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.
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…
New Spotify (And 8Tracks) Playlist – Best Of The Sixties
This playlist is rather different from my normal playlists. Normally, I try to mix up obscure tracks, new things I’ve only just discovered, and old classics. This time, however, this is (almost) on commission.
Talking by email with Plok earlier today, he said he knew a teenager who wanted to learn more about ‘sixties music’, naming a couple of tracks she liked. He told me a couple of other things about her (she’s bright and cheerful, very innocent, etc) and asked me for suggestions.
So I’ve tried to put together a playlist that covers *ALL* of ‘sixties music’, which is frankly impossible. To make it more difficult, I’ve tried to structure it like a mix tape (it’s 90 minutes to within a minute or so), and I’ve also used 8track.com , a site that allows you to create streaming playlists of MP3s, but no more than two tracks by each artist per playlist, because that (unlike Spotify) should be accessible in Canada. I wanted to *try* to get everything from folk-rock to freakbeat to Brit-Blues to psych to soul in there, but 90 minutes is not a long time… I also wanted to put in tracks that would be interesting pointers to other stuff.
I’ve tried to go for a mix of obvious hits and obscure but interesting, but with the emphasis on the former. The notes below should be taken as a guide for teenagers, rather than for people who already know this music, so apologies if it seems patronising to my normal readers. Spotify playlist here, 8track playlist here.
Side 1
Wouldn’t It Be Nice by The Beach Boys opens what many consider the best album ever, Pet Sounds. While it seems like just a simple pop song, it has layers of instruments and vocals that reward repeated listening.
You’re No Good by The Swinging Blue Jeans is included not just because it’s a great little pop record, but also for historical value. The Beatles didn’t come out of nowhere – they were part of a scene, Merseybeat, that produced dozens of successful bands in the early 60s. The Swinging Blue Jeans were the best of the other Merseybeat bands, so this gives some idea of what the competition was like for the Beatles.
Time Of The Season by The Zombies is actually musically quite similar to You’re No Good, but is from the other end of the sixties. From another contender for ‘best album ever’, Odessey And Oracle (yes, it’s spelled that way), the Zombies had already split up by the time this charted.
The Door Into Summer by The Monkees shows just how fast music was changing in the 60s. A year before this, the Monkees had been a manufactured band for a TV show, but now they were busy inventing country-rock, and not just country-rock, but psychedelic country-rock based on a Robert Heinlein science fiction novel…
Good Vibrations by The Beach Boys is pretty much undoubtedly the best single ever released. You may think you know this one from commercials or whatever, but actually *listen* to it and you’ll be astonished.
Do You Believe In Magic? by The Lovin’ Spoonful is one of the most *fun* tracks of the decade.
Days by The Kinks may be the most beautiful song ever written. Nothing more to say about that.
How Does It Feel To Feel? by The Creation is one of the most influential records of the sixties, even though it was never a hit. Listen to this and you realise that Oasis were nothing more than a tribute act to The Creation, but with slightly less talent. Seriously, this is *every* Oasis record ever, but better, and it’s from 1965.
Summer In The City by The Lovin’ Spoonful is a song pretty much everyone already knows, but is here just in case.
Tin Soldier by The Small Faces is actually very like Summer In The City, structurally, but just listen to the dynamics of this record, the way it moves between sections. And that VOICE. Steve Marriot was a short, white lad from London, but his voice here could blow away any soul or rock singer ever.
Dark End Of The Street by James Carr is the best soul ballad ever, and another incredible voice.
You Don’t Have To Walk In The Rain by The Turtles is the single from Turtle Soup, their attempt at making an album like the Kinks’ Village Green Preservation Society – even getting Ray Davies of the Kinks to produce it. It’s a great pop single, and funny with it (“I look at your face/I love you anyway”)
Making Time by The Creation is a more typical 60s garage track than How Does It Feel, but powerful.
Shakin’ All Over by Johnny Kidd And The Pirates is the first great British rock record, from well before the Beatles ever recorded. Just listen to that great guitar riff, and the drum break….
While Seven And Seven Is by Love invented punk and heavy metal while most bands hadn’t even got round to the whole ‘flowers in your hair’ bit yet – this is, staggeringly, from 1966.
Side 2
Even more amazingly, Alone Again Or by Love is the same band a year later.Hard to believe, isn’t it? From another of the general contenders for ‘best album ever’ – Forever Changes.
This Will Be Our Year by The Zombies is another track from Odessey And Oracle, and one of the best songs about being happy in love ever. Shame Rod Argent and Hugh Grundy can’t keep in time with each other…
Some Mother’s Son by The Kinks is one of the saddest anti-war songs ever. World War I was being reassessed in the 60s, and that time period had a huge influence on British music of the period, and you really need at least one song about it on a compilation like this.
Be My Baby by The Ronnettes bom, bom-bom BOM, bom, bom-bom BOM
Lies by The Knickerbockers isn’t by the Beatles. Honestly. It’s a group of jobbing musicians from New Jersey. HONESTLY…
Look Out, There’s A Monster Coming by The Bonzo Dog Band is hilarious.
We’ve Got To Get Out Of This Place by The Animals is the greatest of all the British R&B singles, mostly for Eric Burdon’s astonishing vocal.
I’ve Been Good To You by The Miracles was one of John Lennon’s favourites – enough so that he stole a chunk of it for Sexy Sadie from the White Album.
Keep On Running by The Spencer Davis Group is included partly because it’s one of the best singles of the 60s, and partly because Jonathan Calder would look sternly at me if I didn’t include something with a Steve Winwood vocal.
The Old Laughing Lady by Neil Young from his first album is a pointer to a style that no-one really followed up on, not even Young himself, a sort of progressive-psych-folk-country but with orchestral arrangements. The nearest things I can think of to this track later on are Dennis Wilson or some of Gram Parsons’ music…
Sure ‘Nuff ‘n’ Yes I Do by Captain Beefheart And His Magic Band is about as commercial as the good Captain ever got, and has some great slide guitar by Ry Cooder.
Hold On, I’m Coming by Sam & Dave is one of the great soul tracks.
Walk Away Renee by The Four Tops is here to kill two birds with one stone – the original of this, by The Left Banke, is a classic of baroque pop, but the Four Tops manage to make it fit their Motown style perfectly.
I Say A Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin is an obvious choice, but sometimes obvious choices are obvious for a reason.
And The Intro And The Outro by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band sees us out…
Spotify Playlist For 16/01/10 – Klaatu, Roy Wood, France Gall, Ella Fitzgerald, Mississippi John Hurt…
I’m back.
I’ve had a little while off from the internet, as a whole pile of things have been building up that needed dealing with offline, so I’ve not even checked my email for a week (I see I have emails from Sarah, Pillock, Brad, Tilt, Trevor, Alex and Richard that need dealing with…) and Twitter for longer but I’m off work for 9 days now, so by the end of the week PEP! will be out, and I should have something posted every day. (For those who’ve sent me concerned emails, everything’s fine…)
I haven’t done a spotify playlist for a while, so here’s one with no theme except that the songs sounded good in a row together:
10358 Overture by ELO is one of two Roy Wood tracks on this. The song was actually written by Jeff Lynne (the man who after this first album to all intents and purposes was ELO) but that wonderful string and horn arrangement is not only written by Wood, but he played all of it himself. Wood is one of the great unsung musical geniuses of British pop music, and those who don’t know his work (especially with the Move, and his solo albums) are missing out.
Open Your Window by Ella Fitzgerald is from an absolutely marvellous album called Ella, from 1969, that I discovered through a playlist by my friend Tilt that included her version of Savoy Truffle. It includes versions of Got To Get You Into My Life, Randy Newman’s Yellow Man, Knock On Wood and more, but somehow works very, very well. This is the best track though, a version of a Nilsson song that is close to her style anyway. One of the few examples of a pre-60s artist coping well, and with dignity, with the transition to a new style of music.
Songs Of Praise by Roy Wood is from his solo album Boulders – and it was an actual solo album. He wrote every song, produced it, played every instrument, did all the lead and backing vocals, and drew the cover art. This is probably the catchiest and most conventional thing on the album (apart from the varispeeded backing vocals) – a fairly straightforward pop-gospel song along the lines of the Beach Boys’ then-recent He Came Down – but the whole album is just wonderful, and one of the most imaginative things I’ve ever heard.
Electric Trains by Squeeze is the last great single that great singles band did, mostly due to being one of Chris Difford’s few truly strong late-period lyrics (though it would still be nothing without Glenn Tilbrook’s music and vocals, as Difford’s solo remake with different music showed a few years later). The listing of very specific memories actually manages to get across a very accurate feeling of what it’s like for all adolescents growing up.
Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby? by Jimmy Reed is one of the all-time blues classics. You all know this one, I’m sure.
Stagger Lee by Mississippi John Hurt is one of the earliest variants of this blues standard, and as you can hear very different from the later versions (the most famous of which is the version popularised by Lloyd Price, though everyone from Doctor John to Nick Cave has done their own version of it), Personally I like this folk-blues style far more than the swaggering R&B strut of the more famous versions, though both have their merits.
In Germany Before The War by Randy Newman is the most beautiful song about child murder ever written. This version is from Songbook, Vol 1, an album of solo piano rerecordings of many of his best songs (a better idea than it sounds, as many of his best songs had backing from people like the Eagles, which detracted from them quite a bit – he’s a far better songwriter than producer).
A Magical Night by Laurie Biagini is probably my favourite song from Ridin’ The Wave. Biagini is another one who writes and plays everything herself (though far from Wood’s level) and this one reminds me of Kirsty MacColl.
Revolution #9 by The Thurston Lava Tube I discovered through the same playlist that had the Ella Savoy Truffle in. I love this just because it manages to turn Revolution #9 into a two-minute surf instrumental that is still recognisable, more or less.
Don’t Let It Go by L.E.O. is a perfect imitation of the ELO sound, by a ‘supergroup’ including members of Hanson, Chicago and Jellyfish among others. Amazingly, this is actually a good thing. No, really. Really.
Still I Dream Of It by Brian Wilson is one of the most heartbreaking recordings ever to be released. His home demo of a song he later recorded with full orchestration, this was written at his most mentally ill – and it clearly shows, the lyrics being more or less a stream of consciousness. But this isn’t ‘outsider music’ – it’s some of the most heartfelt communication ever to have been made into art. The reason Wilson’s work is so variable is the same reason he’s so adored by musicians – the man has absolute command of the technical aspects of his work, but has no filters at all – his music is an absolutely open, honest, almost childlike expression of everything going through his mind, but it has an extraordinary technical complexity that makes it a *PRECISE* expression.
Dann Schon Eher Der Pianoplayer by France Gall is there to cheer you up after the depressing song before it. As it’s in German, I have no idea what it’s about, but it’s a very cheery arrangement.
G-Spot Tornado by The Invisible Birds is a surf-guitar and organ version of one of Frank Zappa’s most fiendishly complex pieces (one he thought for many years was unplayable by human beings at all). It’s rather remarkable both how well the piece suits the idiom and how well they render it, though they take it at a much slower pace than it’s intended. (This is from an album of surf versions of Zappa songs by various artists, many of which are surprisingly good).
Maybe I’ll Move To Mars by Klaatu might be the most 1970s thing ever.
And I Go To Sleep by The Kinks was Ray Davies’ very first truly great song (though the Kinks had made great records before this) – obviously hugely influenced by Bacharach, but very much the first sign of the man who would shortly be giving us Something Else and Village Green Preservation Society
Spotify Playlist – Veteran’s Day Poppy
Remembrance Sunday and the eleventh of November are days that evoke conflicting emotions in me. I’m pretty much an absolute pacifist, so you’d expect me to disapprove of them, but at the same time the *reason* I’m a pacifist is because I don’t like seeing people go and get killed (or kill others), and I have nothing but respect for those who fought (and often died) for causes they thought were right, even when (as has so often been the case) they’re led by psychopaths. Those people DESERVE remembrance, and respect. They went through things that none of us who haven’t been in a war can possibly imagine, and many of them behaved with far more decency than their commanders (I’ve read studies that show that in war, even when afraid for their own lives, 85% of soldiers unconsciously shoot to miss, because even in that position they can’t bring themselves to kill – something borne out by stories of people like Harry Patch, the last British soldier from WWI who died earlier this year, who had made a pact with his friends never to shoot to kill, but to aim for the enemies’ legs.)
I also don’t wear poppies, partly because I don’t wear anything like that – no breast cancer awareness badges or make poverty history wristbands, but also because the poppy as a symbol has become incredibly politicised in Britain recently, and it’s increasingly become a symbol of support for a particular right-wing form of patriotism. That said, I do think it’s hugely important to remember the sacrifices people went through for causes both noble and otherwise, so I’ve put together this spotify playlist. A lot of these songs are angry songs, because people should not have to travel thousands of miles to kill or be killed unless there’s a good reason, and often there isn’t. I find it very hard to remember those who died, or those who were maimed for life, without also remembering those who put them in that position. Never again should mean that…
One song I wanted to include was Armistice Day by Paul Simon, which he titled that for reasons much like those in this Vonnegut quote:
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
However, Armistice Day appears to be one of the few Paul Simon songs *not* on Spotify. So it goes.
The songs I have included are:
Veterans Day Poppy by Captain Beefheart (mislabelled as Apes-Ma – all the songs on this album are mislabelled). Sometimes Beefheart’s lyrics are difficult to understand, so here’s a transcription:
I cry but I can’t buy
Your Veteran’s Day poppy
It don’t get me high
It can only make me cry
It can never grow another
Son like the one who warmed me my days
After rain and warmed my breath
My life’s blood
Screamin’ empty she cries
It don’t get me high
It can only make me cry
Your Veteran’s Day poppy
Butcher’s Tale (Western Front 1914) by The Zombies is written and sung by Chris White, and his more fragile voice suits this deeply disturbing song much better than Blunstone’s would have.
Any King’s Shilling by Elvis Costello is a reminder of some of the more recent conflicts. “Stay at home tonight, if you know what’s good for you/I can’t say more, it would be telling/But if you don’t, what will become of you/Just isn’t worth any King’s shilling”.
Shipbuilding by Robert Wyatt is another Costello song (co-written), and possibly the saddest song ever written, about the hope a war brings to an economically depressed town – “It’s just a rumour that’s been spread around town/A telegram or a picture postcard/within weeks they’ll be re-opening the shipyard/And notifying the next of kin once again”.
Some Mother’s Son by The Kinks is from Arthur, the last of their incredible run of straight masterpieces in the mid sixties. “Some mother’s son lies in a field/Someone has killed some mother’s son today” I’d have liked to pair this with the other WWI song from the same album, Yes Sir No Sir (“Give the scum a gun and make the buggers fight/just be sure to have deserters die on sight/If he dies we’ll send a medal to his wife”) but that’s not on Spotify.
Song For The Dead by Randy Newman does a pretty good job of this though – a song from the point of view of a soldier in Vietnam burying his dead comrades and saying ‘a few words on behalf of the leadership’. At once utterly vicious and cynical about the motives of the leaders who start wars, but still recognising the real horror their decisions cause to those who have to carry them out.
Rich Man’s War by Steve Earle continues along these lines – “Somebody somewhere had another plan/Now he’s got a rifle in his hand/He’s wandering Baghdad wondering how it got this far/He’s just another poor boy off to fight a rich man’s war”.
Little Boy Soldiers by The Jam – “These days I find that I can’t be bothered/To argue with them, well what’s the point?/Better to take your shots and drop down dead/then they send you home in a pine overcoat/With a letter to your mum/Saying find enclosed one son/one medal and a note/to say he won.”
Where Have All The Flowers Gone? by Pete Seeger is often thought of as a rather twee song. It really isn’t.
And to finish, we have The Last Post.
Spotify Superheroes
It’s been nearly two weeks since my last weekly playlist, hasn’t it? This needs to be rectified. Some of you may notice a slight theme throughout this week’s playlist…
Superman by R.E.M is a song that many, many people arriving at my blog through search engines are looking for. A cover of a 60s track by The Clique, this is a joyous bit of powerpop fun.
Wonder Woman by Elvis Costello & Allen Toussaint is not, as Spotify thinks, by the Attractions, but is from the Costello/Toussaint/Impostors album The River In Reverse, an album they recorded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This is an old Toussaint song from the 70s.
That’s Really Super, Supergirl by XTC is off what is possibly XTC’s most consistent album, Skylarking. Holly loved this one til she realised it really was about, as she put it, “Supergirl’s emo boyfriend”. I love it *because* of that…
“Batman” Theme by Neal Hefti is the 60s TV theme, in an arrangement that has an ocarina solo. Who could ask for more?
Sunshine Superman by Donovan is one of his better singles – a very enjoyable bit of pop-psychedelic 60s nonsense.
Sgt Rock Is Going To Help Me is our second XTC song, but given that they are both one of the best bands ever and bona-fide comic fans (Andy Partridge is a fan of Kubert and Ditko especially) it seems reasonable.
(Incidentally, one of my favourite facts from the About Time series, which I’ve read over the last couple of months, is that “Andrew Partridge of Swindon” was a runner-up in a 1968 ‘Design A Doctor Who Monster’ competition on Blue Peter. )
The Supreme Being Teaches Spider-Man How To Be In Love by The Flaming Lips is from the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, though I don’t remember it from the film, and quite what Mohammed Ali has to do with anything I don’t know…
Boy Wonder by The Undertones is a classic bit of pop-punk from the late 70s. Annoyingly, Feargal Sharkey, the interestingly-named frontman of the band, went on first to record one of the most cloying, awful singles of the 80s (A Good Heart), and then to become an executive for ‘UK Music’ (the British equivalent of the RIAA). He was great as a teenager, though…
Superman by Benny Goodman is a surprisingly-raw sounding instrumental for the Goodman big band (Goodman usually saved the more dissonant stuff for the small groups). I don’t know any details of the recording, but that sounds very like Cootie Williams on trumpet, and he was only in Goodman’s band in 1940, after leaving Ellington, so we’ll say it’s from then.
Plastic Man by The Kinks is one of those attacks on The Businessman In His Suit And Tie that were so popular in the mid-60s, where rock stars attack people for daring to have jobs and live in suburbia. It’s a fun one though.
Barbara Allen by Lois Lane is a version of the old folk song by a Dutch band. Not my favourite version of the song, but a nice one.
Mr Sandman by The Chordettes is a song you all know. However it sounds stranger than you remember – those backing vocals almost sound sampled, a la I’m Not In Love/Star Me Kitten. Also, the Beach Boys fans among you could note that the ‘my children were raised’ section of Heroes & Villains was ripped off from it. The song definitely shows its age though in the line about “wavy hair like Liberace”…
1952 Vincent Black Lightning by Richard Thompson is a great song. And, well, Black Lightning’s a superhero.
Animal Man by Kim Fowley is as silly as you’d imagine.
And Wolverine Blues by Jelly Roll Morton is a great little track by the man who claimed to have invented jazz…
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