Review: The Animals - Animal Tracks (1965)

Tracks: 1) We Gotta Get Out Of This Place; 2) Take It Easy Baby; 3) Bring It On Home To Me; 4) The Story Of Bo Diddley; 5) Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood; 6) I Can’t Believe It; 7) Club A-Go-Go; 8) Roberta; 9) Bury My Body; 10) For Miss Caulker; 11*) It’s My Life; 12*) I’m Gonna Change The World.

REVIEW

The biggest mish-mash and hodge-podge of the Animals’ short, sweet, and schizophrenic US discography, the Animal Tracks LP has only two songs in common with its similarly-named UK counterpart released a few months earlier. The simplest way to go about it is to remember that the UK edition of Animal Tracks was essentially the equivalent of the already reviewed Animals On Tour, while the US-issued Animal Tracks was an assortment of odds-and-ends stretching all the way back to mid-1964 and then all the way forward to mid-1965, including even a couple of recordings made after the departure of Alan Price from the band. Its only value was in how carefully it swept out all the corners, putting together all the A- and B-sides and all the songs that were left off earlier American albums in favor of even more A-sides so that at the end of the day, the LP trio of Animals, Animals On Tour, and Animal Tracks more or less exhausted all the master takes that the original Animals recorded in 1964–65. (Of course, today that function is more than perfectly fulfilled by simply purchasing the 2-CD Complete Animals package, which will also throw in a couple extra outtakes and the ‘It’s My Life’ single for good measure).

Since more than half of the album is, essentially, the story of The Animals’ single releases throughout 1965, let us trace that back, first and foremost. The band started out in grand fashion, with a recording that showed they were very much ready to expand beyond their rhythm’n’blues foundations — a cover of Nina Simone’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’, unusual not only in its choice of source material but also in how much Burdon, Price and co. reworked the song, adapting it from the original jazz-ballad-à-la-Nina style to a sort of art-pop-rock setting, in much the same experimental way in which The Yardbirds were adapting other people’s material at the same time. With this effort, Eric Burdon was no longer the «Geordie answer to John Lee Hooker» — he was carving out a proper niche for himself as a soul singer in his own right.

With all the deep reverence I have for Nina Simone and for her original recording of this quasi-Broadway tune in particular, I do believe that it took the Animals to fully realize its potential. It is a bit more than symbolic, for instance, that the classic opening riff of the song (which would later be shamelessly and defiantly appropriated by Bruce Springsteen for his own ‘Badlands’) is hinted at by the string section on Nina’s recording, which plays the first half of the future riff, but it takes Alan Price to complete the line by turning it into an «outburst-and-retraction» thing, ideally encompassing the song’s main spiritual point. And then, of course, there is Eric’s performance, which is far more representative of said point, too. This is, after all, a song about repenting for one’s mistakes committed in an emotionally frustrated state — and who better to sing it than Britain/Scotland’s single most emotionally frustrated singer at the time? All through her version, Nina only really captures the final stage of the emotional journey — the exhausted and desperately repenting one — whereas Eric actually swings back and forth between despair and aggression. His own "I’m just a soul whose intentions are good!" sounds like it’s actually being sung with his fists still clenched, and this makes the whole thing psychologically more complex.

And that is not even mentioning the overall musical complexity of the reworked version, which may, perhaps, not be a great advance on the overall musical sophistication of Nina Simone but is quite a bit of a milestone in the evolution of the pop-rock musical world. Watch the «stuttering» pattern of the opening section, for instance, which makes these odd little pauses in the regular 4/4 beat when Price’s organ is left hangin’ in the air and John Steel, the drummer, gently supports it with four soft kicks of the bass drum. The transition from this broken-bossa-nova kind of verse into the martial chorus, mediated by just a tiny touch of what feels like tape delay on the organ. The deep «Gregorian» harmonies of the other band members, creating a dirge-like ambience for Eric to unleash his wailing in. If there’s anything to complain about, it’s that the song sort of runs out of new ideas to explore around the time it hits up the second verse — were this the Beatles, I’m sure they’d come up with something extra exciting at each new turn. Perhaps an Alan Price organ solo would not be out of place (unlike his role on ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, here he is rather strictly confined to just replaying the key riff over and over and over). Even so, the first half of the song is so damn great that simply looping it around for the second half is a forgivable sin. After all, "no one alive can always be an angel".

While we’re at it, let us not forget the B-side of the single, either. I feel like ‘Club A-Go-Go’, credited to Burdon and Price, might have been inspired by some Chuck Berry, starting with the recently published ‘No Particular Place To Go’ and going all the way back to bluesy romps like ‘No Money Down’ — ironically, though, it would be its own main keyboard riff and stomping beat that would, several months later, form the basis for Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ (as a big fan of classic Animals, I’m sure Bob must have quickly assimilated that sound within his own subconscious). The main importance of the song being officially self-composed is that it is The Animals’ first proper love anthem to their own cultural turf — the Club a’Gogo in Newcastle, a veritable Mecca of sorts for jazz, R&B, and rock aficionados from 1962 to 1968; and Eric’s "it’s one of the coolest spots in town" message is the first one in his gradual self-appointment as the MC-extraordinaire of the messia­nic mission of rock’n’roll, a journey that would eventually result in one too many artistic embarrassments, but this first step is just perfect. The song rocks, Price and Valentine are both on fire, and Eric namedrops all those illustrious guests (John Lee Hooker, Rolling Stones, Sonny Boy Williamson...) at the end of the song with such unfettered pride as if he had just accepted a permanent position as Assistant Doorman at the entrance. Good times!

It’s too bad that the band could not maintain the same level of quality for their next single — which, as it turned out, would be the last one to feature Alan Price. ‘Bring It On Home To Me’ is a great song, but apparently there is no way to improve on it after the definitive Sam Cooke original, and although both Eric and Alan try hard, they can’t really poke those walls hard enough to open up a passage to any new dimensions. Then again, my guess is that they simply wanted to pay a little tribute to Sam, whose killing was still quite fresh on everybody’s minds at the time — so it shouldn’t really be regarded as an attempt at a solid artistic statement or anything. The B-side, ‘For Miss Caulker’, a slow generic 12-bar blues formally credited to Burdon, actually suits the general style of the Animals much better, though it certainly pales in comparison to ‘Worried Life Blues’ or ‘I Believe To My Soul’ (it’s kinda fun to hear Alan switch to electric piano for a change, though).

Exit Price then, for reasons that are still not perfectly clear but apparently involved fear of flying, meaning that he could not accompany The Animals on their American tour. His departure could be logically perceived as the reason why the band ultimately did not manage to make a proper transition from the early rhythm’n’blues Sixties into the psychedelic mid-Sixties — what with the man’s organ sound being such a vital part of the band, and with him taking away the lion’s share of the band’s songwriting talent, too. But what was probably more detrimental — in the long run — is that Price’s departure really took all the stops out of Eric Burdon’s ego. Think, for a moment, of Paul McCartney leaving the Beatles around, say, the middle of the sessions for the White Album, leaving John Lennon as the master of the band at the height of his preoccupation with avantgarde and politics — that would be a rough analogy of what happened to the Animals.

In the short run, though, given that it was still 1965 and the world of popular music still rotated around the axis of three minute long pop singles, it was not too bad — actually, it was even brilliant for a while. ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out Of This Place’, the Animals’ most commercially successful recording since ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ and, consequently, also the opening track on this Animal Tracks LP, is a textbook classic, and even if it was not written by the Animals (Mickey Most fell upon the Barry Mann / Cynthia Weil demo almost by accident), I know of no covers — and there’s a shitload of them — that match or exceed the punch of the original. From the opening suspense of Chas Chandler’s bass line and Eric’s sinister "in this dirty old part of the city...", presented in scary-story mode, the song just keeps on building, alternating between the nightmarish present and the dream of revolutionary escapism. Sure, the lyrics still come from the Brill Building, but it takes a working class hero from Newcastle to bring them to life — that whole verse about "Now my girl, you’re so young and pretty / And one thing I know is true / You’ll be dead before your time is due" might just be the single grittiest, harshest thing to come out of the entire early British Invasion.

It’s pretty much a perfect recording; it even illustrates how the Animals had become masters of the subtle touch — watch John Steel’s delicate work with the cymbals over the opening bars, the kind of build-up that would reach its apogee on hard rock classics like AC/DC’s ‘Hells Bells’. Nor is Eric just screeching his head off: his delivery of the "you’ll be dead before your time is due" is drowning in exaggerated grinning cynicism, as if he’d just finished reading A Clockwork Orange before entering the studio. Perhaps the slightly too cheerful, almost pub-style chorus might feel a little emotionally out of place next to the angry swelling bubbles of the verse and the bridge — but then the song is not really about suffocating inside one’s own depression, it’s about finding hope outside its borders. My experience is that most of the remaining normal people over the past seventy years fall into two categories — those whose household slogan is "We’ve gotta get out of this place" and those who’d rather align with "I’ll never get out of this world alive", and, as a self-appointed optimist, Eric Burdon would clearly side with the former rather than the latter. Good for him.

The exact same month that saw the release of Animal Tracks also saw the Animals repeat the formula with ‘It’s My Life’, a song in many ways similar to its predecessor — it also came out of the Brill Building (written by the largely unknown Roger Atkins and Carl D’Errico), it was also written as a socially relevant protest song, and it was also arranged as a song of suspense and build-up, except that this time the major hook — I may be wrong, but I think it was for the first time in Animals history — consisted of a looping guitar riff, ‘Satisfaction’-style but with an ice-cold rather than fiery tone to it. In a way, that might have been an indirect consequence of replacing Alan Price with Dave Rowberry, a solid keyboard player with nowhere near as much musical imagination; but even if it was, it is hard for me to imagine a similarly nasty-sounding piano or organ riff — ‘It’s My Life’ and that ice-queen-on-the-march guitar figure were made for each other.

Amusingly, I think that many, if not most people, probably missed the actual message of the song, because the one part that really sticks out is, of course, the beginning of the chorus — "It’s my life, and I’ll do what I want / It’s my mind, and I’ll think what I want" — so we’ll all be sure that this is a defiant anthem of youthful self-assertion in the face of the oppressive older generation. Which it is, but consider also such verse lines as "There are ways to make certain things pay / Though I’m dressed in these rags / I’ll wear sable some day" or "Are you gonna cry when I’m squeezin’ them dry? / Taking all I can get, no regrets". The song’s protagonist is not only not thinking here of overthrowing the existing order, he is no longer even preoccupied with getting out of this place — on the contrary, he is planning to milk the system for all it’s got, survival-of-the-fittest style, and since it is difficult to suspect Mr. Burdon of openly glorifying such a mindset, it is clear that "it’s my life and I’ll do what I want" has to be taken ironically, with its «message» being quite the opposite of "this is my gene­ration, baby" and suchlike.

At least, such seems to have been the original intention of the writers. How exactly did Burdon himself interpret the song is less clear — and even less clear in light of the single’s bizarre B-side, ‘I’m Going To Change The World’, credited to Eric himself. What the song does is basically steal and recycle the riff from ‘It’s My Life’, speeding it up a bit and looping it for most of the track’s duration, then set it to a 100% progressive set of lyrics: "Hold your fire and listen mister / Don’t cause no trouble for my brother and sister" and so on. No irony or role-playing in sight. By all accounts, the song should suck, but I love it. The riff just keeps swirling around like a solid sample in some classic hip-hop recording, Eric’s vocal is ferocious, the "you can bet your liiiiiiife, baby, bet your life!" chorus resolution kicks your ass into the stratosphere, and the minimalistic instrumental break, when it’s just that riff twirling and Rowberry doing that proto-psychedelic extended organ arpeggio bit, as if he’s gripping his own instrument in a choke hold. Tempestuous, tight, and catchy — what’s not to like? Sometimes I even feel like I appreciate the groove more than the original ‘It’s My Life’ (and I do feel, for instance, that the chorus integrates far more seamlessly into the verse than it does on the Brill Building compositions).

Unfortunately, the single came out a little too late to be included on the album, but since it did not make its way onto the last proper Animals album (Animalisms / Animalization) either, I like to pretend that it’s still a natural part of the experience, which would bring the total number of the tracks from a pitiful ten to a reasonable twelve. As for the rest, the breakdown is as follows:

(a) the earliest stuff — ‘Take It Easy’ was a rather non-descript B-side for the far superior ‘I’m Crying’, and two more tracks that had been left off the original Animals album in its UK version to make way for the hit singles: ‘Bury My Body’ is a decent take on the old Blind Lemon Jefferson et al. spiritual, but the real kicker is, of course, ‘The Story Of Bo Diddley’, which borrows the Bo Diddley beat but uses it to narrate, talking-blues style, a chunk of the biography of Bo Diddley which somehow then manages to turn into a brief history of rock’n’roll from Bo to the «dark years» of 1960–62 and then to the Beatles and Rolling Stones, and then even has some time to narrate a personal anecdote about the band’s meeting with Bo during his UK tour. It’s quite hilarious, really, and it’s notable how even at that early age (mid-1964!) Burdon was already trying to become a bona fide spokesman and chronicler for the spirit of rock’n’roll — and it’s much more entertaining and much less pretentious, might I add, than whatever «Eric Burdon & The Animals» would have in store for the Flower Power generation three years later;

(b) the slightly later stuff — in addition to the ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ single, recorded in mid-November of 1964, there is also a cover of Frankie Ford and Huey "Piano" Smith’s ‘Roberta’ from the same session, which, along with ‘For Miss Caulker’, is the only point of intersection between the US and UK editions of Animal Tracks. Not a lot here to recommend the cover over the original — the added Hilton Valentine guitar solo is weak, and although Eric does try to raise tension over the course of the song, rather than keeping it at the same level like Frankie does, I think that it works better in its original «New Orleans fun» vibe, losing some power when transferred to a more «serious» setting across the Atlantic.

In any case, while this was hardly a big problem on the previous two records, Animal Tracks has a bit too much distance from the likes of ‘Take It Easy’ and ‘Roberta’ to those of ‘We’ve Gotta Get Out Of This Place’, though in this respect it is hardly all that different from, for instance, the Yardbirds’ debut which mashed together the earliest Clapton-era recordings with the latest Beck-era tracks like there was no tomorrow. But then the original Animals were never really an album-oriented band in any sense: they never had any clear strategy for arranging the space on their LPs, and neither, I guess, had their so-called producer, Mickie Most, who never really took any of his artists seriously because to him, making music was never about being serious in the first place. (From Herman’s Hermits to Hot Cholocate, most of his protegés will probably vouch for that). By the time the band came to its senses and fired Mickey for trying to get them to record the same kind of material he was offering to Herman’s Hermits, it was already too late to care about integrity.

Still, much to the honor of the original Animals, while there are some tracks here that are clearly more forgettable than others, Animal Tracks upholds their reputation in that there is not a single — not one! — pre-1966 Animals track that I find less than honestly enjoyable. For all of their Burdon-Price period and even a little bit beyond that, they remained one of the three or four most quintessential bands of the early British Invasion, probably on par with the Beatles and Stones in terms of consistent quality and taste, if not actual musical inventiveness, and certainly way above the earliest Kinks and Yardbirds. Consequently, all three albums, nicely (though chaotically, in terms of chronology) merged into the Complete Animals package, constitute a major cornerstone of the rhythm’n’blues legacy of 1964–65, and the sounds, vibes, and messages hold up brilliantly even unto the next century, I do so believe. How and why exactly, unlike the Beatles and the Stones, the band was unable to make a proper transition into the next era of popular music, is a rather futile question, but in any case, it should not be taken as an excuse to ignore its classic period — unless you also happen to be somebody who believes that the Beatles are not worth listening to until at least Rubber Soul, or that the Stones never made a good album until Beggar’s Banquet.

• Only Solitaire reviews: The Animals