There is a house in New Orleans...

Along with early Beach Boys and Beatles hits, and the Eagles ‘Hotel California’, the Animals version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is one of the first songs I can remember really getting into when I was growing up.

It could have been the slow and menacing tune – pretty unique on the ‘60s nostalgia pop airwaves – and the bluesy intensity of the performance that initially made my young self sit up and take notice, but probably the main reason is that, then as now, I love a song that tells a good story, or at least has interesting lyrics from which you can build a story, and ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is a prime example.

When I first listened to it, I was too young to understand what the song was about, and the mystery of it had me completely transfixed – what could possibly be going on in this house that was so terrible it drove young men to sin and madness? What strange power drew them to it? Whatever it was, it was clearly so awful that instead of elaborating upon it, the singer decides instead to tell us about what his parents do for a living in a tone of equally passionate dread, suggesting that the evil of The House has forever affected his outlook on everyday life. (Presumably the social status implications of being the son of a tailor and a gambler were also lost on me as a child.) My obvious conclusion – well it must be a haunted house, full of unspeakable ghosts and horrors. The young men must dare each other to go in, and emerge as hopeless wrecks, their lives ruined by the stark, screaming terror they had witnessed within.

Man, that organ solo used to chill me to the very bone!

As you can imagine, realising a few years later that it’s actually just about a brothel or something was a huge disappointment. But it’s still an absolutely astonishing song, a classic of the first water. It’s one of those songs like ‘Hey Joe’ or ‘Louis Louis’ that, although it nominally has a composer and publishing company attached to it, has basically become public domain – it’s sufficiently simple for anybody to pick up on, play and remember, and malleable enough for them to concoct their own personal variations on it, without ever losing sight of it’s essential power. Different emphasis can be put on it to hint at issues of race, gender, poverty or just the good ol’ religious good/evil, salvation/damnation angle, not forgetting the aura of vague, nameless dread that so captured my childhood imagination. And just like with the slightly older canon of folk and roots music, listening to the different versions and copping the bits you like isn’t so much stealing as adapting the material to hand to construct your own ‘perfect’ version.

My perfect version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ doesn’t actually exist (yet). It would go as follows; firstly, it would have to stick to the pre-Animals version of the lyrics that comes from a female perspective, as heard on Bob Dylan’s version – “..it’s been the ruin of many a poor girl..”, “..my sweetheart was a gambler..” etc. It would be sung by somebody with a really rough, gutsy voice and backed by a really mean and wild Southern/desert roots-rock type ensemble capable of churning up a whole load of brooding, volatile ‘gathering storm’ type racket. See, don’t get me wrong, the Animals version is a real powerful cut and no mistake, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s just a little bit too FORMAL, and doesn’t quite nail the ragged glory I think the song deserves...

Rather than relying entirely on the well practised aggrepio pattern used by most versions, I wanna hear the guitarist going for it with a bit more feeling, alternating between a few bits of finger-picking and then just thrashing the chords for all they’re worth. There should be a violin in there somewhere too. And I wanna hear the whole band really stepping out and the guitarist really bringing on the fuzz and feedback as the singer howls into “I GOT ONE FOOT ON THE PLATFORM...” – they could even launch into a flailing, fucked up take on the Animals organ solo before collapsing back into the rhythm of the song to let it pound itself out.

It would be so good – can’t you just hear it now? We should round up, say, Carla Bozulich, Nels Cline and the Dirty Three and make it happen.

So anyway, what’s your perfect version?