1964 The Animals: The House Of The Rising Sun

I've been ever more conscious that for at least the last couple of years here, the land I'm starting to wander through is growing ever familiar. The fifties were by and large a wilderness for me, a desert through which I had to pick my way with only the most basic of maps, but toward the end of that decade, dirt tracks started to turn into paths and those paths are now started to be paved with clear signposts marking the way so that I am now walking through almost totally familiar terra firma; The Beatles, The Searchers, Roy Orbison - I know most of this stuff as well as I know the sound of my own voice.

With welcome familiarity though comes a danger all of its own - such music now hangs framed in galleries with the title 'classic' hung over their heads which makes any attempt at re-appraisal difficult - just what is there left to be said about some of this? And if you do find something to say, then any comment will come laced with the double edged peril of praise it and you're dismissed as a predictable old fart bowing to convention, slag it and you're tarred and feathered as a pseudo whatever deliberately courting controversy for the sake of it. You can't win, you can only try.

Hardly contemporary in origin, 'The House Of The Rising Sun' dates from antiquity with author unknown, yet there are few who couldn't tell you that this particular house was a brothel staffed by fallen women who had taken a wrong turning in life. And that bon mot of general knowledge is largely down to The Animals bringing the song to a mass audience (and in so doing recorded a song to which the 'classic' label can now be applied as well as it can to any 'classic' song), though in truth their own version can be dated somewhat later than time unrecorded. From Bob Dylan's 1961 version in fact.

Because Hilton Valentine's now famous guitar arpeggios, the first port of call for any budding player, were an arrangement of Dylan's which The Animals lifted wholesale. Which makes that much a bit of a cheat, but though Dylan kept the female narrator viewpoint of the lyric ("And it's been the ruin of many a poor girl"), The Animals spin it round to tell it from a male stance. Different then, but with the story not now coming from a woman broken by whoring but by a bloke who's broke from spending all his shillings on such a fallen woman then the impact is somewhat lessened and it's difficult to feel too much sympathy with him. Or any even.

Eric Burdon's lead vocal doesn't help much either, telling his tale with all the bellow and bluster of a Sunday night barroom drunk but in a way that ensures we're never less than fully aware that he's role playing here; this isn't Burdon the Geordie R&B singer but Burdon as a hobo from the deep South ruing the bum hand life has dealt him ("My father was a gamblin' man, down in New Orleans" etc etc). It's a performance more akin to pantomime than theatre proper and though he's always entertaining, Burdon is just too shlocky to convince.

What adds the ticks to lift this out of some rocky horror hell is Alan Price and his magnificent organ (yes, yes - a Vox Continental actually). Price starts off by playing ball with some woozy, happy drunk harmonious interjections over Burdon's growls, but by the finale four minutes later he's blasting through with pissed as a rat slabs of oscillating noise that play a tennis game of power with Burdon's increasingly deranged yelling, an effect that's as wild and unpredictable as befits a song recorded in a single take. Distinctive and novel, Dylan himself is reported to have "jumped out of his car seat" when he heard it. And to keep/reverse the Dylan link in a 'giving something back' quid pro quo arrangement, it's no giant leap of faith to get from Price's contributions here to Al Kooper's organ backing that provided a vital piece in Dylan's own 'thin wild mercury sound' circa 1965/66.

Growing up, 'The House Of The Rising Sun' = The Animals the same way that 'Stairway To Heaven' = Led Zeppelin. Each defined the other in my (and not just my) eyes and it wasn't until a good few years later I realised they weren't a.n.other bunch of one hit wonders. So does this deserve its 'classic' status in rock's great canon? Despite some of my above misgivings I have to say yes - 'The House Of The Rising Sun' is an unstructured, undisciplined, impolite force of nature that sucks in the listener like quicksand and keeps them in its swirl till the end. It's not pretty, but it's not meant to be, and the New Orleans re-located to Newcastle sound is a part spiritual, part aggression blues that's uniquely the effect of two separate cultures meeting in a head on collision rather than one seeking to emulate the other.