Customer Reviews

Every One of Us

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

There are many who have tried to squeeze Eric Burdon's recording career into a few rigidly defined categories. Most love his recordings with the original Animals. Unfortunately, Eric's psychedelic period does seem to be an acquired taste for many. And this is unfortunate because some of his best material is made up of these recordings that seem to reek of pot and incense. It's almost as though you need to recreate the right atmosphere by wearing something of the period like a cossack shirt or a fringed jacket or something paisley and then turn the lights down so that the room is cool and dark. And, yeah, if you're one of the older generation, it's alright if you decide to go with a bottle of wine. Now, you're ready to receive Eric's vision. And it's a vision of great power and intensity. Check out John Wieder's slashing guitar solo on "White Houses" and his beautiful acoustic work on "Serenade to a Sweet Lady." "Immigrant Lad" is Eric's tribute to his native Newcastle. Then on to "Year of the Guru" - very 1967/1968 with flashes of hot guitar and a throbbing Danny McCulloch bass line along with some Burdon wit & humor. And then one of the bluesiest versions of "St. James Infirmary" ever laid down on vinyl. Eric's voice is so deep, so down there that you know right from the get-go that you are in the heart of the blues. What a powerful rendition this is - Eric has never sounded better, Vic Briggs' sitar chords glisten like tears, and Danny McCulloch provides a solid anchor with his bass. And then, just when you think you know what's coming, John Wieder takes off with another incendiary guitar solo. Given his work on "White Houses" and "St. James Infirmary", how is it that Wieder remains so little known? The longest cut is the most challenging - "New York 1963, America 1968." And, yeah I've heard some say that it is pretentious and self-indulgent. All I can say to the naysayers is "go back and listen to it once more but try to imagine that it's 1968 all over again." This is Eric's meditation/elegy on America, the hopes and visions that America held for people around the world against the turbulent backdrop of the Sixties as our dreams of love and peace were destroyed by the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, Jr. Even now with all these years having passed, this album is "just one big experience." Get it, turn down the lights, and enjoy!

This has always been one of my favorites from the Animals, too, but I disagree with the other reviewers about the oddball stuff--the latter half of the immigrant lad, the black fighter pilot's monologue in the middle of New York 1963 - America 1968. When this album came out, that was the stuff that blew me away. It was Burdon taking his commitment to the black man and the poor man's plight and finding a radical new way of communicating it and making us listen. It was startling and gripping and now, hearing it for the first time in maybe 15 years, it still knocks me out. The man walked the walk, and the musicians were awesome; Danny McCullogh's bass defines almost every song on the album. On Winds of Change, there were lots of tricks reaching to break through the conventions of r&b and bring it into the acid age. I think Burdon larned a lot in doing that stuff and this album was a return to the simple, straightforward blues...even if it's sometimes a talkin' blues. Brilliant work that stretched the boundaries and the minds of the times. A perfect pair to the over the top trip of Love Is.

The Reportoire label has just released this on CD and the sound quality is truly amazing, far outstripping the One Way and Toshiba of Japan versions.
This album has been one of my personal favorites for years, coupled with Eric & the Animals' next and last, "Love Is". The two have a completely different sound and approach, however. Whereas "Love Is" is in large part radical, extended interpretations of cover songs loosely based on the various aspects of love, "Every One of Us" is more of a psychedelic British folk album with lyrics relating to Burdon's personal observations and experiences.
As with my review of "Love Is", I'm giving 4 out of 5 stars based on filler tracks. "Uppers & Downers" is unnecessary, "Year of the Guru" is witty but dated (great riff, though), and the "America-1968" jam gets a might tedious. However, as others have stated, "Serenade to a Sweet Lady" is a killer instrumental while "St. James Infirmary" is one of Burdon's stand-out vocal performances, sort of a book-end to "House of the Rising Sun".

Sometime during the summer of 1968, Eric Burdon and the Animals put this highly idiosyncratic slab of vinyl on the market. It is typically & turbulently 1968, featuring a long, "experimental" track (this was the year of Inna Gadda Da Vida after all), a song about Gurus (they were big in 68), the shorter "experimental" tracks (Ups and Downs and Immigrant Lad), the strange lyrics of White Houses and the great, great blues rendition of St James Infirmary.

This record typifies 1968 for me: wild, unruly and unusual. Eric is in particularly good voice, the production was excellent and he and the band were in the midst of putting out profusions of good product. This band, by the way, was absolutely phenomenal! I saw them play that summer and they were burning the place up. In fact, of all the wondrous music events I attended during that year, Eric and the Animals was probably the best (and that includes Jimi, the Airplane and many others).

I probably have a less than objective view of this disk because I always hear it in the context of 1968, where it fits quite nicely. In other contexts it probably seems obtuse, unwieldy and strange, but most definitely, this is a great, varied hunk of music.

The inclusion of the two singles helps overall, particularly the group's wild-man take on "River Deep". They outdo Ike and Tina by a great deal here.

For those pursuing a less turbulent overview of the band, "The Best of Eric Burdon and the Animals" is the ticket (if you can find it).

This is a good album. There's no doubt about it. There are some tracks that are hard to digest, for example the latter half of immigrant lad, but on the whole an interesting album which speaks heaps about attitudes and musical direction of the time. Even the latter half of immigrant lad has a kind of point to it but it's not something you want to listen to more than once or twice. My mostly played tracks from the album are serenade to a sweet lady, Year of the Guru, St James infirmary and white houses. I've been looking for a good, solid version of Year of the Guru for ages (after a scratchy vinyl version) and I haven't been disappointed - the riff is cool. St James infirmary is an unsung classic blues/psychadelic stampede and easily matches the power of house of the rising sun. Eric Burdon's voice is as powerful as a thundering steam train and the guitar work on the track (and album in general) is spellbinding. I only gave this four stars because of some of the harder to listen to tracks but, overall, I highly recommend this album.

The penultimate of the four albums by Eric and the second generation Animals can be viewed from two different perspectives: There are only six songs, of which one is an instrumental, and one is only some 3 minutes long while the remaining 3 minutes are a taped pub conversation; there's "Uppers and Downers," which doesn't count because it's a 24-second lark, and there's the epic "New York 1963-America 1068," to which I'll come in a moment, but for now let's just say that I believe that it's not something you play more than once in a while. So, all told you've got about 24 minutes of what can be called a very good rock album - way too short by today's CD-capacity standards.
On the other hand, this is, more today than when it was first created, a stunning document of an era. First there is the evidence of the 60s' idealism at work: no band today would release - or be allowed to release - such a hodge-podge of thoughts, observations, and agonizing social questions, all mixed in with first-rate r&b. An independent artist, perhaps, but not bona-fide pop stars with a million-dollar contract.
Let's look at that taped conversation in a London pub, which constitutes the second half of the moving song "The Immigrant Lad." Amazingly, the writer of the liner notes for this reissue, Chris Welch, who was once a brilliant young rock critic in England, dismisses the conversation as "embarrassing," and suggests fast-forwarding to the next tune. However, it's precisely because the conversation is embarrassing that it's priceless. An out-of-work coal miner from the north (Eric Burdon's turf) has come down south looking for a job; here we have him chatting with a Cockney, and forth pour prejudices that could not make it onto the record today unless you specifically wanted to piss off every civil defense organization in the U.S. (After all, why not, I suppose. Guns& Roses did it for publicity.) Black people are darkies, and we also have Wogs, of course, none of whom are a pleasant sight in the pub for the northerner, while the Cockney reassures him that one eventually gets used to it. Women, too, get theirs: they really should not be seen in a pub.
This snippet is a blow to today's media's coddling of the sixties. It reminds us that not everything was peace and love and all that nice stuff; those stoned folks coexisted not just with the "pigs" and the mean war mongers, they coexisted with the simple, decent workers, who had been raised in a dramatically different world and could not help being who they were. Those workers were more than one hippie's fathers.
Less subtly, with "Year of the Guru" the boys next have a few extremely sardonic things to say about the ever-popular figure of the flower-power summer: the guru. Then, as if to say, forget all that, let's just do what we do so well, the band goes into "St. James Infirmary," one of the finest blues on any record.
So we come to "New York 1963-America 1968." The first 5 minutes or so are a song typical of Burdon at the time: very simple, with good, straightforward lyrics, by no means fabulous but hummable. Then the music stops and a black American talks about his experience as a World War II pilot who, prepared to give his life for his country, was fully trained only to be told by the flying elite that he wasn't wanted. I wish I knew exactly who this man is, because his experience sounds a lot like that of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, who flew crucial missions over Europe but were treated like dirt both during training and afterwards, when they came home as heroes whom no one saluted. They waited sixty years to be recognized by the President of the U.S. - those who were still around to get their medal, that is.
The song ends with a sort of a sing-song ideological workout. The whole is nearly 19 minutes long, and I think you can see why I said you might not want to hear it every time you play the CD.
You get two bonus tracks in the bargain, shortened for radio: mono versions of "White Houses" and "River Deep, Mountain High." Pleasant but by no means essential. The first one is right here on the album, in stereo, the second one, full-length, is on the last New Animals album, "Love Is," which you owe it to yourself to have because it's superlative practically from beginning to end, and there's plenty of it (it was a double-LP).
So: a rocker too short to spend the money on, or a social document worth every penny: your choice.

This is a heavy psych rocker with some cool songs on it.
'white houses' is a fantastic song in which burden says he better get straight, if only he'd listened to himself! then he wouldn't have spaced out so bad later on.
The songs are strong here and 'the year of the guru' is the BEST SONG EVER about how gurus and cults suck! ANd they did that is 1968 when having a guru was supposed to be hip. The last song is is meandering mess though, it's twenty minutes long or so and is both good and terrible and the same time with a man complaining in the background. TOO many drugs lead to such bad songs, but this disc was of the psych period in which deluded people thought drugs would free their mind and most only got enslaved. Still overall this is a powerful cd filled with a great band still at their peak.

Repertoire REPUK 1055 (2004) This re-issue of this seldom heard collection has been very nicely restored and remastered. The sound is superior to even the latest re-releases of the Beatles' catalog. It appears that Repertoire went back to the original multi-track masters for this remaster, and the result is terrific! The sound is lively, strong, and has "punch" without being overwhelming (as so many modern-day releases are as if engaged in some sort of "volume wars"). This rejuvenated collection will not tax your ears, and you will definitely want to play it.

About the music: this penultimate release from Eric and his Animals is a great glimpse into the psychedelia-meets-blues style of music which briefly appeared towards the late `60's. This record includes its share of conventional tunes as well as more experimental ones. The album is perhaps somewhat similar to Pink Floyd's first album but has more musical direction than the Floyd offering. The remastered single versions of "River Deep Mountain High" and "White Houses" are very nice additions to this collection and have also been nicely restored.

My principal regret regarding this album is that it does not seem to feature Eric Burdon enough! This is all the more ironic - and disappointing - considering the band were now calling themselves "Eric Burdon and the Animals." Eric's talent simply seems to be underutilized in this incarnation of The Animals. For this album, Eric is reduced to essentially a band member rather than being the cornerstone of the group as in the earlier versions of the band. But perhaps this is how Eric intended it.

On the whole, the energy and style of this album are tremendous and clearly come through; it is great to hear this truly outstanding restoration of recordings from one of rock and roll's most amazing and dynamic singers at this brief and interesting window in rock and roll history. If you are an Animals fan, you will find this sampling interesting and enjoy it. In summary, this album is a nice sampling of Animals and rock and roll history, and I believe I would recommend it for rock and roll aficionados as well as Animals fans. I give this one `1 and a half thumbs up!'

This record feels like Eric Burdons caputalion to US and his fasination about it almost like real blues typically rock music in the late sixties and early seventy's

This is a very personal album for me. My best friend got it on vinyl for my birthday when I was visiting him and his family in Boise, ID one year for the summer so it brings back some pleasant memories. I finally managed to get it on cd. Aside from that, I dig the well-produced funkiness of the rock, blues, and spoken word swirling around. The 1960s had a hodgepodge of musical styles bubbling in the brew, and this was a nice fit. Not for everyone, but give it a quick listen if you get the chance. It strikes some chord in me that I can't quite describe, and maybe it will bring out something lurking inside of you as well.