There has been another passing involving one of the significant bands of the ’60s. Danny McCulloch, the man who replaced Chas Chandler after Chandler left The Animals to go on and produce Jimi Hendrix, has passed away. Though he was not a well-known name, he did play an important role in Eric Burden diving more deeply in the progressive nature of the ’60s music scene as the decade passed from one end to the other. This was when The Animals went from being a strict Blues band to a more international band with a sound owing to the psychedelic movement.
People like to categorize things-like calling music psychedelic, for instance. It was all great music and it moved forward. It needed no label. As a result, someone like McCulloch needed no label to work with. He just brought his roots and his talent and ended up fitting right in for a few albums.
When I was a child, my first exposure to Eric Burdon & The Animals was through The Twain Shall Meet album. The first anti-war song to ever become embedded in my mind was “Sky Pilot”. “Monterey” painted a picture of all of these musicians that I would end up discovering over the course of years.
I would be completely remiss if I didn’t mention to you the one song that I discovered in the ’70s that shook me to my core. I first heard “When I Was Young” on KSAN-FM in San Francisco. When I heard the guitar intro and then the bass line, I was being thrown into Burden’s version of postwar England in the misty grey of the reality of life. McCulloch helped to give the song the drive it needed to nail that point home perfectly clear. Life is grey to go with the terrible darkness. For that, I thank him for using his talent in order to make songs like that come alive as well as ones such as “Sky Pilot”.
Danny McCulloch
1945-2015
RIP
–Steve Talia