Experience The Sound Of WAR Live At The Tobin Center

Get ready for a night of timeless grooves and electrifying rhythms as WAR, one of the most influential soul and funk bands of all time, takes the stage at The Tobin Center for the Performing Arts with An Evening With WAR.

With a career spanning over five decades, WAR continues to captivate audiences with their signature fusion of R&B, rock, Latin, jazz, and blues. This exciting show is scheduled in the H-E-B Performance Hall on May 16, 2025, at 7:30 PM.

Tobin Member Pre-Sale is happening now. Tickets will go on sale on February 28 at 10am and can be purchased online at tobincenter.org, via phone (210) 223-8624 or in-person at The Tobin Center Box Office (100 Auditorium Circle, 78205).  Box Office hours are Monday-Friday 10a-6p and Saturday, 10a-2p. Tickets start at $49.

WAR, one of music's defining and most enduring soul/funk groups, was founded in Long Beach, California, in 1962. In 1970, producer Jerry Goldstein united the seven-piece band with former Animals lead singer Eric Burdon; the alliance produced the No. 1 worldwide hit “Spill the Wine.” Stepping out on their own in 1971, they launched a fruitful career with a dynamic sound that fused R&B, rock, Latin music, jazz, and blues. In 1973, their smash album The World is a Ghetto vaulted to No. 1 on Billboard's pop and R&B charts behind the crossover success of two top-10 singles, the album's socially conscious title song and its rollicking follow-up “The Cisco Kid.” Over a long and glittering career, WAR has rung up more than 20 multi-platinum, platinum and gold albums and singles. This year, fronted by co-founding member Lonnie Jordan, the group will celebrate 50 years of 1973's #1 Billboard top-selling album, The World is a Ghetto, with a 50-date summer tour, remixes, new releases and more. 

By 1972, it was no secret that WAR was one of America's best and most exploratory soul-funk bands. Bigger things were at hand.

After establishing themselves with two albums for MGM Records supporting former Animals lead singer Eric Burdon (the first of which included the single “Spill the Wine,” a No. 3 pop hit in 1970), the Long Beach, California-bred septet stepped out on their own. All Day Music (1971), their second LP for United Artists Records, climbed to No. 16 on the pop chart and No. 6 on the R&B side on the strength of the stormy Gold-selling single “Slippin' Into Darkness,” which cracked both the pop and R&B top 20.

But those accomplishments were mere warmups for their third UA album The World is a Ghetto, which became the benchmark of their career.

Writing on the 20th anniversary of that LP's release, critic Barry Alfonso said, “If All Day Music was WAR's breakthrough album, The World is a Ghetto was their first masterpiece. Released in late 1972, the LP went on to top the Billboard pop album charts and reach the 3 million sales mark. By turns celebratory, reflective, gritty, and lyrical, The World is a Ghetto transcended musical, ethnic, and national boundaries in its appeal. WAR solidified their position as a world-class band with the album, spurred on by the U.S. top-10 success of its two certified-gold singles, ‘The Cisco Kid' and the LP's title track.”

Debuting on the album chart in late '72, The World is a Ghetto made a steady climb for two months. After entering the U.S. top five in late January of 1973, it spent three weeks in the No. 2 slot before finally dislodging the reigning No. 1 pop album, Carly Simon's No Secrets, and moving to the pinnacle of the chart. It concurrently secured the No. 1 position on the R&B albums chart.

The World is a Ghetto — which spent a total of 68 weeks on the chart during its run — listed at No. 1 among Billboard's year-end ranking of 1973's top five pop albums, above Seals & Crofts' Summer Breeze, Stevie Wonder's Talking Book, No Secrets, and Diana Ross' soundtrack for Lady Sings the Blues.

The album attained commercial liftoff with its two unforgettable, classic hits. “The World is a Ghetto” (No. 7 pop, No. 3 R&B), which enjoyed a 15-week chart run, was a somber, socially conscious track that reflected a deep awareness of the then-current racial tension in America; just as certainly, WAR's seven members were all too familiar with that tension, which had exploded into L.A.'s Watts riots, which received national attention in 1965.

In a 1990 Washington Post story about young, progressive Black music talents, critic Geoffrey Hines called The World is a Ghetto “an [inspirational] example that has never been equaled,” numbering the album among such other socially alert landmarks as Sly & the Family Stone's Stand, Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, and Stevie Wonder's Innervisions.

The album's second, playful, even bigger hit, “The Cisco Kid” (No. 2 pop, No. 5 R&B), shipped Gold and was a cross-cultural salute to its titular hero, the border Robin Hood created in 1907 by writer O. Henry and memorably played by Duncan Renaldo (with Leo Carillo as his faithful sidekick Pancho) in the long-running TV series of the 1950s. The raucous party-hearty number, a cumbria-inflected tune featuring group percussion work highlighted by Lonnie Jordan's timbales and Papa Dee Allen's conga drums, helped cross the band over from its traditional Black audience to a new group of Latino listeners.

In his 1996 book Funk, Rickey Vincent noted, “WAR's sound represented the focal point in the Latino influence on the fonk, as the band generated anthems of streetwise Southwestern culture, including…the dramatized folktale of a Mexican bandit turned freedom fighter, ‘The Cisco Kid.'”

Producer Jerry Goldstein noted to Craig Rosen in The Billboard Book of Number One Albums, “[The song] was based on the fact that [the Cisco Kid] was the only non-Anglo hero in the late '50 and ‘60s that they could relate to. Every other superhero was white.”

That song, and The World is a Ghetto's expansive 13-1/2-minute instrumental “City, Country City,” all bore evidence that the members of WAR were intimately familiar with the surging Latin rock that powered such Santana jams as “Soul Survivor” and “Jingo.” In 1975, WAR achieved their biggest single hit with a sunny, colorful homage to Southern California's barrio car culture, “Low Rider” (No. 7 pop, No. 1 R&B).

The legacy of The World is a Ghetto isn't simply about history. The record's influence has been continuously felt in the mainstream of Black music for decades, thanks to widespread sampling of the album's songs. Acts as diverse as 2Pac, Method Man, Redman, Cyprus Hill, A$AP Mob, Scarface, the Geto Boys, Janet Jackson, and Insane Clown Posse all powered their tracks with slices from the '72 classic, and jazz artists such as Ramsey Lewis, George Benson and more all covered songs from the record.

WAR arrived at the apex of the American charts with a decade's worth of dues paid in full.

Formed soon after Eric Burdon met Jerry Goldstein and a collection of local, live musicians – whose work in and around the scene dated all the way back to 1962 – WAR was assembled by the duo and officially took their name in 1969.

Goldstein — who co-produced The World is a Ghetto and the rest of WAR's catalog, encompassing 17 studios albums and three live sets — recalls the fateful moment when his encounter with the musicians in a North Hollywood club called the Rag Doll set them on the path to stardom.

“I first saw some of the guys who would eventually become WAR playing at a topless beer bar in the San Fernando Valley, backing Deacon Jones, and knew immediately how potent these kids were,” Goldstein says. “I was friends with Eric Burdon, and he was ready to throw in the towel on the music scene and return to Newcastle. He was tired of the ‘rock' thing and desperate for a fresh authentic sound. I called him the morning after I first saw the band and made him return to the club the next night with me. Eric was so blown away by what he had heard that he jumped on stage to jam with them. The guys weren't familiar with Eric or The Animals. I had them in the studio within a week.”

The Alliance between Burdon and WAR commenced on 1970's Eric Burdon Declares WAR (which featured #1 worldwide hit “Spill the Wine”) and continued the same year with The Black-Man's Burdon. Though the group was attracting attention — from, among others Jimi Hendrix, who jammed with WAR at Ronnie Scott's London club the night before he died — the partnership with the mercurial English vocalist ended when Burdon abruptly quit in the middle of a European tour.

Goldstein says, “At the time, I didn't envision WAR as a separate entity. It was just a band to back Eric. I kind of thought it would change with his musical moods. It turned out to be that constantly evolving device, even without Eric Burdon.”

WAR's savvy fusion of hard funk, sweet soul, smooth blues, a Latin tinge, and the swing of jazz, which was definitively stated on The World is a Ghetto, translated into half a century of hit records. Besides their '72 magnum opus, the band has released more than 20 gold, platinum and multi-platinum records. A total of 28 singles reached Billboard's R&B charts.

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