We Gotta Get Out of This Place: from Springsteen to Vietnam, how The Animals took over the world

Bruce Springsteen once claimed he owed his whole career to British beat group, The Animals. Speaking at the SXSW festival in 2012, Springsteen singled out Elvis Presley for igniting his love of rock and roll, Roy Orbison for imbuing him with a sense of musical mystery, Phil Spector for teaching him about the language of sound, The Beatles for showing him the value of a band unit, Bob Dylan for unleashing his inner wordsmith, and James Brown for demonstrating the power of showmanship.

But it was the great bluesy Newcastle combo fronted by Eric Burdon that became the catalyst for his own musical vision. “For me they were a revelation, the first records with full blown class consciousness that I'd ever heard, that mirrored my home life.”

Even the name The Animals struck him as “unforgiving and final and irrevocable, the most unapologetic group name until the Sex Pistols came along. It struck me so deep.” He described The Animals as “the ugliest group in rock and roll. Eric Burdon was like your shrunken daddy with a wig on, he always had a little man’s face, he couldn’t dance, they put him in a suit, it was like putting a gorilla in a suit. And he had that voice, like Howling Wolf coming out of some 17-year-old kid. The Animals weren’t nice, they didn’t curry favour, they were aggression personified, and it was so freeing.”

The death of guitarist Hilton Valentine, aged 77, has shone a light back on this unjustly neglected combo of the first British beat explosion. For a moment in the Sixties, The Animals were on a par with The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, playing a fierce, driven, gritty and very northern take on Rhythm and Blues.

Tributes to Valentine have focused on the distinctive arpeggio guitar line that ripples through their definitive version of House of the Rising Sun, a folk song of ancient provenance previously recorded by Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Nina Simone. Eric Burdon claimed to have first heard it performed by Northumbrian folk singer Johnny Handle, though their version was essentially a brooding electrification of the version performed by Bob Dylan on his 1961 solo debut album, which Dylan had purloined (somewhat unethically) from his folk contemporary Dave Van Ronk.

The Animals arranged their bruising rock version themselves, with Valentine’s guitar figure as the spine, Alan Price’s swirling flyaway Vox Continental organ adding rich musical layers, the rhythm section of drummer John Steel and bassist Chas Chandler building in intensity over a four-and-a-half-minute length that was then almost unprecedented for a pop single. Burdon snarled and sneered his way through the vocal with the tangy bitterness of a man who has wasted his life in dens of iniquity in New Orleans, rather than a 23-year-old Geordie art student who had never been to America. It is an incredible record, that gave The Animals a transatlantic number one hit in 1964. Fifty-six yeas later, it remains a favourite of young guitarists to learn, because Valentine’s picking through an ever-circling chord sequence is at once strikingly effective and incredibly easy to play.

The Animals are a group that mean a great deal to me. Their Best Of was one of the first albums I ever owned, and its tough, bluesy rock thrilled and mesmerised me as a young listener the same way it grabbed hold of Springsteen. One of the great pleasures and privileges of my life as a music journalist was interviewing Eric Burdon in his own home in 2013, an elegant, Spanish style villa in the tranquil mountain village of Ojai, in Ventura County, California. The old rocker proved eloquent, discursive, still incredibly passionate, and quite something to behold whenever he got on a roll.

Burdon suggested the aggressive spirit of The Animals breakthrough classic came from “the ferocity and speed we worked at. We rushed into the studio when we were on tour with Chuck Berry, took a break to take a train down to London, hauled our equipment through the city, down to this dingy recording studio at Kingsway with Mickie Most where we had a few hours before we had to get a train back for our next gig. House of the Rising Sun was recorded for less than $50, just the price of the tape and the engineer. Everything was done on the fly. We were in and out and back on the tour the next day. It was boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!”

The Animals had a run of hits with punchy, gritty versions of soul and R’n’B songs, including Sam Cooke’s Bring It On Home to Me, John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom, a dark and tortured version of Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood (with an electrifying Hilton Valentine guitar riff that Springsteen would later blatantly adapt for his own classic song, Badlands), and brooding blues original I’m Crying, composed by Burdon and Price. But the song that really got through to Springsteen and remains one of the most powerful anti-establishment rock anthems of all time is ferocious 1965 hit We Gotta Get Outta This Place.

It opens with a sleek, threatening Chandler bassline and dark baritone croak from Burdon, singing a verse that took him right back to his childhood in Newcastle. “In this dirty old part of the city / Where the sun refuse to shine / People tell me there ain’t no use in trying…” The lyrics are very dark for a smash hit pop song of the swinging Sixties. “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.”

In an era characterised by generational conflict, the song displays real sympathy for the demands and sacrifices of the singer’s working-class forebears: “Watch my daddy in bed and tired / Watch his hair been turning grey / He’s been working and slaving his whole life away.” The chorus comes crashing in with another energy altogether, brash and uplifting with Burdon yelling at the top of his range, releasing a rebellious, hopeful (if perhaps doomed) cry for escape: “We gotta get out of this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do / We gotta get out of this place! / Girl, there’s a better life, for me and you.”

“That’s every song I’ve ever written,” according to Springsteen, who frequently performs it in concert.

We Gotta Get Outta This Place has an unusual provenance. It was composed by the husband and wife pop songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, a young Jewish couple from New York who operated out of the famous Brill Building, and had already enjoyed much success with The Drifters, The Crystals and The Ronettes. Keyboard player Mann provided the music, and Weil wrote the lyrics. Along with Phil Spector, they created You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling for The Righteous Brothers, which remains in the top 10 highest-earning songs of all time and was the most broadcast song on radio and television in the 21st Century. We Gotta Get Outta This Place was never intended for the Animals, however. It was conceived as a folk-pop ballad, that would launch Barry Mann’s own career as a sensitive singer-songwriter. “The demo was pretty basic,” Hilton Valentine told Uncut magazine in 2013. “It was just Barry Mann playing and singing the song on piano.”

Producer Mickie Most heard it on a visit to the Brill Building, and brought it to The Animals. It immediately struck a powerful chord. “We were all working-class Geordies,” according to drummer John Steel. “Tyneside in the Fifties when we were all teenagers was a pretty grubby place: coal, steel, shipbuilding. Every building was black, when it rained there was a kind of black slime on the pavements. So we could really identify with the words. Once we got down to London at the end of ’63 that was our first experience of living in another city, then travelling to New York in ’64 was like a dream come true to us. That idea of social mobility had just become possible for working-class lads like us.”

The Animals' souped up version was arranged very quickly. “We recorded it at De Lane Lea studios, down in this basement in central London,” according to Burdon. “It was Churchill’s old map room, one of his emergency rooms during the war. The recording was pretty much down the line. We were very sure of ourselves, we didn’t need much producing.” They switched around some lyrics, shifting the verse about the “dirty old city” to the top, because it reminded them so much of Newcastle, and stretching the whole thing out. There’s an extended passage in the middle where the song builds power, with Burdon growling about how he’s been “working, baby, working, working, working” until the chorus explodes as a glorious release of tension.

The song reached number 2 in the UK in July 1965 (kept off the top by The Beatles’ Help) and reached number 13 in the US in August. It has endured as an indelible anthem of working-class life and the yearning desire for escape, but what the band did not know at the time was that it was also becoming hugely popular amongst American troops in Vietnam, a staple of the Armed Forces Vietnam Network radio. A survey of Vietnam veteran in 2006 unanimously identified We Gotta Get Outta This Place as “the Vietnam anthem.” Its message of escape from the lurking shadow of death has gone on to resonate with American and British troops in the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. “I talk to squaddies on the road even now and they come up and say that they listen to that song,” said Steel. “But it’s also this anthem that kids sing when they leave school. It has hung about.”

The Animals had one more big, rebellious hit, It’s My Life, but broke up in disarray soon after. Burdon was pretty unequivocal about what went wrong when I interviewed him. “Money! When we started, we weren’t interested in money, come on, you mean we get paid for doing this sh*t? Now you are in America and somebody is making tons of money. We’re being worked to death for the same per diem as when we started. I was as much a part of the deterioration as anybody, I’ll admit to that. It just fell apart, it got really violent.” He also had a sense that their rebellious reputation was a kind of burden. “You want the experience to be thicker, harder, better, you know, the more pain the better, bring it on, more tours, more drugs, using that to experience music in different avenues… Jesus, it was just a crazy world for a while.”

The Animals broke up in 1966. Alan Price had already departed to go solo, Chas Chandler became a highly successful manager who discovered Jimi Hendrix and Slade. Eric Burdon continued solo, and with different line-ups billed as The Animals which past members floated in and out of. There were short-lived reunions in the mid-seventies and in 1983, before Burdon eventually retired the band name. “I lost faith in The Animals, it was a band that couldn’t live up to its name. We were trashed around and stomped on. The punk thing happened, and we weren’t punk enough.”

But it was during their 1976 reunion world tour that the Animals learned about the relevance of their greatest anthem to US troops. “I would meet guys who got back from Vietnam and they would say, man, you saved my life,” recalled Burdon. “I thought it was f---ing ridiculous, how could I save their life? And then one guy tells a story about how his mother sent him a cassette player, and he kept his Animals tapes in another hole about a hundred yards away, and he went to get them, fire came in, everyone was killed except him. So, ‘you saved my life.’ It was really heavy. I got into the anti-Nam protest thing on a big level, but I wanted both sides, and I was glad that I was getting the thumbs up from soldiers.”

Burdon once visited the Washington Monument, in the small hours of the morning, with film star Angie Dickinson. “We came to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a big black stone wall, and it was pretty moving. We’re walking along, and I remember Angie’s fingers going down and feeling the indentations in the marble, and then I see these guys sitting there, smoking, and there’s big clouds of pot coming from them, and they’ve got a disc player, I heard my voice. They are playing one of my songs, and they’re like, ‘hey, what’s happening, man?” And I’ve got Angie on one arm, stoned Vietnam vets, my music in the air, and this is the ultimate American dreamscape. It really hit me heavy.”

It seems not everyone was quite so enthralled by The Animals version of We Gotta Get Outta This Place, however. According to Burdon, he was sitting in the reception of his doctor’s office in Hollywood in the Eighties, where he was approached by a heavily pregnant Cynthia Weil. “You know, me and Barry hated what you did with our song,” she told him, then tottered off.

Apparently Mann never forgave them for taking a song he hoped would launch his own solo career. His loss was the world’s gain. “Why the hell did they ship it out to us, then?’” pondered Burdon. “Complaining about having a hit and making a fortune and having something meaningful that has lasted. Isn’t that why you write songs in the first place?”