The fourth song from that album had been a transitional single for the group, as it boasted the dual guitars of Beck and Page on the very psychedelic "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago." After that, Page was the single guitarist for the 1967 Little Games, represented on the new collection by "Drinking Muddy Water" on the first disc, then "Glimpses" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor" as bonus tracks on disc two. (The latter had been performed live for the first time by The Yardbirds in Springfield, Massachusetts in 2011.)
Two other song choices finish off the connections to the short-lived Page era, including "Think About It," once the b-side of The Yardbirds' final 1967 single, the forgettable "Goodnight Sweet Josephine." But the highlight to Making Tracks has to be a Yardbirds song they never officially recorded, but that was issued in 1971 on Live Yardbirds featuring Jimmy Page. The song was called "I'm Confused" on that release, but it was actually "Dazed and Confused" by folksinger Jake Holmes with extra lyrics by Relf. Page used it on the first Led Zeppelin album, and the 1971 Yardbirds release came out to capitalize on that album's popularity. It was quickly pulled by the record company, but "Dazed and Confused" is a genuine nugget from the Yardbirds canon and gets a full workout by the new line-up.
Mixed in with the old standards are versions of songs from Birdland, the 2003 release that included new material with redoings of many of the songs done yet again on Making Tracks. Ironically, recent as Birdland is, Dreja and McCarty are the only players from that album reproducing them in these concerts. These include "My Blind Life," the McCarty-penned "Crying Out For Love," and "Mystery Of Being," the latter a McCarty composition the band described as "Afghan psychedelia," although there's a much stronger echo of Santana than Arab themes.
Another cut from Birdland is performed by the Jim McCarty Band as a bonus track on the second disc. As McCarty explains in his introduction, "A Dream Within A Dream" is based on a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, and his group adds flute and other musical flavorings not typical of a Yardbirds rendition. The final bonus song, also from the Jim McCarty Band, is the piano-based "Isadora," a song strongly echoing Renaissance, the second '60s group featuring both McCarty and Relf.
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