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 1 – Kinks
The Kinks’ first album, titled simply Kinks, is a mish-mash of different styles, only some of them effective. While Ray and Dave Davies had been playing together for many years, and had been working with bass player Pete Quaife for some time, the final line-up of the band, with drummer Mick Avory, had only settled down after the release of the band’s debut single, a lacklustre cover of Long Tall Sally, in February 1964. Avory was so new to the band that he doesn’t even appear on much of the album, being replaced by session player Bobbie Graham.
The band’s early singles set the pattern for this album. Long Tall Sally was a semi-competent cover of an American R&B classic, You Still Want Me, the band’s second single, was decent Merseybeat-by-numbers, and You Really Got Me, their third, was one of the greatest singles of all time, a crunchy garage-rock track with one of the best riffs ever committed to record.
And the album is as much of a mixed bag as the singles. Like many British bands in 1964 and 65, the Kinks were attempting to sound like the American blues music of a previous generation. The problem is that like many of those bands, the Kinks were not particularly strong either vocally or instrumentally, and simply couldn’t carry the weight of this material. When Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley sing “I’m A Man”, the implicit meaning is “so don’t call me ‘boy’”. When white teenagers from the Home Counties sing the same material, it comes out sounding more like “I’m a grown man, now, mummy, so you can’t make me tidy my room!”
The best of the British R&B-oriented bands, like the Animals or the Zombies or the Spencer Davis Group, got away with this by having astonishingly good vocalists – and all of these bands soon moved away from the R&B sound. The Kinks, too, would make this move very soon, but in 1964 there was little to impress on their first album.
And while they don’t add very much to the sound, it should probably be mentioned that among the session players who played on this album are Jimmy Page (who added acoustic rhythm guitar on a couple of tracks but did not play any leads, despite some reports to the contrary) and Jon Lord.
The Album
Beautiful Delilah
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The album opener is a perfect example of where most British blues bands of the time were going wrong. A cover version of one of Chuck Berry’s more minor works, this misses everything that makes Berry’s original worth listening to – the wit in Berry’s vocals, and his distinctive guitar work.
It does have a punk energy, especially in Dave Davies’ incoherent vocals, but even so it sounds forced. This is garage band music in a bad way – it’s the work of teenagers who aren’t very good yet, and who love R&B music without knowing what it is they love about it.
So Mystifying
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a much better attempt at the same kind of thing. It appears to have been written off the Rolling Stones’ version of It’s All Over Now, but has a more country-blues flavour, reminiscent both of early Chuck Berry tracks like Maybelline and of Carl Perkins rockabilly. The lead guitar part, in particular, has some unusual choices that point the way forward to the band’s later experimentation with country music on albums like Muswell Hillbillies.
The song, and the track, are still not especially good, but even on a by-the-numbers blues track like this Ray Davies is starting to develop a distinctive voice which suits the band far better than the cover versions they do.
Just Can’t Go To Sleep
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A simple exercise in a girl-group style, this is the kind of thing that bands like the Swinging Blue Jeans were having hits with at the time, and is a very competent piece in the style, but completely unmemorable except for the key change down a tone for the middle section, which is an unusually-long twelve bars. The hook line sounds like an early attempt at the hook for Stop Your Sobbing.
Long Tall Shorty
Writers: Don Covay and Herbert C Abramson
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
This song was originally recorded by Tommy Tucker earlier in 1964 as a follow-up to his hit single Hi-Heeled Sneakers, and has almost exactly the same melody as that track. Probably the best of the R&B covers on this album, this has some very creditable harmonica playing from Ray Davies – nothing technically challenging, but with far more feeling than much of the music elsewhere on the album. It’s still fundamentally pointless though, especially in comparison with Tucker’s much more interesting original.
I Took My Baby Home
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Easily the catchiest and most commercial sounding of the tracks so far, this is a simple three-chord formula pop song of a kind that almost every band did dozens of during the sixties (probably its closest relation is I’m A Fool by Dino, Desi and Billy from a couple of years later, but every Merseybeat band had a few songs like this). The arrangement is more inventive than normal for this kind of song, though, with all instruments except the drums dropping out for the “I wo-o-o-o-on’t” line, and some quite complicated drum fills.
This was the B-side to the band’s first single, Long Tall Sally, and should really have been the A-side, being both a better performance and more in tune with the music that was having success in early 1964.
I’m A Lover Not A Fighter
Writer: Jay Miller
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
A cover of a Cajun blues song by evil racist scumbag J.D. Miller, this features some very nice guitar picking from Dave Davies, but is unfortunately spoiled by his lead vocal, which has all the subtlety of a rutting rhinoceros.
You Really Got Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
It’s almost impossible to describe how much this track stands out from the dross around it. On paper, this should be more of the same – a simple two-note riff, played in three different keys, and a lyric with a 35-word vocabulary (significantly simpler than the average Doctor Seuss book). In fact the lyric originally only had thirty-four words in it, but Davies was persuaded to change some of the ‘yeah’s to ‘girl’, to avoid any possible implication of homosexuality.
The sound of this, though, is extraordinary. Forty-eight years later, this still packs a punch unlike anything else in the charts at that time. At a time when record companies were turning down tracks on the grounds that the guitar was distorted, this is recorded with a guitar put through a speaker cone that had been slashed with a knife. Everything about this track is designed to evoke adolescent sexual tension in the extreme – the riff, the repetitive single-note piano parts, Dave Davies’ long “yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” backing vocals, Ray Davies’ screaming, lustful vocals on the high notes. And nothing like Dave Davies’ finger-twisting guitar solo had ever been recorded before.
Angry, frustrated, raunchy, this is the precise moment when rock – as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll – was invented.
Cadillac
Writer: Bo Diddley
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And we’re immediately back into the realms of R & B covers, although Bo Diddley’s thuggish simplicity is more suited to the band at this stage of their development than many of the other covers have been, and this isn’t too bad at all.
Bald Headed Woman
Writer: Shel Talmy
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
One of two covers of tracks by the folk singer Odetta, included on the album so that producer Shel Talmy could claim a ‘trad. arr.’ writing credit. The band do as competent a job as could be expected for a song so firmly out of their normal stylistic range (it sounds more like a work chant than anything else), but this is pointless.
Revenge
Writer: Ray Davies and Larry Page
Lead Vocalist: Instrumental
As is this, a by-the-numbers harmonica-led instrumental presumably included so that Larry Page, one of the band’s managers, could get some songwriting money too. It’s actually quite an advanced-sounding track – it could easily be a backing track from Love’s first album, two years later, but it sounds like a backing track for which someone’s forgotten to bother to record a vocal, rather than a proper instrumental.
Too Much Monkey Business
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another missing-the-point Chuck Berry cover, again of a song which depends almost entirely on Berry’s delivery for its effect, this one is even less successful than Beautiful Delilah because of the frankly incomprehensible decision to double track the lead vocal. For a wordy song such as this, so dependent on diction, this is fatal. Dave Davies’ guitar solo is quite nice though.
I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain
Writer: Odetta Felious
Lead Vocalist: Dave Davies
The second of the Odetta covers, though on this one Odetta has regained her songwriting credit as the song isn’t actually traditional. The backing track is quite pleasant, in an acoustic hootenany kind of way, but then Dave Davies does his usual tuneless punk hollering over the top. He got much better as a vocalist.
Stop Your Sobbing
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is the second really good track on the album, and one of Ray Davies’ very best early songs. A simple Merseybeat track, this has a gorgeous melody and one of the catchiest hooks Davies ever came up with (“better stop sobbing now”).
It’s also more emotionally ambiguous than the rest of his early songs, paving the way for the more interesting work he’d be doing later on. The protagonist wants to help his girlfriend get over whatever is causing her to cry, but he’s also implicitly threatening to leave her if she doesn’t. There’s a weird unresolved tension here between the sympathetic and the extraordinarily callous, that makes this the most emotionally realistic song on the entire album.
This track is also the first to feature Rasa Didzpetris on backing vocals. Didzpetris was soon to become Ray Davies’ first wife, and as Rasa Davies her vocal lines became an essential part of many of the Kinks’ most memorable records.
While this was never released as a single, The Pretenders released a version in 1979 that was a minor hit.
Got Love If You Want It
Writer: James H Moore
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
And we end with another cover version of a blues standard. This one is better than the album standard, because Ray Davies plays with his vocals here in a way he hasn’t on the rest of the album, and wins over on sheer strangeness. There’s some ferociously good drumming on this track too.
Bonus Tracks
I Believed You
Writer: Ray and Dave Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An early demo recording, before the band had settled on the name The Kinks, this was recorded under the name The Bo Weevils. A much more sophisticated song and performance than most of what we can hear on the actual album, this could easily have been a hit for a band like The Zombies. It suggests that many of the problems with the first album can be laid at the door not of the band themselves, but of producer Shel Talmy, with whom the band didn’t get on, and who notably didn’t produce You Really Got Me, although he was credited with it.
I’m A Hog For You Baby
Writer: Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Another Bo Weevils demo, this one is a fairly poor-quality recording of a Coasters cover, but it still shows the band as far more assured than on the Kinks album, with some very good lead guitar and with the band members doing a variety of silly voices in the style of the original. Where most of the R&B covers on the album show an utter lack of comprehension, this one is a sympathetic cover of what is, ultimately, a fluffy piece of nothing.
I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
A demo from January 1964, in very rough quality, this is a decent enough pop-rocker that would have made a perfectly acceptable album track had it been taken any further.
Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy (demo)
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This is a demo, recorded toward the end of 1964, for what would become the band’s sixth single. I’ll deal with the song more when I look at the Kinda Kinks album, but what I can say is that this demo shows every element of the finished record was conceived very early on – the arrangement barely changed at all, although the performance on the finished track is much tighter.
Long Tall Sally
Writer: Richard Penniman, Robert Blackwell and Enotis Johnson
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
For the band’s first single, they were persuaded to record Long Tall Sally, a Little Richard song that they’d never performed before, on the grounds that the Beatles were performing the song live (this was before the Beatles released their own studio version of the song).
On paper, an R&B song about a transsexual prostitute should have been perfect for the Kinks, but there’s no evidence they’d actually figured out what the lyrics were. While Paul McCartney got round the problem of not being able to understand Little Richard’s screeched vocals by gabbling, Ray Davies seems to have just made up some new lyrics for himself.
The song’s taken at too slow a pace – in fact the band are playing the riff from a different, slower, Little Richard song, Lucille, and for all their singing “we’re having some fun tonight” it sounds like they’re protesting too much. It’s not a bad track, as such, but nor is it a very good one, and it’s easy to see why this was a flop, only reaching number 42 despite a TV appearance on Ready, Steady, Go.
You Still Want Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The band’s second single, this was even less commercially successful than Long Tall Sally, but it’s harder to see why in retrospect. This would have been a great pop hit in 1963, the year of Gerry And The Pacemakers, the Swinging Blue Jeans and the Searchers. Unfortunately for the band, it was released in 1964, at a time when a harder, bluesier style was starting to come into fashion, and sounded like they were trying to jump on the bandwagon just after it had pulled away.
With five decades’ hindsight, though, this was a massive improvement on their first single, and shows that they were headed in the right direction. While this didn’t chart, the lowest chart ranking any of their next thirteen singles would have would be number eleven.
You Do Something To Me
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to You Still Want Me, this uptempo pop track is equal parts Merseybeat (in the verses) and Buddy Holly (in the middle eight), with some quite gorgeous Everly Brothers style harmonies from the Davies brothers, in a style they never really returned to. This is easily as good as, say, any of the hits the Hollies had around this time, and is in much the same style. Quite why this and its A-side were left off the album is hard to say.
It’s Alright
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side of You Really Got Me is a standard Brit-blues riff-based track, possibly showing a little of the influence of Mose Allison, either directly or through contemporary bands like Manfred Mann. There’s no real song there – it sounds like something that evolved out of a jam session – but the performance and arrangement, with a prominent drum part and short spot of dead air when the entire band briefly drop out, are inventive enough that the track remains listenable.
All Day And All Of The Night
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The follow-up to You Really Got Me was very much a repeat of that single’s winning formula. Instead of a two-note riff, this time we have a three-note riff (F, G and B flat ). And whereas You Really Got Me goes up by a tone, then by another tone, this track goes up by a third, and then up by a tone into the chorus.
Otherwise, this sticks as closely as possible to the You Really Got Me template, and amazingly manages to capture lighting in a bottle twice. The band would very soon move on to more complex songs, but like their previous single this is one of the great pop-rock tracks of all time.
I Gotta Move
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The B-side to All Day And All Of The Night is again very similar to the previous B-side, a simple riffy blues track. By this point, the Kinks had become quite good at this kind of track, but there’s little of interest here other than the faint backing vocals, setting up a drone – a sound which would become of more interest to the band in the next year.
Louie Louie
Writer: Richard Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Apparently Ray Davies wrote You Really Got Me while trying to work out the three-chord riff to Louie Louie, which had been a hit for the Kingsmen in the US the previous year, so it was natural that the Kinks would record their own version, which became the opening track of their Kinksize Session EP. This version is now the best-known version in the UK, and is notable for the band getting the chords wrong (they play I-IV-V rather than I-IV-v). This recording in turn seems to have been the inspiration for the Troggs’ hit version of Wild Thing in 1966 – a record produced by the Kinks’ manager Larry Page.
I’ve Got That Feeling
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
The second track on Kinksize Session, this seems to be an attempt by Ray Davies to write in the style of the Zombies, who had recently had their first big hit with She’s Not There. Much like that song, this is keyboard based, and based around a jazzy riff centred on an Am chord, though this continues the habit Davies has at this time of making riffs out of single-tone differences, rather than having the more expansive changes of the Zombies song. This is again reminiscent of the riffs to You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night, but the choice is probably made because unlike the Zombies’ singer Colin Blunstone, Ray Davies was at this time an incredibly limited vocalist, and keeping within a narrow range was probably necessary.
I Gotta Go Now
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
At 2:53, the third track on Kinksize Session is longer than anything on the band’s first album. Which is odd, because it must have taken much less time than that to write, consisting as it does mostly of two chords and six words. And unlike in the case of You Really Got Me, this doesn’t appear to be a deliberate choice as much as it’s an utter lack of effort. I actually managed to forget this track while listening to it.
Things Are Getting Better
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This track, the last on Kinksize Session is actually a rewrite of Cadillac. Ray Davies forgets the lyric to the last line on the last verse, and what little lyric there is is written in an attempt at American dialect (our protagonist “hasn’t got a dime”). Davies would soon move away from this kind of imitation and find a voice of his own though.
Don’t Ever Let Me Go
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
This was apparently an attempt at a follow-up to You Really Got Me, wisely scrapped in favour of All Day And All Of The Night. It features the same riff as You Really Got Me, but married to a more conventional, and thus less interesting, song.
I Don’t Need You Any More
Writer: Ray Davies
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
An utterly by-the-numbers garage rock track, with absolutely nothing of any interest about it.
Little Queenie
Writer: Chuck Berry
Lead Vocalist: Ray Davies
Recorded during a live BBC session, and introduced by Brian Matthew (who is still to this day a BBC DJ, having been a broadcaster for 64 years), this is yet another attempt at a Chuck Berry cover. This time, they miss out half of the lyrics and don’t seem to really have understood the rest. The liner notes for the Kinks deluxe edition claim Ray Davies is singing this, but if so he sounds very like his brother Dave (although the two could often sound alike).
Overall, Kinks, and the material recorded around that time, is a sloppy mess for the most part, with occasional flashes of brilliance, though sloppiness was the norm for every band other than the Beatles or the Beach Boys at the end of 1964. 1965 would see the Kinks improve dramatically…
leave a comment