THE ANIMALS DISCOGRPAHY
AND CAREER OVERVIEW
(best work in color)
1963: I Just Want to Make Love to You (UK-EP - 10/63). 1964: The Animals (US-LP - 9-64). 1965: Animals On Tour (US-LP-3/65 which has most of the songs from the UK Animal Tracks) * Animal Tracks (US-LP-9/65). 1966: Animalization (US-LP-8/66) * Animalism (US-LP-12/66). 1967: Eric Burdon and the Animals Greatest Hits, Volume II. 1973: In the Beginning (Early Live stuff from 1963). 1974: The Night Time is the Right Time (the Animals with Sonny Boy Williamson live in 1963). 1977: Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted. 1983: ARK. 1984: Rip it to Shreds: the Animals Greatest Hits Live.
ERIC BURDON DISCOGRAPHY
(including Eric Burdon with War Discography)
1967 : Eric is Here (US-3/67) * Winds of Change (US-10/67). 1968: The Twain Shall Meet (US-5/68) * Every One of Us (US-7/68) * Love is (US-12/68). 1970: Eric Burdon Declares War (US-9/70) 1971: The Black Man's Burdon (US-1/71) * Guilty : Eric Burdon with Jimmy Witherspoon (US-12/71). 1975: Eric Burdon Band: Sun Secrets (2/75) * Stop (8/75). 1976: Love is All Around (Eric Burdon and War outtakes from early seventies ). 1977: Survivor. 1980: Darkness, Darkness * The Last Drive (Eric Burdon's Fire Dept.). 1988: Wicked Man * I Used to Be an Animal. 1991: Access All Areas (with Brian Auger). 1995: Lost Within the Halls of Fame . 1997: Official Live Bootleg (with the I Band). 1998: Official Live Bootleg 2 ( with the I Band). 2004: My Secret Life (Germany).
In the Beginning gives us one of the earliest glimpses of the original Animals in performance. Seven songs from 1963 from an opening slot with Sonny Boy Williamson show a band attaining rock and roll intensity on a revved up and steady version of "Let it Rock." The blues tunes are ragged and unformed, but Alan Price shines on piano and organ turns on a few of the songs. The audience offers energetic call and response vocals and seems to be having a hell of a time. It is actually Sonny Boy Williams who turns in the shoddiest performance, sitting in and contributing hammy drums to "C-Jam Blues." This was towards the start of the British Invasion; it's not a brilliant performance, but it shows you what was needed to get the kids attention at this early stage.
The debut US album - The Animals - contains the hit "House of the Rising Sun." The rest of the songs are blues and rock & roll covers. Young musicians were beginning to piece together their own idea of song standards and the selection here includes work by John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry and others. Alan Price is the most impressive musician. Price was showing more command and good taste in keyboard soloing and backup than many of his peers. He offers imaginative riffing with clean solo breaks (nice beginnings and graceful exits), and a dense, nimble and intoxicating dexterity. As vocalist, Eric Burdon has a strong personality; he was already a tenacious performer, capable of giving any song a good solid workout. The album is spotty, but offers as prime examples of early sixties' rock and blues "The Girl Can't Help It," "Blue Feelin'," "Gonna Send You Back to Walker," and "I've Been Around."
There were two tests British Invasion bands, and other bands from the era, ultimately had to meet: 1. In the way they are able to increase the intensity of the styles that had inspired them, and 2. In the way they could adapt to the blurring of boundaries leading to pop-rock breakthrough beauty. For some bands, neither was achieved. As the first wave, these early bands took routes they weren't capable of traveling to final destination. The Dave Clark 5 never produced a rock/pop album classic, nor did they seem particularly dedicated to pure blues or rock and roll. On the other hand, the Zombies are a clear cut case of dedicated r&b enthusiasts recreating r&b in their own words and image, and through sheer will power creating something quite different with Odyssey and Oracle. The Move, the Kinks and the Who touched on the earlier idioms, but quickly pitched headlong into realms more wildly colorful and/or contemporary. The Rolling Stones and the Beatles were profound blues/r&b stylists, and more. Every band from the mid-sixties lurks somewhere around these pinpoints of endeavor.
The Animals' third US album - Animal Tracks, from late 1965 - again leads off with a hit, this time by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill - "We Gotta Get Out of This Place." After that it's an well-performed batch of blues/rock and roll tunes, including a few self-penned songs that fit neatly. On "Bring it on Home to Me," Price shows us once again how deftly he gets in and out of a solo. "Club a Go-Go," "Roberta" and "For Miss Caulker" set off some original sparks though it's a little hard to characterize the rest of the band as personal stylists. Guitarist Hilton Valentine typifies a mid-sixties' guitar rock solo technique - a bit dead sounding, more Check Berry than B.B. King, not very melodic or authoritative.
With the August, 1966 US release of Animalization, the original Animals are rather quickly nearing the end. Dave Rowberry has replaced Alan Price who left in 1965. In mid-1966, Barry Jenkins would replace John Steel on drums. In some ways the album is the toughest they would produce. "Cheating," "Inside Looking Out," She'll Return It" and "Don't Bring Me Down" are great Burdon and band moments, and the the Animals are pushing to be a somewhat bigger entity. But as they sit on the edge of psychedelic, guitar-hero, rock opera, multi-track history, the Animals seems to sense their tenuous position. The band dynamics are sturdy, but undersized. The album that followed in December, 1966 (Animalism) would be a regression, with slow covers of "Hit the Road, Jack," "The Other Side of This Life," and "Shake." A couple of songs that Nina Simone had recently covered, crop up in the band's repertoire: "I Put a Spell on You" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" are weak in comparison to Simone's versions. In the blink of an eye, Alan Price has a successful solo career, Chas Chandler is managing Jimi Hendrix, and Eric Burdon is pursuing an everlasting hippie/blues ethos that manages to stave off extreme financial extinction well into the eighties and longer.
Looking back, the band served their muse well and their best music remind us of the early energy and the initial spark the British Invasion generated. But it is the Animals' greatest hits packages which explode with compact rock and roll fever. And in one of the wildest codas a British Invasion band has had - a reunion album in 1977 - Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted - is a surprise success. The band brings years of experience to the kind of thing that appealed to them in the first place. Eric Burdon has seldom sounded so good on record and the band is commanding throughout. Even more bizarre is ARK, the 1983 IRS Records album that briefly resurrected the band with a world tour and a hit single ("The Night"). ARK's eighties' rock style obscures the band's orginal intent, but the songs are surprisingly good in many instances ("The Night," "Trying to Get to You," "Just Can't Get Enough," "Hard Times"). The band would stick around on IRS long enough to produce a classic live album of primal Animalistic fury (Rip it to Shreds).
The brevity of the Animals sixties' career is disguised by the fact that Eric Burdon carried on with "Eric Burdon and the (New) Animals" and had considerable success with what followed. But it's easier and more exacting to consider Eric is Here as the start of Burdon's solo career, given his growth as songwriter/leader, and the fluctuation of band members that followed. Eric is left to persue late sixties' maturity in rock style on his own. His demeanor is so friendly you are tempted to cut him some slack. Burdon has often pursued a celebratory aesthetics of homage. With a positive ambiance that makes him soul brother to everybody from Donovan to Doug Sahm, Eric effuses over the music scene and musicians ("Monterey," "New York 1963," "San Francisco Nights," "A Girl Named Sandoz," "I Used to Be an Animal" "Blues for Memphis Slim," "When We Were a Gang," "Vision of Rassan," "No More Elmore"). There are anti-guru songs, pro-ecology songs, utopian pipe-dreams ("Magic Mountain," "Spill the Wine" "Closer to the Truth"), peacenik tunes, astrological paeans ("Gemini"). And there's always a return to traditional blues and r&b classics. Blues and r&b honesty temper extreme cases of hippie-itus. Burdon would have hits with both War and Eric Burdon and the Animals, but album by album the results are inconsistent.
Twain Shall Meet has "Monterey" and "Sky Pilot," but the rest of the songs run from weak instrumental ("We Love You Lil") to insistent three chord, non-dynamic, brusqueness ("Closer to the Truth"). The same can be said for Every One of Us with its own long, bland instrumental (the queasily named "Serenade to a Sweet Lady"). The album also contains spoken word "street" interviews on "Immigrant Lad," and "New York, 1963; America, 1968" which cloy after a listen or two, and disrupt the album completely. Love Is stretches 8 songs out on a double album set, and a song like "Gemini" which starts well, becomes a contrived jam with every riff lasting a predictable and mechanical-sounding length of time. Love Is has few saving graces - one of them a punk/garage sounding version of "I'm An Animal," and a nicely sung cover of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody." What's missing in much of Burdon's work during this period is a sense of careful song craft. The band just couldn't pull out the talent necessary to be considered upper class contenders in the turbulently creative year of 1968.
Eric Burdon would hook up with War in California, playing some live dates as early as August, 1969. Burdon had become a soul-stirring singer and it's a sheer joy to hear him wail on Eric Burdon Declares War. "Mother Earth" and "Tobacco Road" push Burdon up to a whole new level as a vocalist. Declares War also contained the sizable hit "Spill the Wine." The band is tight, clean, and funky and the album is a joy. The follow-up, Black Man's Burdon again finds Burdon putting on two albums what would have been wiser on one album. From the same era, Guilty: Eric Burdon with Jimmy Witherspoon, includes War as the back up musicians, with an important edition of John Sterling on guitar. The Witherspoon album is centered around prison related songs and offers some strong blues tunes even if it is a little short of perfect.
War goes its own way and Burdon attempts to redefine himself around arena-friendly rock and roll on Sun Secrets, which finds him remaking "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," "It's My Life" and "When I Was Young." It's not thoroughly convincing. Of the later releases we can only comment on a few. Wicked Man is a classic Burdon blues performance with many of the songs penned by Burdon and the previously mentioned John Sterling. "Sweet Blood Cell," "Devil's Daughter," "Crawling King Snake," and "Who Gives a Fuck," are a gritty and rousing batch of hard blues, as tough as any Burdon has recorded. Another collaborator, Steve Grant, whom Eric picked up during the reformation of the Animals in 1983, contributes to the songs on 1995's Lost Within the Hall of Fame. What starts off as an entertaining homage to Burdon's own past, unfortunately drifts into a studio bound synth/keyboard/synth-drum effort that turns downright icky by album's end. But Wicked Man and the first half of Lost Within the Halls of Fame prove that Burdon has an unvanquished gift. Many of the later albums await further research. Eric Burdon may be pursuing the idea that "He/She who ends up with the most good songs wins." We wish him the best in this endeavor.
A note about the UK albums:
The Animals (UK-LP 10/64), Animal Tracks (UK-LP- 5/65) and Animalization (UK-LP- 5/65) do not diminish or improve on the band's career, overall. Most, if not all, of the songs reappear on the U.S. albums to similar effect.
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