Excellent soundboard recording of Eric Burdon's performance at the Westbury Music Fair on the 25th. of June, 1986. The year 1986 is a "lost" year in the Eric Burdon catalogue, with no new releases or available bootlegs (except this one). It's released on Hiwatt records (Japan?) under the name of Searching For A Brand New Day - drawing on the title of one of the tracks performed here (the only live version, as far as I know).

This actually isn't such a bad name, because this was sort of what Eric was doing at the time. He'd just published his first autobiography, and had a record deal for the first time in years. I think you can sort of feel the positive vibe in this concert, and Eric's in much better shape than last year's official live release - That's Live (recorded in March 1985). Sadly, the whole project crumbled (as so many times before), and the multi-media autibiographical project called I Used To Be An Animal was more or less ruined. The book was heavily edited, and the CD album which was supposed to accompany the book, wasn't released until 1988, and then on vinyl. This lead to many of the (best) songs being left off the record (like Storyville and Front Street), and there are several bootlegs circulating with alternate songs/versions from these sessions... The 1995 official album Lost Within The Halls Of Fame is a more true presentation of what I Used To Be An Animal was supposed to be. Here are the spoken word intros for the songs included, and more songs made it onto this release. Sadly, Lost... is the synth-based version of I Used... and thus isn't that great an album.

That makes this concert is a unique document of Eric's artistic visions at this point of time, and it's kind of sad hearing how inspired it sounds, thinking of what actually came out of his hopes and dreams in the years after.

Ripped from the original "release" in lossless wave. Convertion, checksum created and torrent made with Trader's Little Helper.

CD1
01 - It's My Life
02 - DOn't Bring Me Down
03 - Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
04 - No More Elmore
05 - The Riff: Tobacco Road/Bring It On Home To Me/See See Rider
06 - When We Were A Gang
07 - Factory (Working Life)
08 - We Gotta Get Out Of This Place

CD2

01 - River Deep - Mountain High
02 - Searching For A Brand New Day
03 - I'm Crying
04 - House Of The Rising Sun


Enjoy,


M.