.”

Jim McCarty: “That’s probably the hardest thing to try and do. Every time we tried to do that it never really succeeded. I suppose we were lucky in that when we did ‘Shapes of Things’ it was like a hit song, but we were really coming from not trying to create a sort of a 3-minute piece of music, it was just something that seemed natural to us. We started with the rhythm, we used a bass riff that came from a jazz record, got a groove going with that and then added a few other bits from elsewhere, other ideas that we’d had. And I think it was a great success for us, it was a good hit record that wasn’t really selling out. And it was original.”

Shapes of Things

Shapes of things before my eyes,
Just teach me to despise.
Will time make men more wise?
Here within my lonely frame,
my eyes just heard my brain.
But will it seem the same?

(Come Tomorrow) Will I be older?
(Come Tomorrow) May be a soldier.
(Come Tomorrow) May I be bolder than today?

Now the trees are almost green.
But will they still be seen?
When time and tide have been.
Fall into your passing hands.
Please don’t destroy these lands.
Don’t make them desert sands.

Chorus, Lead.

Soon I hope that I will find,
Thoughts deep within my mind.
That won’t displace my kind.