Although there’s absolutely no question that Eric Burdon and his various backing units of Animals have delivered a heapin’ helpin’ of raunched-out rock and roll righteousness over the years, he sadly was never able to sustain the creative peak that he hit after his lysergic bliss-out at the Ronsonol-soaked feet of Jimi Hendrix on the mainstage at the historic Monterey Pop Festival. This spawned, of course, Burdon’s self-penned FM radio classic, “Monterey,” but even so, it was only the start of Eric Burdon’s brief but ferociously fertile “psychedelic” period.

But even after the chemical buffoonery of “New Animals” numbers of that period such as “Yes, I Am Experienced,” “Winds Of Change” and the beat minimalist work-out “Man-Woman,” Eric must have known he’d gone too far with this number, a stylin’ 17-minute free-form flang-o-delic freak-out with more separate sections than you could reasonably hope to keep track of while under the influence of any of the better known recreational drugs, much the same as Arthur Lee must have at least for a split-second, considered the fact that including his 25 minute epic “Revelation” on the “Four Sail” album was sheer commercial suicide. In other words, offendi, the “track” we’re currently in the process of analyzing is definitely not another “House Of The Rising Sun” or “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

Still, our plucky droogie Eric pressed on, and in this case, on and on and on and on and on and on with the epic muse that at that point in time, circa 1968, had inspired him to include this mesmerizingly mendacious marathon as the ultimate climax of a self-pleasing double album issued under the timely, for that post Summer Of Luv summer, title of “Love Is.”

Eric takes the duality inherent in both the song title and the astrological sign and, in a stroke of what he must have called genius, records a duet with himself, bouncing back from speaker to speaker in a spectacular display of double tracking. Well, it’s OK, anyway. For those of y’all on the “prog” tip, this could be some kind of peak listening experience for all I know. You know the cats in Yes and Genesis were giving this a serious listen or 300 as they smoked those great big English hash joints after graduating from those posh private schools they all went to. 

After a suitably flipped out space echo sojourn, Eric and his tape double have a brief exchange worthy of the mighty “Tap” themselves:

“There is only my side.”
“No, there are two.”
“In that case, there must be three sides…”

Huh? Did we hear that right? Well, whether or not we did, this song’s too long to waste time hitting the rewind button. 

Much of the song’s final ten minutes are taken up with the relelentless singing of what can only be the song’s chorus, “Cause I’m a Gemini…” as a Lord Sutch style backup vocal corpse replies “Gemini…” Oh, and there’s a whole nother song there, too, called, “The Madman,” but to be perfectly honest, by the time we got to that we’d untangled the last of the Bulgarian cooking fungus and had, through dogged persistence, beaten and shaped it into the crude pattern of a starfish, the better to divide it up for our next mission, which apparently was to find all the socks Elvis Presley lost in his dryer between 1968 and 1972.

It’s a deep fucking hole, but somebody’s gotta dig it…