Roxy Live Review

07/13/2005 7:00 AM, AMG


This album combines two previously released Eric Burdon live albums. Live at the Roxy (aka Roxy Live) comes from a show at the Roxy nightclub in Los Angeles recorded in 1976. Burdon, fronting a hard rock quintet, was introducing a group of politically oriented songs he had written for a proposed movie that never got made. Old hits "House of the Rising Sun" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" anchored the set, but even they were given radical rearrangements long on screaming guitar solos and echo-laden vocals. Greatest Hits Live (aka F#¢k Me...I Thought He Was Dead!!!) finds Burdon at the Metropol in Berlin in the early '80s performing a set full of old Animals hits for a movie that did get made, the documentary Comeback. Even here he changes words and arrangements. Tacked on at the end is an early-'70s performance of "House of the Rising Sun" from the Whiskey-a-Go-Go back in L.A. Taken together, the two albums give a sense of the way Burdon has spent his time since the mid-'70s: playing versions of his hits and forgettable originals in small clubs around the world. ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide