One Hit No More, No. 41, Eric Burdon & War: The Burden of Burdon

Necessary springboard?

The Hit
I assume, without investigation, that the context in which you first heard 1970’s “Spill the Wine” went almost all the way in terms of shaping how seriously you take it. Even that assumes that anyone takes that song seriously…

Of which, I’ve now confirmed, via Lonnie Jordan, but to multiple sources, the actual lyrics to the chorus of “Spill the Wine.” In his own words (from a decent 2018 interview with Entertainment Today):

“You know, in recording “Spill the Wine” he improvised the song. The chorus [‘spill the wine, take that pearl’], people think it is ‘girl.’ But it is ‘pearl,’ that’s the lady’s nether regions.”

For the record, learning this information did not impress my wife. Still, the part about Eric Burdon, formally and made famous via The Animals, improvising the daffy story at the heart of the song makes the whole thing a little more impressive. It’s hardly high art - it’s more a “holy shit” brag about the things Burdon gets to do (and a bit Playboy cliché), and a “story” only in that sense - but that’s one hell of a jam playing under it. The instruments War played were old as rock ‘n’ roll, but they got something new out of them - at least in actually popular music, aka, the stuff that charts. “Spill the Wine” rose high enough to put Eric Burdon & War on the map and to set them touring across Europe over 1970 and 1971…

…not bad for a band that came together half by design and half by accident. Oh, and to finish the thought, I think I first heard this song in my early 20s and it was presented ironically. No offense to all concerned, but that really stuck. Once you're the butt of a joke, and for whatever reason...

The Rest of the Story
“It is hard to put a label on us, it is hard to put a library card on us. Tower Records had us in a lot of departments, jazz, reggae, RnB. Universal Street Music, that is what I call us.”

First, that's the framing of War as a band out of the way. Second, I was more interested in War than Eric Burdon & War after hearing four albums all of once. I’ve still never made it through The Black-Man’s Burdon, their 1970 follow-up to Eric Burdon Declares War, and I know I never will, not unless someone pays me to do it (note: it wouldn’t take a lot). Critiques of the album aside, Burdon checked out after they recorded it - and in the middle of a European tour. I’ve read a couple reasons for the split and, as much as I like the artistic romance of “he got bored and left,” Jordan told a gentler version to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2019:

“Eric left on a good note. Eric was having issues with his record label at the time, and he didn’t want us to be part of the chaos and the red tape, and bailed on us on a good note and gave us his blessing. He knew we had the fire to continue.”

Jordan’s version makes more sense, or at least it did to me after reading a little about how Burdon and War got together. They started as The Creators in 1962 and with two members - Howard E. Scott (guitar/vocals) and Harold Ray Brown (drums/vocals; they’re all on vocals, so I’ll just list instruments going forward) - but they added, first, Jordan (keyboards), Charles Miller (sax) and Morris “B.B.” Dickerson (bass), then later Lee Oskar (harmonica), and “Papa Dee” Allen (uh, drums?). They bumped along as The Creators until they got hooked up as (I think) a house band with Deacon Jones, a defensive end for the Los Angeles Rams (a very good one, apparently), who owned a nightclub and fronted a band(?). Next slide…

That’s where a decently established producer named Jerry Goldstein (“My Boyfriend’s Back,” “Hang on Sloopy,” and “I Want Candy” (this one's by The Strangeloves, Goldstein's original band) found them. A (circa) 2018 interview with Best Classic Bands hints that Goldstein brought Burdon to see the-band-that-would-be-War play behind Deacon Jones and they opted to elevate them as a backing band to Eric Burdon.

Regardless of how it happened, War hit their peak after Burdon left - and after their eponymous debut stalled. All Day Music went gold in 1972 on the back of the singles, “All Day Music” and “Slippin’ into Darkness” and the two songs you’re mostly likely to know by War - “Lowrider” (original video, btw) and “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” (both co-written by Goldstein, incidentally) - didn’t drop until 1975’s Why Can’t We Be Friends? They actually scaled their highest heights in the middle of all that with 1972’s The World Is a Ghetto…which happens to be the one album I listened to once and moved on. Whatever I think of it - or “The Cisco Kid,” which set War’s high-water mark on the Billboard at No. 2 - it also sold went down as the same outlet’s best-selling album for 1973.

They had still more hits between all that - another 1973 album, Deliver the Word (also skipped), included two more hits - “Gypsy Man” and “Me and My Baby Brother,” which may or may not have peaked at No. 8 and No. 15, respectively - and they recorded a one-off for the famed Blue Note jazz label titled Platinum Jazz…which I also didn’t listen to, but that one…that one I will catch up on for, not this playlist, but the one after. At any rate, yes, War only lines up under the “one-hit wonder” banner if you confine the question to Eric Burdon & War. Then again, “Tobacco Road” was a pretty damn solid song and, based on how often I see it pop up in their collections, I’m guessing it was fairly well-received.

War didn’t end so well as a band, sadly. A battle over royalties boiled over in 1996 and that resulted in Scott, Howard, Osker and, later, Dickerson to leave to form The Lowrider Band. They toured as separate bands for some time after that, and I can confirm that Jordan was still touring, even as recently as 2018 (and despite confessing to a failing memory in every video interview I’ve seen with him, even in the years prior). All the same, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of bitterness among anyone. Or at least Jordan doesn’t seem to care (see the end of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette piece).

About the Sampler
When a Wikipedia entry doesn’t want to actually say anything about a band, the Wikeditors often resort to listing albums, tours and festival dates…and, Jesus Christ, how did I forget to mention that Jimi Hendrix played with Eric Burdon & War (that’s both together) the night before Jimi slipped his mortal coil? Yessir, September 18, 1970.

At any rate, I slipped into that a bit above, but largely in the service of showing how big War got as a band in the first half of the 1970s. To finally get to the sampler, because I liked so much of it, I spent enough time in (parts of) War’s catalog to select my own set of favorites. I also took a deliberate run at appreciating their late catalog - specifically, 1994’s Peace Sign (represented by “Da Roof,” though the title track is solid, even if it didn’t make the cut) and 2014’s Evolutionary (represented by bright numbers like “That L.A. Sunshine” and “Inspiration”).

For War’s main, original catalog, I spent most of my time on their debut (“Sun Oh Son” and “Back Home” (turns out that's a tough google search), both very mellow and contemplative), All Day Music (the two songs already linked to above, plus the wire-tense “Get Down”), plus, as a very late addition, three from their 1977 album Galaxy (“Baby Face,” “Hey Senorita” and, because I wanted to include one of their many long-ass jams, “The Seven Tin Soldiers,” but the title track was an ode to Star Wars, apparently). Finally, or at least it’s the last thing I intend to mention, I can’t recommend “The Jungle - Medley” strongly enough as an artifact of both its era and an example of how fucking long this country has had the same broken conversation about the same broken things…shit.