For Those Who Don’t Get My Beach Boys Obsession…
GAH! This originally posted with the worst thing ever, rather than Brian Wilson. I apologise more than words can say for that.
Watch this, then you either will get it, or you’ll know you never will:
(For those who care, that’s Brian Wilson in 2004 performing the song Surf’s Up, from Smile, written by Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. The backing band there are Darian Sahanaja (keyboards,vocals), Scott Bennett (keyboards, glockenspiel, vocals), Probyn Gregory (french horn), Paul von Mertens (flute, harmonica, conductor), Jeffrey Foskett (sleigh bells, vocals), Taylor Mills (vocals), Bob Lizik (bass), Jim Hines (drums), Nelson Bragg (percussion, vocals), Nick Walusko (guitar, vocals) and the Stockholm Strings And Horns. Sahanaja, Bennett, Gregory, Mertens, Foskett and Bragg are all part of the Beach Boys touring band for the reunion tour).
A Beginners’ Guide To The Beach Boys
The Beach Boys are a hard band to get into. When Mike Taylor asked a while back in the comments to one of my posts which Beach Boys albums someone should try, I actually drew a blank. This is because the Beach Boys rarely made consistently good albums. They started their career when singles, not albums, were the important thing, made one big Album As Statement (Pet Sounds), and fell apart before what would have been their second (Smile).
The band’s work after that, from 1967-74, contains some of the best music ever recorded, but also some of the worst, because they were operating as a democracy. Brian Wilson, the songwriting and production genius responsible for their best music, became less and less interested, and the rest of the band tried to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, while Brian’s brother Dennis turned out to be a great songwriter/producer, and their brother Carl was pretty decent, the other band members really weren’t up to much. (They occasionally hit on something listenable, but more by accident than design).
So this means that for one reason or another, all the Beach Boys’ actual albums are patchy, and you have to do a certain amount of digging in order to find the good stuff.
So where does a beginner start?
First, you’ll probably want the hits. If so, the best of the many, many compilations available is one released in 2003, Sounds Of Summer. Amazon US currently have an offer on to get this with a free T-shirt for $20, incidentally. It’s a 30-track collection, with every track being a top 40 US hit. It contains most of the hits you’ll know (I Get Around, Help Me Rhonda, California Girls and so on), and at least some of these hits are also among the band’s best work – In My Room, Don’t Worry Baby, God Only Knows, Heroes & Villains, Wild Honey and Good Vibrations are great records by any standard.
But after this, you’ll want to get into the band’s artier side. There are various compilations that are meant to introduce this, but all are flawed in one way or another. The best thing to do is dive in at the deep end. The box set Good Vibrations: Thirty Years Of The Beach Boys can be picked up dirt cheap – if you’re OK with MP3s, in fact, you can buy the entire 5-CD, 130-track box set for twenty-one quid from Amazon, which may well be the best deal in the world.
That box set contains all the hits, most of the better album tracks, a half-hour-long selection of the best music from the Smile sessions, most of Pet Sounds, and the handful of decent tracks from the post-1977 albums. It’s not perfect – every Beach Boys fan will have their own list of a dozen or so songs that should be on there – but everyone will agree that what *is* on there is mostly essential, and everyone will differ as to those other dozen songs.
If you don’t want to go for the box set, or if you’ve already got it and still want more, the next step is the compilation Endless Harmony. This is a rarities collection put together as the soundtrack for a documentary on the band, and it says something about the perversity of the band that they would leave some of their best music unreleased.
After this, you want two essential solo albums – Brian Wilson Presents Smile (a reconstruction of a finished Smile album, newly performed by Wilson and his backing band) and Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue (get the two-CD deluxe version of this – it’s well worth it).
After you’ve heard all that, you’ll know whether you want to investigate any further or not. You’ll have an idea of the shape of the band’s career and which albums you should pick up. You’ll know if you want the full Smile Sessions box set, or if Brian Wilson’s version is enough for you. You’ll know if you want to hear more of the R&B-flavoured mid-70s stuff or the whimsical soft-psych late-60s.
One piece of warning, though – the Beach Boys’ albums are available on CD as two-albums-on-one-CD packages. Mostly this is OK, but in the late-70s the bands highs and lows were higher and lower than before. The Beach Boys Love You is one of the greatest albums the band ever did, but it’s paired with the frankly feeble 15 Big Ones. LA (Light Album), the last listenable album the band released, is paired with MIU, an album which is torture to sit through. And don’t buy anything (other than Brian Wilson solo albums) from 1980 on. Those albums (Keepin’ The Summer Alive, The Beach Boys, Still Cruisin’, Summer In Paradise and Stars & Stripes Vol 1) range from soulless competence (The Beach Boys, with its drum machines and Culture Club covers) to soulless incompetence (Summer In Paradise, a good argument that all sound recording and reproduction equipment in the universe should be destroyed, and everyone deafened, just in case they might accidentally hear the song Summer Of Love).
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Brief Notes On Last Night’s Beach Boys Reunion Performance
The most notable thing, first of all, is that this sounds like the Brian Wilson band. Each of the various Beach Boys touring bands has their own sound, and even though to the average listener they’d all sound ‘like the record’ there are clear differences. On Good Vibrations, Al’s band (none of whom other than Al and Dave are present) have a 70s rock feel, almost like a jam band. Mike and Bruce’s band, on the other hand, have a garage-psych feel that very much emphasises the strangeness of the track, all thudding bass, clanging guitars and screeching theremin. Brian’s band emphasise the beauty of the song, and play very precisely, and it’s this latter version that we have here.
This was probably going to be the case anyway, because there are seven of Brian’s backing band there to two of Mike and Bruce’s, but it does show that this tour will sound more like a Brian Wilson tour than any of the recent Beach Boys tours.
However, John Cowsill is, as I suspected, a wonderful addition to the band. His rapport here with Nelson Bragg is quite stunning – Cowsill does some lovely cymbal work, and of all the drummer-plus-percussionist combinations Brian has worked with (at various times his drummers have been Todd Sucherman, Jim Hines and Mike D’Amico, with D’Amico, Bragg and Andy Paley on percussion) this is the best. Cowsill gave the band an energy they’ve sometimes lacked.
Brian was obviously down in the mix to the point of being mixed out altogether, with Foskett singing the lead. Sadly, this makes sense. Brian can sound good when he’s comfortable – in front of his own audience, with time to warm up. However, whenever he’s done a big TV performance he’s sounded, frankly, appaling. A Brian in the same state that he was in at the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 2002 would have made the reunion a target of every bad comedian ever. You can guarantee that he’ll be perfectly audible on the actual tour. He sounded fine in the harmony sections, where he was more audible.
Bruce is completely inaudible in the mix, but Dave Marks works well on the ‘ba ba ba’ sections – he really does add something to the band. But it’s Al’s voice that was most prominent in the harmony blend, unsurprisingly – he’s the only one of them who possibly sounds even better now than he did in the sixties.
So yes, this is tacky and showbiz, but that’s to be expected for the Grammys. Given the context, it’s about as good as we were going to get, and does give us some hope.
Incidentally, this is the first time *ever* that these five Beach Boys have ever performed together – even though they are all proper Beach Boys. David Marks left the band in late 1963, but Bruce Johnston didn’t join until 1965, and while Dave has performed with the band at various points since, especially in the late 90s, he’s never done so with Brian.
We’ve also learned a little more about the upcoming album, and we have another song title – That’s Why God Made The Radio – to go with the one Brian mentioned a while back, The Private Life Of Bill And Sue. This gives me a surprising amount of hope for the new album – those both sound like Brian Wilson song titles, as opposed to what I was fearing, which was a bunch of songs called things like Still Surfin’ In Kokomo, USA. I doubt the album will be a great one, but it sounds at least as if they’re *trying* to do something creative, which will make it better than any Beach Boys album released since 1979.
For those who don’t know, the five Beach Boys on stage are, from left to right as we look at them, Al Jardine (rhythm guitar, vocals), Bruce Johnston (vocals), Brian Wilson (piano, vocals), Mike Love (vocals) and David Marks (lead guitar, vocals).
The backing band for this show is the same one announced for the tour, with the addition (hopefully permanent) of Nelson Bragg:
Jeff Foskett – rhythm guitar, falsetto vocals
Probyn Gregory – guitar, tannerin, vocals (he’ll play a lot more instruments on the tour)
Paul Mertens – woodwinds, harmonica
Brett Simons – bass
Darian Sahanaja – keyboards, vocals
Scott Bennett – keyboards, vocals
Nelson Bragg – percussion, vocals
John Cowsill – drums, vocals
Scott Totten – lead guitar, vocals
That is pretty much exactly the band I would have picked for this tour.
The younger people with microphones pratting about at the front of the stage are apparently members of Foster The People and Maroon Five, who are apparently young person’s skiffle musicians of the day.
For those who don’t know, tour dates will be announced on Wednesday.
The Kinks’ Music – The Kink Kontroversy
The Kink Kontroversy, the Kinks’ third album, was their last in their early ‘beat group’ mode. While it’s a definite improvement on the previous two albums, it’s also a step back in terms of Ray Davies’ songwriting from the non-album tracks that had recently appeared as singles and EPs. It seems, bizarrely, that Davies was seeing his singles as the place for experiment, while the albums were to be kept as close as possible to a formula. This would change with the next album, Face To Face, but here we still have a raw rock group rather than the Kinks as they would become, although the darker, more melancholy tinge to the lyrics is quite pronounced.
The Album
Milk Cow Blues
Writer: Sleepy John Estes
Lead Vocalist: Ray & Dave Davies
The album opener is the only cover on the album, a version of an old blues standard. Happily, it’s credited to the correct writer, Sleepy John Estes (most recordings credit Kokomo Arnold, whose recording of the song was more successful than Estes’ original), though truth be told there’s not much to have written in this collection of floating lyrics. [FOOTNOTE: A 'floating lyric' in the blues is a line that is used in many different songs, for example “don't the moon look lonesome shining through the trees/don't your heart feel lonesome when your baby packs up and leaves” or in the case of this song “don't that sun look good goin' down?/that old moon looks lonesome when my baby's not around”.] This is actually one of the most successful of the Kinks’ blues covers, largely because they completely abandon any pretence of playing the blues and instead turn it into a proto-psych rave-up, something like a three-minute version of Love’s Revelation, with a very prominent piano part from Nicky Hopkins.
Ring The Bells
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This song has one of Davies’ loveliest melodic ideas, based around a beautiful acoustic guitar riff tic-tocking between D and Asus4 chords. It’s such a nice melodic idea, in fact, that the Rolling Stones used it as the chorus to Ruby Tuesday a year later. The later song is better than this one, and more developed – this is still from a period where Davies believes that a two-chord riff and some repeated lyrics are enough by themselves to carry a song – but the similarity is so strong it’s astonishing that there appears not to have been a lawsuit.
Gotta Get The First Plane Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A very simplistic song, this track works better than the song due to its well-thought-out arrangement. Session drummer Clem Cattini [FOOTNOTE: Mick Avory had had a falling out with the rest of the band, especially Dave Davies, and barely plays on the album] uses the kick drum and toms to accentuate the riff, which itself is doubled on guitar and bass, while playing straight fours on a cymbal, while Nicky Hopkins plays boogie trills in the very highest range of the piano. Ray Davies also adds some good, if incongruous, blues harmonica. An example of how unpromising material can still be turned into an adequate record, given the right attention to detail in the arrangement.
When I See That Girl Of Mine
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A track that seems to have been written in the style of the Everly Brothers, this would have fit perfectly into the pop landscape two years earlier. Were it not for the prominence of the bass, this could pass for something Mitch Miller would write for Gerry And The Pacemakers or Freddie And The Dreamers, with its four-chord banal chirpy verse. It all falls apart slightly in the middle eight, with some rough double tracking and an ineffective key change, but it’s still a catchy enough piece of nothing. Bobby Rydell covered this in the US, which pretty much says it all.
I Am Free
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The first sign that Dave Davies was going to become a serious songwriting rival to his brother, this is one of the highlights of the album. The lyrics are sixth-form nonsense, written by someone who likes using big words without caring very much if he actually understands what they mean, but musically this seems to be an attempt at sounding like Dylan, with its folk-rocking six/four strum. The thirteen-bar verses sound untutored, but utterly natural, and go well with the lyric about wanting to escape from civilisation and be free.
Till The End Of The Day
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A top ten hit in the UK, this barely scraped into the top fifty in the US, marking the start of the time when the Kinks’ fortunes in the US took a turn for the worse, after they were banned from performing over there thanks to their violent reputation.
It’s also a turning point in another way, being the last of the band’s generic pop singles. After this, all the rest of the band’s hits would be music that only they could have done.
This is a good thing, as this is musically by far the least interesting of the band’s run of sixties hit singles, the only real point of note being the way that while its tonal centre is in F (or possibly Dm), it starts in D major and wanders back there occasionally by having A chords rather than the expected Am.
It’s a catchy enough pop tune, but they’d done better before, and would do much better afterwards.
The World Keeps Going Round
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another of the many simple, repetitive songs Davies wrote in this early period, this one appears to have been inspired by the Beatles’ Ticket To Ride, sharing with it its broken drum part, clangorous guitar and general world-weariness. It also strongly resembles the Beatles’ later Rain, which has very similar lyrical sentiments.
That said, this is again a clearly minor work, from a writer who still thinks repetition is the key to success.
I’m On An Island
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is one of the few tracks on the album which points the way forward to the band’s later work. An ersatz-calypso track driven by acoustic rhythm guitar and piano, this immediately sounds worlds more professional than anything we’ve heard so far, and the song itself is one of the earliest examples of Davies mocking his own depression, something that would come up again and again over the next few years.
Something that could have been self-indulgent moping (our protagonist is ‘on an island’ because he’s alone since his girlfriend left him, and he wouldn’t mind being alone if he could just be alone with her) becomes instead a tongue-in-cheek piece of self-mockery, and Davies’ vocal here, which could easily have fallen onto the wrong side of the comedy racism borderline, just about manages to remain delightful rather than annoying.
The middle eight, interestingly, bears a strong melodic and syllabic resemblance to that of So How Come (No-One Loves Me)?, an Everly Brothers track that similarly straddles the borderline between comedy and angst.
Where Have All The Good Times Gone
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This, on the other hand, is an absolute masterpiece, and may well be the first post-modern pop song. Davies here impersonates Bob Dylan ca. Like A Rolling Stone to deliver a song that is, in part, a denunciation of the way the simple pop music of a year or two ago was being replaced by more complex, mature, downbeat music, like Like A Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stones’ version of Time Is On My Side, and the Beatles tracks Help! and Yesterday, all of which are parodied during the course of the song.
Except that the song itself is an example of the very form it’s parodying, because it’s a lyrically mature, complex song about depression and nostalgia, of precisely the type that was only just becoming possible for pop bands to record.
And this tension is at the heart of the song – it’s a song about depression, and the tricks it plays on you. The protagonist is depressed not because of anything in particular, but precisely because he’s depressed (“wondering where I’ve gone wrong/Will this depression last too long?”). While he starts by singing about how much better things used to be, soon he realises that “Yesterday was such an easy game for you to play, but let’s face it things are so much easier today” and that he needs bringing down to earth.
Not only that, but the idealised past, the ‘good times’, when described seem anything but – they’re obviously self-deceiving recollections (“they always told the truth”), but even so they still manage to sound awful (“didn’t have no money”, “Daddy didn’t have no toys and Mommy didn’t meet no boys”).
This tension – this longing for a past which is acknowledged as being mythical and never having really existed, while also trying to push forward in progressive directions that wouldn’t have been possible in the past, and self-reflexively commenting on both these tendencies – would become the most important and unique aspect of Ray Davies’ songwriting within a couple of years, dominating the band’s best three albums, Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur. We see it here for the first time, in a song that was only considered at the time to be good enough to be a B-side.
It’s Too Late
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This, on the other hand, is a very basic country song of a type that could have been written by Hank Williams, but played to a slowed-down Chuck Berry rhythm, but without Berry’s swing – it sounds for all the world like a prototype for Status Quo.
Had this been played looser, in a more honky-tonk style, this could have been a very decent little track, but as it is it’s a bit flat-footed.
What’s In Store For Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
While this song is credited to Ray Davies, it sounds to me far more like Dave Davies’ work, both melodically and in its subject matter (the lyric is about wanting to see the future, with lines like “I wish I had a crystal ball”, which would fit rather well with the younger Davies’ well-known fascination with astrology and the occult).
Either way, this is a minor track, over almost before it’s begun. The one interesting feature here is the rhythm guitar part stabbing on the off-beat, a trick presumably borrowed from the Beatles’ She’s A Woman, and one that gives the track almost a ska feel.
You Can’t Win
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray and Dave Davies
And the album finishes with a chugalong R&B riff, one of the band’s best attempts at playing Mod style soul music. While this is still unimpressive stuff in itself, the difference in technical competence between this and the work on the band’s first album is astounding. From here on out, they were going to be able to turn that competence towards far more interesting material.
Bonus Tracks
Dedicated Follower Of Fashion
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The first Kinks single to follow up on the social satire style of Well Respected Man, this could almost be part two of that song, but this time attacking, rather than the upper classes, the London fashionable set (although there was a great overlap between the two groups at the time).
While the song was apparently written as a straight attack, written after an argument (a fashionista had criticised Davies for wearing a comfortable but unfashionable jumper), Davies clearly saw an element of himself in the character. He’s later stated that the lines “they seek him here, they seek him there” (taken, of course, from The Scarlet Pimpernel) were aimed at much at himself and his desire not to be recognised, as well as his lack of a clear sense of identity, as at the character in the song. [FOOTNOTE: This would also make the slight homophobic/transphobic tinge of some of the lyrics seem slightly less offputting - Ray Davies has always been publicly ambiguous about his sexuality, while his brother is openly bisexual. If these lines are aimed at Davies himself, that would take the sting out of the song somewhat.]
In fact the song played a part in Davies’ increasing mental ill-health – he claimed later that people would sing the “oh yes he is” chorus at him in the street, and that in his fragile mental state he believed they were saying they knew who he was better than he did himself.
That said, none of this would have been apparent to listeners at the time, who would have taken the song for what it seems – a witty, playful attack on conformity. The language in the song is beautiful – Davies coined the word ‘Carnabetian’ as an adjectival form of Carnaby (after Carnaby St, the most famous fashion-shopping street in London at the time) and there are some lovely lines like “in matters of the cloth he is as fickle as can be”. Davies’ vocal is also extraordinary, running through a wide variety of different accents and voices effortlessly.
The song does have a bit of a nasty edge to it, as many of the whole 60s ‘attacking conformity’ genre did, but at least here Davies is attacking the hip and trendy rather than middle-aged normal people.
One thing that is always said about this song which is a complete nonsense, though, is that it’s a ‘music-hall’ song. This shows that most people who write about pop music haven’t got ears. Davies’ vocal and the call-and-response chorus do owe a little to music-hall traditions, but musically this is a country-folk song.
I’ll go further and go out on a limb and say it was patterned specifically after Johnny Cash’s cover of Lead Belly’s Rock Island Line. Both songs start with a strummed acoustic guitar, playing the same pattern (slightly stressing the off-beats), then bring in a prominent bassline mostly playing around with firsts and fifths, a similar simple drum pattern, and rockabilly picked guitar (Dave Davies seems to be doing a fairly accurate impression of Luther Perkins, Cash’s guitarist). The parallels aren’t exact – Rock Island Line starts slow and then builds up to a faster pace, while this track stays at one tempo throughout – but this song as recorded owes at least as much to country blues as it does to the music hall.
Sittin’ On My Sofa
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Dedicated Follower Of Fashion was this riff-driven freakbeat 12-bar blues, sounding much like every other London band of the time who had heard a few Stax records. It would have been great to dance to in a Mod nightclub, and it is far more accomplished musically than anything the band had done for their first two albums, but it’s still ultimately forgettable (and, at 3:07, rather too long for the few ideas it has).
I’m Not Like Everybody Else
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
This track, apparently originally intended for The Animals, was released as the B-side to Sunny Afternoon, but has become one of the band’s most-loved tracks, mostly for its punkish attitude (it includes another little dig at the competition – “I won’t say that I Feel Fine like everybody else”). In truth, though, it’s nowhere near the song its reputation suggests. It’s a very callow piece of work, and it exalts individuality in the most generic way possible, so that it was perfectly possible for IBM, the apex of corporate responsibility, to use it in a TV commercial.
Likewise, I remember seeing Ray Davies perform this live at Glastonbury, in front of an audience of about twenty thousand people, all singing happily along, in unison. Davies even introduced the song by saying “None of us are like anyone else, are we?” and pointing a mic at the crowd to get them to bellow “NO!” as one. The crowd appeared not to see anything amusing in this, though one hopes that Davies at least was aware of what he was doing.
It’s a catchy enough song, but at three minutes twenty-eight it outstays its welcome somewhat.
Mr. Reporter
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a minor piece, a Dylan pastiche right down to the ridiculously lengthened nasal vowels. It’s one of the earliest of that annoying subspecies of song, the whine about what a difficult life it is being a rock star. In this case, Davies is attacking, at inordinate length, reporters who misquote him. Some of it is frankly bizarre – “Why, Mr Reporter, do you like some things more than most?” – and there’s an anger to the song that unfortunately means it is lacking in craft. This is a purely relative judgement of course – compared even to the songs the band had been recording three months earlier for the album proper, this is a minor masterpiece – but compared to what Davies was capable of, it clearly falls flat.
The band would return to this song again, for a version with Dave Davies on vocals for a projected solo album, but while that version is an improvement on this, both tracks remained unreleased for good reason.
Time Will Tell
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A thinly-recorded outtake that sounds more like a demo than a finished recording, this track is more interesting than much of what made it to the actual album. A fuzz guitar raveup, it points the way to another possible direction for the Kinks’ music, a road never travelled. Because this song keeps much of the feel of the first three albums, but with more competent musicianship, and with lyrics that seem to deal very frankly with Davies’ increasing depression and feeling that he was an actor playing a role – the chorus starts “time will tell if I’ll survive/I’d rather be dead than just pretend I’m alive”.
This sounds a couple of years ahead of its time, and could easily have been a garage-psych classic for a band like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.
And I Will Love You
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A rather pretty little track that was never taken any further, this is another of Davies’ songs of this period that is based around the repetition of a couple of phrases over and over, and is one of his last songs in that style. It does, however, show the increasing musical sophistication of the band, being based around a bossa nova beat and with a hammond organ pad that one assumes they weren’t taking entirely seriously, but which is still a more adventurous sound than much of what they’d used on record earlier.
Davies here uses the same strange vocal style he uses on I’m On An Island – a style that sounds like a caricature of an ethnic accent, except that no accent in the world sounds anything like it. It’s an odd style, and one he’ll return to at several points in the future, but it works.
All Night Stand
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A very hissy acoustic demo, this song seems to have been written as a favour for Shel Talmy – it shares a title with a book Talmy’s new publishing company was releasing, and was recorded by a band called The Thoughts on a label Talmy owned.
While catchy, it seems completely tossed-off, and its origin is probably visible in the last lines – “Can’t get these people off my back/ten percent for this and that”. Davies was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the number of people, Talmy included, who had business interests in the Kinks but who appeared to have little sympathy for his creative aspirations.
The Kinks’ Music 2 – Kinda Kinks
While Kinda Kinks, the Kinks’ second album, is Ray Davies’ least favourite, and it shows clearly the signs of having been written and recorded in a hurry, with some sloppy double-tracking and less-than-stellar compositions, it is a clear step forward in ambition from the first album.
While Kinks had been pretty much a bog-standard Brit-blues album with few or no distinguishing features other than its one incredible single, Kinda Kinks draws from a much broader range of musical styles. In particular, we see the influences of the new folk finger-picking guitarists who were starting to become known on the London scene, people like Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Davy Graham. Within a year, these influences would become widespread in pop music, thanks to Donovan and Simon & Garfunkel, but Kinda Kinks is the first example I know of of this style in mainstream pop-rock.
On the other hand, we see an increasing influence from Motown here, especially Martha And The Vandellas, whose Dancing In The Streets is one of only two covers on this album. (Oddly, the other cover, Naggin’ Woman, is co-written by evil racist scumbag J.D. Miller, composer of I’m A Lover Not A Fighter from the previous album, under a pseudonym.)
But the shocking thing about Ray Davies’ songwriting at this time is just how much good material he was producing. While the album itself is patchy, there are some wonderful songs, included as demos on the deluxe edition, which were given to other performers, including some of Davies’ best work. Adding in the non-album singles and EP tracks included here leads to this being the first really essential collection by the Kinks, and the first real sign that they would soon become one of the greatest bands of all time.
The Album
Look For Me Baby
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The album opener is an unprepossessing track based on a two-chord I-V riff, with a melody owing a little to Watermelon Man and girl-group backing vocals. At times Davies rushes to get all his lyrics into the space he has, and the double-tracking is incredibly sloppy, but this is still more competent than most of what was on Kinks.
Got My Feet Off The Ground
Writer: Ray and Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A fun little country blues track, this is spoiled by Dave Davies’ lead vocals. Over the years he would become a fine, sensitive vocalist in his own right, but at this point he was just yelling. There’s some nice Chet Atkins-isms on the guitar solo though.
Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another blues-based song, this one uses a pentatonic riff reminiscent of much of Bert Jansch’s work of the time, one that works in cross-rhythm to the rest of the track (and in the intro seems to be completely metrically irregular – every time I try to break down the track into bars, before the entrance of the bass and drums, I get a different number). This is in many ways the most forward-looking of all the tracks on this album – songs sounding exactly like this would make up the bulk of Led Zeppelin III many years later.
A lovely, haunting, if rather slight song, this is easily the most interesting and mature thing the band had released to this point.
Naggin’ Woman
Writer: Jimmy Anderson & Jerry West
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A cover of a blues classic, Naggin’, by bluesman Jimmy Anderson (oddly co-written by Anderson, a black man, and J.D. Miller, a supporter of the Ku Klux Klan), this has some fine blues playing – the best that the Kinks ever did in the genre – but is let down by a poor lead vocal from Dave Davies and a less-than-wonderful lyric.
I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
This track is a simple rewrite – one might almost say a cover version – of Can I Get A Witness by Marvin Gaye, whose simple piano riff had already become the basis of such tracks as The Boy From New York City by the Ad-Libs and Carl’s Big Chance by the Beach Boys. OK on its own, this doesn’t even begin to approach the quality of its inspiration.
Tired Of Waiting For You
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
According to Davies’ autobiography, X-Ray, this was actually written before All Day And All Of The Night and held back so that the more formulaic track could go first. In truth, while this seemed like a huge departure from the band’s formula, it’s based around a very similar two-chord riff to You Really Got Me, just slowed down, in the verses, with the bridge and middle eight being almost as simplistic.
However, melodically and lyrically this introduced a new element into the Kinks’ singles, one that was definitely not present on the earlier hits – there’s a yearning, wistful quality to this that would become a hallmark of Davies’ writing over the next few years. Supposedly about Davies’ longing for success to finally come (though quite how long he could have been waiting, given that You Really Got Me was released only a couple of months after his twentieth birthday, is debatable), there’s a deeper longing and melancholy in here, one that would become more pronounced as Davies’ songwriting progressed.
This, however, is the perfect point between the band’s early garage-rock and its later sophistication, and unsurprisingly became a number one hit in the UK, and the band’s biggest ever hit in the US at number six.
Dancing In The Street
Writer: Marvin Gaye, Ivy Jo Hunter and Mickey Stevenson
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This, on the other hand, is just a horrible mess. A cover of Martha and The Vandellas’ hit of the previous year, this might have worked had any of the Kinks had a funky bone in their body, but their idea of dance music was primal aggression rather than soul, and they don’t even make a half-hearted attempt to copy the original’s distinctive riff or backing vocals.
To make matters worse, Ray Davies apparently seems not to have a clue what the melody is, and to be reading the lyrics off a sheet of paper with little thought as to their scansion. This is then double-tracked, so we have two mumbling Davieses, each unsure of what exactly they’re meant to be doing. Pitiful.
Don’t Ever Change
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
One of the more musically interesting songs on the album, this has a somewhat amorphous structure, showing Davies experimenting with the type of non-traditional songwriting that would later lead to such masterpieces as Autumn Almanac. It’s also far more harmonically interesting than the band’s previous work – still keeping the same basic I-V type relationships that many of the band’s songs are built on (though introducing an element of harmonic ambiguity with the F chords that let us wonder if this is in G, as it originally appears, or C as is later implied), but using extended chords like sixths, ninths and thirteenths.
It doesn’t quite work – it’s pleasant enough, but it sounds awkward rather than sophisticated – but it’s an intriguing experiment and a sign of Davies’ restlessness with the formula he had only recently hit upon.
Come On Now
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A simple three-chord garage-rocker, this is one of the catchier of the album tracks here, and is perfectly suited to Dave Davies’ raw, yelling voice. It has a catchy riff and good backing vocals, and is very danceable, but has few enough distinguishing features that it’s hard to discuss it at any great length.
So Long
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A rather lovely attempt at the folk fingerpicking style, this features a guitar part very similar to the instrumental line in Simon & Garfunkel’s later Leaves That Are Green (compare Paul Simon’s solo recording on The Paul Simon Songbook, recorded three months after this album’s release), and a very unusual structure.
It starts with a simple eight-bar three-chord chorus, much like many of the band’s other songs of the period, but then goes into a twenty-one-bar verse, which hovers between the keys of C and G, never quite resolving into either.
This folky style was a bit of a dead end for the Kinks, and was largely abandoned after this album, but the acoustic wistfulness of songs like this definitely informed much of the band’s later work.
You Shouldn’t Be Sad
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An attempt at writing a Martha And The Vandellas style girl-group song, this track would be pleasant enough were it not for the truly horrible double-tracking of Ray Davies’ lead vocal. I keep going on about this on these early albums, but that’s because Shel Talmy’s decisions are often utterly incomprehensible. Double-tracking can help with a vocal when there’s a problem with pitch or timbre – neither of which are particular problems for Ray Davies, even this early on. On the other hand, he does have problems with his phrasing, often sounding hesitant and not coming in quite on the beat. Double-tracking a vocal like that is a recipe for disaster, and turns tracks like this, which would be perfectly reasonable pop records, into sloppy messes that are actively painful to listen to.
Something Better Beginning
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And the album proper ends with another exercise in stylistic pastiche, this time a strong attempt at a Phil Spector sound, combining elements of Spector’s Ronettes work (the Be My Baby rhythm) with the vaguely Latin feel of Spector’s earlier work with Leiber and Stoller (notably Spanish Harlem).
The band do remarkably well, given that they’re attempting to ape Spector’s style with only a standard rock-band lineup, and while Davies’ vocal is double-tracked in places, it’s done with a much lighter touch than on other tracks.
This is a solid, enjoyable closer to an album which, while far from perfect, is a giant step forward compared to the band’s earlier work.
Bonus Tracks
Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A non-album single, this sounds like an attempt at the sort of mildly R&B-flavoured pop that Manfred Mann or the Rolling Stones were recording around this time. Their lowest-charting single for some time, this ‘only’ reached number 11 in the charts, which is about right – it’s a decent enough track, but really should have been album filler rather than a single.
Who’ll Be The Next In Line
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy, this is similarly uninspiring stuff – it’s as simplistic as many of the early singles without being in any way interesting or exciting.
Set Me Free
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The follow-up single to Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy, this appears to have been written off the back of the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night album, albeit with a return to the almost mantra-like simplicity of the band’s previous hits. Here Davies is consciously copying John Lennon, with the A minor key, repeated ‘little girl’s (something that was a regular feature of the Beatles’ lyrics at this time but not of the Kinks’) and the brief leap into falsetto for the line “You can do it if you try”. Merging these features with the style and structure of their previous biggest hit Tired Of Waiting For You would have seemed a sure recipe for commercial success, and so it proved, with the track making the top ten in the UK.
I Need You
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A crunchy, riffy track with a prominent tambourine part, this is a clear return to the sound of You Really Got Me and (especially) All Day And All Of The Night, combining a variant on the latter’s riff with the same dropping-out before the guitar solo that had worked so well on the former.
It’s clearly an attempt at writing to a formula, and not a particularly good one. It’s still better than many of the album tracks on Kinda Kinks, but it deserved no better than the B-side it got.
See My Friends
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The Kinks’ next single was a very brave departure. While this keeps to the simple, repetitive style of their earlier singles, it’s even more melancholy than Tired Of Waiting, and has a homoerotic subtext (“She is gone and now there’s no-one left to take her place/She is gone and now there’s no-one else/’cept my friends…”), but it’s also the first Western pop record to try to incorporate aspects of Indian music. Davies had heard chanting from river workers during a brief stay in India (hence the otherwise mysterious line about “playing ‘cross the river”) and had decided to try to write something like that.
The Davies brothers’ guitars, detuned and with feedback, are given a vaguely sitar-ish feel here, but it’s far from the overuse of the instrument that would become endemic within a year – this isn’t cultural appropriation or Orientalism, just an attempt to get a new sound out of their own instruments. As such, it’s less embarassing, and less dated, than most of the attempts at incorporating Indian sounds that followed it. The single reached number 10 in the UK.
Never Met A Girl Like You Before
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
While it starts with a little musical joke (the first couple of bars of Tired Of Waiting For You), this track quickly goes into an arrangement similar to that of the band’s version of Beautiful Delilah. The song itself is utterly nondescript, being based around a twelve-bar blues with repetitive lyrics, and is also utterly forgettable. It was the B-side to See My Friends.
A Well Respected Man
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And suddenly, the Kinks have turned into the Kinks.
This track and the three following it are from the Kwyet Kinks EP of acoustic-flavoured tracks, released in September 1965 (although this track was also released as a single in the US, reaching number 13) and this track in particular sounds like the work of a completely different band. While it’s no more sophisticated harmonically than any of the previous material (it’s mostly based around a single chord, but with a descending bassline turning that chord from C to C/B to Am – a trick Davies would use again quite often), Davies has learned the secret of writing melodies for his limited vocal range, and the harmonies by Dave Davies on the choruses are worlds away from his caterwauling on the first album.
But it’s the lyrics to this which suddenly take a sharp turn for the better. While previously the lyrics to Ray Davies’ songs would mostly consist of one or two sentences, repeated over and over, this is a biting, cynical pen-portrait of a member of the upper-middle (or lower-upper) classes, full of a joy at wordplay we’ve never seen from him before – “And he plays at stocks and shares, and he goes to the regatta/He adores the girl next door cos he’s dying to get at her”.
And here’s where Davies becomes a really good singer as well. He’s never been the most rangey or versatile of vocalists, but here he finally learns that he’s good at taking on personas and singing in different characters, and the contortions he makes some of the vowel sounds go through when mocking the accent of the ‘well-respected man’ are a wondrous thing to listen to.
This kind of sneering at the businessman in his suit and tie would quickly become tiresome, as every band of the time took it upon themselves to mock the squares, with their jobs and their houses and their responsibilities, and it would often mar Davies’ own later work, particularly when coupled with his increasing conservatism. But here it’s hard to even think about the negative side of this, as it’s such an amazing leap forward in ambition for Davies. While their next proper album would be something of a step back, this song shows what the band would be doing for the rest of the sixties.
Such A Shame
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another track from Kwyet Kinks, this one doesn’t really fit the ‘kwyet’ style of the EP, being another repetitive, electric-guitar, simple track. Not particularly inspiring.
Wait Till The Summer Comes Along
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A gentle country track, the opening track of the Kwyet Kinks EP, this has a rather hesitant melody and structure, as if Ray Davies was having to hunt around for the shape of the track. Dave Davies turns in a better vocal here than most of his previous ones, but seems a little unsure about the song. This is another song that points the way forward in the band’s career, this time being in a style they would return to for the Muswell Hillbillies album.
Don’t You Fret
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The other highlight of Kwyet Kinks, this is a waltz-time folk-blues song very much in the style of the Odetta covers from the previous album, but this time the band have fully internalised the style and made it their own.
I Go To Sleep
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And here we have the best song Ray Davies ever wrote that the Kinks never recorded. This simple piano demo was used as the basis of a wonderful recording by Peggy Lee. Another waltz-time song, based on similar changes to A Well Respected Man, though more complex, this seems to have been an exercise in writing in the style of Burt Bacharach and Hal David (listen especially to the way the stresses on “imagine that you’re there” fall – that bit of melody could easily come from a Dionne Warwick record).
This isn’t a perfect song – the scansion on the verses is forced, and the middle eight is weak – but it’s an astonishingly sophisticated piece of music for a twenty-one-year-old who had only the previous year been writing You Really Got Me. It’s an absolutely lovely song, and has rightly become something of a standard, being recorded by everyone from Cher to The Pretenders.
Tell Me Now So I’ll Know
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another Ray Davies demo, featuring (like the previous and next tracks) Mitch Mitchell (later of the Jimi Hendrix Experience) on drums, this jazzy minor-chord piece has a vaguely Latin feel, and something of the same flavour as some of the Zombies’ tracks of the time, and definitely deserved to be taken further.
A Little Bit Of Sunlight
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another demo, this one sounds like something from an earlier era, like a song that could have been a hit for Adam Faith or Tommy Steele, although it also has a family resemblance to When I See That Girl Of Mine. While it’s catchy enough, it’s definitely easy to see why this one was discarded, and given to another band (The Majority, whose version sounds roughly four parts The Four Seasons to one part Joe Meek, and wasn’t a hit).
There’s A New World Just Opening For Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
One of the very best of these demos, this combines the folk and Indian influences that Davies had been playing with at the time, using an Indian-style drone, but in much the same way as Scottish folk music does, and with some very impressive fingerstyle guitar playing. This song was given to American band The Cascades, but really this acoustic demo is a wonderful recording in its own right, seeming to come from some alternative universe where Davies would go on to join Pentangle.
This I Know
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another folk-influenced demo, this one uses those techniques in a much lighter, more cheerful way, to produce a breezy, romantic trifle. This demo is of fairly awful recording quality, but even here the song cuts through, and it’s a shame no professional-quality recording of this track exists.
This Strange Effect
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A song written by Davies for Dave Berry, patterned after Berry’s previous hit The Crying Game to a quite ridiculous extent, this BBC session for Top Of The Pops (the Brian Mathew-presented radio show, not the later TV series of the same name) is pretty much identical to Berry’s hit recording, minus the strings.
Hide And Seek
Writer: Paul Winley & Ethel Byrd
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another Top Of The Pops session rounds out the deluxe edition of Kinda Kinks, with this cover version of Big Joe Turner’s boogie-woogie classic. It works about as well as all the other covers of classic blues by the Kinks, which is to say not at all.
Making It – Stew And The Negro Problem
Singer/songwriter Mark “Stew” Stewart and bassist/vocalist Heidi Rodewald put out some of my favourite albums of the late 90s and early 2000s, both with their band The Negro Problem (a baroque-pop group whose ex-members have gone on to be, among other things, in Candypants, Cosmo Topper, the Wondermints and the solo artist Carolyn Edwards, all of whom have made wonderful music as well) and under the name of Stew – used for more acoustic, singer-songwriter type records. (This album uses both names, but doesn’t feature many of the musicians on previous Negro Problem albums, and has more of a ‘Stew’ sound than a ‘Negro Problem’ one).
But until today, they hadn’t released a proper album of new material since 2003′s Stew album Something Deeper Than These Changes. To put that in perspective, not only was I single, unemployed and in my twenties when Stew’s last album came out, but I actually went into a shop and bought the CD. An actual shop. Like people in the olden times used to do. So you can imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this.
This is not to say that they’ve not been busy. A number of ‘official bootlegs’ have come out over the years (and been deleted too quickly for me to buy copies). Stew’s worked as a jobbing songwriter, doing everything from a song for Spongebob Squarepants (Gary Come Home) to one for my wedding (he used to take commissions for songs by email. The song he wrote for our wedding, Now’s Eternity, is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard even without the special context for me). Stew and Heidi wrote a piece for The Asphalt Orchestra, and Stew’s put out a CD of music for a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Various tracks have been made downloadable over the internet.
But mostly, they’ve been doing theatre work – in particular, the wonderful Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Passing Strange, for which Stew wrote the book and lyrics and starred in, which Stew and Heidi wrote the music for, and for which Rodewald was musical director. The soundtrack album for this is a de facto Stew album, and one of the very strongest, and a film of the play, directed by Spike Lee, is now available on DVD.
But this has meant that those of us outside the US – or even, for the most part, outside New York, have been deprived of much from them for the best part of a decade now. Until Making It, which is their break-up record.
During the theatre run of Passing Strange, Stew and Heidi’s personal relationship broke up, and they had to keep performing on stage together while their private life was falling apart. Making It is the album that came out of that, and it sounds like the kind of album you expect from a couple who split up before making it.
(In fact, Making It is another album of songs from a theatre show, like Passing Strange, but where that was a full-cast recording, this only features Stew and Heidi on vocals.)
Thus, while the album is as good as anything they’ve done, there’s little of the joy of some of their earlier albums, only concerns. There’s nothing as light or laugh-out-loud funny here as Ken or Man In A Dress or Into Me, and in some ways that’s a shame, as those songs are always the best ‘in’ to a Stew album. Stew is a very subtle lyricist, and for someone like myself who’s more musically oriented it often takes many listens for me to really get what he’s doing in his more serious songs.
Which is not to say there’s no wit in this album – very far from it. But lines like “When did you first realise there was a problem with your relationship?” “When she left me” are a far cry from the playfulness of some of Stew’s earlier work.
At times, in fact, this can almost sound like the Beautiful South, with very pleasant melodies but utterly bitter, nasty lyrics sung as male/female duets – on possibly the best song, The Curse, Stew and Heidi both sing the exact same words, but just the different inflections, from two singers on opposite sides of the event, give very different impressions of what went on. But the music has far more bite than that, and also features things like some of the best saxophone skronking in rock music since the first two Roxy Music albums (on Speed, a song about methamphetamine).
Some of this material will be familiar to fans – Black Men Ski has been circulating on the internet for nearly six years now, and is utterly brilliant (I actually used it as one of the through-lines in my chapter on Mister Miracle in An Incomprehensible Condition, it has so many good lines in it about race and society), while Tomorrow Gone is a remake of a song from the last Stew album, Something Deeper Than These Changes.
I’m not doing a very good job of selling this album, I know – it only came out today, and it takes at least a year for me to get enough of a sense of perspective on a Stew album before I can talk intelligently about it. What I will say is that Stew is one of the great songwriters of all time – up there with Jimmy Webb or Ray Davies or Paul McCartney or Jake Thackray or Arthur Lee. (I’m referring to Stew as the songwriter here, but Heidi may well have contributed – she is an excellent songwriter herself, and has often collaborated with Stew. I don’t have access to the songwriting credits, and don’t want to underrate her contribution. The fact that Stew and Heidi still work together after their split shows that they are better as collaborators than either would be alone).
I have absolutely no doubt that this will be one of my two or three favourite albums of the year, and it’s almost certain to be the very best, once it’s had more chance to grow on me. It’s not the best introduction to Stew’s music – that would still be either Joys And Concerns or Guest Host, both of which are far more immediate, but it’s a subtle, heartbreaking album, but with an underlying touch of hope.
Stew and Heidi are currently working on a musical adaptation of the great graphic novel Stagger Lee, and I can’t imagine a better match for them. I hope a soundtrack or DVD of that will be forthcoming very soon, but I also hope we don’t have to wait another nine years for the next album like this.
But it’s worth the wait.
Beach Boys Reunion line-up
For those who, like me, are interested but haven’t seen it yet, there’s a list of who’ll be playing on the Beach Boys’ reunion tour at the Beach Boys Band website. Incidentally, the rumour at the moment is that the tour dates will be announced the day after the Grammys, about two weeks from now. The site announces the band as:
THE BEACH BOYS
featuring Original Members:
Mike Love, Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, Dave Marks & Bruce Johnston
with
* John Cowsill, Jeffrey Foskett, Scott Totten, Darian Sahanaja, Paul Von Mertens, Scott Bennett, Probyn Gregory
All dates are subject to change without notice. Most shows go on sale 90 days before concert.
*Backing band subject to changes.
For those who don’t know who these people are, as some of the people reading this won’t:
Mike Love – nasal-voiced frontman, wrote the lyrics for some of the biggest hits, has been the only consistent member of the band.
Brian Wilson – used to sing the falsetto parts but doesn’t any more. Wrote, arranged and produced nearly everything the band did that was any good. One of the two or three greatest living songwriters.
Al Jardine – rhythm guitarist, and strongest vocalist of the living members. Sang lead on Help Me, Rhonda, Cottonfields, Then I Kissed Her and Lady Lynda
David Marks – guitarist, played on the band’s first four albums before leaving in late 1963. Rejoined briefly in 1997-99 and toured with the band in 2008.
Bruce Johnston – joined the band in 1965, and is the only Beach Boy other than Mike Love to be in the currently-touring ‘Beach Boys’ band. Most audible on backing vocals on California Girls and God Only Knows. Also wrote I Write The Songs, for Barry Manilow.
John Cowsill – wonderful drummer and very good singer. Currently tours with the Mike/Bruce Beach Boys, but used to play with his family band The Cowsills, famous for hits like The Rain, The Park And Other Things. The best drummer ever to play with any version of the band, and a genuinely lovely bloke too.
Jeffrey Foskett – onstage band-leader, falsetto vocalist and rhythm guitarist with Brian Wilson’s band. Great singer, but also something of a security blanket for Brian Wilson.
Scott Totten – lead guitarist, musical director and one of two falsetto vocalists for the Mike/Bruce Beach Boys. Very talented man who has improved the touring Beach Boys a great deal since he became musical director.
Darian Sahanaja – Musical director of Brian Wilson’s band and keyboardist. Will probably be in charge of rehearsing the band and ensuring they sound as close to the record as possible. Also a hugely talented songwriter in his own right, with his band the Wondermints.
Paul Von Mertens – Woodwind player with Brian Wilson’s band, also provides all the string and horn arrangements for Wilson’s recent records and live shows. If there are any additional strings on stage he’ll conduct them.
Scott Bennett – keyboardist and vocalist with Brian Wilson’s band. Also co-wrote much of Wilson’s most recent album of original material with him.
Probyn Gregory – insanely talented multi-instrumentalist. Can play guitar, but given the number of guitarists on stage will probably mostly play trumpet and French horn, with maybe a bit of banjo, keyboards, tannerin or glockenspiel thrown in. Member of the Wondermints with Sahanaja.
This is pretty much exactly the band I’d have chosen. I’d maybe have chosen Matt Jardine in place of Foskett, and I’d add Nelson Bragg or Mike D’Amico on percussion and Nick Walusko on guitar, but this is a band that knows and respects the music and can play it well. It’s also a band that wouldn’t have been put together just to go through the hits – though they can play those.
This will be good.
Paul McCartney, MEN Arena 19/12/11
I sometimes think Paul McCartney can’t win. One of the big complaints I’d read from reviewers after the previous shows on this tour was “He’s doing too many hits. Why doesn’t he do some more obscure stuff? It’s just the obvious set.”
And yes, of the thirty-six songs in the set, twenty-five are the absolutely obvious choices that everyone would expect. But then, if you were Paul McCartney, you’d put Can’t Buy Me Love, Michelle, Penny Lane, My Love, Mull Of Kintyre, We Can Work It Out, Silly Love Songs, Coming Up, Let ‘Em In, Another Day, Drive My Car, Here, There And Everywhere, Love Me Do, Things We Said Today, I’m Down, I’ve Just Seen a Face, I Saw Her Standing There and Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the set, wouldn’t you?
And that’s the problem, of course. Paul McCartney is the most commercially successful songwriter in the history of the world, and has as good a claim as any to be the most artistically successful. So much so that he didn’t have space to fit *any* of those songs in last night. Nor did he do Mary Had A Little Lamb, Hi Hi Hi, Listen To What The Man Said, With A Little Luck, Goodnight Tonight, Waterfalls, Ebony And Ivory, The Girl Is Mine, Say Say Say, Pipes Of Peace, No More Lonely Nights, We All Stand Together or Once Upon A Long Ago, all of which went top ten. Yet he’s *still* apparently doing too many of his hits!
What he did do was a perfect mix of songs – weighted, yes, towards the Beatles years (and frankly I’d have loved him to have dropped at least three of those songs for solo songs, as he did Ob-la-Di, Ob-la-Da, Let It Be and The Long And Winding Road, none of which I have any time for) but with a good mix of solo material – both hits like Jet and Band On The Run and more obscure tracks like Mrs Vanderbilt and Ram On. He even did Sing The Changes, from the third Fireman album. And while there’s no such thing as an obscure Beatles song, choices like The Night Before or The Word are as close as it gets, and it was wonderful to hear them live.
McCartney is a stunning live performer – I can hardly even believe he’s human, frankly. His voice is *very* slightly gone at the very top end, but the set was chosen well enough that this was not noticeable, and in the mid and low ranges he sounds a good forty years younger than he is, and he can still scream with the best of them. He also got through the whole two-and-a-half hour show without as much as a sip of water, which given the amount of dry ice and the vocal gymnastics he was having to do is nothing short of miraculous. This is, remember, someone who was at school with my grandfather, yet there’s no way I could perform even half this show without taking a break.
The only thing that showed McCartney’s age at all was that he’s taking less strenuous instrumental parts these days, playing rhythm guitar or second keyboard for the most part. While he plays bass on a few songs, he leaves the complex stuff like Paperback Writer to his guitarists, and his few lead guitar spots are mediocre. But if he can no longer play complex counterpoints to his lead vocals the way he could when he was twenty-three, the fact that he can still sing those vocals at all is more than enough for me.
It was one of those shows that are all highlights from start to finish – whether the expected sort,like the mass crowd singalong to Hey Jude or the fireworks in Live And Let Die, or the unexpected, like Sing The Changes, a rather arty track on record, turning out to be a wonderful chantalong arena-rock song in a live setting (sounding spookily like a cousin of Stay Positive by The Hold Steady actually). Even Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da wasn’t too horrible, thanks to some ska keyboards from Wix Wickens. But a few of the standout moments:
Dance Tonight, with drummer Abe Laborio Jr dancing with his hands. When McCartney put on his mandolin, someone in the audience shouted “Petrushka!” which McCartney misheard as “Red Rooster”. (Oddly, this didn’t look like a scripted bit).
Ram On – just beautiful, one of those lovely little fragments that McCartney does so well.
Junior’s Farm – a brave choice for second song, and it worked very well.
A Day In The Life – the orchestral build works surprisingly well as a garage-psych rock section, though it was truncated to only 16 bars. Wonderful to hear the man who co-wrote this perform it live. Instead of the last verse and orchestral build, they went from the end of the “woke up” section into Give Peace A Chance.
Something – not performed solo like on the Back In The World tour, but instead done as he did it at the tribute to George, starting as a solo ukulele performance, but the full band coming in for the solo and finishing the song in the same style as the record.
But there were two moments that for me made the gig, and rose above the slick professionalism of the show to something approaching great art. The first was Here Today, performed solo on acoustic guitar. I’ve always loved this song, McCartney’s 1981 tribute to John Lennon, because even though the latter half is too generic by far, the first verse is as good a tribute to the loss of a particular kind of friend as I could imagine (“And if I said I really knew you well, what would your answer be/if you were here today?/Well knowing you, you’d probably laugh and say that we were worlds apart…”). I don’t mind saying I cried.
The other real highlight was Come And Get It, the song McCartney wrote for Badfinger in the late 60s. With McCartney banging away at the piano, for a moment he seemed to transform into the man he was when he wrote the song – a cocksure lad in his mid-twenties, able to turn out classic pop songs without even thinking about it, discovering the song as it came out of his fingers and mouth, and grinning a stupid grin at his own cleverness.
I really can’t recommend McCartney’s show highly enough. While I’ve seen better gigs, and certainly cheaper ones, he really is astonishingly good, and given that he’s nearly 70 and has had heart trouble in the past, I can’t imagine he’ll tour too many more times, so go and see him while you can.
If nothing else, when else are you going to get a chance to see the late lamented Liberal MP Clement Freud projected on a screen the size of several houses? (During Band On The Run they show footage from the album cover shooting, featuring Freud, Michael Parkinson, Christopher Lee and others).
There are only two complaints I could make about the show. The first, which McCartney couldn’t really do anything about, is the Everton supporter who was sat next to me. He confirmed my opinion of footballists (which some would call a low opinion – I prefer the term ‘accurate’) by deciding that what delicate, thoughtful ballads like Eleanor Rigby really need is a drunk moron bellowing along to them with no attempt to either keep his voice down or have any idea of the tune or the words. He even managed to sing the wrong words to the ‘na na na nanana na’ section of Hey Jude, which is impressive. Luckily, he also didn’t seem to know anything that wasn’t on the Beatles’ red and blue albums.
What McCartney *could* do though is augment his band. Wix Wickens is a fine keyboard player, but when you’re playing to 21,000-seater arenas, with audiences paying up to a hundred and fifty quid a ticket (not mine, I was in the nosebleed seats), there is no possible excuse for not having real strings and horns. If Brian Wilson or The Monkees can do it playing theatre venues with lower ticket prices, there’s no reason to skimp on the musical side of things. Leave Wix to play the piano and organ parts, but get some real cello and violin players for Eleanor Rigby, and real horns for Got To Get You Into My Life. Those songs deserve better than tinny synth patches.
Setlist:
Magical Mystery Tour
Junior’s Farm
All My Loving
Jet
Got To Get You Into My Life
Sing The Changes
The Night Before
Let Me Roll It/Foxy Lady
Paperback Writer
The Long And Winding Road
Come And Get It
Nineteen Hundred And Eight-Five
Maybe I’m Amazed
I’m Looking Through You
And I Love Her
Blackbird
Here Today
Dance Tonight
Mrs. Vanderbilt
Eleanor Rigby
Ram On
Something
Band On The Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da
Back In The USSR
I’ve Got A Feeling
A Day In The Life/Give Peace A Chance
Let It Be
Live And Let Die
Hey Jude
First Encore
The Word / All You Need Is Love
Wonderful Christmastime
Day Tripper
Get Back
Second Encore
Yesterday
Helter Skelter
Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End
BEACH BOYS REUNION!
New album “under Brian Wilson’s musical direction”!
50-date international tour!
Line-up – Mike, Brian, Al, Bruce, David
From the video (which I’ve only seen once and which rightly focuses on the band members), it looks like the other people at the session for the recording of Do It Again were Jeff Foskett, Scott Totten, Nick Walusko and John Cowsill. I’m assuming we’ll also see Christian Love and Matt Jardine on stage with that lineup. Add Darian and Probyn and that’s my perfect Beach Boys backing band.
For those who worry that this might be a step back for Brian artistically, for the last few years Mike’s band have actually been doing more rarities and interesting things live than Brian’s. And I’d be very surprised if, in keeping with the ‘fifty’ theme, they didn’t do fifty songs. So we’ll almost certainly hear most of Pet Sounds, a few Smile tracks, Til I Die and so on in the mix.
Video:
Review: Monkee Business by Eric Lefcowitz
Rather surprisingly for such a hugely successful band, there are very few actual books on the Monkees. Other than annuals and fan cash-ins from the 60s, some ebooks that appear to be just articles culled from Wikipedia, some self-published fan-fiction on Lulu and a notoriously-inaccurate book called Monkeemania that at one point confuses Micky Dolenz with Micky Kantner from Jefferson Starship, there are only six real books I know of, and luckily for Monkees fans they all cover slightly different areas.
Davy Jones and Micky Dolenz have both written insubstantial autobiographies, there’s an unauthorised biography of Michael Nesmith, there’s my own book (a song-by-song critical analysis), there’s Andrew Sandoval’s day-by-day look at everything the band did (Sandoval has actually written probably another book’s worth of text on the band in his extensive liner notes for the band’s reissues), and there’s this book, the only narrative biography of the band I know of.
Originally published as The Monkees Tale, this was reissued in an expanded version this year – unfortunately just *before* the Dolenz/Jones/Tork reunion tour was announced, thus making what was an up-to-the-minute biography instantly dated.
How interesting it will be for fans will depend on how familiar the reader is with Lefcowitz’s source material. While he conducted a long interview with Peter Tork for the original book, and apparently interviewed Michael Nesmith on more than one occasion, almost every quote in the book from a band member appears to be traceable to two documentaries from the late 90s – Hey, Hey, We’re The Monkees and E! True Hollywood Story.
This may not, though, be Lefcowitz’s fault – all the band members, especially Jones, have spent the last forty-five years telling anecdotes about the same two-year period of their lives, and they have refined everything into smooth, streamlined, versions they can rattle off without thinking. Whenever he’s asked about Tork, Jones will say “Hare Krishna, brown rice and waterbeds”, Dolenz will always say of his trip to England “I’m told I had a great time”, and so on. It’s entirely possible that Lefcowitz’s interviews ended up revealing little that was not already available on the public record in the same words.
Rather less forgivable are the occasional factual errors – errors that access to Sandoval’s book would easily have cleared up. Lefcowitz claims, for example, that Tork had little involvement in Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn And Jones, Ltd, when Tork is on almost every track on that album. He also claims that Jones appeared in Coronation Street only after moving to London, when in fact Coronation Street is filmed in Manchester, where Jones grew up, and that Hal Blaine was a member of the Candy Store Prophets (he wasn’t).
The book also has a large number of typos and proofreading errors, possibly because it’s been published by a small press. Coronation Street is, for example, a ‘soap operation’. There are also some unusual stylistic quirks, like an overuse of hyphens, that a professional editor would probably have smoothed out.
Nonetheless, this is an engrossing book. Lefcowitz pulls everything together into a narrative, and one that does justice to the facts (rather than, as all too often, claiming the Monkees’ commercial failures began as soon as Don Kirshner stopped being involved). He is clearly passionate about the band and the music, and while this can be a double-edged sword (he dismisses outright everything the band did post-Pisces, with the exception of the Head soundtrack, and regards some of Nesmith’s best work as attempts at sabotage), his very personal viewpoint allows him to tell this as a story, rather than a recitation of dry facts.
This does, however, mean Lefcowitz plays favourites. The story that clearly comes through in most tellings of the Monkees’ career is a battle for dominance between Nesmith the artist and Jones the star. Here, though, Nesmith’s manipulation of the band (which at times can appear to have been near-psychopathic, though he appears to have mellowed enormously in the ensuing decades and may now be the most well-adjusted band member) is excused at every turn, as Lefcowitz appears to have a huge respect for him. Jones, on the other hand, is pilloried as a talentless, deluded narcissist, quisling and shortarse. It’s not surprising that Nesmith is the only band member who is thanked in the acknowledgements.
In this battle of the egos, the (comparatively) more modest Dolenz and Tork don’t get a great deal of discussion, though Lefcowitz’s admiration for Dolenz’s vocals is apparent. In particular, the Tork/Nesmith feud seems barely dealt with. It’s always seemed odd that the two band members who most wanted the band to be actual musicians fell out so completely, and Lefcowitz never explains this, just stating in passing three-quarters of the way through that the two loathed each other.
Tork seems, in fact, to be a fascinating character, and it’s a shame that he’s the only band member not to have had any kind of biography out, as he’s intelligent, articulate and musicianly.
It might seem that I’m being unduly harsh on Lefcowitz, but overall I was very impressed with the book. Yes, it has faults, and it’s not quite a definitive biography, but compared to some of the utter drivel that has been published about some of the band’s contemporaries, it’s a minor miracle that the one Monkees biography is this readable.
It won’t tell the die-hard fans much that they don’t already know, and I’d advise anyone reading it to have a copy of Sandoval on hand to double-check the facts against, but for anyone who wants to read the Monkees’ story, we can be glad that the one place to do it is as decent as this is.
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