electronic noise" and wrote: Retrospective assessments In a song review for AllMusic, Matthew Greenwald describes "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" as "One of the greatest, lost singles from the 1966/1967 era... this very progressive record was somewhat lost in the shuffle." He adds: Music historian Bob Gulla effuses in Guitar Gods: The 25 Players Who Made Rock History, "a towering masterpiece of psychedelic pop; [it] occupies the pinnacle of the entire psychedelic genre". In a similar vein, biographer Martin Power comments: "If the Yardbirds had invented or at least contributed heavily to the birth of psychedelic music in their past, they had come to define it with 'Happenings Ten Years Time Ago'." In his book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Jon Savage writes: "It was a compressed pop-art explosion, with a ferocious staccato guitar figure, a massive descending riff and rolling instrumental break and LSD-inspired lyrics that questioned the construction of reality and the nature of time." He adds that such experimentalism came at a cost: "The musicians were seen as overreaching themselves; they had lost an influential reviewer [Valentine] and were in danger of losing their audience." However, author Frank Hoffman sees it as following "Shapes of Things" in "enabl[ing] the Yardbirds to remain commercially viable despite a pronounced experimental orientation". Music writer Keith Shadwick feels it was their last single that showed them to be ahead of the curve. In When Giants Walked the Earth, author Mick Wall comments on the forward-looking aspects of the song: "This was more than simple pop psychedelia. This was ground zero for seventies rock. Hypnotically interweaving, Eastern-influenced guitars, weapons-grade rhythms." Other writers also describe it as pointing the way towards heavy metal: "soar[ing] into a unique psychedelic/metal mode" (Eder); and "presages the hard rock and heavy metal sounds of the 1970s and 1980s" (Stuessy, Lipscomb). Legacy "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" appears at number three on Record Collectors chronological list of the "100 Greatest Psychedelic Records". Elements of the song have influenced or inspired several other artists. Pink Floyd biographer Julian Palacios writes that Syd Barrett "assimilates" the instrumental section for "Candy and a Currant Bun". French identifies Love's "A House Is Not a Motel" (parts of the solos played by two guitars) and the uptempo part of the Stooges' "I'm Sick of You" (the main riff). Guitarist Mark Arm of Mudhoney explained its influence on "Touch Me I'm Sick": "if