Songfacts®:

• This was the opening track on Over Under Sideways Down, which was released in the UK as "The Yardbirds" and re-issued there in 1983 with the new title "Roger The Engineer." Jeff Beck was the band's guitarist at the time (Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton were with the group at various times), and he wrote the song with the rest of the band: bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, drummer Jim McCarty, singer Keith Relf and guitarist Chris Dreja. In our 2010 interview with Jim McCarty, he talked about recording the album: "We had a good combination of people, with Paul and Keith, Jeff, Chris and me, and that lineup. We all contributed and worked very well together. We seemed to work well as a unit to make up stuff. And, in fact, Roger (Cameron), the engineer of the album, we did one of our first albums, it was originally called The Yardbirds, and we recorded that in about a week in the studio. And a lot of it was written at the time, so we sort of made it up as we went along, and it was great fun. And at the time the albums didn't sell too much; albums were looked upon as just a group's wasting a bit of time in the studio. But now it seems to be taken as a classic album."