You’ve heard the song and may’ve even used the expression the title was based upon, but despite the many recordings of different songs with the same title, there are just three that are fit to undergo examination of the origin of “Don’t Bring Me Down”, a stand-up song that has endured confusion, the passage of time, and a multitude of complaints and criticisms no matter who sings them. Consider them exhibits A, B, and C.

The basic definition of the bring down might seem obvious and unnecessary to outline, but since over-explaining is a bit of a specialty of mine, I’m going to do it anyway. If it’s too much of a bring down for you, you can skip this part. But the general idea is that a negative person or event come to destroy an otherwise perfectly good situation—an instant depressor and a real bad vibe—is a bring down. Born from ’50s jazz and hipster lingo (look, I’m no William Safire, but it’s my best guess), whether it’s a party, an idea, a person’s lifetime hopes and dreams, or even their delusions—to be told, ‘That’s not gonna fly, Jim,” is a definite bring down. Ruining someone’s high or coming down from one? A bring down. Get off my cloud, and don’t be a downer, a bummer, or a drag—these are all other ways of saying, “Don’t Bring Me Down.” As jazz lingo had a way of finding its way into R&B and rock ‘n’ roll, and into the vocabs of the people who listen to the stuff, the bring down found its way into hundreds of songs, some more memorable than others. Dig?

The first use in the title of a rock song that I could find was in 1964: “Don’t Bring Me Down,” Exhibit A, by the Pretty Things, was written by Johnnie Dee. His R&B rave-up became a calling card for the Pretty Things, who hit Top 10 in England with the song. The handclap- and harmonica-punctuated blues helped to establish the band as contemporaries of the Kinks, the Animals, and the Rolling Stones (guitarist Dick Taylor had once been in a band with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), though in the US the Pretty Things conducted a career that was more underground. However, in 1973, when David Bowie covered “Don’t Bring Me Down” (as well as the Pretty Things song, “Rosalyn”) on his Pin-Ups album by glamming, hamming, and manning it up, he helped introduce the Pretty Things to an American teenage audience they’d missed the first time around—though the band was doing a pretty good job of that on their own. They’d received good notices for 1970’s Parachute and actually charted in America for the first time in 1974 with the album Silk Torpedo, recorded for the Led Zeppelin-created Swan Song label, which you can bet held sway with the young folk. Believe me, I realize that by bringing up mid-’70s Pretty Things, I risk the wrath of the experts who believe the band was at its nadir artistically at this point. But as a person belonging to the small percentile of fans who actually enjoyed their quasi-prog-rock from the mid-’70s, I’m putting in a plug for the ecstatic “Dream/Joey.” Anyone? Alright then, moving on…

“Don’t Bring Me Down”, Exhibit B, was cooked up by the celebrated songwriting team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King, who’d responded to a call for songs for the Animals while on the job at the Brill Building. Turning out hits for girl groups like the Shirelles, the Chiffons, and the Cookies, the rock ‘n’ roll Animals had initially scoffed at the idea of relying on the likes of Goffin and King for a tune rather than the traditional American roots songbook they favored. But if Goffin and King were good enough for the Beatles to cover them, as they did with the Cookies’ “Chains” in 1963, then they could definitely handle the job of writing a song catering to the Animals. One fine day later, singer Eric Burdon would eventually admit in his autobiography that “Don’t Bring Me Down” was among his very favorite songs to sing. Perhaps there was a ring of truth to the lyrics for the songwriting team: “When you complain and criticize / I feel I’m nothing in your eyes” (Goffin and King split up within a couple of years after the song hit the Top 20 in 1966). Burdon’s interpretation was, of course, characteristically soulful and pleading; it was the last of the Animals’ hits before they became Eric Burdon & the Animals and eventually disbanded in 1969. But with the debut of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in the mid-’70s, there also came a revival of the spare and pure sound that the British invasion brought; the Heartbreakers included their faithful version of “Don’t Bring Me Down” on their live document, Pack Up the Plantation: Live!, and kept the song alive and well in their repertoire for years. Well before Petty came to hang with George Harrison in the Traveling Wilburys, he was just like everybody else: A guy starting a band who loved the Beatles. “The Beatles songs were really hard to sing,” Petty says in Conversations with Tom Petty. “We weren’t good harmony singers so we drifted more to the Stones and the Animals.” Petty and company recorded their own thematically similar “don’t” song, “Don’t Do Me Like That”; Petty went further into command language with “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around”, the song he and Mike Campbell wrote for Stevie Nicks, performed as a duet with TP. Around the same time the Heartbreakers were warming up, the original Animals reunited to lack of fanfare in ’76 and again in 1983 and found the public interest limited. But you can’t keep Burdon down: He’s still riding the serpent and shouting out “Don’t Bring Me Down.” For a fairly elfin guy, he’s a mighty gigantic force in the history of rock: We here at Origin have noticed he turns up in the pages of Crawdaddy! in the unlikeliest places, a little like Waldo would.