Everything you’ve ever heard about the Kinks is true. Everything you’ve ever heard about the
Kinks is a lie. Everything you’ve ever heard about the Kinks is distorted
beyond belief. True, by now the story of the Kinks is a tale about a pair of
brothers, Raymond Douglas and David Russell Gordon Davies — especially
considering that original bassist Pete Quaife abandoned post long ago and
drummer Mick Avory finally followed suit in the mid-Eighties. And, yes, like
most brothers, Ray and Dave have had their conflicts. It’s sure to happen to
relatives (half-brothers actually) with clashing personalities that are forced
together in close quarters for long periods of time. Yes, cymbal stands fly and
guitars get smashed, and there have been moments when they’ve made Oasis’
Gallagher brothers look like the shallow, attention-seeking pansies they are.
But if you believe that brotherly animosity is what the Kinks are about, you’ve
read too many tattered back issues of Circus.
No, the story of the Kinks is the story of the most brilliant and insightful
popsmith the Sixties British rock scene produced, and of one of the most
distinctively raunchy rock & roll guitar players to emerge from a pack of
Lennons, Richards, and Townshends. First and foremost, however, the Kinks are
about…
Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!
Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!
It sounded like nothing you’d heard in your life.
Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!
It sounded monstrous, nasty, vicious — like a big, green, swamp snake
snapping out, ready to attack.
Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!
Then came the voice: flat nasal, almost indifferent. Giirrrll, ya really
got me goin’/Ya got me so I don’t know wot I’m doin’. The lyrics seem to
wanna hold your hand, much like those
cute/cuddly/inoffensive Beatle boys,
but the music leers at ya, as if with a tube of K-Y in its hand. And it keeps
building, piling on intensity in ever-thickening layers, ’til the whole damn
thing blows apart in a guitar solo that ka-booms like so much 16-year-old
testosterone buildup. One more verse swaggers in on its Cuban heels before the
song comes to a tottering resolution, which sounds like its drunkenly kicking
huge-ass holes in the sheetrock.
When the teenage Dave Davies took his daddy’s razor to the inefficient
speakers of his li’l 10-watt green practice amp and inadvertently introduced
the world to the distorted powerchord (Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh!), he’d
captured a weird intangible for the audio-acoustic world: frustration.
Frustrated with “that clean, chingy Fender sound” that then characterized rock
& roll guitar with only a few exceptions (Link Wray, Paul Burlison of
Johnny Burnett’s Rock `n’ Roll Trio, Howlin’ Wolf sideman Pat Hare, John Lee
Hooker), Davies unleashed a sort of sonic profanity which has yet to be excised
from the rock & roll vocabulary. This is why, even today, the record which
introduced the world to Dun-nuh-nuh-duh-nuh! — the Kinks’ “You Really
Got Me” — sounds just like Punk Rock 1964.
Ray Davies, whose laconic deadpan has had to recreate that moment virtually
every night the Kinks have taken a stage, concurs. “Yeah, there’s a lot of
similarities in there, obviously,” he intones in a voice pitched in a
terminally bored register, probably not helped by having to do another
anonymous interview on another anonymous phone in another anonymous hotel room
in Boston. “I think when that wave of punk came through the U.K. in ’77 and
’78, there had been a terribly pompous period in music before that.
“Without naming names,” he laughs, “Elton John and Rod Stewart were strutting
around, and although they were both friends of mine, I was not terribly into
what they were doing. We were doing our sort of Schoolboys In Disgrace thing, Soap Opera things, kind of a different way to go. And it was all
very pompous, and music was becoming The Stadium or Nothing; stories of
promoters giving artists Cartier watches, and they were all making so much
money. It was getting a bit obscene, and when the punk thing came along, it was
great, more than a breath of fresh air. There were a lot of acts — like the
Kinks, I suppose — that actually welcomed them, because we didn’t really fit
the mold of the successful stadium bands.”
Dave, the younger Davies brother, can’t really argue with the
Kinks-as-punk-rock theory, either. “Yeah, it’s weird, innit?” he asks over a
telephone line from London in a voice less bored and higher pitched than older
brother Ray’s, though they share the same pudding-thick Cockney seasoning.
“There were only a few bands that had this sorta really rough-sounding, what we
used to call `R&B’ style in the Sixties. There were the Yardbirds, there
was us, there was the Pretty Things, as well. There was this band called the
Downliner’s Sect, who were very typical of that London/West End scene — very
R&B, blues-based — a very important band from that period, but I don’t
think that they were poppy enough for the public.”
And therein lies what links the Kinks with first-wave punk: The best vintage
U.K. punk records featured really good pop songs played….
“…with a little bit of aggression,” Dave blurts. Just the same as the Kinks
did, when their name meant stupid, red, fox-hunting jackets and endless
mutations of the primordial “Louie Louie” riff. The punks paid endless propers
to that legacy, whether by affectionate pilferage (such as the core riff to the
Clash’s “1977,” which sounded as if Mick Jones had been playing it, er, all day
and all of the night), or directly when the band met such pogo rock
luminaries-cum-Kinks-fans as Jones, Joey Ramone, and Paul Weller. Ray even
recently informed a U.K. rock magazine that the best rock & roll show he
ever witnessed was a chaotic 1976 set from Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers: “It
typified everything that music was about, really. And what rock should
be about!”
Their influence has endured. Just ask dyslexic British garage maven Billy
Childish, whose records sound like he owns Dave’s Li’l Green Amp. Or ask
virtually anyone in the current U.K. hit parade. It seems any Englishman that
picks up a guitar these days, if he’s not uttering the words “Small Faces,” is
uttering “the Kinks” instead. (Ironically, Ray recently presented the Ivor
Novello award to the Small Faces’ surviving membership.) “It’s not exactly a
mod thing they’re celebrating,” notes Ray. “It’s more to do with English pop,
and Small Faces and the Kinks, I suppose, never got that initial praise that
they’re supposed to have gotten. I suppose they’re getting picked up by a lot
of smart young musicians.”
He’s got a point. The Kinks that interests bands like Blur and Pulp is hardly
the electric raunch Kinks. They appear more fascinated with the mid-period
Kinks of “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and Something Else and on
through to maybe Arthur, when Ray’s songs evolved beyond teenage horndog
riffrock into something more subtle. The Kinks now mean pop music obsessed with
Englishness, whether skewering the upper crust in “Well-Respected Man” or
romanticizing the “dirty old river” of “Waterloo Sunset.”
It’s these Kinks that inform Supergrass’ raucous live renditions of “Where
Have All the Good Times Gone?” and who provide the subtext as Jarvis Cocker
skewers the well-respected slumming debutante protagonist of Pulp’s “Common
People.” It’s these Kinks that gloss-coat virtually every note struck by Blur.
And don’t think the Davies brothers are oblivious, either: Ray agreed to duet
with Blur’s Damon Albarn on the British TV show The White Room last
year, the two blending voices on “Waterloo Sunset” and Blur’s “Parklife.” More
recently the pair reunited for a “poetry gig” at Albert Hall, with Ray reciting
“Parklife” poetically to Albarn-ian accompaniment and Damon returning the favor
on an unspecified Davies composition. Dave, meantime, enthuses over Kula Shaker
and Ocean Colour Scene, among others.
“It’s like the Second British Invasion!,” raves Dave. “It’s really
interesting, innit? Things really do go full-circle. This is even more
full-circle than the late Seventies punk thing, really, because the actual
sounds of the records, sonically, are similar. The structure of their songs are
very Sixties. But it’s good writing, I think it’s very good pop writing.”
Well, isn’t that what matters at day’s end? Isn’t the essential ingredient
always going to be a good song?
“Yeah, I think so,” says Dave. “Melody has been important to me, and I think a
lot of the better Kinks songs — even the hard rock stuff — has melody. That’s
been a major part of our music. But I think a lot of people over the years have
gotten confused by our diversity. If you played Muswell Hillbillies and
(1993’s) Phobia side-by-side, you’d probably think they were different
bands!”
Well, not too many have had that chance. The eternal story of the Kinks’
career has been one of occasional flashes of success amidst several years of
criminally neglected (yet usually excellent) records and shit-hot live shows,
with modest support from a die-hard cult fan base. You can blame this mostly on
record company indifference, which doesn’t help the Kinks’ perennial image as
oldies act; the band who did either “You Really Got Me” or “Lola” or “Come
Dancing,” depending on when you graduated from high school. Who knows what the
band’s newly minted profile as Seminal Britpop Influence will bring?
But the Kinks have hardly been inactive, either. Signed to the sixth label of
their career, Guardian Records (the recently-erected pop subsidiary of
classical giant Angel Records), the Kinks have just released one of the more
interesting items in their lengthy catalog: To the Bone, a 2-CD live
document culled from both standard wattage-soaked Kinks concerts and from an
acoustic set performed before an invited audience at the band’s own Konk
Studios (where, besides the Kinks, Big Audio Dynamite and Elastica have both
recorded). Which means you not only get full-blooded, Marshall-overload
renditions of standards like “All Day And All Of The Night,” but gentler fare
like “Celluloid Heroes” and Dave’s signature “Death of a Clown” in a more
intimate setting. Dave, for one, is pleased to have another crack at tunes like
“See My Friends,” which may have lost the distinctive Indian touches that
marked its original 1965 incarnation, but now features stronger harmony work.
And even if they didn’t have the Kinks to occupy their time, the Davieses have
plenty keeping them from pulling a mutual Cain & Abel. With the modest
success of Ray’s “unauthorized autobiography,” X-Ray, comes the release
of Dave’s autobio, Kink, which has apparently been in the works since
the late Eighties. (Nevertheless, the book’s uncomfortable timing is hardly
lost on the elder Davies: “There’s not a lot you can do about it,” he smirks.)
Dave is planning an anthology of his solo works to coincide with the book’s
American publication in February, along with a possible tour backed by the
Smithereens.
Read the books, and you can virtually read the men. X-Ray finds Ray’s
tale filtered through an elaborate, near-science fiction plot involving a
future run by an Orwellian corporation that sends an anonymous drone to seek
out the aging Ray Davies in order to gather biographical data. Kink, on
the other hand, is straight-forward autobiography, told with a painful, almost
too-naked honesty, running from kiss-and-tell anecdotes of drinking and
drugging and sexual experimentation (of both female and male varieties)
to an account of Dave’s encounter with alien forces who sound like they may be
related to those which supposedly visited Phillip K. Dick.
“Yeah, that’s just the way that I am,” says Dave. “Ray’s always closed things.
In some instances, it may be a device he’s cultivated to protect himself
emotionally from certain things that have happened to him. We all have our
little, built-in survival devices or kits or whatever. I like to get things
done. I find sometimes you get more inspired when you do things
impromptu. I always like to get to the point. I think that has to do with my
personality. I like to get to the point quicker, then move on and do something
else.”
Doesn’t this also typify their musical roles? Ray appears to be this
craftsman, who sits there and agonizes over every detail. Dave’s guitar work is
brash, impatient, ready to get the job done and go down to the bar for a few
fast ones.
“This is where Ray and I have often differed and often had great arguments,
because sometimes I feel it’s actually not necessary to spend quite so much
time over something when you might have it already. And that’s happened quite a
few times. A lot of our biggest records were actually recorded and actually
constructed relatively quickly. I think a big frustration of mine with Ray is
that sometimes he spends so much time constructing something which actually
isn’t really very much different from the original idea. But this is a big
ongoing argument which Ray and I have been having for years now. Sometimes, I
have to turn to him in the studio and say, `Ray, everybody’s falling asleep!
It’s the end! It’s done, it’s over, it’s finished! Let’s move on!’
“But conversely, some things obviously do require a different technique — you
need to construct them in a different way. But it isn’t always necessary to go
around the houses to arrive at the end of the street,” he laughs.
Although the Kinks endure, the street appears to be leading its creative
components into different streams of traffic. Ray has clearly been enjoying the
solo gigs he’s been playing since X-Ray‘s publication. (“His cabaret
show, as I call it,” snickers Dave.) An intimate affair, Ray hunkers down with
an acoustic guitar, a well-thumbed copy of X-Ray, and the tasteful,
economical accompaniment of guitarist Pete Mathison, offering stripped-down
renditions of Davies classics — often given fresh, bluesy reinterpretations —
and relevant passages from the book. (“Joey Ramone came to one of my gigs,” Ray
laughs. “It was quite funny, ‘e liked it. He wants to write a book now and do
the same thing! He should.”) A Ray Davies solo album is also in the works, a
record which would have its base in the solo shows, “but along the way, I’ll
turn it into something else. It’ll be more expansive than that.
“I carry a little four-track on the road with me. I like working that way. The
new style I’m writing for this record is gonna be mainly acoustic, anyway. I
just need an acoustic guitar and a tape recorder. So, um, we’ll see how it
blossoms. But I will use other musicians for certain tracks.”
Is it just good to get a break from the Kinks and work with other people?
“Well, it’s something I should have done more of, I think. Because it does
absorb everything I do, the band. It’s nice to go off and do things. I’d like
to take certain chances. I used to take chances. When you end up with an
established act, I suppose, that has a certain track record, it’s difficult to
take chances in the sense that the record company don’t like you to. When you
do, they’ll say, `Yes, you’ve got the artistic right to do it.’ But they do sod
all with it, once they get it. So, it helps me to focus on the thing I’m
writing about, and less for a formula.”
Ketchup and chocolate ice cream. Twinkies and motor oil. Tipper Gore and
Blackie Lawless. Ray and Dave Davies….
“I know,” Ray laughs. “It goes on and it goes on.”
“Maybe because Ray and I are so different in our approach,” says Dave, “it’s
helped the Kinks’ music over the years. It’s the tooing-and-froing of two
different types of energy operating within it. I’d like to think that when it’s
been good, it’s complementary to the music.
Dave Davies laughs. “And when it’s been bad, it’s been ‘orrible!” n
This article appears in November 15 • 1996 and November 15 • 1996 (Cover).