CRITICAL MASS : Ray Davies and The Kinks created some of the best — and most underrated — music of the British Invasion
Posted on Tuesday, April 11, 2006
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When you name your band
Kinks, you’ve said
something about how you wish
to be perceived and how you perceive yourself. You’re taking a stand apart, opting out of whatever mainstream may develop. A band named The Kinks could never achieve Beatles-like commercial success — for them the toppermost of the poppermost was never a real, attainable place at all. A Kink is never king.
So it’s hardly surprising The Kinks are the most underrated of the British Invasion bands that most people seem to think matter — they occupy a definite third tier, beneath The Beatles, who have the high ground to themselves, and The Rolling Stones and The Who, those angrier young men of British pop and blues.
Maybe it was because Ray Davies did not think he was pretty enough, or maybe his appetite for subversion required self-abnegation. Maybe you slough off a little pressure. You in a band ? Yeah, but it is a ridiculous one, isn’t it ? A silly avocation for a working class kid from Muswell Hill, but what are you gonna do ? The birds go for boys in tight trousers and guitars, might as well see how it all plays out.
Did Ray think his brother Dave the really talented one ? Dave did — and probably still does; it’s that heartfelt sense of grievance that gives his career such interesting bite. Dave’s complaint is that, although it was he who invited Ray to join his band, The Kinks were always Ray’s band.
It was Dave’s guitar that animated the beast. Who invented the power chord ? Who invented distortion as an aesthetic choice ? Bollocks, it was Dave Davies. Took a razor blade to the speaker cones of his little green amp, he did.
“You Really Got Me.” “ All Day and All of the Night. ” OK, they’re virtually the same song. That’s the bona fides, guys, that’s the credentials, the staggering, metal shaking hits. That’s enough to get your ticket punched to a Hall of Fame awards banquet right there. Anybody could have sung those songs.
But it’s hard out there for a Kink. And sibling rivalry being what it is, Dave and Ray square off a few times, on stage and off, a couple of 130-pound nance boys throwing down. Pathetic. Drink and blackouts, Nervous exhaustion. What Ray called “jealousy, greed, resentment, misunderstanding.”
In 1965, normally well-mannered drummer Mick Avory went after Ray onstage with a drum pedal and beat up the lead singer. Avory went on the lam 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. What would have been four lucrative years. Four years is a long time in rock ’n’ roll. Most bands don’t last four years. Most bands implode, break up or have a plane crash. Somebody ODs. Somebody gets religion and moves to Katmandu.
ART LOVER But The Kinks didn’t fold. Ray started writing songs from the perspective of the middle-class Britisher astonished and appalled by the social tsunamis of the 1960 s. He started
taking on
different
personas, standing
outside the
drama, telling
stories. People
talk about
Bob Dylan’s
songwriting
and yeah, Bob
Dylan changed
the world in
as big a way as
Elvis Presley
did: He 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. Ray Davies knew where all the lonely people came from. Some of them came from Muswell Hill.
Go back and listen to the stuff from the 1960 s. You’ll be impressed how well Something Else By The Kinks holds up. Maybe it’s the best record of 1967, that annus mirabilis that produced Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Their Satanic Majesties Request, Surrealistic Pillow, Disraeli Gears, Days of Future Passed and Sunshine Superman. “Waterloo Sunset” was a revolution in a china cup.
And Something Else was surpassed by The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society the next year.
By then The Kinks weren’t about Dave’s guitar, although he could still play it loud. They were about Ray’s empathy and wistfulness, his longing and peculiar compassion for the poor old sad old world. Ray 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. If you know The Kinks, you know what’s next. If you don’t, you don’t care. You can skip over the theatrical productions, the rock operas Preservation Pts 1 & 2 and Soap Opera. Some nice tunes — “Celluloid Heroes,” for example — but nothing five-star essential. Then you have the Arista revival, ho-hum, a brace of hits —
the near-great
Sleepwalker,
the
commercially viable
album Low
Budget and “Come
Dancing” — on
MTV. That was
a peak, and the
band never saw
that kind of
success again.
The Hall of
Fame induction
came in the early 1990 s, Ray published a really good “unauthorized autobiography” called X-Ray in 1995 and for all practical purposes the band retired around 1997. Good run, Kinks.
A WELL-RESPECTED MAN You only thought it was over. Ray Davies released his first solo album earlier this year, a little observational gem with the misdirecting title Other People’s Lives. It’s full of the sort of genius that some people dismiss as a trick of the light, or simple weirdness. It’s a record by a 62-yearold man who understands exactly what getting older means.
Davies has always been an accessible Robyn Hitchcock, a guy who understands that the best pop music is aspirational, that it wants and needs an apprehending audience. It’s not just pretty sounds sliding around on the radio. It lives through language, through recognizable voices. It’s about communication. Aside from the overly sentimental lead single “Thanksgiving Day,” Other People’s Lives is a near-perfect map of an empathetic heart, a restrained and intelligent reflection on the singer’s mortality. It’s an act of confession and contrition, livened up with pumping American swamp organ and occasional wide blue guitar chords. Always underrated, Davies has been able to leverage his limitations — his scratchy voice quails and trembles and explodes over shining seas of generic guitar jangle. If you’re looking for it, you can find what patronizing critics always called Davies’ “quaint” side, but the world-weary “After the Fall,” the lacerating “All She Wrote,” and the almost ponderous album opener “Things Are Gonna Change” belie the idea of Davies as a gifted miniaturist. The Kinks made the best album of 1967. Ray Davies has made the best album of 2006, so far. Not bad for an apeman. E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline. com