How The Animals made Carole King hate her own song
For most of their early career, The Animals picked their material from the best of what American pop music had to offer. Their speciality was that they could pick the poppiest and most straight-laced songs, spin them around, and turn them into bluesy garage rock numbers. It happened with hits like ‘We’ve Got To Get Out of This Place’ and ‘It’s My Life’, and it happened again on ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’.
Written by legendary songwriters Carole King and Gerry Goffin, ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ came from The Animals’ producer Mickie Most, who reached out to the Brill Building for new material. Singer Eric Burdon was never terribly happy with this arrangement – although The Animals scored some of their biggest hits from outside songwriters, Burdon felt that they didn’t mesh with The Animals’ hard-driving R&B sound.
In fact, Burdon had made fun of Goffin and King on the very first song from the British version of The Animals’ debut studio album. In ‘Story of Bo Diddley’, Burdon outlines the then-brief history of rock music backed up by Diddley’s signature beat. Burdon contended that thanks to payola, rock and roll died off after roughly two years, with songs like Goffin and King’s ‘Take Good Care of My Baby’ half-heartedly filling in the gap.
Buron had written ‘Story of Bo Diddley’ before The Animals started appealing to the Brill Building for material. It was probably for the best that Burdon didn’t know that Goffin and King had penned ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, but he later found out that King wasn’t much of a fan of The Animals’ rendition. He didn’t just hear it through the grapevine either: King told Burdon herself.
“I didn’t realize that it was a Goffin, King song until I was in a doctor’s office in Beverly Hills, and Ms. King came in and sat next to me,” Burdon told SongFacts in 2010. “I didn’t know it was her, I was just reading a magazine, and she turned to me and said, ‘You know, I hated what you did to my song.’ I didn’t know what to say, so all I said was, ‘Well, sorry.’ And then, as she got up to go into the doctor’s office, she turned around and said, ‘But I got used to it.'”
It certainly didn’t hurt that ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ was a top ten hit in the UK, bringing King a steady windfall of royalty cheques once the song was out in the world. ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ only hit number 12 in America, much lower than the number one smash ‘House of the Rising Sun’, but it did account for the second-highest chart position that The Animals achieved until their next single, ‘See See Rider’, hit number 11 a few months later.
Check out ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ below.
