| "We Gotta Get out of This Place" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single by The Animals | ||||
| from the album Animal Tracks | ||||
| B-side | "I Can't Believe It" | |||
| Released | July 1965 (UK) September 1965 (U.S.) |
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| Format | 7" single | |||
| Recorded | 1965 | |||
| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 3:17 | |||
| Label | Columbia Graphophone (UK) MGM Records (U.S.) |
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| Writer(s) | Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil | |||
| Producer | Mickie Most | |||
| The Animals singles chronology | ||||
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"We Gotta Get out of This Place", occasionally written "We've Gotta Get out of This Place",[1] is a rock song written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and recorded as a 1965 hit single by The Animals. It has become an iconic song of its type and was immensely popular among United States Armed Forces during the Vietnam War.
In 2004 it was ranked number 233 on Rolling Stone's The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list; it is also in The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll list.
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Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were husband and wife (and future Hall of Fame) songwriters associated with the 1960s Brill Building scene in New York City.[2]
"We Gotta Get out of This Place" was written and recorded as a demo by Mann and Weil, with Mann singing and playing piano. It was intended for The Righteous Brothers (for whom they had written the epic hit "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"), and indeed the demo almost sounds like a Righteous Brothers recording, with the piano supplying the easily-recognized bass line and both a pop and blue-eyed soul feeling accompanying the foreboding lyrics.[3] But then Mann gained a recording contract for himself, and his label Redbird Records wanted him to release it instead. Meanwhile, record executive Allen Klein had heard it and given the demo to Mickie Most, the producer for The Animals. Most already had a call out to Brill Building songwriters for material for the group's next recording session (the Animals hits "It's My Life" and "Don't Bring Me Down" came from the same call[4]), and The Animals recorded it before Mann could.[3]
In The Animals' rendition, the lyrics were slightly reordered and reworded from the demo, and opened with what seemed to be a reference to their industrial, working class Northern England origins:
Next comes a verse about the singer's father at the end of his life with little to show for it, followed by one of The Animals' call-and-response buildups, finally leading through delayed tension to the well-known chorus:
The arrangement featured a unique bass lead, played by Chas Chandler. It also included unusual organ work from Dave Rowberry. Eric Burdon's vocals range from a calm whisper to a primal roar. Rolling Stone described the overall effect as a "harsh white-blues treatment from the Animals. As singer Eric Burdon put it, 'Whatever suited our attitude, we just bent to our own shape.'"[5]
The song reached number 2 on the UK pop singles chart on August 14, 1965 (held out of the top slot by The Beatles' "Help!").[6] The following month, it reached number 13 on the U.S. pop singles chart, its highest placement there. In Canada the song also reached number 2, September 20, 1965.
In fact, the UK and U.S. single releases were different versions from the same recording sessions. The take that EMI, The Animals' parent record company, sent to MGM Records, the group's American label, was mistakenly one that had not been selected for release elsewhere. The lyric most used to spot the difference is at the beginning of the second verse: the U.S. version went "See my daddy in bed a-dyin'," while the UK version went "Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'." It is not surprising there were differences among takes; even during later Animals performances, Burdon would ad lib or alter lyrics of the song.
In the U.S. the song (in its "mistaken" take) was included on the album Animal Tracks, released fall 1965, and again on the popular compilation The Best of The Animals released in 1966. The song was not on any British Animals album during the group's lifetime.
Once Animals reissues began occurring during the compact disc era, Allen Klein, by now owner of ABKCO and the rights to this material, dictated that the "correct" British version be used on all reissues and compilations everywhere. Although The Animals' catalogue has always been chaotic, this decision was for the most part adhered to. Thus, as U.S. radio stations converted from vinyl records to CDs, gradually only the British version became heard. This dismayed collectors and fans in the U.S. (as evidenced by letters to Goldmine magazine), who believed that the U.S. version featured an angrier and more powerful vocal from Burdon, and who in any case wanted to hear the song in the form that they had grown up with. Finally with the 2004 remastered SACD Retrospective compilation from ABKCO, the U.S. version was included.
At the time, the title and simple emotional appeal of "We Gotta Get out of This Place" lent itself to some obvious self-identifications — for instance, it was a very popular number to be played at high school senior proms and graduation parties.
More notably, the song was very popular with United States Armed Forces members stationed in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was frequently requested of, and played by, American Forces Vietnam Network disc jockeys.[7] During 2006 two University of Wisconsin–Madison employees, one a Vietnam veteran, began an in-depth survey of hundreds of Vietnam veterans, and found that "We Gotta Get out of This Place" had resonated the strongest among all the music popular then: "We had absolute unanimity is this song being the touchstone. This was the Vietnam anthem. Every bad band that ever played in an armed forces club had to play this song."[8] Indeed, just such a band played the song in an episode ("USO Down", by Vietnam veteran Jim Beaver) of the American television series about the war, Tour of Duty, and the song is reprised in the episode's final scene.
The iconic "We Gotta Get out of This Place" was also used in Dennis Potter's late 1965 television play Stand Up, Nigel Barton and in the BBC's 1996 Newcastle-set Our Friends in the North, which partially took place in the 1960s. In America it was used as the title credits song in some episodes of the Vietnam War-set television series China Beach. It was then applied to the Bin Laden family, having to leave the United States in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, in Michael Moore's 2004 Fahrenheit 9/11. It also was featured memorably in the soundtrack in the 1987 movie Hamburger Hill. It was used in a third-season episode of the 2000s television series Heroes, in a brief montage that showed some of the characters on the run from the law, and a serial killer with super powers expressing his desire to be the only one of his kind left.
The song's title and theme have become a common cultural phrase over the years.
It formed the basis for the title of academician Lawrence Grossberg's We Gotta Get out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (1992), detailing the conflict between American conservatism and rock culture. Similarly, it formed the title basis for Gerri Hirshey's 2002 account, We Gotta Get out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock.
It has also been used as the title of editorials by American Journalism Review[9] and other publications. The title was even used to name an art exhibit, curated by Stefan Kalmar at the Cubitt Gallery in London in 1997.
As a ready-made anthem, "We Gotta Get out of This Place" has been recorded or performed in concert by numerous artists, including The Partridge Family (1972), Bruce Springsteen (performed only a handful of times in his career, but acknowledged by him as one of his primary influences in the 1970s[10]), Udo Lindenberg (in a German language adaption in the 1970s for which commercial success was small), Blue Öyster Cult (1978), Steve Bender (1978), Gilla (1979), Angelic Upstarts (1980), Grand Funk Railroad (1981), David Johansen (1982, and a hit on album oriented rock radio and MTV as part of an Animals medley), Fear (1982), Richard Thompson (1988), Jello Biafra and D.O.A. (1989), Randy Stonehill (1990), Bon Jovi (1992, again as part of an Animals medley for an MTV special), Midnight Oil (1993, for their MTV Unplugged), Space (1998), Grand Funk Railroad (a 1982 live performance first released in 1999), Southside Johnny (concerts in the 2000s), Widespread Panic (2005), Ann Wilson with Wynonna Judd (2007), and Alice Cooper (2011) and many others.
In 1990 Eric Burdon returned to the song, joining Katrina and the Waves for a recording of it for use by the aforementioned China Beach. In 2000 Barry Mann revisited the song, performing it with Bryan Adams on Mann's retrospective solo album Soul & Inspiration. When Suzi Quatro was on a Germany tour in 2008 she came on stage and played bass on "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" during an Eric Burdon concert at the Porsche Arena in Stuttgart. Burdon also performed it in 2010 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, when songwriters Mann and Weil were inducted.[11]