#06 - Dogs from Animals (1977)
Appeared On: 23 ballots (out of 33 . . . 69.7%)
Total Points: 406 points (out of 825 possible points . . . 49.2%)
Top Rankers: @Pip's Invitation @Yo Mama @Mookie Gizzy @Dr. Octopus @zamboni @Desert_Power
Highest Rankings: 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4
You Gotta Be Crazy (Live 1974),
You Gotta Be Crazy (Live 1975),
Demo,
Scene from WKRP in Cincinnati,
RW - 2000
Live Performances: PF: 104,
RW: 267
Covers: Graham Bonnet,
Les Claypool,
Buddha Lounge Ensemble,
Fleesh,
Samarai Of Prog,
Which One's Pink,
House Of Bread
We say goodbye to Animals with a song that was first called You Gotta Be Crazy and performed as far back as 1974. The Dogs represent businessmen who destroy themselves and others by obsessing over their egos and careers.
DG wasn't always a fan of the song. Initially, he complained that it had too many lyrics for him to sing. "Once in a while I would find something uncomfortable to sing. The first lot Roger wrote for Dogs when it was called You Gotta Be Crazy, were just too many words to sing. Dogs had so many words, I physically couldn't get them in. We just cut out two-thirds of his words, to make it possible rather than impossible. I thought the chord progressions were quite nice. I was very proud of it. I thought it was very clever. Then Roger went and accidentally wiped it out and I had to re-create it. The solos on Dogs I kept on because they're different and slightly outside my usual scope. But the song is not one of my real favorites." Dave never performed the song again after the 1977 tour.
Fitting into the album's Orwellian concept of comparing human behavior to various animals, Dogs concentrates on the aggressive, ruthlessly competitive world of business, describing a high-powered businessman. The first two verses detail his predatory nature: outwardly charming and respectable with his "club tie and a firm handshake, a certain look in the eye and an easy smile", while behind this facade he lies waiting "to pick out the easy meat...to strike when the moment is right", and to stab those who trust him in the back. Subsequent verses portray the emptiness of his existence catching up to him as he grows older, retiring to the south rich but unloved: "just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer", and drowning under the weight of a metaphorical stone.
The final verse explores a number of aspects of business life and how it compares to dogs, for example taking chances and being "trained not to spit in the fan", losing their individuality ("broken by trained personnel"), obeying their superiors ("fitted with collar and chain"), being rewarded for good behavior ("given a pat on the back"), working harder than the other workers ("breaking away from the pack") and getting to know everyone but spending less time with family ("only a stranger at home").
RW: "It's sort of a cartoon sketch of how I saw the way society was organized. And obviously it leans heavily on Orwell and
Animal Farm and the idea of anthropomorphizing animals to represent aspects of human behavior. That round at the end of Dogs is very powerful and quite chilling. 'Dragged down by the stone' is the last line of it. 'He was told what to do by the man...' It's a bitter reclamation against authoritarianism and against what I perceived when I was growing up."
The band was in a shambles by the time the 1977 tour came around. Roger has asserted himself as the clear leader of the band. "Animals signaled the end of Pink Floyd as it had been before. I think we've been pretty close to breaking up for years." “Animals was a very angry record,” Gilmour later said, with some understatement. In Waters’ mind, the balance of power within Pink Floyd had also changed. “It was the period when Roger really began to believe he was the sole writer of the band,” said Rick Wright. “It was partly my fault, because I didn’t have much to offer. Dave, who did have something to offer, only managed to get a couple of songs on there.” Dave contradicted Wright, insisting that he “didn’t feel remotely squeezed out”, and also suggested that “Rick didn’t seem to be pulling his weight at the time”.
Wright, the band’s most diffident character, was going through a painful divorce. “It wasn’t a fun record to make,” he said. “I didn’t have anything to offer, material-wise, so I was in a difficult situation.” “There wasn’t any room for anyone else to be writing,” said Waters. “If there were chord sequences there, I would always use them. There was no point in Gilmour, Mason, or Wright trying to write lyrics. They’ll never be as good as mine.”
The 1977 tour featured $2 million worth of equipment that was bussed from city to city in 26 trucks and looked after by a crew of 60. During the Dogs section of the In The Flesh tour, a huge inflatable nuclear family, comprising a corpulent businessman, his wife, and their 2.5 children was released above the crowd. On his 2000 tour, Roger and members of the band set up a table and chairs and started playing poker in the middle section of the song.
Vulture Ranking (out of 165 songs): 32
UCR Ranking (out of 167 songs): 4
Louder Ranking (out of 50 songs): 7
WMGK Ranking (out of 40 songs): 29
Ranker Ranking (out of 132 songs): 21
Billboard Ranking (out of 50 songs): 23
Vulture Ranking (32 out of 165 songs): Animals is a difficult album. I have been quite sure since it came out that it was an inferior piece of work, with both production and the songs simply not near the band’s previous two albums. Over the years I’ve come to think it’s a
failed album rather than a
bad one. It’s ambitious and probably a bit misconceived, but with many powerful moments. I respect that Waters was trying to make a Big Statement; it just doesn’t cohere. I do thank Roger for not resorting to dog-barking noises until about the five-minute mark. With Waters, at this point, that’s restraint.
UCR Ranking (4 out of 167 songs): Animals’ best track delivers even more incredible guitar work from DG, who makes his instrument cry and cackle, moan and mock, surge and slice. But this 17-minute leviathan is a brilliant collaboration between Floyd’s members – not just co-writers Waters and Gilmour (who each sing lead for a while), but also Mason (who pounds and cracks his way through the song’s changing tempos) and Wright (who plays no less than five different keyboards to bring a variety of textures to the epic). As lyricist, Waters is in full-on deride mode, as he writes about Machiavellian menace, but the writing is so crisp and clever (“And it’s too late to lose the weight you used to need to throw around”), the scoffing becomes sport.
Louder Ranking (7 out of 50 songs): These days, the album cover is better known than the music on Animals. Dogs arrives on a wave of ominous-sounding guitar and brooding organ. Just as arresting is the disparity between DG’s sweetly precise vocals and Waters’s vituperative lyrics, where he rails against a rich, predatory businessman. It’s a horrible and wonderful at the same time. RW sings the lead vocal in the song’s second half, explaining how his character’s grinding work ethic and constant kowtowing to his superiors has rendered him emotionally numb and a stranger to his family. Dogs is so crushingly, almost comically grim that had a generation of corporate bankers and city traders been forced to listen to it the global financial collapse of 2007 might have been avoided. Meanwhile, Gilmour and Wright’s weaving guitars and synths and Mason’s sparse drumming notch up the tension even further.
WMGK Ranking (29 out of 40 songs): A 17-minute epic that likens the behavior of modern business to the way that wild dogs act. Gilmour sings the first half of the song, detailing an existence that is all about winning and devoid of any sense of honor. In the second half of the song, Waters takes the mic and the narrator seems to shift back to when he was in the thick of the business world. He concludes with an origin story of sorts: describing the type of person who would end up being drawn into such a cut-throat world. In a catalog of dark songs, this is surely one of the darkest.
Billboard Ranking (23 out of 50 songs): A 17-minute song complete with Call of the Wild-meets-Wolf of Wall Street survival-of-the-fittest lyrics, extended sections of guitar-lead harmonizing, heart-racing acoustics, several tempo changes, and yes, no shortage of barking sounds from the title characters. Sounds exhausting, but it surprisingly isn’t — least not until the very final “who was…” lyrical checklist — as the song’s discrete sections all stand out as individually arresting, and hand off to the next at seemingly just the right moment, with enough memorable lyrical checkpoints from Waters and Gilmour to mark time and maintain interest throughout.
and down (down, down, down)
