The Animals "The Best of The Animals" [1966]

Lots of rock music traditions got started with The Animals in the early-mid 60s, and they all suck. Amateur, high-in-the-mix organ playing, honkified approximations of sweaty old black bluesmen and brazen tunes about whorehouses can all be blamed directly on this stevedore version of the Rolling Stones. Eric Burdon consistently sings like a constipated grandpa, making way for a plethora of white-bread hacks on either side of the Atlantic (Ocean, not record label) to hawk their own brands of pedestrian garage crap -- and ones with the same shallow interests as dipshits who go into various other lines of work, like advertising on Madison Avenue or war profiteering at Kellogg, Brown and Root. Being rockers, the Animals' "grand scale" thinking is relative: they dream to "wear sable, one dayyy." Basically, these are young guys who were forced by their record label into Nehru jackets and love beads, only to be surprised their bastardization of John Lee Hooker and Bo Diddley tunes was met with utter derision by actual black people. Instead of imploding from drugs, The Animals went the unfortunate way of a much higher percentage of rock bands: ripped off by their manager, the bass player left to be a corporate music biz stooge, and Burdon dug his own grave by extending his clown show of faking black music until the top-heavy weight of his self-imposed buffoonery collapsed him in a heap of self-parody. Knowing what we know now, rock music should have just stopped there.