Eric Burdon Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
I think it was around San Franciscan Nights that I started to have my misgivings about Eric Burdon. While The Animals had been a significant feature of my early radio listening, there was something about the message being promulgated that didn't quite seem to work the way it should. Earnest, definitely, but something wasn’t quite right.
Those suspicions were mildly negated by Monterey before surging back with Sky Pilot, though I must admit that I still bought the single. It was early in my listening career, but even then that chorus (Sky pilot/How high can you fly?/ You’ll never reach the sky...) was pretty naff. Once again, earnest, doubtless well-intentioned, but there was a hint of preachiness thrown in that I’d detected in the previous two efforts but was much more to the fore here.
While the voice was still there, I was firmly convinced that Burdon was better off as an interpreter of other people's material than a writer in his own right, a conclusion that was reinforced by Winds of Change, The Twain Shall Meet and Love Is, where I thought the covers bought and sold the original material.
And while a few of my acquaintances were smitten by Burdon's collaboration with L.A. funk band War. The titles Eric Burdon Declares "War" and The Black Man's Burdon were greeted with a cringe that the contents didn't do a whole lot to dispel, at least from where I was sitting.
But the man was still somebody, if you catch my drift, and while I felt that based on his opinions as revealed in the odd article in the music press he was somebody you could probably push to one side of the plate in the same way you'd sideline something your hostess has dished up that you feel you should like but can't quite find the taste for.
One night in 1971 I was informed one of the kitchen ladies who looked after the meals at St Marks College that before her family had emigrated to Australia her eldest boy who'd opted to remain in the U.K. had been in a band with some of the Manchester lads who went on to form The Hollies, and that her living room couch back in those days had regularly hosted a nice young boy from Newcastle who, predictably, turned out to be Mr. Burdon.
Then, in the early bit of the twenty-first century, planning to add an extension onto the Little House of Concrete, we had the plans drawn up by a local draughtsman. It was at the stage when I was presenting a couple of hours of music on the local community radio station on a Sunday afternoon.
The news that the draughtman was a regular listener and that he liked 'the old stuff' had me raising an eyebrow which became positively arched when I learned that Neil was a Geordie and that his best friend back in the day had been one Hilton Valentine, who'd played guitar with The Animals.
In any case, with those two memories firmly etched in, a sighting of the Burdon autobiography in the Southport branch of Angus & Robertson, marked down to $6.99 set me thinking. There was always the chance of an anecdote that would tie in with the above, and, in any case, since I'd started on this writing caper there was always the chance that I might encounter some snippet that'd shed light on something I was researching.
Oh, and there was the collectable CD inside the back cover. Not that it was a major consideration, of course., but for seven bucks....
Actually, you can do a lot with seven bucks, even in this day and age, and many of them would probably be a bit more rewarding than this fairly inconsequential read.
Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll can, in the right hands, be a pretty potent combination, but unfortunately Burdon's aren't the right hands. There’s no denying that it's a fairly easy read (which is what we have ghostwriters for), doesn't have you pausing to consider and reflect too much and I knocked it over in an afternoon with time to spare, but that was largely so I could get it out of the way and move on to something else.
There's quite a bit of sex (implied, side-referenced rather than full blow by blow descriptions), an inordinate amount of drugs with most of the usual suspects on deck and the odd magic mushroom thrown in for good measure and quite a fair bit of rock 'n' roll, but in the long run there's very little that comes across as new and interesting information.
Some new, the odd morsel that's interesting, but the two don't coincide very much, at least not to this reader, apart from Burdon's suggestion that he was the eggman of I Am The Walrus fame.
Now, there's every chance that there's something along the lines I was looking for in Burdon's earlier autobiography, I Used To Be an Animal, but I'm All Right Now. Unfortunately it looks like that volume’s well out of print and, in any case, after sampling this one I don’t know that I’m inclined to try tracking it down.
There’s also Sean Egan’s Animal Tracks: The Story of The Animals, which, according to the reviews I’ve seen might be an interesting read and tie in with some long-term interests, but at the moment it’s not a high priority.
That’s not to say there’s nothing to learn from the contents. If nothing else, Burdon’s account of the millions he lost through shonky management and shady dealers, right back to the writing credits for House of the Rising Sun. There allegedly wasn’t room for everyone’s names in the space on the single’s label, so manager Mike Jeffrey, who went on to considerable notoriety when it came to Hendrix’s recorded legacy, suggested they credit it to organist Alan Price.
There are similar complaints about the way Robbie Robertson ended up with the lion’s share of The Band’s writing royalties in This Wheel’s On Fire: Levon Helm and the Story of the Band, but Helm’s version comes across considerably better.
In any case, having been caught, you’d expect the once bitten, twice shy factor would’ve kicked in big time, but it seems Eric kept falling for the siren song of the guys who were going to make him his fortune but usually ended up arranging it so that he was making theirs.
As someone remarked around the time the Nigerian internet scams started appearing, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
What’s that Hunter S. Thompson quote?
The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
But when I went looking for the wording, I also found this one:
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
Ultimately, Burdon seems to have been caught too many times, though that may have been a side effect of the sex and drugs in between the rock ‘n’ roll rather than the other possible conclusion.