MOJO EYEWITNESS
A funk-soul-Latin-rock band from Long Beach, they collided with a lost Eric Burdon in 1969: together they got free, jammed with Hendrix and hit big with the acid-soaked Spill The Wine. War did even better after Eric jumped ship mid-tour, reaching US Number 1 with 1972’s conscious The World Is A Ghetto and setting stages alight. “We were musically waging war against war,” recall the group who rode a tank down Sunset Strip. “We never stopped.”
Harold Brown: [Guitarist] Howard Scott and I formed The Creators in 1961 when we were in high school. I was from Long Beach, he was from Compton. We wore blue jackets and I used to draw a moustache on with my mom’s eyebrow pencil to try and look older. We had Howard’s nephew Morris ‘BB’ Dickerson on bass and Lonnie Jordan on keyboards. We were one of the first black groups to play the Sunset Strip and we used to open for The Righteous Brothers and Ike & Tina Turner.
Lonnie Jordan: We did covers: Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, James Brown, Little Richard, Mongo Santamaría, Harry Belafonte. We were raw and real and that mix helped sketch out what War became.
HB: Howard got drafted in 1966. When he came home I said, Let’s give it one more chance, so we called ourselves Nightshift because I was a machinist on the nightshift. Papa Dee [Sylvester D Allen, percussionist] was on percussion. I’d seen him at a gas station, he was playing his bongos between his legs and conga in front of him. I’d never seen anything like it.
Lee Oskar: I was jamming at Thee Experience [on Sunset Boulevard] with Blues Image [in 1969] and Eric Burdon came in and played and we connected. The Animals were superstars to me and I was starstruck. We started playing together and I ended up sleeping on his couch.
Jerry Goldstein: I was a producer and writer in New York and I met Eric when The Animals played the Paramount and we stayed in touch. That was 1964, so fast forward five years to I’m in LA and he came to my office, he was despondent, said how he was giving up on music and going back to Newcastle. I was working with Nightshift, they were Latin, jazz, funk, rock, and I said he might be interested. We went to The Rag Doll in Hollywood, me, Eric and Lee Oskar to see them.
