Cover songs are the backbone of the rock world. Without the unnecessary covers done there would be none of the heavy hitters of pointless additons to already great songs: no Elvis and no Beatles. But what about when a band covers another bands cover and in turn pisses off the defunct bands fired guitarist? Well, then you have the curious case of Train Kept A-Rollin’.
Before Aerosmith was a shalmtzy, ballad-slinging sell out of what was once considered pretty admirable Rolling Stones rip-off, they were one of the leading rock bands of their day. While glam took over and southern rock was becoming more and more popular, Aerosmith stayed true to a certain sensibility that was being missed: guitar driven, sleazeball music. Mama Kin, Same Old Song and Dance, Walk This Way, so on and so forth. On their second album, 1974’s Get Your Wings, there was a cover of Train Kept A-Rollin. The band had long been performing it as a part of their live sets, put it to wax, and found a bit of radio hit from it. It solidified them as a torch carrier for the blues-based rock bands of the 1960s. Steven Tyler said of his inspiration to record the song:
"I had seen the Yardbirds play somewhere the previous summer with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the band ... In Westport [at their supporting gig on October 22, 1966] we found out that Jeff had left the band and Jimmy was playing lead guitar by himself. I watched him from the edge of the stage and all I can say is that he knocked my tits off. They did 'Train Kept A-Rollin'' and it was just so heavy. They were just an un-fuckin'-believable band." - Steven Tyler, 2003
The Yardbirds were beloved for their ability to churn out some of the best British blues guitar players of their time - [the overrated] Eric Clapton was their first player before leaving, was replaced by [the insanely talented] Jeff Beck, before he was booted for Jimmy Page. Clapton cited his leaving as a dislike for the direction the band was going - less bluesy and more pop centric - but his replacement? Never once had a player used a status within an established band to do the most inventive pieces like Jeff Beck was suddenly doing. Pushing the boundaries of what was expected of his role, creating sounds that were so unique he was being upheld as the pièce de résistance to the Yardbirds fame: they may not have been the best band, and certainly couldn’t out do their contemporaries, but they had Jeff Beck and that was more than enough to make them worth their salt. It was during their 1965 tour they recorded a cover of the classic R&B track Train Kept A-Rollin. The song was orginally written by Tiny Bradshaw and Syd Nathan, released by the Johnny Burnette Trio to some acclaim in 1956:
The Johnny Burnette Trio performing Train Kept A-Rollin in 1956
The cover was a typical romp but it was what Beck did on the riffs that set it apart, his guitar becoming a train whistle and defying the laws of what was to be expected of a blues guitarist. The song, by any other account, was the same as most other British Invasion rock coming out at the time. Most of the Yardbirds songs fall into a sort of limbo where the only thing that is really worth the price of admission is to hear what Beck was doing - and he excels here at making this piece worth the time. Beck, discussing the song with Guitar World in 2011, said “That was the beginning of punk, I think. [..] I just nailed what turned out to be heavy metal.” Beck would go on to truly perfect what would become heavy metal with his first releases with the Jeff Beck Group [whose pieces would be lifted by one Jimmy Page for Led Zeppelin], up until 2022 where he guested on Ozzy Osbornes' Patient Number 9 [doing one of his all time best features], but it was all started with his experimentation within Train Kept A-Rollin that lead him on this journey of just maybe being one of the godfathers of punk and heavy metal.
The Yardbirds performing Train Kept A-Rollin and Shapes of Things in 1966
Beck's influence was often felt less with the public and more with players, he wasn't designed for guitar hero status and did his best to ignore what notority he gained. Just as he wouldn't appear in music videos for the songs he featured on through the 80s, only hearing through the grapevine he was even there, it wasn't until Aerosmith got a hold of Train that he got his flowers for the work he did on the orginial single. The song struggled to find much success, but it became a cult classic for garage bands, guitarists suddenly wanted to figure out how Beck did what he did as he did it. This is how the song was added to Steven Tyler's vocabulary, leading to the cover that would actually catapult the song to a more main-stream rocker. The cover is admirable - Joe Perry does just about everything a devout disciple of Beck would, knowing not to copy and not to try to sound like the unmatchable man. The cover was regarded pretty highly, and was a many people’s introduction to the song at all.
Aerosmith perfomring Train Kept A-Rollin in 1974
The Yardbirds had disbanded in 1969, becoming slowly but surely Led Zeppelin, and before that had seen the exit of Jeff Beck, who was kicked out of the band for a “personality issue”. While Led Zeppelin would go on to be the biggest band on their day, keeping the mythology of the Yardbirds in top gear for how successful some of their guitarists turned out, Beck struggled through most of the 70s to find his footing in an ever changing world of guitar driven music that was inspired by him. Halfway through the decade he settled into his now iconic string of jazz-rock fusion, one that pushed the idea of guitar and what you could make it do to an incomprehensible level. He would do a live album with Jan Hammer, where he would add his lick from Train Kept A-Rollin, a nod to those who actually knew the origin of the songs rock roots. He told Guitar Player magazine in 1980: “[I was] pissed off at Aerosmith. I mean, I was known for playing ‘Train Kept A-Rollin’ with the Yardbirds, and these people come up to me - and they weren’t kids, they were 24 - saying ‘Hey, I liked your angle on the Aerosmith tune.’”
Never easy to work with and seemingly harder to empress, Train Kept A-Rollin with the Aerosmith spin was a hit to just about every person that tuned into it - sans Jeff Beck. Though, who really expected him to be happy about that one?
Jeff Beck performing his genre-creating riff with Joe Perry, Jimmy Page, Flea, and Metallica:
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