Best of the 60's

If this Dutch compilation had been titled "Best of 1964-1965," it would have accurately described the contents. At the time, the Animals were signed to Britain's EMI label, which released the band's records through its Columbia subsidiary (no relation to the U.S. Columbia). They were also working with producer Mickie Most. At the start of 1966, they left EMI and Most, switching to the Decca label and producer Tom Wilson. (These differences would have been more apparent to U.K. fans than American ones, since their recordings continued to be licensed to MGM in the U.S.) During 1964-1965, the Animals gradually evolved from an R&B and blues-influenced group playing covers of material by the likes of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and John Lee Hooker into more of a pop/rock unit. That development was still ongoing at the end of 1965, and while this album contains all of the group's first seven American Top 40 hits, U.S. listeners will miss "Inside Looking Out" and "Don't Bring Me Down," which scored in the first half of 1966 after the U.K. label shift and thus are not included. In a sense, though, the cutoff comes too late rather than too early, since there are tracks like "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" and "It's My Life" that came in the second half of 1965, after the departure of organist Alan Price, who, along with singer Eric Burdon, helped define the Animals' early sound. The bulk of the album is devoted to the group's covers of songs like "Boom Boom" and "Memphis, Tennessee," and those 1965 hits arguably come from the group's second phase with what seems, from purely a fan's point of view, to be an arbitrary interruption. As such, Best of the 60's is not a fully satisfying sampler of the Animals' hits, though it does contain many of their most popular recordings. ~ William Ruhlmann