Fact #105189
When:
Short story:
The Animals play the first of ten nights at The Paramount Theater, New York City, USA, along with Jan And Dean, Chuck Berry and Del Shannon. The Animals spend the evening with Bob Dylan.Full article:
John Steel (drummer, The Animals] : When we got to New York, House Of The Rising Sun had just been knocked off the No1 spot by The Supremes.
America was amazingly conservative. We were shocked when we got there because we'd been brought up on this image of America from the movies as this fantastic land of free enterprise and opportunity and excitement. In fact it was a very conservative place... still living in the fifties.
Anyway the thing at this big old Victorian theatre, The Paramount, was a week of shows promoted by the WMCA Good Guys in Manhattan. It was a radio show in direct competition with Murray The K. Murray was putting on a show at the Fox in Brooklyn, so WMCA did this package show at the Paramount.
The thing that surprised us was that as well as pop and rock bands, you also had the old big bands playing, like Benny Goodman. It had a rising stage that came up from the depths with the band playing on it as they came up. When we were there it was the Benny Carter Big Band, very good band with Bernard Purdie on drums, about fifteen years old. The trombonist was the guy who wrote Tuxedo Junction. So you'd get these pop vocalists over the week would come in and be backed by this wonderful band.
As well as that, they'd show a movie at some point in the day. The line-up changed almost every day. Chuck Berry was headlining one day. We started about ten in the morning and did four or five shows a day, interspersed with the movie. Very peculiar.
It wasn't a tremendous success, this show. Murray The K beat us hands down that week. They were desperate to drum up business, so one day we were walking outside in Times Square and there was this guy outside the theatre dressed in a grizzly bear suit, because we were The Animals. That was the level of thinking.
We were very keen to meet Bob Dylan and there was an English woman who was involved in a promotion business and she knew Bob Dylan and she got it organised. We went to Al Grossman's apartment and met Dylan there, he was living there at the time, I think, he seemed to be pretty resident there.
One of the first things that struck me was that he had very, very fine skin. We still had a mental image of him in folkie clothes, with the cap and denim jacket look. But we were taken aback that night because he was dressed very stylish, well-groomed, cufflinks, just like he is on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. In fact, that was the room we met him in.
He told us that night ... I remember we had a delicious tossed shrimp salad in a wooden bowl, which was the first time I'd come across anything like that, it seemed incredibly exotic ... Afterwards he took us out on a folk den tour of Greenwich Village, and everywhere he went he was recognised, because he was the biggest star of that scene. The place was buzzing, music playing everywhere, and wherever we went there was instantly an electric atmosphere because the latest sensation from England had walked in with Dylan.
At one of these clubs, maybe the Kettle O'Fish, he told us that he'd been driving along in an open-top sports car with the radio on, and heard our version of Rising Sun. He said, "I just had to pull over and stop the car." Now, we'd been inspired to record that because we'd heard it on his album... there was some PR bollocks, about us hearing it from Leadbelly, designed to make us look cool. We got it off the Dylan album.
So we'd been inspired by him, and then he's telling us that he was inspired by our version. He said it was like a light going off in his head. And that was when he decided he'd have to experiment with electric.
We ended up that night, pretty drunk, sitting in Dave Van Ronk's flat, with Dylan and Van Ronk playing guitars and singing.
Tweet this Fact
America was amazingly conservative. We were shocked when we got there because we'd been brought up on this image of America from the movies as this fantastic land of free enterprise and opportunity and excitement. In fact it was a very conservative place... still living in the fifties.
Anyway the thing at this big old Victorian theatre, The Paramount, was a week of shows promoted by the WMCA Good Guys in Manhattan. It was a radio show in direct competition with Murray The K. Murray was putting on a show at the Fox in Brooklyn, so WMCA did this package show at the Paramount.
The thing that surprised us was that as well as pop and rock bands, you also had the old big bands playing, like Benny Goodman. It had a rising stage that came up from the depths with the band playing on it as they came up. When we were there it was the Benny Carter Big Band, very good band with Bernard Purdie on drums, about fifteen years old. The trombonist was the guy who wrote Tuxedo Junction. So you'd get these pop vocalists over the week would come in and be backed by this wonderful band.
As well as that, they'd show a movie at some point in the day. The line-up changed almost every day. Chuck Berry was headlining one day. We started about ten in the morning and did four or five shows a day, interspersed with the movie. Very peculiar.
It wasn't a tremendous success, this show. Murray The K beat us hands down that week. They were desperate to drum up business, so one day we were walking outside in Times Square and there was this guy outside the theatre dressed in a grizzly bear suit, because we were The Animals. That was the level of thinking.
We were very keen to meet Bob Dylan and there was an English woman who was involved in a promotion business and she knew Bob Dylan and she got it organised. We went to Al Grossman's apartment and met Dylan there, he was living there at the time, I think, he seemed to be pretty resident there.
One of the first things that struck me was that he had very, very fine skin. We still had a mental image of him in folkie clothes, with the cap and denim jacket look. But we were taken aback that night because he was dressed very stylish, well-groomed, cufflinks, just like he is on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home. In fact, that was the room we met him in.
He told us that night ... I remember we had a delicious tossed shrimp salad in a wooden bowl, which was the first time I'd come across anything like that, it seemed incredibly exotic ... Afterwards he took us out on a folk den tour of Greenwich Village, and everywhere he went he was recognised, because he was the biggest star of that scene. The place was buzzing, music playing everywhere, and wherever we went there was instantly an electric atmosphere because the latest sensation from England had walked in with Dylan.
At one of these clubs, maybe the Kettle O'Fish, he told us that he'd been driving along in an open-top sports car with the radio on, and heard our version of Rising Sun. He said, "I just had to pull over and stop the car." Now, we'd been inspired to record that because we'd heard it on his album... there was some PR bollocks, about us hearing it from Leadbelly, designed to make us look cool. We got it off the Dylan album.
So we'd been inspired by him, and then he's telling us that he was inspired by our version. He said it was like a light going off in his head. And that was when he decided he'd have to experiment with electric.
We ended up that night, pretty drunk, sitting in Dave Van Ronk's flat, with Dylan and Van Ronk playing guitars and singing.