A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 115: “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

Episode one hundred and fifteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “House of the Rising Sun” by the Animals, at the way the US and UK music scenes were influencing each other in 1964, and at the fraught question of attribution when reworking older songs. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Memphis” by Johnny Rivers. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A history of rock music in 500 songs by 100 Hockey Episode 115 House of the Rising Sun By the Animals Today we're going to look at a song that more than any other song we've looked at so far shows how the influence between British and American music was working in the early 1960s

A song about New Orleans that may have its roots in English folk music that became an Appalachian country song performed by a blues band from the north of England who learned it from a Minnesotan folk singer based in New York. We're going to look at House of the Rising Sun and the career of the Animals.

The story of the animals, like so many of the British bands of this time period, starts at art school when two teenagers named Eric Burden and John Steele met each other. The school they met at was in Newcastle, and this is important for how the band came together. If you're not familiar with the geography of Great Britain, Newcastle is one of the largest cities, but it's a very isolated city. Britain has a number of large cities. The biggest, of course, is London, which is about as big as the next five added together.

Now there's a saying that one of the big differences between Britain and America is that in America, 100 years is a long time, and in Britain, a hundred miles is a long way, so take that into account when I talk about everything else here. Most of the area around London is empty of other big cities, and the nearest other big city to it is Birmingham, 100 miles northwest of it. About 70 miles north of that, give or take, you hit Manchester,

and Manchester is in the middle of a chain of large cities. Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Sheffield, and the slightly smaller Bradford are more or less in a row, and the furthest distance between two adjacent cities is about 35 miles. But then Newcastle is another 100 miles north of Leeds, the closest of those cities to it, and then it's another 100 miles or so further north before you hit the major Scottish cities,

which cluster together like the ones near Manchester do. This means Newcastle is, for a major city, incredibly isolated. Britain's culture is extraordinarily London-centric, but if you're in Liverpool or Manchester, there are a number of other nearby cities. A band from Manchester can play a gig in Liverpool and make the last train home, and vice versa.

This allows for the creation of regional scenes, centred on one city, but with cross-fertilisation from others. Now again, I am talking about a major city here, not some remote village, but it means that Newcastle in the 60s was in something of the same position as Seattle was, as we talked about in the episode on Louis-Louis, a place where bands would play in their own immediate area

and not travel outside it. A journey to Leeds, particularly in the time we're talking about, when the motorway system was only just starting, would be a major trip, let alone travelling further afield. Local bands would play in Newcastle, and enlarged nearby towns like Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough, but not visit other cities.

This meant that there was also a limited pool of good musicians to perform with, and so if you wanted to be in a band, you couldn't be that picky about who you got on with, so long as they could play. Steel and Burden, when they met at art school, were both jazz fanatics, and they quickly formed a trad jazz band. The band initially featured them on trumpet and trombone,

but when rock and roll and skiffle hit, the band changed its line up to one based around guitars. Steel shifted to drums, while Burden stopped playing an instrument and became the lead singer. Burden's tastes at the time were oriented towards the jazier side of R&B, people like Ray Charles, and he also particularly loved blues shouters like Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Joe Turner. He tried hard to emulate Turner,

and one of the songs that's often mentioned as being in the repertoire of these early, groups is Roland Pete, the Big Joe Turner song we talked about back in episode two. The jazz group that Birden and Steel formed was called the Pagan Jazz Man, and when they switched instruments, they became instead the Pagan's R&B band. The group was rounded out by Blackie Sanderson and Jimmy Crawford, but soon got a fifth member, when a member from another band on an early bill asked if he could sit in with them for a couple of numbers. Alan Price was the rhythm guitarist in that band,

but joined in on piano and instantly jelled with the group, playing Jerry Lee Lewis-style piano. The other members would always later say that they didn't like Price either as a person or for his taste in music. Both Burden and Steele regarded Price's tastes as rather pedestrian when compared to their own hipper tastes, saying he always regarded himself as something of a lounge player

while Burden was an R&B and blues person and Steele liked blues and jazz. but they all played well together, and in Newcastle there wasn't that much choice about which musicians you could play with, and so they stayed together for a while, as the pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five or the Kansas City Seven, depending on the occasional presence of two brass players. The Kansas City group played mostly jump blues, which was the area of music where Burden and Steele's tastes intersected. Musicians they've cited as ones they covered were Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and Big Joe. Turner. But then the group collapsed, as Price didn't turn up to a gig. He'd been poached by a pop

covers band, The Contours, whose bass player, Charles Chandler, had been impressed with him when Chandler had sat in at a couple of Kansas City Five rehearsals. Steel got a gig playing lounge music, just to keep paying the bills, and Burden would occasionally sit in with various other musicians. But a few members of the contours got a side gig performing as the Alan Price Rhythm and Blues combo as the resident band at a local venue called the Cluba Go-Go, which was the venue where

visiting London Jazzmen and touring American blues players would perform when they came to Newcastle. Burden started sitting in with them and then they invited Steele to replace their drummer and in September 1963 the Alan Price Rhythm and Blues combo settled on a

lineup of Burden on vocals Price on piano, Steerner heel on drums, Chandler on bass, and new member Hilton Valentine, who joined at the same time as Steele, on guitar. Valentine was notably more experienced than the other members, and had previously performed in a rock and roll group called the Wildcats, not the same band who backed Marty Wilde, and had even recorded an album with them, though I've been unable to track down any copies of the album. At this point, all the group members now had different sensibilities. Valentine was a rocker and Schiffel fan, while Chandler was into more mainstream pop music, though the other members emphasised in interviews

that he liked good pop music like the Beatles, not the lesser pop music. The new line-up was so good that a mere eight days after they first performed together, they went into a recording studio to record an EP, which they put out themselves and sold at their gigs. Apparently 500 copies of the EP were sold. As well as playing piano on the tracks,

Price also played melodica, which he used in the same way that blues musicians would normally use the harmonica. This kind of instrumental experimentation would soon further emphasise the split between Price and Burden, as Price would get a Vox organ rather than car to piano between gigs, while Burden disliked the sound of the organ, even though it became one of the defining sounds of the group. That sound can be heard on a live recording of them a couple of months later, backing the great American blues musician Sonny Boy Williamson 2 at the Club of Gogo. One person who definitely didn't dislike the sound of the electric organ was Graham Bond,

the Hammond organ player with Alex's Corner's band, who we mentioned briefly back in the episode on the Rolling Stones. Bond and a few other members of the Corner group had quit and had formed their own group, the Graham Bond organisation, which had originally featured a guitarist named John McClocklin, but by this point consisted of Bond, saxophone player Dick Hextall-Smith and the rhythm section Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker.

They wouldn't make an album until 1965, but live recordings of them from around this time exist, though in relatively poor quality. The Graham Bond organisation played at the club of Go-Go, and soon Bond was raving back in London about this group from Newcastle he'd heard. Arrangements were quickly made for them to play in London. By this time, the Rolling Stones had outgrown the small club venues they've been playing,

and a new band called The Ard Birds were playing all the Stone's old venues. A trade was agreed. The Ardbirds would play all the Allan Price Rhythm and Blues combo's normal gigs for a couple of weeks, and the Allem Price Rhythm and Blues combo would play the Ardbirds, or rather the animals would. None of the members of the group could ever agree on how they got their new name, and not all of them liked it, But when they played those gigs in London in December 1963,

just three months after getting together, that was how they were billed. And it was as the animals that they were signed by Mickey Most. Mickey Most was one of the new breed of independent producers that were cropping up in London, following in Joe Meek's footsteps, like Andrew Oldham. Most had started out as a singer in a duo called The Most Brothers, which is where he got his stage name. The Most Brothers had only released one single. But then, most had moved to South Africa, where he'd had 11 number one hits,

with cover versions of American mock singles, backed by a band called The Playboys. He'd returned to the UK in 1963, and been less successful here as a performer, and so he decided to move into production, and the animals were his first signing. He signed them up and started licensing their records to EMI, and in January 1964, the animals moved down to London. There has been a lot of suggestion over the years that the animals resented Mickey Most pushing them in a more pop direction, but their first single was an inspired compromise between the group's blues purism and most's pop instincts.

The song they recorded dates back at least to 1935, when the state street boys, a group that featured Big Bill Bruinsie, recorded Don't Tear My Clothes. That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of us. That song got picked up and adapted by a lot of us. the blues singers, like Blind Boy Fuller, who recorded it as Mama Let Me Lay It on You in 1938. That had in turn been picked up by the Reverend Gary Davis, who came up with his own arrangement

of the song. Eric Ron Schmidt, a folk singer from Massachusetts, had learned that song from Davis, and Bob Dylan had in turn learned it from Von Schmidt and included it on his first album as Baby Let Me Follow You Down The Animal The Animals knew the song from that version which they loved but most had come across it in a different way He'd heard a version which had been inspired by Dylan

but had been radically reworked. Bert Burns had produced a single on Atlantic for a soul singer called Hogi Land and on the B-side had been a new arrangement of the song retitled Baby Let Me Hold Your Hand and adapted by Burns and Wes Farrell a songwriter who had written for the Churrell's. Land's version had started with an intro

in which Land is clearly imitating Sam Cuck but after that intro, which seems to be totally original to Burns and Farrell, Lanz's track goes into a very upbeat, twist-flavoured song, with a unique guitar riff and Latin feel, both of them very much in the style of Burns' other songs, but clearly an adaptation of Dylan's version of the old song. Most had picked up that record on a trip to America, and decided that the animals should record a version of the song based on that record.

Hilton Valentine would later claim that this record, whose title an artist he could never remember, and it's quite possible that most never even told the band who the record was by, was not very similar at all to the animal's version, and that they'd just kicked around the song and come up with their own version. But listening to it, it is very obviously modelled on Land's version. They cut out Land's intro and restored a lot of Dylan's lyric, but musically it's Land all the way. The track starts like this. Both have a breakdown section with spoken lyrics over staccato backing, though the two sets of lyrics are different. Compare the animals, and lands, and both have the typical Burt Burns' call and response ending.

Lands and the animals. So whatever Valentine's later claims, the track very much was modelled on the earlier record but it's still one of the strongest remodeling's of an american rmb record by a british group in this time period and an astonishingly accomplished record which made number 21 the animal's second single was another song that had been recorded on dylan's first album house of the rising sun has been argued by some though i think it's a tenuous argument to originally date to the 17th century english folk song little musgrave and lady barnard On a day on a bright holiday As many there been in the year

When a little ma's grave to the church did go God's holy word to hear He went and he stood all at the church door He watched the priest at his mass But he had more mind of the fair women What we do know is that the song was circulating in Appalachia in the early years of the 20th century, and it's that version that was first recorded in 1933,

under the name Rising Sun Blues, by Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster. The song has been described as about several things, about alcoholism, about sex work, about gambling, depending on the precise version. It's often thought, for example, that the song was always sung by women and was about a brothel, but there are lots of variants of it sung by both men and women, before it reached its most famous form. Dave Van Runk, who put the song into the form by which it became best known, believed at first

that it was a song about a brothel, but he later decided it was probably about the New Orleans Women's Prison, which in his accounting used to have a carving of a rising sun over the doorway. Van Runk's version traces back originally to a field recording Alan Lomax had made in 1938 of a woman named Georgia Turner from Kentucky. Van Runk had learned the song from a record by Hallie Wood, a friend of the Lomaxes, who had recorded a version based on Turner's in 1953. Van Runk took Wood's version of Turner's version of the song and rearranged it, changing the chords around, adding something that changed the whole song. He introduced a descending bass line, mostly in semi-tones, which, as Van Runk put it, is, a common enough progression in jazz, but unusual among folk singers. It's actually something you'd get a fair bit in Baroque music as well, and Van Runk introducing

this into the song is probably what eventually led to things like focal harums are white a shade of pale, ripping off bark doing essentially the same thing. What Van Runk did was a single trick. You play a descending scale, mostly in semi-tones while holding the same chord shape, which creates a lot of interesting chords. The baseline he played is basically this. And he held an A-minor shape over that baseline, giving a chord sequence A-minor over G, A-minor over F-sharp, F. This is a trick that's used in hundreds and hundreds of songs later in the 60s and onwards. Everything from sunny afternoon by the Kinks to go now by the Moody Blues to

forever by the Beach Boys. But it was something that at this point belonged in the realms of art, music and jazz, more than in folk, blues or rock and roll. Of course it sounds rather better when he did it. House of the Rising Sun soon became the highlight of Van Monk's live act, and his most requested song. Dylan took Van Monk's arrangement, but he wasn't as sophisticated a musician as Van Ronk, so he simplified the chords. Rather than the dissonant chords, Van Rang He played standard rock chords that fit Van Runk's bass line. So instead of A minor over G, he played C with G in the bass. And instead of A minor over F sharp, he played D with an F sharp in the bass.

So Vang Runk had, while Dylan had, The movement of the chords now follows the movement of the bass line. It's simpler, but it's all from Van Ronk's arrangement idea. Dylan recorded his version of Van Ronk's version for his first album As Van Runk later told the story though I'm going to edit out one expletive here for the sake of getting past the adult content rating on Apple One evening in 1962 I was sitting at my usual table in the back of the cattle of fish and Dylan came slouching in

He had been up at the Columbia Studios with John Hammond doing his first album He was being very mysterioso about the whole thing and nobody I knew had been to any of the sessions except Soos, his lady. I pumped him for information, but he was vague. Everything was going fine, and, Hey, would it be okay for me to record your arrangement of House of the Rising Sun? Expleative. Geez, Bobby, I'm going into the studio to do that myself in a few weeks.

Can't it wait until your next album? A long pause. Uh-oh. I did not like the sound of that. What exactly do you mean? Uh-oh. Well, he said she'll. I've already recorded it.

You did what? I flew into a Donald Duck rage and I fear I may have said something unkind that could be heard over in Chelsea. Van Runk and Dylan fell out for a couple of weeks, though they're later reconciled. And Van Runk said of Dunn's performance, it was essentially my arrangement,

but Bobby's reading had all the nuance and subtlety of a Neanderthal with a stone hand axe, and I took comfort thereby. Van Runk did record his version, as we heard, but he soon stopped playing the song live because he got sick of people telling him to play that Dylan song. The animals learned the song from the Dylan record and decided to introduce it to their set on their first national tour,

supporting Chuck Berry. All the other acts were only doing rock and roll and R&B, and they thought a folk song might be a way to make them stand out, and it instantly became the highlight of their act. The way all the members except Alan Price tell the story, the main instigators of the arrangement were Eric Burden, the only member of the group who had been familiar with the song before hearing the Dylan album,

and Hilton Valentine, who came up with the arpeggiated guitar part. Their arrangement followed Dylan's rearrangement of Van Ronk's rearrangement, except they dropped the scalar bass line altogether. So, for example, instead of a D with an F-sharp in the bass, they just play a plain open-d chord. The F-sharp that Van Runk introduced is still in. there as the third, but the descending line is now just implied by the chords, not explicitly

stated in the bass, where Chas Chandler just played root notes. In the middle of the tour, the group were called back into the studio to record their follow-up single, and they had what seemed like it might be a great opportunity. The TV show Ready, Steady Go, wanted the animals to record a version of the old Ray Charles song, Talking About You, to use as their theme. The group travelled down from Liverpool after playing a show there and went into the studio in London at 3 o'clock in the morning before heading to Southampton for the next night's show

but they needed to record a B-side first of course and so before getting round to the main business of the session they knocked off a quick one-tick performance of their new live showstopper. On hearing the playback everyone was suddenly convinced that that, not talking about you, should be the A-side, but there was a problem.

The record was four minutes and 20 seconds long, and you just didn't ever release a record that long. The rule was generally that songs didn't last longer than three minutes, because radio stations wouldn't play them. But most was eventually persuaded by Chas Chandler that the track needed to go out as it was, with no edits. It did, but when it went out, it had only one name on as the arranger, which, when you're recording a public domain song, makes you effectively the songwriter. According to all the members other than Price, the group's manager, Mike Jeffrey, who was close to Price, had explained to them that you needed to just put one name down on the credits, but not to worry, as they would all get a share of the songwriting money.

According to Price, meanwhile, he was the Solar Ranger. Whatever the truth, Price was the only one who ever got any songwriting royalties from their version of the song, which went to number one in the UK and the US. although the version released as a single in the US was cut down to three minutes with some brutal edit, particularly to the organ solo.

None of the group liked what was done to the US single edit and the proper version was soon released as an album track everywhere. The Animal's version was a big enough hit that it inspired Dylan's new producer Tom Wilson to do an experiment. In late 1964, he hired session musicians to overdub a new electric backing onto an outtake version of House of the Rising Sun

from the sessions from Dylan's first album to see what it would sound like. That wasn't released at the time, it was just an experiment Wilson tried, but it would have ramifications we'll be seeing throughout the rest of the podcast. Incidentally, Dave Van Runk had the last laugh at Dylan, who had to drop the song for his own set

because people kept asking him if he'd stolen it from the animals. The animal's next single, I'm Craying, was their first and only self-written A-side, written by Price and Burden. It was a decent record and made the top 10 in the UK and the top 20 in the US, but Price and Burden were never going to become another Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards. They just didn't like each other by this point. The record after that, Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, was written by the jazz songwriters, Betty Benjamin and Horace Ott,

and had originally been recorded by Nina Simone in an orchestral version, that owed quite a bit to Bert Bacarach. The animal's version really suffers in comparison to that that. I was going to say something about how their reinterpretation is as valid in its own way as Simone's original and stands up against it, but actually listening to them back to back as I was writing this, rather than separately, as I always previously had, I changed my mind, because I really don't think it does. It's a great record, and it's deservedly considered a classic single, but compared to Simone's version, it's lightweight, rushed and callow. Simone was apparently furious at the animal's recording, which they didn't understand, given that she hadn't written the original. And according to John Steele, she and Burden later had a huge screaming row about the record.

In Steele's version, Simone eventually grudgingly admitted that they weren't so bad for a bunch of white boys. But that doesn't sound to me like the attitude Simone would take. But Steele was there and I wasn't. Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood, was followed by a more minor single. A cover of Sam Cucks Bring It on Home to Me, which would be the last single by the group to feature Alan Price. On the 28th of April, 1965, the group were about to leave on a European tour. Chas Chandler, who shared a flat with Price, woke Price up and then got in the shower. When he got out of the shower, Price wasn't in the flat, and Chandler wouldn't see Price again for 18 months.

Chandler believed until his death that while he was in the shower, Price's first royalty check for arranging House of the Rising Sun had arrived, and Price had decided then and there that he wasn't going to share. the money as agreed. The group quickly rushed to find a filling keyboard player for the tour, and 19-year-old Mick Gallagher was with them for a couple of weeks, before being permanently replaced by Dave Robbery. Gallagher would later go on to be the keyboard player with Ian Jory and the blockheads, as well as playing on several tracks by The Clash. Price, meanwhile, went on to have a number of solo hits over the next few years, starting with a version of I Put a Spell on You, in an arrangement which the other animals

later claimed had originally been worked up as an animal's track. Price would go on to make many great solo records, introducing the songs of Randy Newman to a wider audience, and performing in a jazz-influenced R&B style, very similar to Moes Allison. The Animal's first record with their new keyboard player was their greatest single. We Gotta Get Out of this place had been written by Barryman and Cynthia Weil,

and had originally been intended for the righteous brothers, but they'd decided to have Mann recorded himself. But before that version was released, the animals had heard Mann's piano demo of the song and cut their own version, and Mann's was left on the shelf. What the animals did to the song horrified Cynthia Weil, who considered it the worst record of one of her songs ever,

though one suspects that's partly because it sabotaged the chances for her husband's single. But to my mind, they vastly improved on the song. They tightened the melody up a lot, getting rid of a lot of interjections. They reworked big chunks of the lyric. For example, changing, Oh girl, now you're young and oh so pretty, staying here would be a crime,

because you'll just grow old before your time, to, Now my girl, you're so young and pretty, and one thing I know is true, you'll be dead before your time is due. I'm making subtler changes, like changing if it's the last thing that we do, to if it's the last thing we ever do,

improving the scansion. They kept the general sense of the lyrics, but changed more of the actual words than they kept, and to my ears at least, every change they made was an improvement. And most importantly, they excised the overlong bridge altogether. I can see what Man and Wyle were trying to do with the bridge. Righteous Brothers' songs would often have a call and response section, building to a climax, where Bill Medley's low voice and Bobby Hatfield's high one would alternate and then come together.

But that would normally come in the middle, building towards a climax. the last chorus. Here it comes between every verse and chorus and completely destroys the song's momentum. It just sounds like noodling. The animals version by contrast is a masterpiece of dynamics of slow builds and climaxes and dropping back down again. It's one of the few times I've wished I could just drop the entire record in rather than excerpt in a section because it depends so much for its effect on the way the whole structure of the track works together. From a creator's rights perspective, I entirely agree with Cynthia Weil that the group shouldn't have

messed with her song. But from our listeners' point of view, I have to say that they turned a decent song into a great one, and one of the greatest singles of all time. We Got to Get Out of this place was followed by another lesser but listenable single, It's My Life, which seemed to reinforce a pattern of a great animal single being followed by a merely okay one. But that was the point at which the animals and most would part company. The group were getting sick of most attempts to make them more poppy. They signed to a new label, Decker, and got a new producer, Tom Wilson, the man who we heard earlier experimenting with Dylan's sound, but the group started to fall apart. After their next single, Inside Looking Out, a prison works song collected by the Lomaxes,

and the album Animalisms, John Steele left the group tired of not getting any money, and went to work in a shop. The album after Animalisms, confusingly titled Animalism was also mostly produced by Wilson, and didn't even feature the musicians in the band on two of the tracks, which Wilson farmed out to a protege of his, Frank Zappa, to produce. Those two tracks featured Zappa on guitar and members of the wrecking crew, with only burden from the actual group. Soon the group would split up, and would discover that their management had thoroughly ripped them off. There had been a scheme to bank their money in the Bahamas for tax reasons, in a bank which mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth.

Burden would form a new group, known first as the new animals and later as Eric Burden and the Animals, who would have some success but not on the same level. There were a handful of reunions of the original line-up of the group between 1968 and the early 80s, but they last played together in 1983. Burden continues to tour the US as Eric Burden and the Animals. Alan Price continues to perform successfully as a solo artist. We'll be picking up with Chas Chandler, later, when he moves from bass playing into management, so you'll hear more about him in future

episodes. John Steele, Dave Robbery and Hilton Valentine, reformed a version of the animals in the 1990s, originally with Jim Rodford, formerly of the Kinks and Argent, on base. Valentine left that group in 2001, and Robbery died in 2003. Steele now tours the UK as The Animals and Friends, with Mick Gallagher, who had replaced Frank briefly in 1965, on keyboards. I've seen them live twice and they put on an excellent show, though the second time one woman behind me did indignantly say as the singer started, That's not Eric Clapton, before starting to sing along happily. And Hilton Valentine moved to the US and played briefly with burdens animals after quitting steals, before returning to his first love,

Skiffle. He died exactly four weeks ago today and will be missed. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Memphis by Johnny Rivers. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month. book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, from Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes. This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced

by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500 songs. That's 5.0.0.The numbers, songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes, and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. word of mouth more than any other form of promotion is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.