The Animals - I'm Gonna Change the World

The Animals

Listen – I’m Gonna Change the World- MP3

Howdy.
I hope everyone had a cool weekend (literally and figuratively) and your ready for a little bit of heat.
One of the first records I ever sought out back when I was round about 13 was the mid-70’s Abcko ‘Best of the Animals’.
Like a zillion other people, the first Animals tune I heard and fell in love with was of course ‘House of the Rising Sun’.
A little bit further down the road I was watching a French movie on PBS (the title of which has long since slipped from my fevered brain), in which a group of teenagers gathered in a friends room to play records. The first record they put on blew my mind, and it wasn’t until weeks later – while listening to WCBS-FM – that it was identified for me as ‘It’s My Life’ by the Animals.
That was the song that I was searching for when I grabbed the ‘Best of…’ from a stall at the Englishtown Flea Market (known locally as ‘The Auction’). Oddly enough, if memory serves I bought that record from a weird old hippie dude (with a dog named Satan) who I ended up working for briefly a few years later.
Anyway….
That LP became – along with the old Best of Cream (the one with the vegetables on the cover), and my Beatles albums – a cornerstone of my musical growth.
Some years later, during my 80’s garage punk period I became acquainted with the later period, psyched out Animals of ‘Sky Pilot’, ‘Monterey’ and ‘San Franciscan Nights’.
Flash forward 20 years, and aside from a few old 45s and the CD re-ish of the ‘psychedelic’ Anmals stuff, I realized that I didn’t have any of their old-school bangers, so I went looking. I ended up grabbing a cool 2-CD EMI comp* which included the best of their bluesy stuff, as well as their early pop-slanted singles like ‘It’s My Life’.
The biggest surprise for me in that set was a tune that I had never heard before, which it turns out was the b-side of the song that made me seek out the Animals in the first place some 30 years before.
That tune – and today’s selection – was ‘I’m Gonna Change the World’.
This is one of those tunes that just about lit my ears up and required immediate multiple replays.
The best Animals records – for me anyway – are those cuts where they still have roots in the John Lee Hooker covers of their breakout 45s, but are reaching into the pop void and – like so many pickup bands in garages all over America – were stumbling upon the fusion that would become known as 60’s punk.
Written by Eric Burdon, the tune has a great guitar riff, pumping combo organ and gruffly delivered socially charged lyrics.
It’s a killer.
Peace
Larry

Buy – the Complete Animals – at Amazon.com

*By the sound of the MP3 you may surmise correctly that I have since gotten a copy of this particular 45….

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