It was 60 years ago today!
The Animals’ version of “House of the Rising Sun” was released and the rest is history…
This iconic song was released on June 19, 1964.
This is the cover art for the album “The Animals” (album) by the artist the Animals.
The Animals balanced tough, Rock-edged Pop singles against Rhythm-and-Blues-oriented album material and were part of the “British Invasion”. The band is most known for their deep-voiced frontman Eric Burdon and for their gritty, Bluesy sound, exemplified by their signature song and transatlantic number-one hit single "The House of the Rising Sun”. The Animals had begun featuring their arrangement of the song during a joint concert with Chuck Berry, using it as their closing number to differentiate themselves from acts that always closed with straight rockers. It got a tremendous reaction from the audience.
Source: Wikipedia.org
Similarly, the song has been part of our band’s set lists for over a decade, often as our closing number. Call it mojo, magic power, or whatever you want, but nearly every time that we have performed this song live, there was a mysterious, yet palpable force, that lifted our band and our audience to a higher place. The song calls forth your talents as a musician and gives you permission to improvise.
House of the Rising Sun was recorded in just one take on May 18, 1964. While it was released to most of the world on June 19, the song wasn’t released as a single in the United States until later that August. The U.S.-version was also shorter in length and was subsequently included on the group’s American debut album “The Animals”, released in September. The hit song was the album’s opening track and went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for September 5, 1964, where it remained for three weeks. It was the first British Invasion-number one song unconnected with the Beatles.
Source: Wikipedia.org
In the years that followed, the Animals provided us with more legendary recordings and performances, including “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”, “It’s My Life, and “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood”. My late mother preferred the grittier acts from the “British Invasion”, including The Rolling Stones (her favorite), the Kinks, and the Animals. During the British Invasion, my mom and her family lived in West Germany, as my grandfather was stationed there with the U.S. Army. She heard these famous acts and songs on West German and American-run radio, often before her fellow Americans living here did.
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