Yardbirds' "Heart Full Of Soul" - Analysis

 Aside from being among the first to incorporate Eastern elements into a rock sound, the Yardbirds also experimented with Gregorian chants, controlled feedback, and radical tempo and time signature changes. While not as commercially successful as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, by the middle of 1966 the influence of the Yardbirds on the American garage band movement rivaled that of either of those bands.

By starting with a detailed look at the Yardbirds, we will make an excellent start in opening up much of the topical and stylistic field of psychedelia in the mid-1960s. Let’s start with a topical reading of one well-known Yardbirds song, “Heart Full of Soul”. The overarching point is that all of the topical moves and style components to be identified in the Yardbirds became widely adopted by other groups of the period. These were not necessarily all pioneered by the Yardbirds, but the Yardbirds were among their earliest and most influential exponents.

Psychedelic music could be broken up into subtypes in many different ways. In terms of historical development, one of the more important distinctions has to do with the difference between psychedelia as a decoration applied to conventional song forms and the slightly later appearance of new formal strategies cognate with psychedelia. Many bands incorporated elements that might be considered psychedelic while maintaining the basic structures of garage rock, i.e., two- to three-minute songs with conventional verse-chorus arrangements usually based around three to five chords. This psychedelic garage-rock hybrid was prevalent in the period 1966–67, with many examples predating the more improvisation-based sound popularized by San Francisco bands.

Of all the topical features in “Heart Full of Soul” the one that has been most widely noted by commentators is the introductory guitar figure, in which Jeff Beck employs conventional logic of the song to come to the foreground more strongly than subtle transformative or sequential relationships between topics. The main factor here is not just the foregrounding of formal convention, since other conventional forms such as sonata allegro are highly compatible with temporally elaborated meanings. But conventional pop song structure emphasizes the alternation of contrasting sections over continuous development and tends to use topics as a means of highlighting those sectional contrasts. None of this is to say that longer-range structures such as narrative and expressive genre are impossible or completely absent in such cases. But they do not seem to be invited very strongly.

There is also a similarity between this sort of pop song and certain aspects of the visual in psychedelic style. It is often striking how much textural and affective complexity can arise from clustering colorful and topical elements around a conventional song form. The result is not unlike the visual effect of a Persian carpet, mandala, or kaleidoscope, all of which were strongly influential on psychedelic design. These sorts of patterns resemble one another in being simple and bold on higher levels but almost fractal in their richness on smaller scales. Similarly, concise song forms with ornate psychedelic decoration are clean-lined and simple on a higher formal level but reveal considerable complexity on more local scales. By contrast, some of the more structurally protracted later psychedelic forms, such as the group improvisations and early space rock, have an almost opposite structure: quite simple on a moment-to-moment level but formally more extended.

Of all the topical features in “Heart Full of Soul” the one that has been most widely noted by commentators is the introductory guitar figure, in which Jeff Beck employs a fuzz effect to emulate an earlier demo version played on sitar. This figure is one example of a much broader trend circa 1966 toward guitar figures evocative of Indian motifs used either by themselves or in conjunction with other signifiers of Indian music. We do not need to say more than note its presence here and to remark that “Heart Full of Soul” is frequently cited as a key text in starting the trend.