Some songs belong to the year in which they were recorded. Others resist musical carbon dating.
“The Animal Speaks” is one of those songs.
Fifty years ago, 15-60-75—better known as The Numbers Band—released the song on its debut album, Jimmy Bell’s Still in Town. Led by Robert Kidney alongside his brother Jack, the long-running Northeast Ohio group had recorded the live album the previous year at Cleveland’s Agora, where it opened for Bob Marley and the Wailers (and used the Wailers’ mobile recording unit, gratis). It captured a seasoned band working in an odd musical language of its own, far outside the machinery of the 1970s record business.
The album slowly acquired a cult following. Then a remastered and expanded two-LP edition, released in 2013, introduced it to another generation. David Fricke of Rolling Stone heard “blues and chaos, raw power and the true price of independent rock & roll spirit.” Writing in The Guardian, Tom Hughes called the reissue a “thundering, juddering marvel,” while Greil Marcus long described the Kidney brothers’ music as a “radical, visionary and living force.”
Kidney’s fellow musicians speak of him with similar admiration. Chris Butler, later of Tin Huey and the Waitresses, played bass with the Numbers Band in the 1970s. He regards Kidney’s achievement as civic as well as musical.
“Bob was able to play original music five nights a week, three one-hour sets, build an audience, and pay his musicians something close to a living wage. That is unheard of,” says Butler. “He gets to be an artist and we get to eat – it gets no better than that.”
Kidney, now 79, has an old-school noir character-actor gravity, a heavy brow, a set jaw, and a stillness that commands the room.
Of all the songs on Jimmy Bell’s Still in Town, “The Animal Speaks” has had the strangest afterlife. Its energy and jagged attack might now be filed under post-punk, though it predates the category. In the decades that followed, it was sung by John Lydon as well as Cream’s Jack Bruce, placed in a scene in a film about Jeffrey Dahmer, and heard by listeners far removed from the Northeast Ohio clubs where it began.
None of this was imaginable to Kidney when he wrote it.
“I wanted to do something original,” he said. “I wanted it to be unique, and I worked hard, to the best of my ability and knowledge, to write all the songs on Jimmy Bell in that sense.”
A Band Outside the System
The Numbers Band emerged when Northeast Ohio was producing an improbable concentration of groups that seemed unable—or unwilling—to make themselves easy to explain.
Devo came from Akron. Pere Ubu, Dead Boys, the electric eels, and X_X came from Cleveland. Tin Huey and the Waitresses developed in the same orbit as did Chrissey Hynde, the Bizarros, Chi Pig, Rubber City Rebels, and others of the era. Eventually, these groups and others were gathered under the loose designation of the “Akron sound,” a category elastic enough to encompass several cities and almost as many musical traditions.
The region’s eccentricity was underwritten by an industrial work ethic.
“With Bob, it was almost like a factory job,” says Butler. “You rehearsed two or three times a week and then played three hours a night.”
Kidney said the band, today, is treated with a degree of reverence, partly because it survived. But at the beginning, things were less congenial.
“Back then, we were pariahs,” he said, repeating the word for emphasis.
Most of the groups around them played covers. Those that wrote original material tended to shape it toward radio tastes. Kidney had little interest but understood what his fans came for.
“They were listening to the primal force of the music,” Kidney said. “It didn’t matter what the song was. What mattered was that we were going to cross over into where the primal source of humanity was being tapped to make energy.”
For a time, Kidney had reason to believe the Numbers Band might break beyond the region. The group had developed a large local following, and WMMS was earning a reputation for championing boundary-pushing acts such as David Bowie, Rush, Roxy Music, and Lou Reed. When the opportunity to make an album arrived, Kidney hoped the station—and the city—would rally behind his band.
It did not.
“When it came out, WMMS wanted nothing to do with it,” he said. “Nobody in Cleveland wanted it. That’s when I realized I was more like Thelonious Monk than Bob Dylan.”
Butler put it like this: “They were too esoteric. There was no station hip enough to play that at the time.”
Turn the Beat Around
“The Animal Speaks” began with a rhythmic inversion.
Speaking by phone from Tallmadge, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, Janet, Kidney explained that he took rock and roll’s foundational rhythm—Chuck Berry—and reversed its emphasis. The familiar pattern accented the second and fourth beats. Kidney shifted it to the first and third.
Butler remembered the effect as a physical force—an inverted rhythm that shouldn’t work on paper but drove the room anyway.
“It’s backwards,” Butler says. “It’s anapestic. It’s a heartbeat turned around. If you analyze it musically, it ought to make you stumble. But instead, you start moving.”
Meanwhile, the lyrics emerged from the world Kidney knew, a crowded club, a charged local audience, and the nocturnal existence of a musician playing most nights of the week.
The opening line of the song, “Out across night’s sky lights down through the doorway, wide-eyed blues alive,” describes Kidney entering the Kove, a basement club on North Water Street that had become a center of Kent, Ohio’s live music scene. He is descending the stairs, taking in the room, and preparing to perform. But the phrase struck him as incomplete.
“After writing that line, I thought, how much more do I want to reveal? I said to myself, I should say the truth,” says Kidney.
The song begins in appetite—for music, sex, women, and the raw self that Kidney inhabits onstage—but the swagger gradually gives way to vulnerability as the narrator reckons with loving a woman who may never trust him. She becomes the dawn, finding him as he emerges from the darkness of the club. It is a striking and raw vision of redemption and rebirth that mirrors the song’s own trajectory across fifty years.
Johnny Rotten Picks Up the Animal
Nearly a decade after the album’s release, “The Animal Speaks” entered another room—this one occupied by some of the era’s most adventurous musicians.
The Golden Palominos were a collective of musicians organized around the late Anton Fier, the Cleveland-raised drummer and producer whose interests ranged from experimental pop and funk to out jazz and New York’s downtown scene. The group’s 1985 album, Visions of Excess, featured an all-star cast that included Michael Stipe, Richard Thompson, Bill Laswell, and John Lydon. Fier would also work with Mick Jagger, Yoko Ono, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Laurie Anderson, Jeff Buckley, John Zorn, and many others.
Lydon, the former Sex Pistols singer, performed “The Animal Speaks” on the album. Jack Bruce of Cream sang an alternate version released as a twelve-inch single.
Fier knew Kidney through the Northeast Ohio scene. Fier had played with Pere Ubu and came to see the Numbers Band, often accompanied by the bassist Tony Maimone, who later played with Kidney as well. Fier was looking for songs and performers to bring into the Golden Palominos’ circle.
By the time “The Animal Speaks” appeared on Visions of Excess, however, the Numbers Band had largely stopped playing it at home.
“Nobody in our audience was interested in it,” Kidney said. “It was alienating to them.”
The Song Enters the Movies
The next turn in the afterlife of “The Animal Speaks” came through film.
The Numbers Band’s recording appeared in My Friend Dahmer, the 2017 independent feature written and directed by Marc Meyers and adapted from Derf Backderf’s graphic novel.
Butler’s relationship to the project was unusually direct. In 2005, he bought Jeffrey Dahmer’s childhood home in Bath Township. A Spice Girls cover of his song “Christmas Wrapping” had helped provide the down payment on his first house. Only after he had fallen in love with the property did the real-estate agent make a disclosure.
“We need to tell you something,” the agent said. “This is the Dahmer house.”
Butler was flabbergasted.
“I’m not a ghoul,” he said.
He was, however, a collector of 1940s and ’50s furniture, and the house—a striking example of mid-century modern architecture set in the woods of Summit County—appealed to him on its own terms.
“I had to buy it,” he said.
Butler and his girlfriend set out to make the house what he calls a creative and joyful place. Years later, the scenes set in the Dahmer family home were filmed inside the actual house, with its rooms returned to an approximation of their 1970s appearance.
During preproduction, Butler encouraged director Marc Meyers to draw on the music of Northeast Ohio, an idea that fit with Meyers’s effort to ground the film in the culture of the period. The two met at a local bar and talked about the region’s musical history.
“The Animal Speaks would never have been in the movie except Chris Butler, who brought the filmmaker to hear the band live,” Kidney says. “He was knocked out, and Chris encouraged him to put the song in the film.”
Meyers remembers the search for music as part of a broader effort to immerse himself in the Akron of the period.
“I went to the Dahmer house and met Chris, who was about to move from Jersey City, I think, to Akron and rent the actual childhood home,” Meyers says. “During preproduction I met Chris in a bar. I was educating myself on the history of that moment.”
That research extended to the music developing in the region while Dahmer was living there.
“I wanted to use the sounds of local radio and the culture because music is definitely a character in the film—the music Dahmer was listening to,” Meyers says. “I found music to use on the car stereo, and that led me to other Akron punk songs to fill out the needle drops. That music grounded the film in place and time.”
There was a regional irony to it all. Many listeners encountered the song not through an interest in Northeast Ohio music but through one of the area’s most notorious histories. Jeffrey Dahmer, a graduate of Revere High School, committed his first murder in his Bath Township house in 1978 and later admitted to killing seventeen people before being arrested. His heinous crimes cast a lasting shadow over the region. The film, however, also returned part of Kidney’s musical history to public attention.
Film and television placements are one of the principal ways old music reaches young listeners. The process is called rediscovery, though the word implies a shared memory. However, most young listeners are not rediscovering these songs. They are hearing them for the first time.
Recently, my twenty-five-year-old son, a musician and visual artist living in Brooklyn, heard “The Animal Speaks” at a club on the Lower East Side. Since then, he has heard it in rotation at several other places, including Sophie’s, where younger patrons have encountered it without knowing its Ohio history or that it is 50 years old. (I had played the song for him years earlier as an example of some of the best music Ohio ever produced. He called to tell me the song had found him again.)
What Survives
A record turns fifty. It is reissued, reconsidered, and celebrated.
“The Animal Speaks” resists that arrangement.
Its history is not a neat progression from neglect to recognition. The Numbers Band was never entirely obscure, at least not locally. The band worked steadily and maintained a devoted audience. And Anton Fier could hear that it could be a John Lydon performance. Or a Jack Bruce performance. And the filmmakers behind My Friend Dahmer heard the original recording could unsettle viewers who knew nothing about the Numbers Band. Younger listeners, like my son, hear something that requires neither regional loyalty nor nostalgia.
This is a story of a song that travels well. A musician hears the song. A new singer inhabits it. Then another. A filmmaker places it against images. A stranger in a bar asks what is that that is playing. And along the way, the song acquires new associations around the very thing that makes it notable.
“The Animal Speaks” began as the sound of a band playing to a live room, ready to dance.
Fifty years later, the room keeps getting bigger.