Eric Burdon & War

War came together in Long Beach in 1969, and on the first go-round they were billed as Eric Burdon and War, a band that sounded like nothing else going: funk, soul, rock, jazz and Latin rhythm all boiled down in the same pot. Lonnie Jordan, Howard E. Scott, Lee Oskar, B.B. Dickerson, Charles Miller, Harold Brown and Papa Dee Allen built their sound out of everything drifting through the windows of the mixed-up Los Angeles neighborhoods where they lived, where every race and culture was stacked on top of each other, and the lineup itself was a statement about crossing those lines.

Eric Burdon Declares "War", from 1970, gave them "Spill the Wine", a stoned, slow-rolling groove with a half-spoken vocal floating over a band that simmers and never boils, and it set the table for everything after. Burdon was gone by 1971, and War carried on without him into a string of '70s hits: "The World Is a Ghetto", "The Cisco Kid", "Why Can't We Be Friends?", "Low Rider" and "Summer". The World Is a Ghetto was Billboard's biggest-selling album of 1973.

The lineup kept changing for years afterwards, and Jordan is the only founding member left in today's version; four of his old bandmates went off to form the Lowrider Band.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.