The Animals - Radiohuset, Stockholm, Sweden, 1-18-1968

As I get older, the issue of sound quality becomes more important to me. Life's too short, and there's too much good music out there, to listen to a murky bootleg, unless there's something extraordinary about it. When it comes to the Animals in the 1960s, it's amazing to me that there's virtually no worthy sounding concert recording of them... except for this one, which sounds great. This comes pretty late in the day, in the last year of the band's existence, and it's fairly short, at 39 minutes. But the key thing is the sound quality is excellent, as good as an officially released live album from the 1960s, and the performance is spot on as well. So here you are.

(By the way, there is one soundboard concert bootleg of the band in Italy in 1967, but it's so badly mixed, with the voice way too loud compared to the rest, that it doesn't pass muster for me. And there's an official album of the band in concert from 1963, but most of that has them backing up blues legend Sonny Boy Williamson, so I don't count that one. There also is a great recording of them playing at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, but that's only four songs long, not enough for an album.)

In this last week, I posted four albums of the Animals playing at the BBC. There's a lot of overlap between the songs on that and the songs here. But with this, the band gets to stretch out more than they typically did at the BBC, and you get banter between songs.

01 talk (Animals)
02 I'm So Excited (Animals)
03 It's My Life Baby (Animals)
04 Tobacco Road (Animals)
05 talk (Animals)
06 Yes I Am Experienced (Animals)
07 talk (Animals)
08 San Franciscan Nights (Animals)
09 talk (Animals)
10 Monterey (Animals)
11 talk (Animals)
12 Paint It, Black (Animals)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15471463/TAnimls_1968_RdiohustStockhlmSwedn__1-18-1968_atse.zip.html

It looks like the album cover photo was taken from a TV show appearance in 1967 or later, judging by the clothes and the decor, but I don't know the details.