The Animal They Can't Put Down

THE ANIMAL THEY CANT PUT DOWN

The Age, Melbourne, VIC, Australia - Friday 13-Nov-1998 - by Patrick Donovan

The face of rock'n'roll was changed forever at Royal Albert Hall in 1966 when Bob Dylan plugged his electric guitar into an amplifier and played his folk songs rock-style. Folkies booed, walked out, and one immortalised himself on recordings by crying out "Judas''. They probably witnessed the first punk-rock gig. But if Dylan played the first punk-rock show, it was Eric Burdon who gave him the courage to do it. Two years earlier, his band, The Animals, had proved that folk and rock were not mutually exclusive when their dramatic take on the traditional folk song House of the Rising Sun became the first American No.1 hit by a British R&B band.

Dylan, whose folk version of the song appeared on his 1962 self-titled debut album, was duly impressed, and the rest is history. Burdon checked in to the House of the Rising Sun the moment he first heard it. "There's certain things that happen to you in your life that you know are going to be around forever, like certain people you meet, who will remain with you even when they die, and I felt that way about that song the first time I heard it.'' House of the Rising Sun emerged as a folk song in the early 1900s in the southern states of America, says Burdon, who researched the song's past for his new book of the same name.

"When I was about 14, there were recordings around by people like Josh White, and all I knew was the first two lines. But I would go to jazz clubs and folk clubs in my home town and get up and verbalise over the top of the instruments. And then I discovered Dylan's first album and realised that Bob had found more lyrics than I ever believed had existed. So the Animals chopped back that information that came via Bob and tried to tame the song to make it palatable for the record-buying public.''

The Animals won the coveted support spot for the Chuck Berry / Jerry Lee Lewis tour and road-tested the song on British audiences. "The song was so successful on those crowds that we jumped off mid-tour, and on a Sunday morning we manhandled the gear off a railroad train in Kings Cross, headed to a studio, nailed it in three takes, and rejoined the tour. A producer on the TV program Ready Steady Go was interested and ran it and it took off like a rocket. And as the story goes, I don't know if it's true or not, it's rock'n'roll legend, Dylan heard the song electric and thought ... Wow, that's where I want to go ... , went electric, and he's kept on rocking since then.''

Burdon is in Australia for the first time in eight years for the British Rock Symphony, a symphonic tribute to classic British rock bands: the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Animals and Pink Floyd. The American performance featured the Who's Roger Daltrey with a 60-piece orchestra, rock band, back-up singers, and gospel choir. The show has been scaled down for Australia, and Burdon will be joined by soul diva Thelma Houston, former Little River Band vocalist Glenn Shorrock and local R&B harmony group CDB, a rock band and 28-piece orchestra. Not one to shy away from genre-mixing, Burdon has experimented with symphonies, jazz and blues in the past.

The Animals played with an experimental big band at a London jazz festival in 1965 (which happened to be the Beatles' last public appearance together). And just before he was approached to sing in the show he had recorded a version of House with a Californian string quartet, with the intention of releasing it with his new book. "It's always been in the back of my mind to try to experiment in that direction. But I haven't had the time or the chance; I've had to wait for someone else to present it to me'' he says.

Burdon says ... "the energy from an orchestra is totally different from the energy that comes from a rock'n'roll concert. There's nothing like hearing a string section to carry a musical moment. I get off on stage singing when my keyboard players use programmed strings. As a singer, it affects the way I approach a song. I regard it as a vocal event. What fired me up when I was first approached for this project was the amount of voices I had to play with; it's going to be fun to experiment with five black male back-up voices''.

Burdon compared the show he saw in Hollywood to "a grand night in front of the best stereo system you could ever have''. He will sing House of the Rising Sun, the Animals' We Gotta Get Out of This Place, Pink Floyd's Money and George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps (which he always regrets that Jimi Hendrix didn't cover) and a suitable finale that will touch Australia, "without being too corny''.

The Animals scored a dozen hits in the '60s, a number of which were covers of American songwriters, including Nina Simone's Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, Sam Cooke's Bring It On Home to Me and Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil's We Gotta Get Out of This Place.

By the mid-1960s, the Animals and fellow British Invasion band the Yardbirds found themselves supporting touring bluesmen John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williamson. Burdon says the young British musicians were in for quite a shock when they played with their heroes, Williamson in particular. "There were some quite hair-raising moments with English musicians trying to tune in to this guy who was from a different world,'' he says.

Being on the road with black bluesmen, Burdon was as horrified by tales of American racism as watching Williamson drink himself to death. "Back home, he was probably broke and would never dream of seeing a bottle of single-malt scotch. He carried a case of it around on the tour. They were eye-opening experiences for our young heads.''

But Burdon was soon chasing new eye-opening (and mind-expanding) experiences in San Francisco. "I met an American girl called Judy Wong in London. I had only been to America once or twice at that point, and I was going on at her about America's racial attitude in the south and she said ... I will show you one of these days, I'll prove to you that there's more to America'' The phone call came from the West Coast in 1966. "She said there was ... something wonderful going on in San Francisco. You have to be here, you have to see what's going on.'' Within days Burdon and his new band, Eric Burdon and the Animals, were bound for the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. It was a fruitful adventure, scoring chart success with the songs When I was Young, San Franciscan Nights, Monterey and the anti-war hit Sky Pilot.

"I went out to SF to see what was going on, and then came Monterey. From that point on I realised I wanted to become a Californian - not an American - and I've pretty much based myself out of the West Coast ever since.'' Burdon recalls.

In the purple-hazy late '60s, Burdon, like many others, believed the counter-culture would change the world. Today he realises that the ideas are no longer relevant. "How can we take a stance now with our view for the use of drugs in light of today's world?'' he says. "People just won't buy it. But fortunately, or unfortunately, I was dropped in the middle of this psychic storm that was going on in California in 1967 and it was the most important period of my life. I'll never forget it and I won't forget it and I think that for a short period of time we really took America and stood it on its head. And America was laughing at itself for the first time in a long while. I thought this was the beginning of the end of all the uptightness. And, hey (chuckle), I was wrong. But, what the hell, life goes on.''

The band split in 1969, leaving Burdon to pursue a solo career, which included a successful collaboration with the funk band War, before the original Animals line-up reunited in 1976 for two more albums.

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

"I'm not quite sure what I do'' he reflects. "I'm not a musician, I'm an instrument. That's what I say to my bands: 'Don't expect anything else. You guys have got to play me, you send the signals through me, and I do what I do' - I'm not quite sure what that is.''

While the lyrics of the Animals' early hits were written by racially abused black Americans years earlier, the underlying themes were very relevant to a young Burdon in Britain in the early '60s. And they still ring true to a 57-year-old Burdon in California in 1998. "I still feel frustrated and angry at a lot of things. But while it's acceptable to be an angry young man, nobody wants an angry old man,'' he says. "So you have to find different ways to vent your anger and I think a great way is through humor, just keep 'em laughing. But you can't lose sight of the bouncing ball and the real target in life. I always knew that it would be a lifetime's work to achieve what I need to achieve for myself. To straighten out my own head, to deal with the inadequacies of life as we live it today. Because man with his technology just gets further and further away from the real thing.''

Burdon still stands by the feelings he had as a teenager. "My attitude is that I haven't really started yet. People may be of the opinion that I have no business being in the business - the age and time and space that I am - but my opinion is that the best is yet to come.''

The singer last visited Australia in 1990 in a "charming little tour'' of regional towns with the Australian band the Party Boys.

Fortunately for Burdon, playing live has always been a pleasure, and he never tires of playing Animals songs. "I'm fortunate enough to have a good backlog of songs that are really easy to get on with. I'm able to sing the Animals catalogue front-to-back, back-to-front and inside-out without really getting bored because the songs are so good and the people react to them. It's a lot of fun.''

The British Rock Symphony opens at the Crown Showroom on Sunday and runs until 13 December.