As the drummer in the Yardbirds, Jim McCarty has a unique perspective on rock history: He’s seen it all from the rear. “My immediate memory is seeing the backs of Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck playing together,” he says. “I’ve seen some great performers from back there.”

The sole original member, McCarty brings the latest incarnation of the Yardbirds to City Winery on Wednesday, April 9. If you’ve seen the band in recent years, this show will be a little different: There’s a new lead guitarist, Godfrey Townsend. And for the first time, McCarty will be telling his stories of band history between the songs. “I’ll be talking through it and we’ll have projections to illustrate the songs. Then at the end we’ll do a few songs together and rock out, so to speak. I’m used to running over the history by now and fortunately my brain works pretty well for an older guy.”

The Yardbirds were originally part of a wave of UK bands, with the Who, the Animals and the Rolling Stones, all enraptured with American blues. “It was all timing, really. All my friends knew about the rock and roll coming from America. Then all of a sudden we heard this music that had a real edge to it — Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters. It was interesting and evocative, great repertoire to play. And it happened by word of mouth, you had to find the vinyl records in the shops when there weren’t many places selling them. You couldn’t find them online in those days.”

Legend has it that Eric Clapton stomped out of the band after they recorded “For Your Love”— their breakthrough US hit, but definitely not a blues song. “It was a little complex. He wasn’t really a team player in a band and though we had a lot of fun together,  he didn’t like what we wanted to do to go on being successful. We wanted to have a hit record and a lot of what we’d done live wasn’t working in the studio. ‘For Your Love’ was very special, a moodier kind of song. But he thought we were selling out.”

The band’s next guitarist, Jeff Beck, pushed them to a more original sound. “We could play cover versions of the blues but that can be limiting, always a 12 bar sequence. We wanted to make the sound our own and give it something else. So it was fortunate that we had someone like Jeff Beck with all his devices and gizmos, and his interest in a variety of sounds. He played a lot of those things off the top of his head.” This era of the band— with Beck eventually joined and then replaced by Page on guitar— became the most legendary. “I just saw a documentary recently on (UK TV channel) Sky Arts. They had Alice Cooper, Brian May, Ronnie Wood all talking about being fans of the group. That’s always quite nice for me.”

McCarty inadvertently helped create progressive rock when he and Yardbirds singer Keith Relf started their next band, Renaissance. “We came in with some quite folky songs that we had written. But then our keyboard player played a bit of Beethoven and we said ‘This is unusual, let’s keep it in.’ Then we went to America and they were shocked, they thought we were going to sound like Led Zeppelin.”

With three original Yardbirds (Beck, Relf and guitarist Top Topham) passed away and the others retired, that leaves McCarty and Eric Clapton as the only ones still performing. “Yeah, it’s down to me and Eric. But I have talked to Jimmy Page recently, asked why he doesn’t go out on the road — He said ‘I’ve got too much admin.’ I thought that was pretty funny, but I guess he’s busy with Led Zeppelin bootlegs.”

The Yardbirds play City Winery April 9.