Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One is a difficult album to assess from this distance. Artistically, it’s a clear step down from Arthur, but at the same time it sparked a short-lived commercial resurgence for the band, at least in the singles chart, providing the Kinks with their last two UK top ten singles in Lola and Apeman.

Musically, the album is as inventive as ever, if in a heavier rock style than the band had had prior to Arthur, but lyrically the album is somewhat lacking, being self-obsessed in a way that the earlier albums hadn’t been. Fully half the songs are about how hard it is being a rock star and how managers, record companies, publishing companies and the rest of the music business are all out to make pop singers’ lives as difficult as possible.

Of course, for those of us who aren’t rock stars, this may seem a little hard to relate to — it’s hard to feel much sympathy for someone who is still, in the grand scheme of things, being paid vast sums of money for doing a job that is far more enjoyable than most people could dream of.

However, while it may be hard to sympathise, Ray Davies had a real reason to be angry. A contractual dispute with Eddie Kassner, his publisher, dating back to 1965 had meant that for the previous five years — the Kinks’ prime earning period — he had not received a penny of the songwriting royalties he was due. He’d eventually settled out of court in order to get any of the money at all, agreeing to a lower royalty rate and paying Kassner £30,000 (the equivalent of £653,000 in 2012 money) so he could get some of what he was owed. One can perhaps understand his frustration.

Lola vs Powerman is a transitional album for the Kinks in a number of ways. It was their last proper studio album for Pye records, the label they’d been with from the start of their career — they recorded the largely-instrumental soundtrack to the film Percy and then left for RCA Records. It’s also the first album to feature new keyboard player John “Baptist” Gosling, and is a clear step toward the blend of country music and heavy rock the band would achieve on their last truly great album, Muswell Hillbillies, though it’s not quite there yet. However, the songwriting is tighter than it was on Arthur, with almost all the songs coming in under four minutes, and almost half being under three. When a song begins to pall, another one will be along soon, and there’s still a better than average chance it’ll be a good one.

In this piece I will have to deal slightly more with the personal lives of the band members than I like to, simply because the songs themselves are so personal.

The Album

The Contenders
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This track starts with a lovely little two-chord bluegrass harmony section, Ray and Dave Davies harmonising with each other over a dobro and banjo backing, sounding almost like the ‘rebel country’ music made by people like Steve Earle a few decades later, before crashing into a Canned Heat style harmonica-led boogie (and a key change from E to A), with some of the best harmonica playing on a Kinks record.

Lyrically, this seems to be in equal parts about Davies’ wish to escape from domesticity (his first marriage was rapidly heading towards collapse at this point) and about his ambitions for the band — he doesn’t want to be a manual worker or to go into a respectable job, but he’s “got to get out of this life somehow”. When he sings “We’re not the greatest when when we’re separated/But when we’re together I think we’re going to make it”, he could be singing to the “little mammy” of the first line (presumably his first wife, Rasa), but equally he sounds like he’s singing to his brother and the rest of his bandmates.

Strangers
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

So it’s appropriate that the next song (which is segued into — the album is sequenced almost without gaps between the songs) would be this outstretched hand from Dave Davies to his brother.

The first song that Dave Davies had had on an album since Something Else, this may be the best song he ever wrote. Around the time that Lola Vs Powerman was being recorded, Dave Davies had had a mental breakdown, but communication between the brothers had got so bad (and Ray Davies was under so much pressure himself) that Ray had not even been aware of this. However, Dave had managed to pull himself back from the brink with a variety of New Age beliefs, and now saw himself at the beginning of a new spiritual journey.

The song recognises that Dave Davies is starting from a place where all his previous certainties have been shattered, but that he can see a way forward — and that while his brother can’t see that way forward, he knows that he’s been in a similar situation, and wants to offer him help. He recognises that the two are drifting apart, but there’s a deeper bond between them.

With Dave Davies’ trademark metrical irregularity, but with a very simple backing track (two acoustic guitars, piano, organ, and what sounds like just a kick drum and floor tom), this is a wonderfully tender, touching song of brotherly love, and the best thing on the album.

Denmark Street
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A rather slight song about the music publishing industry (Denmark Street was the street in London where almost all the UK’s music publishers were based), this combines pub-singalong piano, country-rock and 1940s pop (one section sounds very like George Formby) into a style which prefigures quite a lot of the pub rock sound of the late 70s. Were this song slightly more funky, it could fit musically quite comfortably with the work of Ian Dury and The Blockheads.

Lyrically, however, it’s a nothing piece of fluff, just saying that music publishers don’t necessarily like the music they publish.

Get Back In The Line
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

This is possibly the hardest song on this album to judge from the perspective of the twenty-first century, because it’s a very political song, but talking about something that no longer exists.

In the 1970s, unions were far more powerful in the UK than they are today. Between the decline of Britain’s manufacturing and mining industries, legislation brought in by the Thatcher and Major governments, and European law banning ‘closed shops’, unions in Britain today have little power and relatively low membership. In the 1970s, however, they were a major political force, and there was a growing consensus that they were using that power harmfully.

This consensus (which is the accepted view on nearly every side today) may or may not have been correct (I have relatives who were trade union officials at the time whose stories of some of the more prominent causes celebres of the time differ wildly from the accepted view), but that was certainly the belief among an increasing proportion of society at the time, and that clearly included Ray Davies.

So in this ballad, one of the best melodies he wrote on the album, he writes from the point of view of a working man trying to earn a living and being blocked by “the union man”.

It may seem that this song, about British working-class life, has no place on an album which is mostly about the music business, but Ray Davies had had his own problems with unions. From 1965 through 1969 — the band’s prime years as a singles band in the UK — they had been banned from playing in the USA as a result of a dispute with the US Musicians’ Union, a dispute which had led to their career crashing into obscurity over there.

Davies clearly (and understandably) thought that the frustrations he experienced from the Musicians’ Union were much of a piece with the problems he was having with his managers, publishers and record company, and so felt a great deal of sympathy with those who were in the power of the unions in the UK.

Musically, this is the clearest example for a while of how Ray Davies’ love of descending scalar basslines is clearly influenced by Bach. Here the organ part gives the song something of the flavour of organ works like Liebster Jesu, wir sind hier or O Lamm Gottes, unschuldig, though the melody is all Davies’ own. The bassline is more cleverly worked out than some of the earlier stepwise basslines have been, though — while in the chorus it’s mostly based around a descending scale in G, when the chord gets to Em, the bassline suddenly starts rising, getting to A — a tone higher than it started — before dropping back to D, which would have been the natural next note in the descent after Em, and continuing to go down.

This sudden rise to higher than the bassline has been previously, followed by a precipitous drop to lower than it was before, melds beautifully with the lyrics — the rise from E to A starts on the phrase “the sun begins to shine”, before the drop down and descent on the line “Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line”. Rarely has Davies ever matched musical form with lyrical content to such devastating effect.

Lola
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The Kinks’ biggest hit for many years — their first UK top ten hit for three years and their first in the US since Well-Respected Man — was this track about meeting a trans person [FOOTNOTE In the song it's not made clear whether Lola is transgendered or transvestite, or even if Davies was entirely aware of the difference between the two, so I shall be using the term ‘trans' to cover both in this piece.] in a bar, and going back to have sex with her unaware she’s not biologically female — and then not minding too much when he finds out.

I’ve dreaded writing about this song, because it’s witty, clever, and one of the catchiest things Ray Davies ever wrote, but it also perpetuates some negative stereotypes about trans people. However, it also shows more respect to trans people than any other pop song I could think of, so I decided to ask some of my trans friends what they thought of the song. The poet Rachel Zall responded:

Well, speaking for myself as a trans woman:

Certainly it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t repeat and reinforce all sorts of tired transmisogynist tropes, or that the song doesn’t have a nasty hetero-cis sneer underneath it.

But for lots of folks, as you said, it was at least a mention that we exist that was framed in a non-hostile way, and for folks who’ve never heard themselves represented before, a song suggesting that one might at least be lovable to someone somewhere, even ironically, can mean a lot. (I mean, four decades later, can you name another love song to a trans woman? I can’t.)

Personally, for just that reason it meant a lot to me when I was a kid (along with “Walk On The Wild Side” and Rachel Pollack’s run on Doom Patrol), so I’m always a bit kinder to it than I can justify.

Having said all that, I think this speaks more to the desperation many trans women feel trying to find any even theoretically positive depiction of ourselves in popular culture. Divorced from the culture around it, the song is hugely problematic and hard to defend, but in context, it seems better than it is by virtue of being a small, sickly fish in an otherwise empty pond. Which is kinda sad, actually.

Which is about what I thought the reaction would be — the song is problematic now, even though at the time it was a fairly progressive song.

(And incidentally, no, I can’t think of any other songs about being attracted to a trans woman, off the top of my head — other than, actually, the Kinks’ later song Out Of The Wardrobe, which manages to urge tolerance for trans people while simultaneously being rather homophobic, a trick not many people have managed).

Lola was actually based on several real experiences the band and people around them had. Most of the Kinks were not entirely heterosexual, and Mick Avory apparently spent a lot of time in trans nightclubs. At various times, Ray Davies has said the song is about Avory, about his own (apparently non-sexual) meeting with Candy Darling, and about the Kinks’ manager Robert Wace going home with a trans woman, too drunk to care.

Oddly, the biggest problem this song had with getting radio play was not the subject matter, nor the ending of the song (with its implication of our protagonist performing fellatio on Lola), but the mention of “Coca Cola” in the lyric — the BBC were then not allowed to mention brand names, and Davies had to make a 6000-mile round trip to overdub the word “cherry” over “Coca” for the single release, in order to get it played. Both versions of the song are on the current release of the album.

Dave Davies has often claimed that he wrote the music for this song, uncredited. Whatever the correct credits, this is one of the best singles the Kinks ever released, and has now entered the popular culture to such an extent that this was the song chosen for Ray Davies to play when he performed at the Queen’s Jubilee concert in 2002.

Top Of The Pops
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A tedious heavy riffer with no real reason to exist, this is just a song about how having a hit single makes you popular, a sentiment that very few of the listeners will be able to appreciate.

The two main points of interest here are the line “I’ve been invited to a dinner with a prominent queen”, presumably included so that Lola would fit in with the rest of the album (other than that line there are no connections between the subject of Lola and the music-business stresses of the rest of the album), and the last line, in which Davies puts on an ‘hilarious’ mock-Jewish voice to play an agent.

One of the more positive changes over the last forty years in the UK is that outright mockery of ethnic minorities is no longer considered acceptable, but in the early 1970s — and even into the mid-80s — there was considered nothing wrong with even fairly small-l liberal comedians blacking up or making fun of Jewish people. In that context, Davies’ ‘comedy’ voice at the end of this song was perfectly acceptable — he’s doing a caricature of the stereotypical showbiz agent, not dissimilar to those done by people like Monty Python or The Goodies. Today, it mars the album, and comes across as very unpleasant.

The Moneygoround
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The best of the music-business songs on the album by a long way, this is a short (one minute forty-three) romp, in the style of Noel Coward or Flanders And Swann, through the details of the contracts that Davies was enmeshed in. While it’s obviously biased towards Davies (Robert Wace and Grenville Collins, both of whom are named in the lyric, have objected to the line “do they all deserve/money from a song that they’ve never heard?”, claiming that they knew and loved the music of the band when they were managing them), the description is one that anyone who knows about the music industry at that time will recognise as being largely accurate, with layers of publishers and managers all taking a cut before the artist gets a penny.

Musically, this is a pre-war show tune, from the almost-ragtime verses (with yet another Davies descending bassline) to the melodramatic bridge (Davies sounding wonderfully hammy on “I thought they were my friends”, his tongue firmly in cheek even as the point of the song is serious) and the bouncy chorus, with its lyrical quote from The Music Goes Round And Round. The Moneygoround also has a slight musical resemblance to that song, a hit for the Tommy Dorsey band in 1936 that was a pop standard when Davies was growing up. The resemblance to The Music Goes Round And Round can be heard most closely in Russ Conway’s piano version, though I don’t recommend anyone listen to that track.

This, however, is a delight. Funny, clever, and entertaining, and complaining about a real problem without being angsty.

This Time Tomorrow
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

Side two opens with this, one of the most affecting tracks on the album, even though like many of the better tracks on this album it admits of less analysis than some of the more complex music on the band’s mid-sixties records.

Staying almost entirely in the key of G (apart from an occasional B major chord, usually just as a passing chord), this is a curiously melancholy upbeat song about a long plane journey home, to “fields full of houses”. The most interesting feature in the track, and the one that lifts it into the top tier of the band’s early-70s work, is the way the banjo part (played by Dave Davies, with a very unusual attack — he’s playing it like a guitar player, rather than a banjo player), with its fast-picked arpeggios, is doubled by Gosling’s piano. The odd, skipping, rippling effect created by having two such different instruments play such a fast arpeggiated part on an otherwise mid-tempo song is one that must have been hellish to achieve in the studio, but which paid off, making this track endlessly listenable.

A Long Way From Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

And after the plane touches down, you find “you’re still a long way from home”. This piano ballad seems to be addressed to both Dave Davies and to Ray himself. For Ray Davies throughout his career, losing touch with one’s roots seems to be the single worst thing possible, even as he clearly grows to have less and less in common with the poor North London people he grew up with.

Here he sings about how “your wealth will never make you stronger”, because “you don’t know me” from the perspective of someone who knew a rich star when he was a “runny-nosed and scruffy kid”. Whether this is Ray singing to Dave, or Ray taking on the persona of someone from Muswell Hill talking to Ray, it’s fair to say that the critique in the song summed up how both men felt at the time.

The song is very pretty, but curiously forgettable — I have listened to this album hundreds of times, and on the day I wrote this piece I listened to the album five times in a row before I started writing, but I still thought “Which one was that, then?” when I came to write about it. It works in the context of the album, and it clearly meant a lot to the band, but it’s not a highlight.

Rats
Writer: Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies

Musically, Dave Davies’ second song on the album is an early heavy metal track that could have been recorded by Deep Purple or Black Sabbath with little change. It’s not a genre I particularly like, but it seems a competent enough example of the style, if out of place on this album.

Lyrically, however, this is one of the strongest and strangest things on the record, a hallucinatory scream of despair at the music business people he sees as “rats jumping on and off my back” whose “hate spreads just like infection”. It’s clearly the work of a troubled man, and is possibly the most unfiltered, honest thing on the whole album. It was the B-side to Apeman.

Apeman
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

The second single from the album, and the band’s last top ten hit in the UK, was this calypso song, which returns to Davies’ regular themes of wanting to get back to nature and a simpler life, rather than live in a civilised world with “the over-population and inflation and starvation and the crazy politicians”.

Much like Top Of The Pops, this song has been accused of having what gets described euphemistically as “outdated racial attitudes”. And in a sense it does — this song is from a time when it was considered reasonable to sing in a comedy fake-Carribean voice, which would probably be considered unacceptable today by most people but was, like the “Jewish” voice in Top Of The Pops, considered perfectly normal at the time. The voice is ‘outdated’, but no worse in that respect than many other products of its times (which is not necessarily to defend those other products).

The problem comes when the ‘outdated’ comedy voice is combined with lyrics that contain the line “I’m a King Kong man, I’m a voodoo man, I’m an apeman”. The combination of a stereotypically ‘black’ vocal sound with references to apes and voodoo is at best an unfortunate one, and one that has caused several people to see the song as racist.

However, while I’m not going to argue that there is nothing problematic about the song, I don’t believe this song was intended in a racist manner, and I can’t imagine that it occurred to Davies for a millisecond that the conjunction of the ape imagery and the voice could be taken to have any racist implications.

Certainly, the faux-Carribean feel of the song seems to have been taken by real calypsonians as being a mostly-sincere tribute, rather than an insult — a cover version of this was recorded less than a year later by the Esso Trinidad Steel Band as the opening track of their self-titled album [FOOTNOTE This was reissued in 2011 on Bananastan Records, the label of Van Dyke Parks, the album's producer, and is essential listening.].

Certainly, in retrospect, it would have been better had Davies not put on that particular ‘funny’ voice when singing that particular set of lyrics, but I do think intentions count for a lot, and this isn’t the song of someone with bad intentions.

Leaving that to one side, is the song any good?

Well, yes, it is. Other than the piano part at the start (played to sound like a steel band), this is musically almost a straight reworking of Lola, with similar instrumentation (including the prominent dobro that’s all over the album), feel and chord sequence. It seems a clear attempt to recapture lightning, having much the same resemblance to Lola that All Day (And All Of The Night) had to You Really Got Me. Apeman was so much Lola part two that Davies even had to make another transatlantic plane trip to drop in another single word to get the song played on the radio, this time when the BBC weren’t sure whether the air pollution was “fogging” or “fucking” up Davies’ eyes.

Apeman, however, floats where Lola lumbers. Where Lola is by far the more instantly impressive track, Apeman sticks with the listener, and is an absolutely perfect pop record, and the last truly great Kinks single.

Powerman
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

A dull, plodding rocker, comparing the “Powerman” who’s “got my money and my publishing rights” with Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Hitler and Mussolini. Possibly comparing Edward Kassner (whose parents died in Auschwitz) with Adolf Hitler was not the best way to get people’s sympathy. Failing that, Davies could have tried writing a more interesting song to put the comparison in.

Got To Be Free
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies

And we finish the album with a song that ties together its themes, both lyrically (the themes of wanting to escape from the people making Davies a “slave” and live free like “a flea or a proud butterfly”– he even reuses the line about “the bugs and the spiders and flies” from Apeman) and musically. In particular it returns to the bluegrass section from the start of The Contenders and turns it into a full song.

The verses, which stick closely to the feel of that section of The Contenders, work well, with surprisingly authentic-sounding bluegrass banjo and dobro playing. The choruses work a little less well, sounding like an attempt to sound like the Rolling Stones in their more country-blues moments.

The song, like the album it’s closing, is something of a curate’s egg, veering from dull to surprisingly effective. The best moments of the album are as good as anything the band had done, but even those are problematic in a way earlier work hadn’t been, while the worst moments were inferior to anything the band had done since Face To Face.