Quote:
Originally Posted by mojopinuk
Given The Animals' members were from all over the North East and not just Newcastle, Alan Price being from my little town, about 2 minutes from here, then it is considered especially important to know their stuff.
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^ Hey, congratulations !
I saw AP once in a small pub venue; a wonderful, professional set that included songs as diverse as
My Girl and
Simon Smith. I still remember how he introduced the song that everyone wanted to hear
; "We`re going to do a song now made famous by the Animals..." - which of course was a very well-received version of
House of the Rising Sun.
I think
Winds of Change is one of the Animals most interesting albums; it represented a bold change of direction, but despite including the top-quality pop hit,
San Franciscan Nights, it was rather overlooked at the time of its release. Well, maybe that`s because it came out in 1967 and had to fight for attention with albums like
Sgt. Pepper, Piper at the Gates, Surrealistic Pillow, and
The Doors first. Also, this was the year when American record-buyers enjoyed a love affair with The Monkees. (Little-known fact; for an extraordinary 31 weeks of that year a Monkees album was at number one in the Billboard charts, leaving second-raters like The Beatles to jostle with Herb Alpert for the remaining honours.)
Anyway,
Winds of Change has a lot of great moments, not least the first three tracks that run together so neatly. For anyone interested, here are two of them to give you a taste :
Although some of the album`s psychedelic explorations don`t work so well, EB`s voice delivers a mixture of celebration and menace that IMO was only rivalled by Jim Morrison. In fact, when EB chants this line (from the over-ambitious
Black Plague), "Diseased eyes roll upwards as if knowing in which direction their souls will travel", it sounds uncannily like a line from
Horse Latitudes , which I think JM wrote later the same year.