The Animals’ Eric Burdon identified the “secret of life” back in 1967
“My opinions are changing so fast I can hardly keep up with meself,” Eric Burdon told an Associated Press reporter in 1967. By this point, his band The Animals were already one of the old veterans of the British Invasion, but at the age of 25, Burdon was still a growing boy.
It’s hard to wrap one’s brain around the fact that Burdon’s most famous vocal – the gravelly and world-weary Louisiana baritone on 1964’s ‘House of the Rising Sun’ – was the voice of a baby-faced young English lad from Newcastle. But the reasons weren’t complicated; Burdon grew up listening to American blues records and had gradually absorbed them into his own DNA.
“I still basically write in the blues style,” he said. “The hardest thing for me to do is try and retain most of what I learned and still sound English and just be meself. I’ve spent more time in America in the last two years than in England.”
Burdon’s switcheroo to the States had essentially led to the demise of the original Animals, who disbanded after the 1966 album Animalism and reformed into a new American-British hybrid, now known as “Eric Burdon and The Animals”. Drummer Barry Jenkins was the only original band member who stayed on board, and he seemed to serve an important role, keeping Burdon in check when the frontman started going off on groovy philosophical tangents.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Burdon confidently announced in this particular chat with the AP, “Within the last year I’ve worked out the secret and answer of life.”
This was, in Burdon’s defence, not an uncommon sort of statement for a musician to make heading into the “summer of love”. Like the Beatles and Stones, who were embracing various mind-expanding options and channelling their effects directly into their work, Burdon freely admitted “experimenting” with LSD in the recent past, but also seemed to be coming around to a new idea of a life’s purpose free from a reliance on outside substances.
“To be honest, simple; to be yourself,” Burdon decided, was the key to it all. “You can get high without [drugs].”
The Beatles would echo this sentiment about six months later, when they held a press conference during the Maharishi’s visit to the UK, telling their fans that drugs were no longer where it’s at, and that transcendental meditation was their new preferred bag. Burdon kept things even a bit more simple than that, though, going more biblical in his assessment of the universe and man’s place in it.
“There are two ultimates, good and evil,” he said. “The easiest one is evil. To squeeze a trigger is a real groovy feeling. I’ve done it, hunting animals [presumably not his bandmates]. Breaking somebody’s window or tripping a cripple is an easy way of getting high. But the high you get from helping people lasts longer.”
Eric was probably revealing too much about his youth by talking about the joys of antisocial behaviour, but fortunately, this is when drummer Barry Jenkins suddenly interrupted his pal and turned a casual band profile piece into a spat from a Philosophy 101 classroom.
“But the feeling you get from helping people is selfish,” Jenkins said, accidentally positing that man has no free will and that all actions he engages in are ultimately self-serving. Like a typical drummer, he was attuned to the basic rhythms of human instinct and didn’t buy into the saviourism of the pop star.
“Performers are doing it for themselves,” Jenkins said. “To feel good.”
Burdon was displeased with this and tried to put his passion into words. “I can’t believe that,” he said. “When I pick up a mouth organ, I want to create, to give other people pleasure.”
Jenkins probably snickered at this, but the reporter didn’t indicate any sound effects. “Well, if you really think that,” the drummer calmly responded, “That is good”.
