Monday Music "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" by Santa Esmerelda

    I was driving to work early Monday morning a couple of weeks ago and I happen to stop on the "Studio 54" channel of Sirius/XM, it plays a lot of dance and Disco, hence the channel location of "54" like the famous "Studio 54" in New York during the Heydays of Disco, well anyway I heard this sone and I stopped and listened to it because I heard it before somewhere and it took a couple of minutes to figure it out.   

  YES!    I heard it during the fight scene between Uma Thurmond and Luci Liu.  I always liked the Kill Bill Vol1 because of the Revenge and Payback angle in the movie.  Fun fact, the Yellow Tracksuit Uma Worn is in homage to Bruce Lee Track Suit in "Game Of Death" 

    

The Animals did a version in the 1960's and I actually heard it on my "60's Gold" channel on my Sirius/XM a week later, Funny That.

The Animals' lead singer Eric Burdon would later say of the song, "It was never considered pop material, but it somehow got passed on to us and we fell in love with it immediately."

The song was recorded in November 1964. The band became a trans-Atlantic hit in early 1965 for their rendition of the song, rising to No. 3 on the UK Singles Chart, No. 15 on the U.S. pop singles chart, and No. 4 in Canada.

Cash Box described it as "a striking combination of R&B and English-rock touches." This single was ranked by Rolling Stone at No. 322 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

During Animals concerts at the time, the group maintained the recorded arrangement, but Burdon sometimes slowed the vocal line down to an almost spoken part, recapturing a bit of the Simone flavor.

At the South by Southwest festival in 2012, Bruce Springsteen credited the song as the inspiration and the riff for his 1978 song "Badlands".

       Now This is the version I heard on Channel 54

A disco version of the song by the group Santa Esmeralda, which took the Animals' arrangement and transformed it with disco, flamenco, and other Latin rhythm and ornamentation elements, also became a hit in the late 1970s. Their version of the song was first released in summer 1977 as a 16-minute epic that took up an entire side of their Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood album, which was picked up for greater worldwide distribution by their label at the time, Casablanca Records. The 12-inch club remix was extremely popular, reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Club Play Singles chart and in some European countries as well. Though, the single peaked at No. 4 on the Hot Dance/Disco-Club Play chart. Their 7-inch single version peaked at #15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S., which is coincidentally the same number at which The Animals version peaked.

Instrumental sections of this version were used in the pilot for the US game show Bullseye, live telecasts of the PBA Tour on USA Network from 1982 to 1984, and in the 2003 Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill: Volume I, in the background during the final duel between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).