THE KINKS
Recording years |
Main genre |
Music sample |
1964–1994 |
Classic pop-rock |
Autumn Almanac (1967) |
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Album
released: Oct. 2, 1964 |
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Tracks: 1) Beautiful Delilah; 2) So
Mystifying; 3) Just Can’t Go To Sleep; 4) Long Tall Shorty; 5) I Took My Baby
Home; 6) I’m A Lover Not A Fighter; 7) You Really Got
Me; 8) Cadillac; 9) Bald Headed Woman; 10) Revenge; 11) Too Much
Monkey Business; 12) I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain; 13) Stop Your
Sobbing; 14) Got Love If You Want It; 15*) Long Tall Sally; 16*) You Still
Want Me; 17*) You Do Something To Me; 18*) It’s Alright; 19*) All Day And All
Of The Night; 20*) I Gotta Move; 21*) Louie, Louie; 22*) I Gotta Go Now; 23*)
Things Are Getting Better; 24*) I’ve Got That Feeling; 25*) Too Much Monkey
Business; 26*) I Don’t Need You Any More. |
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REVIEW History has
been kinder to the back catalog of the Kinks than to quite a few of their
contemporaries; all of their original LPs on Pye Records (and even all of
their later RCA and Arista records) have been re-released in CD format as expanded
versions, including all the accompanying singles (as well as some hitherto
unreleased demos and outtakes) as bonus tracks and saving us from the problem
of having to hunt down scattered individual gems, and/or to rely on the
parallel American catalog in order to get a more comprehensive, but also more
confusing, picture of the band’s output — see the Rolling Stones for a good
example. In the case of the Kinks, just as in the case of the Hollies or, in
fact, in the case of pretty much every British Invasion band with the possible
exception of the Beatles, this is particularly important since, for the first
couple years of their existence, true gold from this band only came in the
form of 45 rpms. |
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Well,
maybe not in the form of their first
45 rpm, an oddly slow cover of ʽLong Tall Sallyʼ with an unexplicably swampy harmonica solo. The
slowing down means that it does not even begin to compare to the maniacal
Little Richard original or, for that matter, to the Beatles’ version in terms
of overall craziness. Its choice for the band’s first single was probably
dictated by brother Dave Davies, the quintessential «rocker» in the group,
and his none-too-pretty nasal vocals and overdubbed waves of screaming
(arguably the only exciting thing about the recording) are all over the place
here, but they failed to convince UK audiences at the time. With
brother Dave failing at his task, brother Ray steps into the game with his
original composition ʽYou Still Want
Meʼ — a pretty
little bit of power pop whose opening ringing power chords strongly predict
the band’s classic early sound, as well as that of the Who and other upcoming
pop-rock bands with a whiff of garage aesthetics. Unfortunately, the song in
general sounds way too much like... no, not
like the Beatles, as you might have guessed (Ray always had too much
condescension towards the Fab Four), but rather to contemporary Dave Clark
Five (Mick Avory’s thumping drumming here pretty much apes the Dave Clark
jackhammer approach) without being able to match or better the DC5’s glossy
production values, and, once again, the record-buying public was bored. The
same problem also manifests itself on the B-side, ‘You Do Something To Me’,
which also sounds like a song that
should have rather been donated to the DC5. Perhaps part of the problem lies
in the fact that Ray and Dave were never that great at singing in harmony — or,
if I am mistaken here, that Ray was never that great at multi-tracking his
own voice. Isolated, they have a ton of personality; together, they exude
neither beauty nor power, but rather just a tolerable background buzz, and
the added echo effect does not help in the least. That said, I will be the
first to admit that at least ‘You Do Something To Me’ is a finely written
composition with clear signs of Ray’s melodic genius — with a better, more
«Kinky» type of arrangement it could have nicely fit inside their hot parade
of pop nuggets. Anyway,
neither of these two songs made an impression on the charts, meaning that both
would be shunned and humiliated when the time came for their first LP. Third
time around (under heavy pressure from Pye to move it or lose it), the Davies
brothers decided to go with something edgier — and, as legend would have it,
ended up accidentally inventing garage rock with ʽYou Really Got Meʼ, the song that launched a thousand ships and is still a matter of
controversy among those who insist that the guitar solo was played by Jimmy
Page rather than Dave Davies. (Non-spoiler: it was not; but the drums,
apparently, were played by session
man Bobby Graham rather than the Kinks’ regular drummer, Mick Avory). Not
that the solo is some sort of technical marvel or anything — no, it merely
features Dave figuratively setting himself on fire and acting a bit
Neanderthal, which, in the timid days of 1964, was still a novel thing to do.
(There is also not the least doubt on my part that the solo was heavily
influenced by Keith Richards’ similarly Neanderthal break on ʽIt’s All Over Nowʼ, considering that the Stones’ single had only just come out in June
and must have been in heavy rotation in the Davies’ camp). Regardless,
I think that even today it is easy to see how the riff of ʽYou Really Got Meʼ could have produced the effect of the fuckin’ motherlode — especially the realization that you
could record something wild and simple like that in the studio, get it
distributed through an official network and make serious royalties on it. Up
to this day, Ray and Dave Davies continue to fight about the recording, which
Ray defends as quintessentially his
song, one that helped him form his own artistic identity, and Dave treasures
as that one song which helped him
find the quintessential hard rock sound of the Kinks, with his semi-legendary
story of poking the band’s little amplifier with a pin and discovering early
rock nirvana. I would say the dispute is a little futile, considering how
quickly the band would move away from that sound altogether — it is, in fact,
quite ironic that they would forever be branded as the «forefathers of hard
rock» when the absolute majority of their greatest songs would have nothing
to do whatsoever with hard rock (no to mention their late Seventies / early
Eighties «comeback», when the harder they tried to rock, the more they
usually failed at it). But then again, the early-to-mid Sixties were a great
time for all sorts of wonderful historical accidents and absurdities, and if
we can even accept Ted Nugent as a psychedelic rock hero, what’s wrong with
accepting Ray Davies as a dangerous, sexually menacing, hard-rocking caveman? That
the Kinks were not able to immediately capitalize on the success of ʽYou Really Got Meʼ with a consistent LP is no big surprise. The brothers were, after
all, still only learning their songwriting craft when the single began to really
took off and, in a fairly predictable move, Pye Records and producer Shel
Talmy immediately pushed them back into the studio where they simply did not
have enough time to come up with much of anything. Sure, six out of fourteen
songs were still credited to Ray Davies — a respectable recognition of the
man’s talent by the industry superiors — but of these six, ʽRevengeʼ (co-credited
with manager Larry Page) is just a Link Wray / Ventures-style
harmonica-driven surf-blues-rock vamp, and ʽSo Mystifyingʼ, once you listen
closely, is a hilariously embarrassing — and utterly pointless — rewrite of
the very same ʽIt’s All Over
Nowʼ which had
already just influenced the guitar solo in ‘You Really Got Me’. Of
the remaining originals, ʽJust Can’t Go
To Sleepʼ is another
clumsy piece, this time written more in the Merseybeat than Tottenham style,
with its crudely swallowed syllables ("every night I jes can’t goat sleep...") contributing to
an altogether unconvincing atmosphere of I-don’t-really-know-what. ʽI Took My Baby Homeʼ (which, by the way, was originally the B-side to ‘Long Tall Sally’) is
a rewrite of Allen Toussaint’s ʽFortune Tellerʼ, with only the last line of each verse rewritten to
give the song more of a nursery-pop feel; less irony, more corn. Only ʽStop Your Sobbingʼ has more or less endured as a very minor Ray classic (enough to be
chosen by the Pretenders as their debut single in 1979) — it is here that we
actually see the man beginning to uncover the magic of his own voice, which
works best in a context of emotional sympathy and consolation. Fate would
rather have Ray Davies become not one of the great romantic lovers, but one
of the great musical psychotherapists, and ‘Stop Your Sobbing’ is his first
attempt at graduating — still a relative failure, because I think the chorus
gives us a fussy and generally unsatisfactory resolution (that "better
stop sobb’n now" would have
never gotten the Paul McCartney seal of approval), but at least he is
definitely on the right track here. In
between these beginner’s exercises, we have the usual stuff so typical of
contemporary UK R&B. Namely, there are a couple of Chuck Berry covers: ʽBeautiful Delilahʼ opens the album with an early example of brother Dave’s distinctive
voice, nasal and guttural at the
same time, grossly exaggerated and making him sound like the local snotty
teenage wimp trying to pull off a tough guy image (for the record, I’ve
always found Dave’s vocal overtones strangely off-putting even in real life,
compared to the softer and more distinctive voice of his brother — see for
yourself, for instance, in this short interview
with both from 1968). ʽToo Much Monkey
Businessʼ partially
compensates for this travesty with the best lead guitar impression of Chuck
Berry this side of Keith Richards (do check specifically the alternate take
included in the CD bonus tracks — it is sped up to an insane proto-Ramones
tempo and was probably rejected as too
sloppy and vulgar, but in retrospect it is one of the fastest, craziest
rave-ups from 1964 that Father Time was kind enough to leave us). If
the band’s Chuck Berry has about 50/50 chance of working, their bluesier R&B
grooves are even less lucky. Slim Harpo’s ʽGot Love If You Want Itʼ is bold enough
to stretch out for almost four minutes, but the band is nowhere near as
tight, loud, or convincing as the Yardbirds for such rave-ups, and Dave
Davies as the devil-ridden terrifying womanizer has nothing on Mick Jagger.
Meanwhile, Bo Diddley’s ʽCadillacʼ shows that, while they could be as musically tight as the Animals if the stars aligned
all right, the lack of a convincingly raunchy singer of the Eric Burdon type
in the band still rendered their Animalisms essentially useless. Tommy Tucker’s
ʽLong Tall
Shortyʼ, an obscure
rarity (actually, just a re-write of his own better known ʽHi-Heel Sneakersʼ, and sounding on the whole like a completely generic Jimmy Reed
blues-rock number), could be inoffensively forgettable if not for another one
of Dave’s barely bearable vocal performances. Finally, there is no reason to
listen to Dave’s equally unsavory take on the song ʽI’m A Lover, Not A Fighterʼ if you can lay your hands on the obscure original by Lazy
Lester from way back in 1958 (Leslie Johnson plays that guitar with just
as much flair as Dave here, and he is a much
better singer by a country mile). Adding
insult to injury are two «songs» forced on the band by Shel Talmy, in a
standard-for-the-time arrangement which helped the producer make more cash
from record sales — ʽBald Headed
Womanʼ and ʽI’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountainʼ, both of them just covers of old blues / folk tunes
with no copyright restrictions. Actually, ʽBald Headed Womanʼ does not
really sound that bad — the band,
augmented by several distinct keyboard parts (it is rumored that Jon Lord
himself, of future Deep Purple fame, plays the organ here), gets a cool
wall-of-sound going on by the end, somewhat presaging the controlled chaos
atmosphere of the Who’s debut a year later (not that surprising, considering that it would also be produced by
Shel Talmy... and that the Who would be another
band to whom he’d peddle ʽBald Headed
Womanʼ). But the very
fact of presenting this stuff as Shel Talmy originals, along with references
to bald mountains and bald headed women on both of the tracks, makes the
whole thing look ridiculous. Still,
looking back on it as a whole, Kinks
is not such a complete embarrassment as it is often made out to be in
critical circles. ʽYou Really Got
Meʼ and ʽStop Your Sobbingʼ act as anchors here, showing that the band had already found its main
voices — the hard rock groove and the soothing pop serenade — and simply did not have enough time in store to follow them
exclusively. The rock’n’roll covers already show Dave Davies as a
fiery-spirited, crunchy guitar player with garage-punk ambitions, even if his
singing leaves a lot to be desired (then again, I openly admit that there are
people who really appreciate the timbre of his voice here, considering it to
be suitably arrogant and obnoxious for this material — no accounting for
taste indeed). And even when they are at their objective worst, the record
remains listenable — there is a healthy rock’n’roll vibe running through it
all, showing that they were clearly on the «authentically genuine» side of
the newly emerging pop sound, rather than the «commercially glossy» side.
Even those early originals which try to emulate the Dave Clark Five, through
their very sloppiness and shagginess, show that the Kinks would not be the
ones to powder up their music for mainstream public appeal. So
I guess you could call the album an auspicious debut, if nothing else; and in
this particular case, even the bonus tracks are of questionable quality,
concentrating on the early and still under-cooked singles. Of course, at
least one of them is essential — ‘All Day And All Of The Night’, the
immediate follow-up to ‘You Really Got Me’ which almost (but not quite) made
it to #1 itself. However, pretty much the only
thing distinguishing it from ‘You Really Got Me’ is a slightly more complex,
though equally catchy and somewhat self-resolving riff — other than that, it
is almost ridiculous how the song completely apes the structure and mood of
its predecessor, which is why I have always been sitting on the fence about
it. In some ways, I almost prefer the B-side of ‘You Really Got Me’, the
R&B vamp ‘It’s Alright’ on which Ray seems seems to be intentionally
trying to pull off the intensity and nastiness of Eric Burdon — and almost
succeeds! (Not the B-side of ‘All Day’, though: ‘I Gotta Move’ is just a
slight variation on Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Wish You Would’, though they do get
a nice acoustic / bass groove going on). The
bonus tracks also include all of the Kinksize
Session EP from November ’64, on
which you can hear the perennial classic ʽLouie, Louieʼ sung with marginally
comprehensible lyrics; ʽI’ve Got That Feelingʼ, which is about as much of a collective rip-off of all sorts of music
ideas from A Hard Day’s Night as
one could stomach (though "let me tell you ’bout a girl I know" is,
of course, rather quoted from Chuck Berry); and ‘I Gotta Go Now’, notable for
Ray’s vocal stretching and exploring his breathy falsetto range for the first
time in Kinks history, something that would become quite common for him
already in 1965. All in all, most of this stuff is absolutely indispensable
not just for a historian of the Kinks, but for any aspiring young songwriter
in need of understanding how to hone one’s songwriting craft, and go from
clumsy raw talent to breathtaking genius over the shortest time span
possible. |
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Album
released: March 5, 1965 |
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Tracks: 1) Look For Me Baby; 2) Got My
Feet On The Ground; 3) Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ’Bout That
Girl; 4) Naggin’ Woman; 5) Wonder Where My
Baby Is Tonight; 6) Tired Of Waiting For You;
7) Dancing In The Street; 8) Don’t Ever Change; 9) Come On Now; 10) So Long;
11) You Shouldn’t Be Sad; 12) Something Better Beginning; 13*) Everybody’s
Gonna Be Happy; 14*) Who’ll Be The Next In Line; 15*) Set Me Free; 16*) I
Need You; 17*) See My Friends; 18*) Never
Met A Girl Like You Before; 19*) Wait Till Summer Comes Along; 20*) Such A
Shame; 21*) A Well Respected Man; 22*) Don’t You Fret; 23*) I Go To Sleep
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REVIEW 1965 started
out on a really high note for the Davies brothers: January 15 saw the release
of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, which is, in a number of ways, one of the most
significant songs in their entire career. For one thing, it became their
biggest ever chart hit in the US (yes, even higher than ‘Lola’!), completing
the hit trilogy with ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day And All Of The Night’
and reliably securing a place for the Kinks in the rock history annals of the
American critical establishment — one might argue that if not for the
popularity of those early recordings in 1964-65, the latter might have easily
slept out the already less-than-cool Britishness of ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and
‘Waterloo Sunset’ at the dawn of the new Psychedelic Age. |
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More
importantly, it was just a new type of song — if we stretch out the
application of the term for a mile, we might just as well call it the first
«power ballad» ever written. While it began life on the umbilical cord of
that soft, colorful, jangly arpeggiated lead line from the folk-pop circuit,
it did not really deliver until
brother Dave came up with the idea of adding (almost) the exact same
hard-rocking, distorted sound of ʽYou Really Got
Meʼ for
counterpoint — and it is all but impossible to properly describe to which
extent the song is elevated by the added boost of the grumbly "da-doom, da-doom" G-F riff.
Basically, it combines the best of both worlds available to pop musicians at
the time, and in a way that makes perfect sense: after all, why can’t a song
be «soft» and «hard» at the same time? He loves her — that’s soft — but she
just won’t commit — that’s hard — and there you go, simple as that. You
can see how rudimentary the pop writing approach still remains in some
matters: for one thing, the lyrics, endlessly recycling the same chorus, the
same single verse and the same single bridge, are even less advanced than the
Beatles’ contemporary exercises in teen-pop (though they do fit in well with
the musical mood). For another, the song delivers all of its goods exactly
one minute into the proceedings, with no additional ideas for extra melodic
and harmonic overlays (again, the Beatles were miles ahead here at the time,
having already learned the lesson that if you end the song exactly the same way that you began
it, you have not properly fulfilled your duty). Yet in that one minute, they
manage at least two major feats —
first, the phenomenal soft-hard juxtaposition, and then the declaration of
one of the Sixties’ most beautiful musical instruments, namely Ray Davies’
breathy-nasal falsetto on the "it’s your life..." bit, which I
personally will take over Paul McCartney’s and Brian Wilson’s upper ranges any time of day, given how it
adds a whole extra dimension to the predictable «tenderness» effect. Which
dimension? I’m actually still trying to understand that. It’s either a little
bit of unsettling irony, or a touch of grim melancholy, or maybe both. When
Paul and Brian go for falsetto, it’s like "you’re so beautiful,
girl". When Ray does the same, it’s like "you’re so beautiful,
girl, but the universe is expanding and we’re all gonna die". I don’t
know about you, but to me this automatically makes Ray the coolest of the three. For
the record, the single also clearly established, once and for all, who of the
two brothers would be riding first class and who would be taking coach:
Brother Dave clearly takes the main responsibility for the B-side ‘Come On
Now’, which, in contrast to the A-side, is a fun, but one-dimensional
pop-rocker which, furthermore, commits the travesty of outright stealing the
riff to the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ for its primary groove. Additionally,
Brother Ray is clearly waiting for his Special One to come into his life,
whereas Brother Dave is just waiting for some broad to accompany him to an
evening dance party while she is too busy fixing her face... hey, what do you
mean «it’s the same broad»? Oh,
right, they’re time traveling and singing about Patti Boyd. It’s the frickin’
distance from ‘Layla’ to ‘Wonderful Tonight’ all over again. Anyway, good
song, but nowhere near the monumentality of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, of
course. (Might I also add that the backing vocals sound silly — it’s as if
Dave were a Mafia guy and all of his henchmen were trying to break into the
lady’s boudoir). The
success of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ clearly showed that the group would go
way beyond the one-hit wonder status: after all, ‘All Day And All Of The
Night’ did milk precisely the same formula as ‘You Really Got Me’, but ‘Tired
Of Waiting’ was already something significantly different — still linked to
the previous hits with the same stylistic elements, but taking a distinct
side turn and promising future creative growth without compromising quality.
Naturally, this meant going back into the studio and making another album,
and this time, actually going all the way trying to make it a proper album, rather than just a lousy
collection of filler, hastily assembled around a hit single. For
all the progress that Ray and Dave Davies brought to the world during their
peak period of 1966–1969, it can be very seriously argued that no other gap
between any two of their classic albums required taking such a giant leap
forward as the distance between Kinks
and Kinda Kinks — and I know this
is hard to believe just by looking at the uninventiveness of the actual album
titles, but give them some slack for popularizing the letter K back in the
day (I mean, why should the Klan be taking all that glory instead?). Even if
there are relatively few truly timeless classics on Kinda Kinks that could match the power of ‘Tired Of Waiting For
You’, what is important is that it finally sounds, on the whole, like a proper Kinks album, one where the band
consistently comes into its own and nobody else’s style. This is, of course,
a subjective judgement, but at least it is objectively backed by the fact
that 10 out of 12 songs here are credited to Davies (usually to Ray) —
compared to just five on the first LP — reflecting an exceptionally fast rate
at which Ray was beginning to turn into one of Britain’s finest young songwriters,
a fact that he himself could hardly have predicted even one year earlier. Next
to an entire load of botched, poorly thought out covers on Kinks, easily the only atavistic reminder
of their crummy fumbling from yesteryear is ʽNaggin’ Womanʼ, rather an odd
choice for a cover at this moment — originally recorded by little-known
vocalist and harmonica player from Mississippi by the name of Jimmy Anderson,
which even in its original incarnation sounded like an average wannabe-Jimmy Reed
number. For his delivery, brother Dave once again selects his obnoxiously exaggerated
nasal voice and pushes it so much further than either Jimmy Reed or Jimmy Anderson that I can almost
literally smell bits of drunk vomit in the air, and it is not so much
«authentic and gritty» as «stupid and nasty». I do appreciate Dave cleverly
reproducing the proverbial «nagginess» of the woman in question with
minimalistic, whiny guitar licks (as opposed to Anderson’s harmonica in the
original), but that instrumental break is probably the only salvageable
component of the entire disaster. Leave that back in 1964, will you, please? On
the other hand, they fare surprisingly better with upbeat Motown material,
provided it has been properly Kinkified: Ray sings Martha & the Vandellas’
ʽDancing In The
Streetʼ with plenty of
idealistic-romantic aplomb, but it is the raw, swirling, scratchy rhythm
guitar playing which makes the song — lacking either
the budget or the experience to emulate the original’s glorious brass
arrangement, the Kinks put everything they have into the guitar groove, and
make it into a kick-ass sample of young British rhythm’n’blues. (I have no
idea why the band’s biographers keep calling the cover bland and colorless:
maybe they think that Ray’s nasal voice cannot convey the jubilant enthusiasm
of the original, and they may have something there, but the tough rhythmic
groove comes out as far more «street-wise» than Motown’s glossy original. If
you want a truly bland cover of the song, check out the Tages’ version, which
just hangs on one chord from start to finish). Turning
now to original material, it is true that, next to the ground-shattering
breakthrough of ʽTired Of
Waiting For Youʼ, the rest of Kinda Kinks may feel lackluster in
comparison — and, well, it probably is, considering how much Ray
used to berate producer Shel Talmy for forcing the band to record it in a
mere two weeks’ time (for comparison, the Beatles would use the results from
seven different sessions, extended over a three-month period, to put together
their second LP). Even so, most of the originals still represent tiny slices
of catchy, emotionally resonant pop-rock with all sorts of subtle twists,
particularly the lengthy stretch on Side B which begins with ʽDon’t Ever Changeʼ. Of
the two truly original compositions on Kinks,
it is the ʽStop Your
Sobbingʼ model rather
than ʽYou Really Got
Meʼ that Ray keeps
following — maybe not exactly inventing the formula of «consolation-pop», but trying his best
to associate it with his own name, once and for ever. Under his direction,
the Kinks are building up their own little «safe space» on the market, a sort
of musical shelter for all those young girls who, after having their hearts
burned down by the Beatles and their other organs soaked wet by the Stones,
could find peace and relaxation by gently weeping on Uncle Ray’s comforting
shoulder (whether Uncle Ray had his own ulterior creepy motives staked out or
not is an open question, but at least he was freshly married at the time). Although
most of these songs are romantic, they are perhaps even less sexual in nature
than those of the Beach Boys — not to mention the complete lack of any traces
of misogyny or the slightest disrespect towards representatives of the opposite
sex, so common among young British rhythm’n’blues players at the time (not
least because they were following the role models of African-American
bluesmen — there’s your ‘Naggin’ Woman’ for you). Mr.
Ray Davies ain’t no Jimmy Reed, though, nor is he John Lennon, Mick Jagger,
or Eric Burdon. Instead of telling her that "it’s all over now", or
that "you can’t do that", or that he’s "gonna send her back to
Walker", or even that this happened once before when he came to her
door, etc. etc., all Mr. Ray wants to do is to sincerely wish her a "don’t
you ever change now, always stay the same now", to tell her that she "shouldn’t
be sad", and to go on record with the confession that the only thing
that holds him still is the memory of her sweet caress. In fact, if it wasn’t
for the memory of her sweet caress, he would have probably asked for
political asylum in the USSR while traveling through Sheremetyevo Airport in
1966 — after all, he’s got no time for Muswell town any more... Exceptions
still exist: the excruciatingly long-titled ʽNothing In The World Can Stop Me From Worryin’ Bout That Girlʼ does tell the story of a nasty two-timer who
"just kept on lying" to poor Mr. Ray. But even with this kind of
hurt, all it leads to is quiet heartbreak rather than anger — there isn’t a single insult in the lyrics, and the song, a
minimalistic piece of blues-pop whose acoustic riff incidentally predicts the
guitar melody of Simon & Garfunkel’s ʽMrs. Robinsonʼ three years
later, is quiet, sulky, and sad, rather than vindictive. And on ʽSomething Better Beginningʼ, a song written so obviously in the style of the
Ronettes that it simply screams for
a wall-of-sound production which Shel Talmy cannot grant it, Ray is clearly
singing about a break-up — but he never ever mentions who was the culprit, and
the song on the whole is all about optimism and faith in, well, something
better beginning. Note the little lyrical nod to the Beatles — "then I
saw you standing there..." — which is most likely intentional, as Ray
intends to emphasize the psychological distance between himself and Paul
McCartney. The latter — silly naïve boy that he is — seems to think that
"now I’ll never dance with another" (yeah, go tell that to Jane
Asher), while the former — wise old guy that he is — is all about thinking
ahead: "Each step that I took with you / Brought one thing closer to my
mind / Is this the start of another heartbreaker?.." It
is precisely these little things which make all these tunes, as simplistic as
they are on the surface, sound believable
— almost from the very start, Ray is not interested in simply churning out
one commercial, formulaic pop song after another; instead (somewhat similar
to the role of the Shangri-Las across the Atlantic), his purpose is to think
up short stories of realistic human relationships, and although at this point
he was not yet fully consistent (stuff like ʽWonder Where My Baby Is Tonightʼ, unimaginatively attached to the riff of ‘Can I Get A Witness’ and
chucked over to brother Dave to sing, is still fairly cartoonish), most of these
boy-meets-girl stories are as true to life as the band’s soon-to-follow
social miniatures of everyday routine in the UK. From
a pure melodic standpoint, Ray’s compositions for now are still arguably
weaker than contemporary Beatles stuff, but already at this point the musical
avatar of Ray Davies comes across as a living and breathing person asking for
our empathy, whereas the true-to-life, psychologically believable personal
sides of Lennon and McCartney would still take a couple years to truly emerge
from under all the artistic craft (in a way, one might argue that it was not
until the Beatles began to disintegrate as a group, around the time of The White Album, that their output
became notably less theatrical in nature). It is from that point, for instance, that one should evaluate Ray’s many
scathing criticisms of the Beatles in 1965-66 (see his notoriously
devastating review of Revolver,
for instance) — while jealousy was certainly one of the factors, the defining
one was unquestionably the huge gap between the two bands’ musical ethics and
aesthetics. Even at this dawning period of the British Invasion, Ray Davies
could never have written ‘If I Fell’, and John Lennon could never have
written ‘Nothing In This World Can Stop Me From Putting Together Such Long
Song Titles’. That
said, for all the goodness contained within Kinda Kinks, it was a
rushed LP, and the Kinks were still
essentially a singles-oriented band at this point. Consequently, no other
album in the band’s entire catalog benefited greater from the arrival of the
CD era, when it became possible to expand it by including all of their
singles released in between Kinda
Kinks and The Kink Kontroversy
— and so bear with me just a tad longer while I allow myself to drool a bit
over the best of those, or maybe even a bit longer than just a bit, given
that the bonus tracks almost double the length of the album, and almost each of those is a tiny gem in
its own rights. We
begin on a relatively humble note with the double punch of ʽEverybody’s Gonna Be Happyʼ and ‘Who’ll Be The Next In Line’, both of them
energetic pop rockers but not quite
what the public was expecting from the Kinks in March ’65, because, come on,
where is that ‘You Really Got Me’-style crunch? Have the boys run out of
needles to stick in amplifiers? Not even Mick Avory, with some great
proto-funky drum fills on ‘Be Happy’, could turn the tide of dissatisfaction.
Honestly, while both songs are fun and catchy, they are also not particularly
«Kinky» — each of them could be performed by the likes of, say, Cliff Bennett
or any such second-rate British rhythm’n’blues performer. But
the great run is back after this relative setback. ʽSet Me Freeʼ brings back, loud and proud, the powerful crunch of the two-chord
riff (G-Am instead of G-F this time), and while on the surface it seems to
bring back the formula of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, emotionally it is
completely different. It is, in fact, an emotional sequel to ‘Tired Of Waiting’: now that it finally becomes clear
that the girl is going to keep the poor guy hanging for the rest of his life,
he implores her to break the spell — which is, of course, impossible. If the
G-F riff was that of heavy brooding, then the G-Am riff is the one of
rattling chains dragging across the floor (and, in a rare case of modern
technology improving upon an old classic, I think that the live performance
of the song on the band’s To The Bone
album in 1996, with Dave adding wholesale grungy distortion to the original
riff, conveys that effect even more sharply). Even more effective is Ray’s
singing — that moment when his choked, strained, almost glottalic plea of
"set-me-free little girl" pushes high into the falsetto range of
"...you can DO it if you TRY..." is a bitch to properly pull off, one of the greatest vocal tricks of
his entire career and the #1 source of magic for this particular song, and by
«magic» I do indeed mean «I have not the slightest idea why it moves me so
much, but the doctor said it makes my heart jump, my eyes tear up, and my
heart to go out there and bring a five-ton package of peace, love, and
understanding for humanity». One of those field days for biochemistry, I
guess. The
anti-climactic news is that the B-side of that single was ‘I Need You’, which
not only shares its simplistic title with a better George Harrison song from
the same year, but is actually a third
stylistic rewrite of ‘You Really Got Me’; alas, unlike ‘Set Me Free’, it does
not push its immediate stylistic predecessor to further heights and depths,
but merely walks the same walk one more time. Ironically, the opening power
chords feature a bit of stinging feedback which could have made the waves,
had it been released half a year earlier; as it is, the trick seems to be
fully derivative of the Beatles’ use of feedback at the start of ‘I Feel
Fine’, further contributing to the humiliation of the song. Fortunately, a
B-side is a B-side — if it’s good, you can quickly retitle it as «the second
A-side», and if it’s not, you can quickly forget it ever existed in the first
place. The
next single, while (on a personal level) not nearly as gut-wrenching as ‘Set
Me Free’, was far more important for the history of rock music: ʽSee My Friendsʼ — one of the first pop songs to incorporate genuine Indian motives.
Unfortunately, the Yardbirds beat Ray by a couple of weeks with their own
‘Heart Full Of Soul’, but you could at least argue that in spirit, the droning, meditative nature of ‘See My Friends’ brings
it closer to the conception of a rāga than the Yardbirds song (an
opinion shared by Peter Lavezzoli in his fairly monumental exploration, Dawn Of Indian Music In The West).
Ironically, even though the Yardbirds did record a sitar version, neither of
the two bands ended up having a sitar on the commercial recording, which still gives the final honours to the
Beatles on ‘Norwegian Wood’. Allegedly,
the song was inspired by the band’s brief stopover in Bombay on their way to
Australia, and Ray would later claim that its lyrics were a tribute to the
death (in 1957) of his elder sister Rene — which, not coincidentally, makes
‘See My Friends’ deeply innovative for the band not only in terms of music,
but also in terms of lyrical subject, going way beyond the boy-meets-girl
theme. Subtly conforming to the age-old folk tradition, the droning lament
depersonalizes the singer, with Ray relying on multi-tracked vocals, wedged
fairly deep inside the mix and making him sound a wee bit closer to an actual
group of chanting Indian fishermen than he might even have intended to. Small
surprise that critics did not exactly get the song at the time, and the
public bought fewer copies of the single than was expected (though it still
reached #10 on the charts) — the whole thing was way too far ahead of the
kind of sound that grabbed the public’s attention at the time. Heck,
even today, when listening to this stuff, I am not sure of what my exact
emotional reaction is; maybe it is actually close to what I am feeling when
putting on a Ravi Shankar piece — which would, in its own way, already serve
as a major compliment to Ray Davies, though I have to warn you that I have
not the faintest idea of what that feeling is. Pacification? Humility?
Self-loss in the almighty Brahman? Let’s just admit that it was, and still
is, a very cool way to sing about death (certainly a much less pretentious
one than ‘Great Gig In The Sky’), and leave it at that. Also, the B-side
sucks: ‘Never Met A Girl Like You Before’ starts out like it’s going to be a
re-write of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, then quickly becomes a rip-off of the
Beatles’ ‘She’s A Woman’, with throwaway lyrics and retarded vocal tones. But
I guess if they’d made it the A-side instead, the single might have charted
higher than it did. Finally,
the last single on this run is yet another
important milestone: ‘A Well Respected Man’ is chronologically the very first
in a long and honorable series of Ray Davies’ social portraits — it might not
be the most melodically polished of them all, and, in fact, its strolling
rhythm would eventually be recycled for superior creations like ‘Dedicated
Follower Of Fashion’ and ‘Dandy’, but a first is a first, and it allows us to
put an approximate date (September ’65) to the emergence of Ray Davies as the
Charles Dickens of Sixties’ pop-rock. The B-side, ‘Such A Shame’, is this
time quite commendable in itself: the musical style of the song, all choppy
power chords and complex, crashing drum patterns, puts it close to the 1965
pop style of the Who, but Roger Daltrey could never have conveyed an
atmosphere of such depressed gloom as Ray was capable of with his "it’s
a shame, such a shame, such a shame" mantra which he repeats and repeats
mechanistically, like a punished schoolboy in the classroom corner. For
the sake of completeness, I also have to mention that the reissue adds two
more tracks that were previously available on the 4-track EP Kwyet Kinks (also released in
September ’65), which, in addition to ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Such A
Shame’, contained probably the first ever good
song written by Brother Dave (‘Wait Till Summer Comes Along’, a pretty
country-pop-rocker which he even manages to sing in an acceptable voice), and
the wonderfully fussy ‘Don’t You Fret’, a song written by Ray in an almost
Appalachian folk style and culminating in a crazy wall of sonic noise which
would also have made the Who truly proud... except it’s all done with acoustic guitars. (There’s no evidence
that they smashed them upon completing the record, either). Finally, last,
but not least, is the previously unpublished piano demo of ‘I Go To Sleep’, a
song that would be donated to the Applejacks (and still much later covered by
the Pretenders); the Applejacks honestly completed the recording and made it
publishable, but Ray sings the song far more beautifully, leaving behind yet
another little melancholic masterpiece — which, for that matter, also
concludes this behemoth of a CD on a surprisingly intimate, solitary note,
something which probably would not have worked for the Beatles, but
retroactively feels like a totally natural move for the Kinks. Slow this song
even further down, polish its production, and it would not feel out of place
on a classic cold, atmospheric album such as Brian Eno’s Before And After Science. Altogether,
that makes for 23 tracks worth of material and, as I already mentioned,
probably the single most fruitful
year for the Kinks in terms of their artistic evolution. At the end of 1964,
they were a bunch of fashionably dressed young punks who had accidentally
learned how to crunch a great distorted riff — nothing guaranteed that they
would be coming here to stay, much less follow a Beatlesque model of constant
evolution and self-improvement. By the fall of 1965, they’d learned to root
out most of their early flaws, develop their own trajectory of songwriting,
invent the power ballad, delve into Indian influences, and begin
incorporating social critique and irony into the 2-minute pop song — and
that’s just the major achievements,
see? From
a certain point of view, everything that Ray would be doing for the next four
years — the most glorious ones of the band’s career — would simply be
perfecting and deepening the formulae developed during this period. And while
the actual LP, as indicated above, does not yet reflect the band’s full
potential, the magnificent run of singles from March to September of 1965
most certainly does. The only reasons why they still feel a bit like a
rehearsal are technical — lack of experience in the studio, lack of
technological breakthroughs, and the
fact that pop music was still only on the verge of being recognized as a
genuine art form. In late 1965, it was still possible for a band like the
Kinks to write a song like ‘Never Met A Girl Like You Before’ (or for a band
like the Beatles to write a song like ‘Wait’, for that matter). Fast forward
one year, or maybe even just a few months, and you’d already need a band like
the Ramones to do that kind of thing, which would be a whole other story
altogether. |