the animals " we gotta get out of this place " mono to stereo mix. 16 July 1965 (UK)
August 1965 (U.S.)
Recorded
15 June 1965
Genre
Rock
Label
Columbia Graphophone (UK)
MGM (U.S.)
Songwriter(s)
Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil
Producer(s)
Mickie Most
"We Gotta Get out of This Place", occasionally written "We've Gotta Get out of This Place", is a rock song written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and recorded as a 1965 hit single by The Animals. It has become an iconic song of its type and was immensely popular with United States Armed Forces GIs during the Vietnam War.
Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil were husband and wife (and future Hall of Fame) songwriters associated with the 1960s Brill Building scene in New York City.
Mann and Weil wrote and recorded "We Gotta Get out of This Place" as a demo, with Mann singing and playing piano. It was intended for The Righteous Brothers, for whom they had written the number one hit "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'"but then Mann gained a recording contract for himself, and his label Red Bird Records wanted him to release it instead. Meanwhile, record executive Allen Klein had heard it and gave the demo to Mickie Most, The Animals' producer. Most already had a call out to Brill Building songwriters for material for the group's next recording session (The Animals hits "It's My Life" and "Don't Bring Me Down" came from the same call, and The Animals recorded it before Mann could.
The two versions.....
The UK and US single releases were different versions from the same recording sessions. The take that EMI, The Animals' parent record company, sent to MGM Records, the group's American label, was mistakenly one that had not been selected for release elsewhere. The two versions are most easily differentiated by the lyric at the beginning of the second verse: in the US version the lyric is, "See my daddy in bed a-dyin'", while the UK version uses, "Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin'" (as a result of an error by the music labels, certain online retailers sell the UK version but incorrectly identify it as the US version).
In the US the song (in its "mistaken" take) was included on the album Animal Tracks, released in the fall 1965, and again on the popular compilation The Best of The Animals released in 1966 and re-released with an expanded track list on the ABKCO label in 1973. The song was not on any British Animals album during the group's lifetime.
Once Animals reissues began occurring during the compact disc era, Allen Klein, by then owner of ABKCO and the rights to this material, dictated that the "correct" British version be used on all reissues and compilations everywhere. Thus, as US radio stations converted from vinyl records to CDs, gradually only the British version became heard. Some collectors and fans in the US wrote letters of complaint to Goldmine magazine, saying they believed the US version featured an angrier and more powerful vocal from Burdon, and in any case wanted to hear the song in the form they had grown up with. The 2004 remastered SACD Retrospective compilation from ABKCO included the US version, as well as the budget-priced compilation The Very Best of The Animals.
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