Eric Burden Squinty Eyes

The British rock & soul band, The Animals, included legendary band members Eric Burdon and Chas Chandler, the latter being known in history as the man who discovered Jimi Hendrix. In the mid sixties, the group became popular with their #1 hit "House of the Rising Sun" and a string of other blues-based hits.  But by 1966 the group had disbanded and Burdon and drummer Barry Jenkins reformed the group as Eric Burdon and the Animals.

Their first studio album for the new group was “Eric Is Here,” which featured the hit single "Help Me Girl", released in December 1966 and so they were touring behind this album when they hit San Francisco for one night in March 1967. 4 nights later the band played across the Bay in Oakland. In a few weeks the band would release, “When I was Young” with a B side “A Girl Named Sandoz,” Sandoz being the company that invented LSD…

Of all the people to have lived through the Utopian Dream of San Francisco in the late 1960s, none seemed more changed by the experience than Eric Burden. He spent about 10 days in the Bay Area during and around these two shows where he was said to have taken LSD, hung out with Janis Joplin and enjoyed a rare run of quite warm Spring evenings.

This led to the song, San Franciscan Nights (#9 in US charts and #1 in  Canada) released in August 1967, which included a spoken dedication by Burdon "to the city and people of San Francisco, who may not know it but they are beautiful and so is their city", with Burdon urging European residents to "save up all your bread and fly Trans Love Airways to San Francisco, U.S.A.," to enable them to "understand the song", and "for the sake of your own peace of mind".

Eric Burdon and the Animals also performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in June and released a single later that year, “Monterey,” which recounted the scene in great detail (#15 in US charts). In his book, Monterey Pop, Joel Selvin wrote that, at the festival, "Burdon did nothing short of reinventing himself in front of the audience."