Spill The Wine

Eric Burdon sang lead on this track. Before Burdon joined, the group was known as Nite Shift and was playing backup for Deacon Jones, a former US football player who was trying to become a Soul singer. The group was re-named War and played with Burdon for two albums, both credited to "Eric Burdon and War."

Harold Brown, who was the drummer and a founding member of War, told us that record executive Steve Gold arranged for War and Eric Burdon to record together. Says Brown: "Steve wanted first to see what we could do. So for about a year we just kept going in and out of studios. And then one day we were up in San Francisco, just playing and stuff. Lonnie (Jordan, War keyboard player) came in acting all drunk and stuff and out. They had a bottle of wine, and some of that wine got spilled in the console. Lee (Oskar, War harmonica player) says he felt that the song didn't have anything to do with the wine going into the console, but all I know is after that they moved out of the A studio, they moved us into the B studio, and then we were playing a Latin thing, and even if Eric had been writing 'Spill The Wine' all along, and writing the concepts, that's when it all came together. I think that Eric was already working on an idea about leaking gnomes waking up in a grassy field, and then when the wine inadvertently got knocked over, whether it was part of the song or not, it all just came together right at that moment."

This is widely believed to be about, or at least heavily influenced by drugs. According to Brown, this song celebrates women: "All ladies are beautiful. You've got to look at them. God, I believe, put all of us here and made us all different so we could be like the flowers, you know. Like women. I look at them as beautiful flowers. Even when they get older, the flowers and so on, and that's what it really boils down to, they can be skinny, big, fat, I've seen some fine voluptuous women. And then I've seen some that are skinny, and if you look at them, they could be beautiful, depending on personality and stuff."