Me and My Friends #34 - A Hot Minute: Animal Bar
An album comes out, and you know the single. You’ve heard that a hundred times already. It’s imprinted on your brain to the point that it stands out like a mountainous peak on the album itself. By the time Stadium Arcadium arrived, I was so familiar with “Dani California” that I probably could have taken a two-year break from the song and not really missed anything. I had rinsed it completely.
When you hear an album for the first time, there are the songs that make themselves known. I remember “Wet Sand” and “Turn It Again” making the biggest immediate impression at the time; probably due to John’s guitar work. Then of course, “Snow” and “Tell Me Baby” got brought up as well, due to the nature of their being singles. In fact, the sticker that came stuck to the first pressing of the album revealed what one of those singles would be a few month’s early.
But there are those third-tier songs that take a little longer. Not third-tier in terms of quality of course, just the ones that don’t immediately jump out at you. You listen to a new album from a band you love for the first time and it’s overwhelming; you have no idea what you think about most of it, especially if it’s for a band that you adore, and you know you’ll be spending a lot of time with it in the future. It’s like being shown twenty-eight images and then being asked to recall them in detail and in order. For the first few goes-around, most of it is a blur. And for an album as long and as varied as Stadium Arcadium, it can be a little hard to nail down those immediate thoughts. You might know you like it, but there are first-time impressions, and there are the opinions that come with listen #45.
But as the weeks go by, you start to pick and mix, and dip in and out, and moments grab you from time to time. You realise what songs you love (“Slow Cheetah”) and what songs you feel less generous towards (“Especially in Michigan”); you pick up on things you missed the first time around, sometimes entire songs – the aspects that were previously overshadowed by those mountainous peaks.
The last minute of “Animal Bar” will always reminds me of that time, probably June of 2006, when I was just getting into those third-tier songs; when I was finally starting to memorize those twenty-eight blurry images; when the feelings of being overwhelmed settled down, and I could really get into some Pepper weeds.
The song itself is an interesting departure, one of those moments where the band is acting. In this case, they’re pretending to be Krautrock superstars, NEU! or Can. Of course, it still sounds like the band, but the band painting with different colours than normal. Flea’s bass is wonderfully hypnotic – in the SA album commentary, he talks about a rehearsal session where the three of them played that verse over and over for hours on end – and it’s interesting to note that there isn’t really a verse line from John, just those volume swells that fade in every couple of bars like waves lapping at a shore.
It’s a hypnotic song, but it’s also a slightly repetitive song; the “it won’t be long” sections, ironically, go on a little too long. But my favourite aspect of the track, and an example of the expert way that John put his mark all over the album via his extensive overdubbing and mixing, is the way the track builds towards the end, specifically in that last minute.
Anthony’s vocals at the end of every chorus line – frustration/break this/station/forsaken dissolve into a mess of modulated warbles, but only in that last chorus. It’s as if they’re channelled at the last second into a malfunctioning echo chamber. This development, the way a song builds throughout, adding pieces and pieces to each consecutive verse and chorus, happens frequently on the album. “Dani California” is one other prime example, but it’s in basically every song.
Without that little touch, that extra little serving of flavour, the song would actually wind up being fairly repetitive. But I find myself listening to it purely for that tiny touch in the final chorus, in that final minute. It reminds me of the transition from the first chorus into the second verse of “Never Is A Long Time”, where the whole song collapses in on itself in a very controlled way in the space of about a second. It sounds the way this GIF looks. The building blocks of the song are all nice, but it’s the little details that really make it, and keep me coming back.
And then, of course, John’s (intensely Robert Fripp-inspired) guitar solo comes in, and that could be an entire entry in itself.