Review: The Animals - The Animals On Tour (1965)

Tracks: 1) Boom Boom; 2) How You’ve Changed; 3) Mess Around; 4) Bright Lights, Big City; 5) I Believe To My Soul; 6) Worried Life Blues; 7) Let The Good Times Roll; 8) Ain't Got You; 9) Hallelujah, I Love Her So; 10) I’m Crying; 11) Dimples; 12) She Said Yeah.

REVIEW

Yes, the Animals did go on tour in the States... but not on this record. A cheeky-cheesy marketing strategy was worked out between MGM Records and Mickie Most in 1965, according to which both of the bands he managed at the time — the Animals and Herman’s Hermits — would release an album called On Tour, probably to trigger some happy subconscious association in the heads of impressionable teens dying for an extra souvenir from the latest meeting with their idols. (The same trick would later be tried out by other labels, e.g. Decca’s Magic Bus: The Who On Tour, released in 1968 and also containing no live recordings). In retrospect, this maybe wasn’t so bad — with live recording technologies still in their infancy and hormonal screaming still generally overshadowing the musical nuances in 1965, getting one’s hands on twelve brand new studio recordings instead of a piss-poor quality screamfest was a much better deal for the young ones.

Of course, with the usual confusing discrepancies between UK and US discographies, these twelve recordings weren’t all that new at the time of release. In fact, this is just a usual mish-mash, consisting of several tracks carried over from the band’s UK debut (‘Dimples’, ’Boom Boom’, ‘She Said Yeah’), one important non-album single (‘I’m Crying’), and the rest of the songs previewing the band’s second UK LP, Animal Tracks (not to be confused with the later US LP of the same name, provided you can help it). Just as it is with the Stones, though, it is really difficult to tell which of the discographies in this case should be considered more «authentic», given the lack of conceptual structure in both sets of LPs and the fact that both bands’ UK-based producers and managers seemed to prefer to work with the US market, from which they obviously made a much larger profit. So let’s just lower our defenses, temporarily allow ourselves to be dominated by the American corporate industry, and get on with it.

There is no single outstanding classic track on here that could hold up to the epochal standard of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ (and we shouldn’t blame them for this) — but on the whole, The Animals On Tour ends up more consistently impressive than the first US album. In particular, the band’s basic rock’n’roll and dance-oriented R&B chops are well represented by Larry Williams’ ‘She Said Yeah’, which rocks with the same slightly childish exuberance as the rock’n’roll tracks on The Animals (no wonder — they all come from the same early sessions), and Ray Charles’ ‘Mess Around’, which shows a new level of confidence for Price as he directly challenges the master... and fails, because the true coolness of Uncle Ray’s performance is in how his left hand walks all over the boogie bass line while his right one is kicking the shit out of those staccato chords, while Price leaves most of the bass work to the bass guitarist, instead «messing around» with the melodic potential of the higher octaves — it removes much of the original’s sharpness. Still, it’s good because it’s handled in a fairly different way, and Burdon’s vocal performance, for compensation, goes to wilder territory than Ray’s; I love both versions (as opposed to, for instance, the ridiculously disco-ified live version from Squeeze in 1980).

More importantly, the rock’n’roll sound is finally tested out on a piece of genuinely original songwriting: ‘I’m Crying’, credited to Burdon and Price, was their first single after ‘The House Of The Rising Sun’, and it’s a fabulous piece of work, based on an easily recognizable bluesy chord sequence that they ingeniously sped up and transformed into a head-spinning up-and-down roller coaster (the Kinks would later steal it away and make it even more crunchy for their own ‘Mr. Churchill Says’). The tiny touch of genius, of course, is in how they bring specific extra meaning to the traditionally empty vocalise of "aaaah – aaaah – ah!" by merging it with the chorus of "I’m crying, I’m crying, hear me crying". It’s like, first you hear the "aaaah" and it’s «okay, nice little vocalise», then you get to the verse and then to the chorus and then it’s "aaah" time again and a little light bulb lights up, «oh, that’s what the vocalise was about! they’re crying!» It probably seems silly to you, but I am a big fan of such quirky little moves which can put the yeah-yeah-yeahs and the sha-la-las in a proper context (which most singers and songwriters very rarely do). Plus, Alan is a real beast on the organ, and Eric’s frenetic vocal buildup from first to last verse is a classic instruction in raising tension. Alas, the song failed to repeat the chart success of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ (though it still cracked the Top 10 in the UK), which likely convinced Mickey Most that the band would never make it as competent songwriters, so from then on all of their original compositions would be confined to B-sides, possibly the most dumbass decision of the band’s entire career which very likely contributed to the sad demise of its most classic and seminal incarnation.

Fortunately for us, at the time the band was still on a roll when it came to expanding their cover repertoire to the darker and deeper regions of the contemporary American blues and soul scene — and reinventing them for the white youth market of 1965. The Animals’ John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed, in particular, are subverted, inverted, and reconstructed to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Hooker’s takes on songs like ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Dimples’ were quiet, grim, and gloomy; when listening to them, you will most likely visualize the hellbound old black man busking in the street, creeping out little girls who pass him by while mumbling ‘like the way you walk, like the way you talk’ under his breath in a decidedly unsanitary manner. With Burdon and the boys, both of these songs come out of the closet and become loud, brawny, relentless, and thoroughly unsubtle expressions of drunken lust — you could say that they try to infuse John Lee Hooker’s blues with the spirit of James Brown’s R&B, yet there is a sort of brutality here which could never come from James Brown, but only from a working class dude from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

There is this particular moment in ‘Boom Boom’, already after Eric has unfurled the battle cry of "come on, let’s shake it!" and the rest of the band has donned its hoodlum caps while sweeping through town on a Clockwork Orange rampage, at the very end of the chorus where he brings things down with "come on, come on, all right, all right" and the next sustained "all right" slides right into Valentine’s and Price’s solos, which pretty much symbolizes the spirit of early ’65 rock’n’roll for me. I am not sure why; maybe it is the air of heroic, Rolandian determination with which the instrumental players take off the same note as the vocalist and lead this multi-pronged attack — there are few tracks from that era on which vocals, guitar, and organ would be so much in sync and all three would be so blunt and primal, yet in a friendly and cheerful manner rather than a viciously aggressive one. They’re really smashing all your windows and tables on this one, but they’re doing it because they just feel so doggone good. They might even compensate you for the damage when they’re done, but if they forget to, you’d be a real asshole to press charges against such nice lads, you know?

But they are not just ruffians from the street — they can be quite creative ruffians from the street when the situation calls for it. For instance, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ used to be just another in an innumerable series of totally same-sounding Jimmy Reed songs. Here, it is transformed from its plain origins into a little dynamic suite, replete with a new quiet mid-section and ad-libbed lyrics, in which Eric names all the city perils that conspire to turn his girl loose — "long Cadillacs... Rolls Royce... men with money... cigarettes... flamenco... scotch... bourbon..." — before returning to the song’s main theme, now reprised in an even more hystrionic manner once the narrator fully realizes, much to his horror, all the negative consequences that moving to the big city can work on a country girl.

But maybe the biggest overall change from the first album is the addition of a new style to the band’s repertoire: slow, dark, psychologically challenging soulful blues. They did not record any such songs in 1964, possibly not yet feeling enough confidence to embrace the style; with the success of ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, however, Burdon and Price were more than willing to try out some of that nuanced heart-pulling, so The Animals On Tour includes no fewer than three slow blues numbers — the classic ‘Worried Life Blues’, Chuck Berry’s ‘How You’ve Changed’, and Ray Charles’ ‘I Believe To My Soul’. These might take a bit of time to sink in (particularly if you are not a big fan of the 12-bar form), but at the end of the day they show the Animals to be complete masters of the form, and I mean it: no other UK act at the time did this kind of material with as much flair and depth as these guys (most UK acts would not, in fact, touch soulful blues with a 10-foot pole, and the ones that did simply did not have that combination of talent).

For ‘I Believe To My Soul’, Burdon actually wrote a whole new set of lyrics — replacing not only the obviously incongruous bit about "I heard you say ‘oh, Johnny’ when you know my name is Ray" (I guess "when you know my name is Eric" just does not fit the meter too well, and besides, what’s a good rhyme for ‘Eric’? Cleric?), but also Ray’s aggressive "I think I’m gonna have to use my rod" line, which is sort of an instructive reminder that sometimes them white dudes were actually cutting down on the misogynistic flair of them black dudes. (Eric replaces it with a really odd line, though: "You keep complaining my progression is slow / You shouldn’t complain, babe, you ought to know" — not sure which «progression» he is talking about). More importantly, it is just a great, great performance, this time fully capturing and even enhancing the magic of Ray Charles with a beautiful piano part from Price (they speed up the song a bit, which gives them enough time to insert a technically brilliant and emotionally moody piano solo into the tune’s three and a half minutes).

The crown gem, however, is ‘Worried Life Blues’, for which Price once again switches to organ and delivers one of the best performances of his entire career — the church tone of his Vox Continental gives a bit of a Bach flair to the opening and never lets go throughout the song. In intensity and soulfulness, this is maybe just a few short steps away from ‘House Of The Rising Sun’, mainly because the effect is more «introverted», but in terms of musicianship, this might even be superior, especially if you contrast Price’s organ with the quiet, tasteful, muffled jazzy lines of Hilton Valentine, playing as if he were some humble disciple of Wes Montgomery doing his own thang from behind a paper wall in a different studio. Finally, throw in Burdon’s clever separation of the hookline into three different parts — most bluesmen sing "someday baby, ain’t gonna worry, my life no more" in three tonally equal blasts, but Burdon prefers to do it in «ready, aim, shoot!» mode, giving his protagonist the kind of tragic determination you can only encounter in a great soul-blues performance. Ray Charles could do this it; John Lee Hooker or Big Bill Broonzy could not. Eric does this in Ray Charles mode, and he does it better than Ray Charles ever did (Ray covered the song two years earlier, and it is not one of his best).

All of this greatness makes the relative lowlights of the album easily forgivable — Shirley Goodman’s lightweight ditty ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ (not to be confused with another Ray Charles classic) is catchy, silly, and fluffy; Jimmy Reed’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ is good, but I think the Yardbirds had a more definitive version; and yet another Ray Charles classic, ‘Hallelujah I Love Her So’ is... well, you can hardly improve on perfection, and, unlike the case of ‘I Believe To My Soul’, the Animals have little to offer in this case. All of these songs are still perfectly enjoyable and do nothing bad to the overall flow — so I can only repeat that in terms of sheer consistency, of the three Price-era US LPs The Animals On Tour gives you the best deal for your money and shows an impressive amount of progress for a band so stubbornly refusing to (or not being allowed to) grow out of its «cover band» status.