#163
1980 Housekeeping
Eric Burdon’s Fire Dept.
Last Drive
Genre: Mick Jagger Junior
2.75 out of 5
Highlights:
Atom-Most-Fear
So, after my band finished our proper album I was asked by our guitarist, the late Iden Kamishin, what was next. Was I working on any songs? What did I want to do to follow up that record?
I hadn’t really been working on anything but I did suggest that I was thinking of a concept album about California, about living in Los Angeles. Sort of keying off my least liked song on our record, a song about pursuing what are ultimately empty dreams, “Pyrite”. But the idea would have been to have each member of the band write something about their experiences or suggest ideas and backdrops and that I would flesh those out and that would be our concept record.
I broke up the band instead of doing that and, to be honest, looking over notes from that time, the world was lucky to have not heard a concept album by a band fronted by an actor who was a tourist in the club rock scene.
I’m reminded of this while listening to Burdon’s second album of 1980. Because I know that Eric was an actor as well as a singer and he was probably as good an actor as he was a singer (I say this with love, that is how I would describe myself, too) and this sounds like what an actor who isn’t really a singer sounds like.
In closing, this record is about what I would have expected Throttle Back Sparky’s California album to be like inasmuch as it’s not great and just reminds you that would probably never liked the band in the first place.
It’s around “Bird on the Beach” that it becomes obvious that Eric came from the same school of vox as Mick Jagger and I don’t know who stole from whom but the comparison is impossible to ignore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFhdGSV48xk&list=PLlvn8uktX5Lv2o4r0v_nkDWli_ocbbKtG
