KINKS @ 60

A brief tuggle of guitars and drums and the band bashes into Beautiful Delilah. The guitars are hot but clean. It's the vocal that sounds overloaded, a constant rasping growl that could be a young buck's inner monologue or that of some aging lech looking where he shouldn't. This unmelodic assault stretches time for its mere two minutes and wraps around your ears like fine grain sandpaper. That's what most of this album is going to be. It is the sound of a sustained wince.

Not only does this band that has originals on offer, start with a cover of a Chuck Berry song but it's not even frontman Ray Davies singing but his brother Dave. You can tell when, for all his torn tonsil rawness, his "r" that sounds like a "w" plonks him right back down to London and not Tennessee. It really screams ersatz. When the originals turn up, they are just like that with the name Davies on the by line. It sounds like the grubbing square-spectacled record execs of the U.K. scooped up anyone under twenty-five who looked good in a suit and could at least hold an electric guitar, kicked them into a studio and gave them an hour to make a record. 

That, I emphasise, is how it sounds. Stand back, make sure you're not hungover (as this music will punish you in that state), think a little more historically, and you might well hear something you didn't at first, the beginnings of greatness, looking here more like a larval stage of a buzzing insect than a rock band but forming, all the same, right in front of you.

Yes, most of these two sides are rusty, clanking covers and soundalikes. Yes, Shel Talmy had a lot to learn about record production. Yes, this is not a patch on what was to come. No, this was not the last anyone would hear of The Kinks and for good reasons.

I'm going to be selective about the tracks I'll describe on this one as most of them are made of the same adjectives and I don't want to put either of us through that. However, I'd like you to consider what people who bought long playing records back in the '60s expected of them and how they made their way into daily lives.

The music discs that mattered the most in the early '60s were singles, seven inch vinyl platters with one song per side that got played on the radio. These were where bands put anything they called art, the big statements that failed or succeeded which meant the band did either. The Kinks had already flopped with a (with hindsight) horrible version of Long Tall Sally and an under appreciated original called You Still Want Me. The reason this album was made on the Pye label's shilling was the breakthrough of the third single, which we'll get to.

What that meant was that if the singles proved the band to be viable in the market, they go to do an album. What most of them did was a version of their live set. And that is where you get to why this record is so rasping and ugly: this is what The Kinks sounded like live. If you bought it, you bought it for a sound that could get a party dancing to the slamming beats and cut-through vocals of R&B standards. If the originals didn't stop anyone dancing, that was more of a proof of concept than anything. Repeat.

Follow the various threads through to 1965 to find out how albums became something more than this by the mid '60s and you'll see how the LP became an attempted art form. Before then, it was a long ad for live shows or live shows you were too young for.

Also, none of these emulations are slavish recreations of originals. The later '60s were plagued with blues purists whose museumish covers attempted authenticity only to sound more irritatingly British. In the early '60s these bands found their own feet by doing the songs the way they worked at the pubs. 

Then you get to the end of side one and the single that made the difference. If Long tall Sally was weirdly reserved (compare it to the Beatles' screamfest) and You Still Want Me second rate Beatles, You Really Got Me was an explosion.

It starts with a snarling two chord riff, mean as mustard and unstoppable. The emphasis changes as soon as the band kicks in but it's still going. Ray's vocal comes in slyly but changes into earnest with the first rising chord change. A chorus of humming voices starts up and the momentum gathers, hitting the ceiling repeatedly when it leaps up a fourth for the chorus, a raucous shouting of the title three pounding times before a brief relief with a chord one tone down before everything starts again. The next time that happens Dave Davies' solo scratches its way in, scurrying around the room and hissing dissonantly. Back for the verse with a distant piano and the chorus finished with four bamming barre chords. End of side one.

Amp distortion had only ever been accidental on British recordings until that moment when Dave put a little amp through a bigger amp so the stressed output valves of the first one blare out to the mics in front of the second. That's a fuzz pedal by longer means. You can find overdrive on blues records and select  rockabilly sides but even The Beatles only seemed to get to its outer edge (listen to Misery on Please Please Me), remaining hot clean rather than blasting. Dave Davies gets it monstrous, making it huge when matched by the bass. Even now, after decades of evermore refined guitar overdrive, this scratchy early step still thrills. When I went to see Ray Davies and band (not The Kinks) play the Palais down here in Melbourne there were very young ushers dancing to this in the aisles, getting up and into the song's celebration of everything good about being young and ready.

More of the covers and clones populate the second side so the party can just keep going. That is until the penultimate track comes up and we can with hindsight, understand one of Ray Davies' strains as a songsmith at its beginning. Stop Your Sobbing. Ray starts before the band. "it is time for you to stop all of your sobbing". When they come in on the word sobbing it becomes a kind of beatgroup ballad led by Ray's melancholy plea. A second part of the verse calls the others in before Ray repeats the title with a non verbal extension on the last syllable. It feels like whatever began with You Really Got Me has ended crushingly and his narrator is fronting up with a kind of tough aloofness but knows it's a see through mask. The change for the middle eight with its admission that he really wants to hold her and conquer her sadness and would if it weren't too late. The music of this section is, however small its scale, momentus, showing what drama can come from a slight rhythm change and plainer chords. So it's on to the fade and the next one who really gets him. Repeat. The sense of this inevitability is the other side of swinging London, the one that happens in all those kitchen sink epics of the East End and Ray knows it.

From this song came the serious pausing for thought audible in See My Friends, Waterloo Sunset, Days, Shangri-La and so many many more. The page representing The Kinks in the Nik Cohn and Guy Peellaert picture book Rock Dreams, after the louche fantasies of The Beatles, Elvis and the Stones, is a back street of London at night. Ray stands beside a woman with a pram, they are both looking at the viewer. Stop your sobbing, there's more.

The album plays out with what was the last song favourite of every R&B combo in the greater city of London. Got Love if You Want it was the cue for a rave up jam and experiments with dynamics. That's what happens here. What's up next? Oh, there's this new one from The Yardbirds!

Think of these two pinnacles on this LP. Let them stay visible over the duty-bound live set chestnuts that make the mood, remember that, equipment limitations aside (Abbey Road this wasn't) these two sides of songs were pretty much exactly what The Kinks wanted out of their first LP, something you could dance to and keep dancing to. Most bands, if they got as far as this, put it out, split up and lived on memories. If you revisit this you will start noticing the vocal arrangements, use of piano, growing awareness of why songs work, and get a sense that Ray Davies knew the music his friends could make and took it there.

Masterclass with Bread and Jam: THE KINKS FILE

In 1978 the only thing I knew about The Kinks was a chapter in a years old book about British pop and that leader Ray Davies was acting like an embittered has-been: he upturned his table in a nightclub when the act on stage played a version of Tired of Waiting for You, taking the title as a snipe about him being a has been. The book chapter mixed an admiration for his work with a condemnation of what was then considered his downward spiral into alcohol. Then two things happened.

The first was Van Halen's cover version of You Really Got Me, their hit debut in Australia. I heard the tail end on the radio and thought I was hearing the original for the first time and couldn't believe how contemporary it sounded. Then I saw the clip of Zepellin wannabes and looked through them into the song which bashed its way with primal rage.

The second thing that happened was a clip of The Kinks doing their new single Sleepwalker on Countdown. Same kind of chunky chord guitar assault but with a vocal far more compelling than the cover version of YRGM. Something had to be done.

Win came to the rescue with an old compilation from his sister's collection which he taped for me.

The compression on the TEAC tape deck in the rumpus room really pumped the old recordings and the opening snarl of You Really Got Me burst out. And then when the weird guitar riff scanscion changes with the entry of the vocals and everything is locked into the new rhythm this relatively tiny production feels enormous. Nothing else I'd heard from that early in the 60s had anything like that power. Early 60s? It trumped the Van Halen version, making it sound like Cracker Night in a one ute town.

The compilation was a frustrating one, probably a mix of whatever was easily to hand and relatively licence free to use on release. There were great moments but also bewileringly naff ones. I needed more.

But if the Beatles back catalogue had been hard to find a few years before the Kinks' was impossible. You couldn't even find the more recent ones apart from Sleepwalker. I didn't get Sleepwalker, even though it was well written up everywhere because I didn't want the single to be a fluke and wanted to start at the beginning. I knew even then that I probably wouldn't have got into the Beatles if I'd only heard Wings or Walls and Bridges. And one day it happened.

I went into town with Mum and splintered off as usual to haunt the record shops. There in Palings I found The Kinks File, fresh as the morning's bread. It was a double with every single they'd released in the UK in the 60s. It was about nine dollars. I had three on me. I must have expected to find nothing of interest. After we got back home I raided my cash I nagged Mum to take me back into town. Mine!

That night Mum stopped me for a peculiar moment, hinting, as I worked out later, that she thought I'd been going back for drugs. If she'd been observant she would've noticed the record in my hands (encased in its period-correct  Palings paper bag) that contained something far more dangerous than THC.

It was a yardwork free Saturday and (with Stephen at Uni in Brisbane) I had the rumpus room to myself. On went the disc, down went the needle.

The Kinks' version of Long Tall Sally is history's worst. Regardless of how you rate the Beatles you'd have to agree that their version of the Little Richard number eclipses the original and can only be helpfully described as blistering. The Kinks' first single is a strange murmured version, the kind of thing a hipster duo would do now and succeed with. I have only heard it in its entirety in the last two years as it was part of the Kinks in Mono box set, failing to make even the multi disc compilations in the meantime. The unignorable fact of it is that The Kinks could not have been unaware of the fabs' version when they did their own. And then they went ahead with it. A lifelong conundrum.

After that this compilation fulfils the following requirements of compilation albums: it's instructive, it's compelling, it's fun.

My first impressions:

1. The production standards plummet below George Martin's work for the Beatles. At first this feels cheap but as the sides progress it assumes its own flavour. As soon as the brash opening of You Really Got Me stutters to life more and more intention appears in the smaller scale scene.

(On this pressing the sound was tinny and hollow. It fed back if I turned it up. If this had been almost any band but the Kinks it would have been the end of my fandom. Anyone who bangs on about the innate superiority of the vinyl experience should give these discs a spin. Bad mastering always equals bad listening, vinyl, cd, cassette, wax cylinder or stone tape. If you see this auctioned for a lot of money, go and find a recent remastered cd compilation and thank me later.)

2. After the embarrassing misstep of Long Tall Sally Ray Davies completes a lightning practical course in Beatlesque songcraft. Then, when You Really Got Me happens and Tired of Waiting For You soon after he has cleared his apprenticeship and breaks his own path, a lonely one until following generations do what I'm doing. Where he goes often sounds easy but there is a great deal of heft involved in creating that impression, heft we never feel and only know if we work out the songs ourselves and see what's inside them. There be wonders there.

3. Even the jubilant highs of Till the End of the Day or Everybody's Going to be Happy have the same sober melancholy as Well Respected Man or Waterloo Sunset. The middle eight of Set Me Free has a kind of psychotic beauty. "I don't want no one if I can't have you to myself..." is the kind of thing everyone who's ever been fourteen has felt but Ray's delivery is barely controlled, wide-eyed and experienced. You don't want to know what he will do (including to himself) if she says no. See My Friends has been endlessly debated to even accomodate gayness but, really, it still eludes easy definition beyond a longing far more naked than you'd expect from a mid 60s beat band. By the time you hit Shangri-La you are swept on a wave of deep sadness that is both elating and dangerously high.



4. After all the partying and boy/girl Friday night drama Ray Davies cared about what was around him. It's funny in Dedicated Follower of Fashion. It isn't in Well Respected Man, a minor key Cockney two-step observation of a ruling class predator in city clothing. In Dead End Street it goes from spirit of the blitz false cheer to a football chant of DEAD END! DEAD END! "What are we living for? Two roomed apartment on the second floor." That melancholy seethes with anger and almost before we know it this song feels like watching something grim starring Albert Finney. Waterloo Sunset takes down a long set of stone steps to show us a quite beautiful city scene observed, in case we should forget, by someone who protests that he doesn't need any friends. Everyone else in 1967 is turning into a hippy. And then there's Shangri-La again: "The little man who gets the train got a mortgage hanging over his head but he's too scared to complain cause he's conditioned that way." And the new estates keep rolling out, the lavatories have been moved inside along with everything else. Outside is just for show.

5. The Kinks are English. Not like Herman's Hermits or Steve Marriot's "'Ow's your bird's lumbago?" They are English like Graeme Greene, Alfred Hitchcock, Joyce Grenfell, Charles Dickens and Christmas Panto. They might have been stirred up by American rock and RnB but they put it in a council flat and let it dream of country gardens. They are reason No.1 why the British reinvention of American rock music in the 60s outstripped the original for decades.

If, like me, you found yourself in the middle of a Kinks compilation in the late 70s and at all inclined towards your own musical adventures you knew you were in class when you listened, an intensely practical class with the best, funniest and sharpest teacher in the system.