The “Golden Hits Of The 70s”
Main MenuConcept Refinement The Author..Wayne JancikGolden Age Of The 50sGolden Age Of The 60s1970s and There After
ERIC BURDON & WAR
“SPILL THE WINE”
(Howard Scott, Morris Dickerson, Harold
Brown, Charles Miller, Lonnie Jordan,
Sylvester Allen, Lee Oscar Levitin)
MGM 14118
No. 3 August 22, 1970
.
“Mother Blues,” a Memphis Slim tune, was the last music to ever to be executed by JIMI HENDRIX. Jimi
was reportedly depressed, holed up in his London apartment for months. The night of September 17,
1969, buddy Eric Burdon pursued Jimi to check out his new band, War, and to jam a tune or two. Later
that evening, he would take nine sleeping pills.
As lead singer of the Animals, Eric Burdon (b. May 11, 1941, Walker-on-Tyne, England) had helped create
some of the finest R & B-based British Invasion records. After a string of hits like “House of the Rising
Sun,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” “It’s My Life,” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” Eric
discovered LSD and led his New Animals through a psychedelic love-and-peace phase. Gentler and softer
singles followed: “San Francisco Nights,” “Monterey,” ”Anything.” In 1968, Burdon announced that the
album Love Is would be the group’s final record, and soon dropped out of sight.
Meanwhile, an early incarnation of War–a group called either the Creators, the Romeos, or Senior Soul–
was cutting unsuccessful sides. When Eric ran into them in L.A. in 1969, the band, redubbed Night Shift,
consisted of percussionist Sylvester “Papa Dee” Allen (b. July 19, 1931), drummer Harold Brown (b. Mar.
17, 1946), bassist B. B. Dickerson (b. Aug. 3, 1949), keyboardist Lonnie Jordan (b. Nov. 21, 1948), saxo
phonist Charles Miller (b. June 2, 1939), and guitarist Howard Scott (b. Mar. 15, 1946).
“We were playing in North Hollywood with Deacon Jones, the football-player-turned-singer,” Harold
Brown recalled to Rolling Stone. “One night we were sitting around waiting for the star to arrive. He
never did show up, but Eric Burdon and [harmonica virtuoso] Lee Oskar [b. Mar. 24, 1948, Denmark], a
musician from Copenhagen, did. Lee got up there, and we started doing this shuffle, it must have lasted
about 40 or 45 minutes…. When it was over, everybody’s mind was blown.”
In his autobiography, I Used to Be an Animal, but I’m All Right Now, Eric reports that he was penniless,
when the proposed union of he and the Night Shift happened–living on a Hollywood hill with a girlfriend
named Caroline, who sold psychedelic pillows door-to door. “She was hawking her wares in Beverly Hills
when she met two guys who said they wanted to manage me.” They were Far Out Productions, the Gold
Dust Twins, Jerry Goldstein and Steve Gold, “an ex-CPA and one-time stand-up comedian,” who at the
time was selling pop posters out of his office. “They were ruthless and vicious,” wrote Burdon, “one brain
with two mouths.”
The day after the jam, Eric invited Night Shift over to Goldstein’s pad in Benedict Canyon. Burdon offered
the guys co-billing if they would work for him as his back-up band. They agreed; Goldstein and Gold,
renamed the band War. “The deal,” Burdon explained, “was I’d give them talent and they’d give me the
tools I needed to move forward as an artist.”
“We started doing road shows with Eric–and I mean road shows in the real sense of the word. We took
seven band members plus our road manager, and a trailer on the back of a ’66 Ford station wagon that
was knocking before we even left California. We did that for two years.” Eric Burdon & War crafted a
soulful mix of Latin, funk, and jazz. Success finally materialized with “Spill the Wine” and its follow-up,
“They Can’t Take Away Our Music” (#50, 1971). Their collaboration generated two best-selling albums,
Eric Burdon Declares War (1970) and The Black Man’s Burdon (1970), but problems with the MGM label
beset the group.
“Right to this day [1973], I haven’t seen any kind of statements or money from MGM,” Brown complained.
“Steve [Gold] decided that he wasn’t going to let MGM have us, especially since they already had Eric all
tied up. So we became the first group in the history of the record business to get a gold record who wasn’t
signed to a record company.”
During a 1971 European tour with the group, an exhausted Burdon departed. Steve Gold negotiated a
contract for War with United Artists, and later that year, they released War. Burdon appeared in the flick
The Comeback (1978), as a fading rock star; teamed up with Jimmy Whitherspoon for an album and with
the German rock band Fire Engine for another poor selling LP; and moved into the ’90s in what proved a
low-keyed solo career. Meanwhile War scored on the charts with 45s like “Slippin’ Into Darkness” (#16,
1972), “The World Is a Ghetto” (#17, 1973), “Cisco Kid” (#2, 1973), “Low Rider” (#1, 1975), and “Why Can’t
We Be Friends?” (#6, 1975).