Every One Of Us

Alan Price (keyboards) started out as a northern British bluesman, playing with a combo - Hilton Valentine (guitar), Chas Chandler (bass) and John Steel (drums) -that was making a name for itself on the Newcastle club circuit. Price played a mean set of keyboards and had a soul-tinged voice that was sexy but standard, lacking the ferocity to cover the grubbier end of rock. However, in 1962 they recruited a suitably mean lead singer to fill out the sound and beef up the image. Eric Burdon had one of the grimiest voices in the business; he would throw himself into the songs, whip the band into overdrive and slaughter the audience. The original name of the group, The Alan Price Combo, had to go and The Animals came into being.

Supporting older, black musical legends like John Lee Hooker and Sonny Boy Williams as they toured the UK, the band grew into a professional unit, with Eric perfecting his skills as a rabble-rouser. The only dark cloud on the horizon was the rivalry between Alan and new frontman Eric, and the first signs of resentment soon began to show. In 1964 they moved to London, where they teamed up with then-unknown producer Mickie Most, and signed to Columbia. They blasted their way through Price's arrangement of the traditional "House Of The Rising Sun", which went to #1 in the UK, the USA and around the world.

For the rest of the 60s, The Animals hit the charts regularly, most famously with "(Please) Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "We Gotta Get Out Of This Place". However, it wasn't long before ego problems resurfaced, and only two LPs - The Animals (1964) and Animal Tracks (1965) - were recorded before Price left to pursue a more mainstream solo career. He was quickly replaced by Newcastle's Dave Rowberry. Steel had also left the band by the release of its third album, Animalism (1966), the new drummer being the ex-Nashville Teen Barry Jenkins.

In the limbo of these personnel changes, Burdon recorded a solo single and an LP (Eric Is Here) and moved his base to California. There he formed a second incarnation of the band, Eric Burdon & The Animals, comprising Burdon, Jenkins, ex-Steampacket guitarist Vic Briggs, John Wieder (guitar/violin) and Danny McCulloch (bass). This line-up produced two LPs with a different style from the R&B stompers they'd kicked around in the clubs of London and the north of England. 1967's Wind Of Change featured tracks with titles such as "Poem By The Sea", "It's All Meat", and "Yes, I Am Experienced", Burdon's reply to the title of Jimi Hendrix's just-released debut album.

The new, 'psychedelic' Animals did fairly well, with chart successes at home and in the USA, but not well enough to avoid McCulloch and Briggs being replaced by bassist Zoot Money and guitarist Andy Summers. This final line-up was packed full of skilled musicians, each of whom had his own musical statement to make. Expecting them to function as a unit was demanding too much and after two minor LP releases, The Animals folded.

Alan Price was by now an 'all-round entertainer' having done TV, novelty songs, and worked briefly with fellow British bluesman Georgie Fame in a kind of R&B supergroup. Chas Chandler had hung up his bass to reinvent himself as a producer, working with Hendrix and British glam-popsters Slade. Wieder went on to become part of Family, Zoot Money went solo, and Andy Summers worked with Kevin Ayers and Kevin Coyne, before joining The Police. Eric Burdon kept on rocking, digging back down into the dirt for his next venture, WAR.

War's urban, Latin-tinged funk had to be put briefly on hold while the original Animals re-formed in early 1976 , releasing an album, Before We Were So Rudely Interrupted,which generated some interest on the nostalgia circuit. However, Price left almost immediately to continue his solo career and nothing more was heard from The Animals until they briefly re-formed again in 1983, recording a studio LP, Ark (re-issued onCastle 1997), and issuing Rip It To Shreds, a live hits compilation. They then, once again, returned to solo projects. Castle have also recently released Greatest Hits - Live recorded on tour in 1983 and frankly, one for the obsessive devotee only.

Eric Burdon & the Animals were nearing the end of their string, at least in the lineup in which they'd come into the world in late 1966, when they recorded Every One of Us in May of 1968, just after the release of their second album, The Twain Shall Meet. The group had seen some success, especially in America, with the singles "When I Was Young," "San Franciscan Nights" and "Sky Pilot" over the previous 18 months, but had done considerably less well with their albums. Every One of Us lacked a hit single to help drive its sales, but it was still a good psychedelic blues album, filled with excellent musicianship by Burdon (lead vocals), Vic Briggs (guitar, bass), John Weider (guitar, celeste), Danny McCulloch (bass,12-string, vocals), and Barry Jenkins (drums, percussion), with new member Zoot Money (credited, for contractual reasons, as George Bruno) on keyboards and vocals.

Opening with the surprisingly lyrical "White Houses" — a piece of piercing social commentary about America in early 1968 — the record slid past the brief bridge "Uppers and Downers" and into the extended, John Weider-authored psychedelic mood piece "Serenade to a Sweet Lady," highlighted by Briggs' superb lead acoustic guitar playing and Weider's subdued electric accompaniment. This is followed by the acoustic folk piece "The Immigrant Lad," a conceptual work that closes with a dialogue, set in a workingman's bar, in which two Cockney workers, voiced by John Weider and Terry McVay, talk about their world and their lives. "Year of the Guru" is another in a string of Jimi Hendrix-influenced pieces by this version of the Animals, showing the entire band at the peak of their musical prowess, and Burdon — taking on virtually the role of a modern rapper — generating some real power on some surprisingly cynical lyrics concerning the search for spiritual fulfillment and leaders. "St. James Infirmary" recalls "House of the Rising Sun," as both a song and an arrangement, and is worthwhile just for the experience of hearing this version of the group going full-tilt as a rock band. And then there is "New York 1963 — America 1968," an 18-minute conceptual track with a center spoken word section featuring not a group member, but a black engineer named Cliff, who recalls his experience as a fighter pilot during World War II, and tells of poverty then and now — although the opening section starts off well enough musically, amid Burdon's sung recollections of coming to America and his fixation on the blues and black music in general, and the closing repetition of the word "freedom" anticipates Richie Havens' famed piece (actually an extension of "Motherless Child") from Woodstock, the track is too long and unwieldy for any but the most fanatical listener to absorb as more than a curiosity of its time.

In fairness, it must also be said that Burdon's mixing of politics and music, social criticism and art, however inappropriate as pop music for a mass audience, was out in front of most of the competition during this period, in terms of boldness and reach, if not grasp. The extended jamming on this and the other songs also highlighted a fundamental problem that afflicted this version of the Animals from the get-go, the fact that they were touring too much to write enough songs to properly fill their albums, which meant extending the instrumental portions of everything that was on them, in order to fill up the running time; this group had the musicianship and talent to pull it off totally successfully in all but one instance here. This album would be one of the last times that this lineup of the group would appear on record — Briggs and McCulloch would leave later in the year, both to be replaced by Andy Somers (aka Andy Summers), and the group as a whole would pack it in with the waning of 1968.