Welcome to MusicDayz

The world's largest online archive of date-sorted music facts, bringing day-by-day facts instantly to your fingertips.
Find out what happened on your or your friends' Birthday, Wedding Day, Anniversary or just discover fun facts in musical areas that particularly interest you.
Please take a look around.

Fact #83600

When:

Short story:

The Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo plays a midnight set at The Downbeat Club, Newcastle, UK. With two new members, guitarist Hilton Valentine and drummer John Steel, this is the first appearance together of the quintet that will later become The Animals.

Full article:

John Steel (drummer) : I'd just got back from a short break in Ostend and I went straight to the all-nighter at the Downbeat for my first gig with the Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo, which was also my introduction to Hilton Valentine on lead guitar, because he'd come in. I was introduced to him at the gig, we didn't even rehearse, just got up and started playing. But we all knew the songs, we'd been playing them for years, and what you didn't know, you just winged it. So that was the first time that all five members of what later became The Animals played together.

Hilton Valentine : I was with the Wild Cats for four or five years before The Animals. We were a pop/rock band. Well, we started with skiffle, and playing Bill Haley stuff like Rock Around The Clock. Then we moved on to stuff like Cliff and The Shadows, and instrumentals, like a lot of bands at that time.

Chas Chandler saw me playing with the Wild Cats and he said, 'How serious are you about playing music? Would you go up to London and pack your job up?' And I said, 'Aye.' I was the only one of the Wild Cats who was that keen.

Hilton Valentine : I had the echo unit and everything, you know, for Apache and F.B.I. When I went along to play for the Combo it was, "Can you turn the echo down a bit?" Then it was, "Could you turn the echo off altogether?" So I did, and it sounded terrible. It was like standing naked. But they were all saying, "That's better, that's great."

Chas Chandler : He had a completely different musical attitude to all of us, but somehow it all gelled in ....When Hilton joined, it drove the band towards a more commercial sound. Guitars were the thing at the time...

At least half our set (Combo) was made up on the spot. Two of the songs in the first set would be, 'Let's do something based on this rhythm and that riff,' and we'd start playing it and make it up as we went along. Then the second set would be written in the interval - arranging the keys and the stops right there in the dressing room. The last set would be every rabble-rouser we knew, just to get people going.

John Steel : I was astonished at the atmosphere. The place was packed and to my amazement we gelled right away. From the earlier gigs as Kansas City Five we'd always struggled to get an audience but the interest in r'n'b was growing around the country. It was jammed and the condensation was running off the walls. You could feel that there was something going on. Little prickly hairs going up on the back of the neck.



THE STORY OF THE ANIMALS by Johnny Black (Oct 00)

It was the unfamiliar chink of metal colliding with glass that alerted Eric Burdon to the fact that he was as near to death as he ever cared to be. Half a world away from the comfortingly English Tyneside gangsters he knew on first name terms, Burdon sat next to New Animals' guitarist Andy Summers at a table in a spartanly furnished Tokyo room, and realised he was staring into the eyes of a Yakuza overlord who would not hesitate to have him executed on the spot.

It was late 1968, and Burdon's latterday band the New Animals had arrived in Japan, expecting to play 21 dates in three-weeks. What they didn't know was that the local promoter, hand in glove with the Oriental mafia, had promised his bosses that the band would also play extra shows for the exclusive delight of the Japanese godfathers, their wives, children, relatives and henchmen.

"We'd been doing 10,000-seater halls and then all of a sudden they wanted us to play in a nightclub," recalls Burdon. "This was a place so tiny we could have barely got the equipment in. So I started asking questions, demanded to see a contract in English. Next thing we know, we're face to face with these bad guys. They took us into a room, sat us round a table, and clunked these whiskey glasses down in front of us. Now, when the Japanese are about to make a deal, they always break open a bottle of Johnnie Walker. That's the ritual. The waiter came round and poured a shot into every glass except mine."

"At that point, over my left shoulder, one of the Yakuza heavies dropped half a dozen 9mm bullets into my glass. Ka-chunk! Ka-chunk! From that moment on, I knew where we stood."

Fast-talking their way into gaining time to think, the band returned to their hotel rooms and booked the next flight out of Tokyo, only to find themselves confronted again at the airport check-in desk by Mr Big and his cronies. "I just went out of my mind with rage. I went into a tirade, screamed at him that I had believed the Japanese to be the most cultured people on the planet, but he'd destroyed that for me, and now whenever I thought of Japan I'd think of his snivelling little face and his band of brigands and, to my amazement, he started crying. I had him in tears."

The fortuitous arrival, at this crucial moment, of a phalanx of Japanese schoolgirl fans afforded Burdon's boys their opportunity to shuffle towards the departure gate, and off into the security of a Pan-Am jetliner. "I guess I'm one of the few guys living who can say I faced down the Yakuza and lived."

Or, at least, that's the way Eric Burdon tells it. But then, over the years, Burdon has claimed variously to be the reincarnation of Jimi Hendrix, to have received a message for The Beatles from the astral plane while on an acid trip and that Bo Diddley came to see The Animals in Newcastle. John Steel, the drummer who founded the original Animals with Burdon points out with evident affection that, "Eric always had a vivid imagination. If life wasn't interesting enough, he'd just make up the facts to suit himself."

The curious thing is that Burdon has no need to embroider the facts. Few bands before or since ever operated on the level of heightened intensity that was The Animals' norm. Their zigzag trail through the sixties rock scene was etched by a veritable drink and drug-fuelled whirlwind that left destruction, depravity and brain-damage in its wake.

Burdon and Steel had met up in 1957 as first year graphics students at Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design. Burdon, then playing trombone in trad jazz combo the Pagan Jazz Men, invited trumpeter Steel to join, not so much for his limited musical abilities, but because he owned a tape recorder whose microphone input allowed it to double as a band PA.

Within a year, Burdon's trombonely ineptitude and the increasing popularity of rock'n'roll, propelled the band to a momentous decision. Burdon switched to vocals, Steel to drums, and they became The Pagans. "Other local bands, like the Wildcats and The Gamblers just played covers of pop hits," points out Steel, "but our repertoire, as well as obvious choices like Jailhouse Rock and Move It, included more obscure stuff like Ain't That A Shame and Let The Good Times Roll."

These exotic choices were dictated by Burdon, who used his long Summer Holidays to make pilgrimages south, to London and beyond. "When I was seventeen, I started going to Paris to buy records, because there was virtually a black city on the Left Banke of the Seine, the Moroccan Quarter. It was a very mystic experience for me, the first time I ever smelt marijuana drifting through the air. Lots of name American musicians, refugees from America's race policies had taken up residence in Paris. I used to hang out with people like Memphis Slim and Chet Baker. I never had the gall to talk to them, but I observed. It was a world I'd only imagined when I lived in England."

Returning north during term-time, Burdon would introduce the band to his latest discoveries, which would then be performed on their regular round of youth clubs and church hops. One such was Headlam Street Church Hall in Byker where, during a March 1959 booking, guitarist Alan Price of the night's top attraction, The Frank Headley Combo, was sufficiently impressed to ask if he might play along with The Pagans. "Frank was an out and out Jerry Lee Lewis copyist, so he was on piano," explains Steel. "That meant Alan was on guitar. When he got up with us, though, he played piano, very strong boogie and rock, so we were well impressed. So we asked him to join us, and he did."

That one snap decision brought together the seeds of The Animals and the seeds of the band's destruction. "We quickly discovered that Alan was a prickly sort of bloke, and we were never his great personal friends, but we put up with him for the return we got from his playing."

The Pagans evolved into the Kansas City Five, their style moving further towards stride and boogie blues, as dictated by Price's pianistic strengths. They had now progressed to playing in established night clubs, mostly owned by local entrepreneur Mike Jeffery, but alarm bells should have started ringing on 18 May 1962 when Price, without warning, failed to show up for a gig in The Downbeat.

Decent pianists being thin on the ground, Price had been poached by a more established band, The Kontours, including 6' 4" bassist Bryan 'Chas' Chandler. "Pricey was such an important member of the Kansas City Five that it broke the band up," says Steel. "Without him we couldn't do the stuff that was the basis of out sets."

As luck would have it, The Kontours also fell apart, leaving Price and Chandler to soldier on as The Alan Price Rhythm And Blues Combo, a trio with various drummers. Despite having lately suffered the effects of Price's self-interest, on return from a London jaunt in the late summer of 1963, Burdon hooked up with the Price Combo, and they drafted in guitarist Hilton Valentine to beef up the sound.

"Chas had seen me playing in the Wildcats," explains Valentine. "I had the echo unit and everything, you know, for Apache and F.B.I. but when I went along to play for the Combo it was, 'Can you turn the echo down a bit?' Then it was, 'Could you turn the echo off altogether?' So I did, and it sounded terrible. It was like standing naked. But they were all saying, 'That's better, that's great.'" As far as Chandler was concerned, it was Hilton's arrival that pushed the band towards a more commercial, rock-based sound.

The definitive Animals line-up played together for the first time at midnight on 11 September 1963, when John Steel was tempted back to join them on drums at The Downbeat. "I didn't even know Hilton. We were introduced at the gig, we didn't rehearse, just got up and started playing." Immediately, though, Steel noticed that the club was rammed. "I was astonished at the atmosphere. As the Kansas City Five we'd struggled to get an audience but the interest in r'n'b was growing around the country. It was jammed and the condensation was running off the walls. I could feel little prickly hairs going up on the back of my neck. There was something going on."

Downbeat club owner Mike Jeffery had also noticed the swelling interest in r'n'b. The conveniently timed burning down of his unprofitable Marimba coffee bar provided an insurance windfall which enabled him to open a more promising venture, fondly remembered by Steel. "Mike rented the top floor of a curious Victorian building in Handyside Arcade. The ground floor was little shops, people who'd fix your washing machine or sell military medals or stamps. Two floors above that was two big rooms, one either side of the stairwell. That's what Mike turned into the Club A Gogo."

With residencies at The Downbeat and the A Gogo, plus another -promoted gig in the Victoria Hotel, Whitley Bay, the Combo was becoming lucrative, but very dependent on Jeffery. The insurance fraud at the Marimba was common knowledge around town, and he was known to have some dubious acquaintances but without him, gigs would be hard to come by. "We should have known then," admits Steel. "Right from the start we had trouble getting our money out of him. We were forever running from the Downbeat to the Gogo, trying to get paid."

It was during November that revered British organist Graham Bond brought his Graham Bond Organisation to play in Newcastle and was so impressed by his support group, that he raved about them to Yardbirds' agent Giorgio Gomelsky on return to London. "Jeffery then came down to see me in London with a demo of the Alan Price Combo and, although I didn't take to Jeffery - he seemed a slippery, worm-like character - I did like the sound of the band. So I told him we'd be able to do business."

When Bond's manager, the well-connected Irish entrepreneur Ronan O'Rahilly stopped into the A Gogo to check out the band, Jeffery made a decisive move. He secured five signatures on a management contract. "Not one of these standard type-written things you get nowadays," recalls Steel, "but a big, fancy one with scroll writing and red seals on, like you'd buy from a gift shop. Anyway, we didn't know shit from clay, so we just signed up."

The obvious question is why, given what they knew of Jeffery's shady dealings, dubious connections and unwillingness to pay them for gigs, did the band sign up? Burdon has no doubts. "We were young, dumb and full of come as they say. Also, we believed that you needed a bit of a street shark to get you where you wanted to be. The problem is, how do you measure that kind of guy? During wartime, they get medals and call them heroes, and when peace comes they rob banks."

One of the music industry's most enigmatic figures, Jeffery went on not only to screw The Animals, but to divest Jimi Hendrix of most of the cash he earned, before disappearing when a DC-9, inbound to London from Majorca, crashed on 5 March 1973. His body was never recovered and even those who worked closely with him for years knew little about him. "He came out of the south, from where I still don't know, and entered Newcastle University," says Burdon. "When I was at college, he gave me the only professional job I ever had, which was designing the Club A Gogo."

Steel has nothing much to add. "He seemed to us like an older, more mature guy. He always wore tinted glasses, black suit, white shirt, black tie, black hair. Good-looking guy in a James Bond-ish way. He claimed to have been in British Military Intelligence in Egypt, but you never really knew. You just had to take Mike's word for it. He was devious. He could have been phenomenally successful if he'd just done things straight, but he seemed to prefer his corkscrew method."

Chas Chandler, who later worked with him as co-manager of Hendrix, put it even more succinctly, characterising Jeffery as, "A thief. A double-dealing, lying bastard. Simple as that."

Burdon's other nugget of Jeffery-lore is a jaw-dropper. He maintains that the Michael Caine gangster classic Get Carter was inspired in toto by the Tyneside clubland Mafioso that Jeffery ran with. "The only thing the director changed was to make their business pornography rather than music."

Once installed as manager, Jeffery moved fast to secure a band-swap with Gomelsky, via which The Yardbirds played in Newcastle, while the newly re-christened Animals spent a week in London, mostly playing at Ronan O'Rahilly's Scene Club, the ultimate mod hangout. "We did our first gig in London on 12 December," says Steel, "stayed for ten days and got