(* and the Animals )
Chart entered : 15 Jan 1969
Chart peak : 35
We're now in the last year of the sixties and there are more departures than arrivals. Indeed that's the chart story of the next few years, a sweeping cull of former stars. What makes it mysterious is that there was largely nothing much to replace them, just a parade of anonymous studio collectives like Edison Lighthouse or second-rate acts - no names yet but we'll be meeting them soon enough - who couldn't get arrested in the sixties but were able to take advantage of the public's desire for new names for a new decade. That someone as talented as Eric Burdon was discarded in favour of say Tony Christie seems bizarre but there you go.
At this point Eric was still recording under the name "Eric Burdon and the Animals" but no other original Animal was on board. Alan Price was the first to jump ship in May 1965 partly through fear of flying. The following March drummer John Steel left and in September the group dissolved with Chas Chandler and Hilton Valentine moving on, the former into management and the latter to California. Eric felt the brand still had some purchase so put out his first solo single "Help Me Girl" under the new moniker even though he had no band and used session musicians. In December 1966 he put together a new Animals , recalling Steel's replacement Barry Jenkins and recruiting three new members although his name stayed out front. The new band were never as popular as the old and only had one top 10 hit "San Franciscan Nights" in 1967. Their final line-up included future Police guitarist Andy Summers. They had already decided to dissolve following a terrifying tour of Japan in the autumn of 1968 where they were threatened by yakuza gangsters so this is the first "conscious" goodbye single ( from a group perspective ) we've covered.
"Ring Of Fire" is a Joe Cocker-esque deconstruction of the Johnny Cash song beginning with a military tattoo and wordless chanting before Eric's entrance in the highest register he can manage. It crams a lot into its four and a half minutes with a scraping cello accompanying Andy's guitar solo in the lengthy middle eight and quiet / loud passages anticipating Nirvana. It's a tad over the top for me. Strangely, considering the band were much more popular in the States at this point it wasn't a hit over there though it di get to number 2 in Holland.
Eric's had a long and active career since his exit from the charts so this is going to be a meaty post. Eric was living in Los Angeles by the time the group split and foolishly announced his interest in a film career. When no offers came through he and his friend Lee Oskar , a Danish harmonica player, decided to put a new band together and persuaded the members of Nightshift, a black group currently backing Deacon Jones , an American Footballer moonlighting as a singer to join them in the venture, to be known as Eric Burdon and War.
They announced themselves with a killer single, "Spill The Wine" in April 1970 which was a big hit everywhere except here ( perhaps Auntie didn't like the sexual connotations ) , reaching number 3 in the States. To the backing of an irresistible stoner groove Eric rambles , with occasional irrepressible Geordie intonations, from mocking his own ambitions "Imagine me , an overfed, long haired, leaping gnome , should be a star of a Hollywood movie" to an erotic fantasy in which the meaning of the title becomes clear. Charles Miller's flute follows and illustrates the lyrics to great effect and a young Latin lady starts chattering in the background as the story develops. Though lacking her, their performance of the song on Beat Club ( currently available on youtube ) is even better than the recorded version.
The album "Eric Burdon Declares "War" " followed hot on its heels. It doesn't contain anything else as instantly appealing with three lengthy jams and a brief piano ballad for a coda although Eric's embarrassing monologue at the beginning of the twelve minute "Blues For Memphis Slim" is the only thing that needs skipping. An edit of their funky version of "Tobacco Road" was released as a single but didn't chart. The album got to number 50 here and 18 in the US.
The band then went on a big tour of Europe to rave reviews. On 18 September they played at Ronnie Scott's and Hendrix joined them on stage for the last half hour. He died the following day. I recall Eric being interviewed by Johnnie Walker on his afternoon show in 2004 and Eric saying he went looking for someone with a rifle that evening. Walker hastily changed the subject. At the time Eric claimed to possess a suicide note that he wasn't going to disclose which didn't do his reputation any favours.
They returned to the US to record their second album "The Black- Man's Burdon" trailed by the single "They Can't Take Away Our Music". This slow-burning soul number where Eric shares the lead vocal duties with the other members and eventually Sharon Scott and the Beautiful New Born Children of Southern California add a gospel fervour to the track. It got to number 50 in the US.
The album was controversial as Eric went out of his way to be provocative. The back cover had Eric stood with a woman in a suggestive pose while the inside gatefold sleeve had two naked white girls laid on their backs in front of the rest of the band ( most of them shirtless ). It's a double LP beginning with a 13 minute jam on "Paint It Black " containing a lengthy drum solo and a short poem , "PC", about shagging the queen which unsurprisingly was excised from the UK release. After the brooding R &B of "Spirit" ( itself eight minutes plus ) and the unyielding blues/gospel grind of "Beautiful New Born Child" there's another 13 minute jam this time on "Nights In White Satin" where Miller greatly extends Ray Thomas's flute solo and Eric adds a stream-of-consciousness rant before coming back to the song. The second disc is all original material which would repay more attention than I can give it here. As the album was effectively unpromoted in the US it only got to 82 and was ignored in the UK.
The band went back out on tour to promote it in Europe but halfway through a concert on 5th February 1971 Eric collapsed on stage with an asthma attack. He took it as a cue to leave the band. It was the pivotal moment in this story. Eric's career has never really recovered and he's been at a loss to explain it adequately describing himself as "out of control", reeling from a divorce and the death of Hendrix and imagining he was quitting the music business not just the band. They finished the tour without him and went on to further success including half a dozen UK hits beginning in 1976 with Low Rider.
Eric's "retirement" didn't last long. He was coaxed out to do an album with jump blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon in 1971 part of which was recorded at a live gig at San Quentin Prison. The band for the album was called Tovarich and guitarist John Sterling helped Eric with two of his original compositions for the album. It's mostly workmanlike blues rock though the two principals' only joint composition "I've Been Drifting, Once Upon A Time" stands out for its choking melancholic feel. Neither the album nor the single "Soledad" ( hardly an obvious choice ) charted anywhere.
Eric took some time out to get married again in 1972 ( which saw "House Of The Rising Sun" enjoy another run in the British charts peaking at 25 ) then put together The Eric Burdon Band featuring Aalon Butler on guitar, Randy Rice on bass and Alvin Taylor on drums. They played the Reading Festival in 1973 and got a deal with Capitol. The album , released in December 1964 was "Sun Secrets" . The lead single was Edwin and Aalon's song "The Real Me" which was a reasonable hard rocker that sounded like Alice Cooper with a better singer although the most impressive feature was Rice's inventive bassline. That was actually the only entirely new song on the LP which mainly consisted of lengthy rock re-workings of old Animals tunes such as "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "It's My Life". Another attempt at "Ring Of Fire" was the choice for a second single. Neither single charted but the album made a respectable showing at 51 in the US charts.
Eric and the band recorded some music for and Eric ploughed a lot of money into, a film project Mirage which never got made. The songs were eventually released on the CD "Mirage" in 2008. Its failure caused a rift with his longtime associate Jerry Goldstein and in July 1975 the label put out "Stop" as a new album from the Eric Burdon Band though it was actually comprised of unreleased material he had worked on with Tovarich in 1971-73 and didn't feature the other guys at all. Eric wasn't consulted and disowned it but it was reasonably reviewed and made a minor showing in the US charts.
Eric escaped to England to take part in a full scale Animals reunion. In 1975 the five original Animals got together at Chas Chandler's studio and recorded the album "Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted". It's essentially a covers album with only one new group composition "Riverside County". Despite having a fair haul of hits as a vocalist himself, Alan Price deferred to Eric as lead singer and stuck to the keyboards. It stands up pretty well but unfortunately Eric's tussles with Goldstein prevented its release until the summer of 1977, just about the worst possible time to release a comeback album from a sixties band. After a mini-tour in 1976 promoting an album that no one could buy the band had gone their separate ways so there was no one around to promote it. A couple of promo films had been made for individual tracks but no singles were released. It got to number 70 in the US, and 24 in Holland but didn't chart in the UK.
In the aftermath of the recording Eric is thought to have recorded some demoes with Hilton Valentine and Steel but these have never surfaced. Instead Eric reunited with Zoot Money ,keyboard player in the second incarnation of The Animals to write his next album "Survivor" recorded in London in 1977 and produced by Chandler. It's mainly in a hard rock vein with songs of variable quality, the Al Stewart-like ( apart from the vocal of course ) "Woman Of The Rings" being the standout track. It probably deserved better than being completely ignored but that was its fate. Eric relocated to Germany shortly afterwards
Eric toured extensively in Europe in 1978 but found time to record an album of covers in Ireland at Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio with the likes of Thin Lizzy's Brian Robertson and Wings's Henry McCulloch. Entitled "Darkness Darkness", it didn't find a label until 1980 when Polydor released it. By this time Eric was touring in Europe with a band called Fire Department and his next album "Last Drive" came out under the name Eric Burdon's Fire Department. It's his "New Wave" album and it's intermittently interesting, with Eric trying to mesh his inimical vocal style with reggae and post-punk influences, but some of it is just dreadful. The suspiciously sexist "Female Terrorist" 's six and a half minutes of tuneless white funk is bad enough but "Bird On The Beach" is staggeringly awful, its slow piano grind giving plenty of space in which to ruminate on lines like "It's only a dead bird and its soul has gone to the sky" , bawled out by Eric like a third rate pub singer. The reggae-influenced "Power Company" ( not bad ) was a hit in Austria as a single.
In 1981 he finally got the acting opportunity he'd been hoping for. He'd appeared briefly in a film called "Gibbi" by German director Christel Buschmann and she now wrote a film around him as "Rocco" a washed-up blues singer attempting a comeback imaginatively called "Comeback" . Eric put together a new Eric Burdon Band for the film and recorded enough songs for an accompanying album ( and a second collection released as "Power Company " in 1983 ). In the film Eric performs a dreadful song called "Who Gives A Fuck ?" and that unfortunately was the public response to the project.
It was released in 1982 the same year that "House Of The Rising Sun" had a third chart run peaking at number 11. Record Mirror's chart guru Alan Jones attributed this to the "75p picture discs flying out of my local chart return shop" . Whatever the marketing logic it sparked enough interest in the band for another reunion to make sense. Eric was the last member to get on board after appearing as a guest star at Alan Price's Newcastle gig in December 1982 but on the other hand he was the only one to make any writing contributions to the project. Unlike on the previous reunion album the band attempted to update to a contemporary rock pop sound, aided by additional musicians including Zoot Money. Both he and Stephen Grant are listed as playing keyboards and synthesisers and apart from the odd electric piano break it's difficult to detect much input from Price in the finished product. It generally works although Burdon's style often sounds rather anachronistic alongside the synths and production sheen. I remember seeing them doing the first single "The Night" ( somewhere between Huey Lewis and The Cars ) on Carrot's Lib but Radio One ignored it and nothing charted in the UK. In the States the single got to 48 and the album to 66. The second single "Love Is For All Time" a Police-like white reggae tune and probably the best track on the LP didn't chart. The band did a tour in the autumn of 1983 marked by fisticuffs between Eric and Price and the band's last concert at Wembley in December was released as the "Rip It To Shreds" album the following year. The band broke up permanently at the end of the year. Neither Price nor, before his death from a heart attack in 1996 , Chandler, have been involved in any subsequent resuscitation of the name and Eric has never worked with Steel since.
Eric went back to his relentless European touring , commemorated in the 1985 album "That's Live" before taking a break to write a candid autobiography, "I Used To Be An Animal But I'm Alright Now" published in 1986. Two years later he put a new band together to record the LP "I Used To Be An Animal" which is an appalling mix of rose-tinted nostalgic lyrics and late eighties production bombast. The title track tramples on the band's legacy, setting a potted history to a generic Fairlight rock-funk setting . "The Dream" is Eric does hip hop and is worse than that sounds. "Leo's Place" is a Bruce Hornsby-like piano rock number spoiled by over-production.
Eric produced no new material in the nineties. He kept on touring mainly in Europe, sometimes in partnership with fellow sixties survivors like The Doors's Robbie Kreiger or Brian Auger and periodically released live CDs and DVD's. He had occasional small film roles. From 1998 he began billing his band as the New Animals. In 2001 he brought out a second volume of memoirs "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood".
In 2004 he released his first new material since 1988 with the album "My Secret Life" , its release being the occasion for the Johnnie Walker interview referred to above. Walker particularly enthused about the opening track "Once Upon A Time" a Hammond -led bluesy ballad of reminiscences about Eric's musical heroes. That's the most immediate track; elsewhere a lot of it sounds similar to Robbie Robertson's solo work, dense , brooding and eclectic though I like his version of the folk classic "Factory Girl". His voice has held up pretty well over the years. It made a minor showing in the German charts.
After another live CD recorded in Greece in 2005 he recorded an album of Southern soul covers "Soul Of A Man" in 2006. It did well in Germany reaching number 43 and scraped into the charts in France. He became involved in a long running dispute with John Steel who had been ( and still is ) playing in Animals-derived bands since 1994 and trademarked the name. For a while Eric lost the right to use the name in the UK but eventually the case was decided in his favour. In 2008 he reunited with War for a one-off concert at the Royal Albert Hall.
In 2012 he hooked up with a young garage band for a mini-LP logically titled "Eric Burdon and the Greenhornes". Eric's latest LP "Till Your River Runs Dry" was released just last year; again his German audience gave him a hit there. Its lead-off single "Water " was apparently inspired by a meeting with Gorbachev. The murky lyrics give few clues as to what was discussed and the voice isn't quite what it was but there's still a spark there. Eric's clearly determined to die with his boots on and good luck to him.
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