The Kinks: Bona fide Brit invaders
Philip Martin
The paradox of pop music is that the best of it is imminently disposable yet forever fresh. What distinguishes a great pop record is not the song -- there can be lousy recordings made of great songs -- but something apart from the sequencing of chords and lyrics, the imprinting patterns of beat and melody.
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The paradox of pop music is that the best of it is imminently disposable yet forever fresh. What distinguishes a great pop record is not the song -- there can be lousy recordings made of great songs -- but something apart from the sequencing of chords and lyrics, the imprinting patterns of beat and melody. It hasn't that much to do with the way the musicians cohere or the skill they exhibit on their instruments. Making a great record has something to do with lassoing a moment with urgency and tautness and the possibility of disaster.

Or at least it did, back in the days when these records were being made. Nowadays we know how to stop time and nudge a note a micro-tone flat or sharp and achieve a kind of antiseptic perfection. Which is beautiful, in its shiny store-bought way, but leaves some of us hungry for a little human frailty.

I am trying to tell you why I love The Kinks so much, and trying to deal with the strangeness of writing about music from 50 years ago that still feels electric and throbbing and, in a real way, dangerous. I am struggling to avoid saying anything preposterous, like more than any other band, more than The Beatles or the Stones or The Who, The Kinks evoke the spirit of what we call the British Invasion (which was really the amplified echo of American blues and rock reverbing off an appreciative English scene).

The occasion for this is the recent release of The Kinks: Anthology 1964-1971 (Sanctuary, $79.99), a five-CD boxed set. It has all of the band's official single releases, including familiar tracks "Tired of Waiting for You," "Who Will Be the Next in Line," "A Well Respected Man," "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," "Sunny Afternoon," "Lola" and "I'm Not Like Everybody Else." There also are lesser-known songs, outtakes, demos and remixes. It's the sort of item baby boomers and hipsters like to buy, as much to advertise their taste as for the music.

It's a good set but not a great one. The packaging feels cheap and there's no definitive essay to put the band in context, just a booklet of collages of newspaper articles with superfluous quotations about the band's influence from the likes of Jon Bon Jovi. It's by no means "complete" and some of the tracks -- particularly the live Chuck Berry covers on the first disc -- can be safely skipped.

The period covers the seven years the band was under contract to Pye Records. Group members were brothers Ray and Dave Davies from Muswell Hill in North London, bassist Pete Quaife and drummer Mick Avory. Nicky Hopkins was a frequent contributor on piano, while Ray's wife, Rasa Davies, often sang backing vocals. Quaife was injured in an automobile accident in 1966 and was replaced by John Dalton in 1969. Rasa Davies -- married to Ray from 1964 to 1973 -- contributed some lovely background vocals to most of the band's studio recordings during this period (including a part in "Waterloo Sunset").

While I'd suggest that there's some value in the band's later records -- the Arista years, starting with the near-great Sleepwalker album in 1977, have a few redeeming moments -- few would disagree that this is the band's best lineup. I hold them responsible for some of the best pop records ever made.

Admittedly the band occupies a third tier beneath The Beatles, who have the high ground to themselves, with the grittier Stones and angrier Who on the second step. But The Kinks weren't as overexposed either. You might only know one or two of their songs, such as "You Really Got Me" or "All Day and All of the Night," which are essentially the same song (and only a few degrees off "Louie, Louie"). Those songs were driven less by the sensibility of The Kinks' great songwriter and frontman Ray Davies than by the power chords of his little brother, lead guitarist Dave.

Not that I don't love those records -- especially "You Really Got Me," which may be the genesis of heavy metal and distortion as an aesthetic choice. There are battling creation myths on that one. Ray maintains it was he who stuck a knitting needle in Dave's little green guitar amp, while Dave, well, here's his recent Facebook post:

"My brother is lying. I don't know why he does this, but it was my Elpico amp that I bought, and out of frustration I cut the speaker cone up with a razor blade, and I was so shocked and surprised and excited that it worked that I demonstrated the sound to Ray and Pete ... Ray liked the sound, and he had written a riff on the piano which formed the basis of the song 'You Really Got Me,' and I played the riff on my guitar with MY new sound. I ALONE CREATED THIS SOUND."

BROTHERS KEEPERS

For 50 years they've been going at it like this.

It was bad in the early days. Dave and Ray had a few fistfights, on stage and off. A couple of 130-pounders worn raw by touring, nervous exhaustion, drinking themselves into blackouts. In his 1994 book X-Ray (a deeply interesting piece of experimental nonfiction he called an "unauthorized autobiography"), Ray blamed it all on "jealousy, greed, resentment, misunderstanding."

Pete Townshend smashed guitars onstage. The Kinks smashed each other. In 1965, the normally well-mannered drummer Avory went after Dave Davies onstage with a drum pedal, apparently in retaliation for the guitarist kicking over his drum kit the previous night. (Dave had attacked the drum kit out of frustration of losing an offstage fistfight with the drummer.) Avory had to hide out for a few days to avoid arrest for grievous bodily harm.

Then Ray slugged someone other than his brother and the American Federation of Musicians kept The Kinks from touring the States for nearly four years.

I tend to believe Dave's version of the little green amp story for no other reason than Ray's insistence that his brother has always been the genuinely talented one. Part of what makes the band so interesting is Ray's heartfelt sense of grievance. From Ray's perspective, he joined Dave's band -- the only thing he could bring to it was some cleverness and rhythm guitar. Dave's complaint is that, although it was he who invited Ray to join his band, The Kinks was always Ray's band in that it was the instrument of his expression.

Anyone could have sung "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night." Those songs aren't about the singer but about ground-shaking scuzz tones flaking off the car radio speakers. It was Dave who made that monumental noise (the rumors that Jimmy Page played the riff are grounded in the fact that he did play on some of the early Kinks sessions; he might have even replaced Ray on rhythm guitar on "You Really Got Me").

But The Kinks were just about the noise.

Those four years when the band couldn't tour in the states would have been profitable years. Most bands wouldn't have stayed together -- four years is a long time in rock 'n' roll. Most bands implode, break up or have a plane crash. Somebody ODs. Somebody gets religion and moves to Katmandu.

ROCK WITH EMPATHY

But Ray Davies stayed in Muswell Hill. He started writing songs from the perspective of the middle-class Britisher astonished and appalled by the social tsunamis of the 1960s. He started taking on personas, standing outside the drama, telling stories. People talk about Bob Dylan's songwriting and yeah, Dylan changed the world in as big a way as Elvis Presley did. Dylan made it OK for grown-ups to like rock 'n' roll.

But Ray Davies made it possible for rock 'n' roll to like grown-ups, to have empathy for the people who were like everybody else -- the shopkeepers and stifled park-bench sitters. Davies became a regular Samuel Pepys. He knew where all the lonely people came from. Some of them came from Muswell Hill.

Go back and listen to the stuff from the 1960s. You'll be impressed by how well Something Else By The Kinks holds up. "Waterloo Sunset" was a revolution in a china cup. Maybe Something Else was the best record of 1967, that "annus mirabilis" that produced The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request, Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow, Cream's Disraeli Gears, The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed and Donovan's Sunshine Superman.

And Something Else was surpassed by The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society the next year.

By then The Kinks weren't all about Dave Davies' guitar, although he could still play it loud. They were about Ray Davies' empathy and wistfulness, his longing and peculiar compassion for the poor old sad old world. He was writing songs not for a market but for himself -- "songs his friends would like to listen to." Britain was being subsumed by the American tide. All an Englishman could do was mourn the changing of the guard.

In late 1970, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, took on the rock 'n' roll circus and spawned "Lola," a kinky hit about a romance with a transvestite.

Come to think of it, if you know The Kinks, you probably know that song too.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 01/04/2015