Review: Blur's 'The Great Escape' 30th Anniversary Edition

If there was any question that Damon Albarn was positioning himself as the Ray Davies of the nineties with Parklife, The Great Escape shot any doubts dead. The Davies who spat at commercialization with "Holiday in Waikiki", gently mocked the ruined rich with "Sunny Afternoon", guffawed at trendiness with "Dedicated Follower of Fashion", and expressed disdain for a cad with "Dandy" was alive and alright in 1995 thanks to Albarn channeling him to craft such withering commentaries as "Dan Abnormal", "Stereotypes", "Charmless Man", "Top Man", and the positively Arthurian (the album, not the king) "Mr. Robinson's Quango". 

Review: 'The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society' 2018 Remaster

It is a very Kinky bit of irony that as The Kinks were hitting an artistic peak in 1968, they were at an all-time commercial low. Consequently, almost nobody bought their masterpiece, the album that I personally believe to be pop’s very finest: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Of course, in the year’s following its near-silent release in late 1968, many have become aware of the album’s nostalgic, delicate, funny, sad, absurdly tuneful charms. You know that later-day artists such as Blur, Elliott Smith, Belle & Sebastian, and The Shins were listening—not to mention The Kinks own contemporary and Village Green super fan Pete Townshend.

Today, this album is regarded as a pop treasure, and as has become customary for such things, its fiftieth anniversary is not being ignored as its original birthday had been. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is being released as a massive a five-CD, three-LP, 5-single box set. Alas, Psychobabble has only received a single CD containing a new remaster of the core album for review purposes. This remaster is very similar to the great sounding one from the triple-disc edition of Village Green released in 2004 with only slight, occasional differences. For example, the new master of “The Village Green Preservation Society” is noticeably louder and brighter than the old one, though you’d be hard pressed to discern any differences in most of the other tracks. As a whole, it’s a draw.

Review: Edsel Records' Deluxe Turtles Reissues

Although they scooped up a bundle of smash 45s such as “Elenore,” “You Showed Me”, “It Ain’t Me Babe”, and the deathless “Happy Together”, The Turtles never quite garnered the reputation for being a great album group as peers such as The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Monkees did. That’s too bad because The Turtles’ albums tended to be as effervescent, memorable, and weird as their singles. The LPs also really throw a spotlight on the odd ways a group most noted for their good-timey pop tunes evolved.

The 1965 debut, It Ain’t Me Babe, finds the L.A. sextet in total folk-rock mode, covering Dylan with almost as much enthusiasm as The Byrds did on their debut. The Turtles also shred through a couple of bitter treats by Dylan-aspirer P.F. Sloan and thoughtful originals by their own Howard Kaylan, such as “Wanderin’ Kind” and “Let the Cold Winds Blow”. While there are none of the gum drops that would soon come tumbling out of The Turtles’ shells, a jaunty version of “Your Maw Said You Cried” and the band’s decision to cover a tune by Tin Pan Alley team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil is an early clue that times would soon be changin’ for the less politicized.

Nevertheless, 1966’s You Baby/Let Me Be is still dominated by “Let Me Be” brooding rather than “You Baby” sugariness, offering another slew of withering folk rock, such as Kaylan’s “House of the Rising Sun”-esque “House of Pain” and Highway 61-esque “Pall Bearing, Ball Bearing World”. Even the love songs are pretty moody, and the upbeat “Flyin’ High” and the Kinky “Almost There” bookend the album with a fanged snarl. A version of Bob Lind’s “Down in Suburbia”, however, matches cute social commentary with a fun and funky Latin clatter, hinting at the clever strangeness to come.

Then came The Turtles’ breakthrough year, 1967, and the hits that really defined their career. “Happy Together” and “Me About You” are too moody to really categorize as bubblegum, but “She’d Rather Be with Me”, “Guide for the Married Man”, “Makin’ My Mind Up”, and “Person without a Care” deliver the Bazooka Joe goods in the best way. Happy Together is also where The Turtles started exploring their inner zany for good (“The Walking Song”) and ill (the unlistenable “Rugs of Woods and Flowers”).

Produced by one-time Turtle Chip Douglas, 1968’s The Turtles Present the Battle of the Bands makes use of a concept that allows the band to indulge every idiosyncratic side of their personality with complete abandon. The album basically makes good on the supposed concept beneath Sgt. Pepper’s: The Turtles pretend to be a different band on each track, which allows them to show off how well they could mock soul combos (“The Battle of the Bands”), psych groups (“The Last Thing I Remember”), corny C&W pickers (“Too Much Heartsick Feeling”), surf bands (“Surfer Dan”), jazz fusionists (“Food”), Booker T. & The MG’s (“Buzz Saw”), errr…world music? (“I’m Chief Kamanawanalea”), and themselves (“Elenore”). A rare flash of sincerity called “Earth Anthem” reveals that the Turtles still cared about their world, could create work of tremendous beauty, and were rather prescient in their ability to foresee the coming environmental movement of the seventies. Anyone baffled by how the guys who sang “Happy Together” ended up working with Frank Zappa should listen to Battle of the Bands pronto.

Unlike The Turtles’ previous hit-packed albums, Turtle Soup failed to spawn a significant single. This is significant because it also marks The Turtles’ complete maturation as an album group. Blame Ray Davies, whom the band hired to produce in the vein of The Kinks’ raucous early singles. However, Davies had just completed his masterpiece, the textured and sensitive Village Green Preservation Society, and decided to continue with that approach while also taking advantage of resources available to a band that sold a lot more records in 1968 than The Kinks did. The results were such Wagnerian production feats as “Love in the City” and “How You Loved Me”, as well as the more elegantly orchestrated “John and Julie”. Relatively simple productions, such as the ’66-style jangle of “She Always Leaves Me Laughing”, the stripped down boogie of “Hot Little Hands”, and the “Happy Together”-revisited arrangement of “You Don’t Have to Walk in the Rain” were just as effective. As far as I’m concerned, Turtle Soup is not just the best Turtles album but also one of the very best of 1969, and I’d sooner spin it than such acknowledged classics of that year as Led Zeppelin’s debut, Let It Bleed, and The Kinks’ own Arthur.

If you’ve yet to discover the hidden wonders of Turtle Soup and the rest of The Turtles’ long-playing catalog, you’d do no better than starting with Edsel’s new reissue series. Utilizing Bill Inglot’s same warm and detailed remasters that graced Manifesto’s Complete Original Album Collection released in the U.S. last year, Edsel’s new individual releases split the mono and stereo mixes of the first three albums between two discs each (don’t bother popping in the stereo It Ain’t Me Babe disc unless you have a high tolerance for vocals hard panned to the left and instruments hard panned to the right).  The second discs of Battle of the Bands, Turtle Soup, and the collection of 1966 outtakes Wooden Head load up on stereo mixes of non-album singles (the mono originals were collected on last year’s superb All the Singles), Turtle Soup demos, some fabulous psychedelic outtakes cut around the same time as “Sound Asleep”, and a fascinating and characteristically unsettling half-dozen Jerry Yester productions recorded for the band’s scrapped 1970 LP to be titled Shell Shock (judging from these tracks, it would have been a great record). The nice digipak packaging and Andrew Sandoval’s short but sweet liner notes help give these excellent albums the respect they should have been receiving for the past fifty years.

Review: 'The Train Kept A-Rollin’: How the Train Song Changed the Face of Popular Music'

From time to time I receive a piece of media that I didn’t specifically request to review. Whether or not I review such items depends on my availability and interest. At the moment, my schedule is pretty packed, and I’ve never been particularly fascinated by trains, so I didn’t think I’d crack Spencer Vignes’s recent book The Train Kept A-Rollin’: How the Train Song Changed the Face of Popular Music. Then I started thumbing through it. “Mystery Train”. “Waterloos Sunset”. “Down in the Tube Station at Midnight”. “Last Train to Clarksville”. “Midnight Special”. “White Room”. “The Locomotion”. “The Last of the Steam Powered Trains”. “Folsom Prison Blues”. The book’s title song. Huh. As it turns out, a lot of my favorite songs deal with trains, which got me wondering why so many great songs are train-centric. So I decided to take Vignes’s ride.

As it turns out, there’s no definitive answer to the essential question The Train Kept A-Rollin’ raises. Trains are mysterious because they whisk our loved ones off to undisclosed destinations. Musicians dig trains because trains take them to gigs or serve as quiet places to write songs. Poor blues and folk artists found work on railway lines. Several British pop artists have engaged in the UK tradition of trainspotting. All are posed as possible reasons the train is second only to the car as the preferred pop conveyance.

This lack of a definitive conclusion is natural considering that Vignes does so little editorializing and consults such a wide variety of sources to break through the mystique of train songs. The author’s interviewees are just as much of an enticement to read The Train Kept A-Rollin’ as the songs he discusses are. Ray Davies, “Clarksville” so-writer Bobby Hart, Ian Anderson, T.V. Smith, Robyn Hitchcock, Bryan Ferry, Chris Difford, and “White Room” co-writer Pete Brown make up a small sampling of the brains Vignes picks. The author also doesn’t limit his pages to train songs. He dallies with train-themed album covers, music videos, on-stage films, and model train collectors in the pop world.

Yet the absence of a few of my personal favorite train songs that would have brought a few more angles to the story—particularly The Beach Boys “Cabin-Essence”, which could have introduced a few paragraphs on how railroads disrupted the American landscape and The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away”, which addresses the less savory things that might take place on trains—left me feeling as though The Train Kept A-Rollin’ still isn’t quite the ultimate train-song book. Nevertheless, the book chugs out a long-enough line of great songs and artists to satisfy both train freaks and train-ambivalent freaks such as myself.

Review: 'Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album'

Terry O’Neill photographed some of the most monumental movers and shakers of the twentieth century: JFK, Churchill, Mandella, Blair. That’s very nice for him, but what about the people who made us move and shake? Well, stand back, because this cat has shot The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Ray Davies, Led Zeppelin, Elvises Presley and Costello, Chuck Berry, Diana Ross, Janis Joplin, Springsteen, Bowie… I think you get the picture. You can get a slew of them in a new A (for AC/DC) to Z (for Zeppelin) collection of his most iconic and rarest pictures called Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album.

That title is actually slightly misleading because quite a few of the stars between its covers have nothing to do with rocking or rolling (there’s a big spread on Sinatra, who hated the genre). Don’t get too hung up on that because there’s plenty that fits the bill from O’Neill’s earliest swinging snaps of the Fabs, The Dave Clark Five, The Animals, and some very, very young Stones through relatively recent artists such as Blur and Amy Winehouse. She’s the most recent one in the lot because O’Neill admits in his introduction that no one since her has had enough star power to ensnare his interest (I see what he means).

The interesting thing about O’Neill’s work is the way it often subverts our expectations. He’s the one who shot that famous picture of Ozzy in which the evil one looks like he just paid his one hundred bucks at Glamour Shots. He made Liza Minnelli look like Jagger. He made ol’ Lucifer Lips look like a cuddly bear all wrapped up in his fur-lined anorak. Ringo appears to be the lead Beatles as he leaps over the rest of the band in an extraordinary action shot I’d never seen before. He filmed hellion Marc Bolan in a very moving embrace with his infant son.

At other times, O’Neill captured the artists just as we expect them to be, whether it’s Sir Elton posing in his giant wardrobe of outrageous gear or Alice Cooper subverting that Bolan shot hilariously by applying fright makeup to a sleeping baby. Really, there is no unifying style or approach to perceive among the mass of photos in Terry O’Neill’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Album. Color or black and white, candid or staged, funny or po-faced, action-packed or serene, bizarrely normal or normally bizarre, the photos in this big, big, big book really have one thing in common: big, big, big music stardom.

Review: 'Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground'

Armed with just a trio of cheap-ass cameras (a Polaroid, a Brownie, a 110 Instamatic), Paul Zone was fully equipped to chronicle his fellow revelers in sleazy late-seventies NYC. Zone’s main gig was lead singer of The Fast, a band well covered in his new book Playground: Growing Up in the New York Underground, though not quite as legendary as a lot of the people he snapped. Along with the usual scene suspects (The Ramones, New York Dolls, Blondie, Suicide, Patti Smith, a very long-haired Lenny Kaye, Suicide, Tom Verlaine, etc.) there are some of the hugest rock stars of the day. Zone’s lo-fi approach to photography makes Ray Davies, Iggy, KISS, Alice Cooper, and Marc Bolan seem as gutter-bound as Wayne County. Not surprisingly, Debbie Harry’s natural luminosity makes all her pictures seem much more professional than the rest.

With Chris Stein, Harry also provided a short foreword for Playground, but the big text comes from Zone, himself, who tells his own story with all-appropriate rawness intact. There’s child abuse, drugs, serious health scares, and death, as well as love, generosity, and sex Tupperware parties. It gives a valuable glimpse of the guy behind the camera, though his pictures have so much personality that you can almost get his biographical gist without reading it. And most impressive of all, I’ve never seen a single one of these shots before.

The Mountain and the Meadow: The Day 'The Beatles' and 'The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society' were Released

November 22, 1968. The date arrived toward the exhausted end of a year that started with the United States taking a crippling blow in the Vietnam War with the Tet Offensive on January 30 and acting out in the most horrendous of ways with the My Lai massacre of March 16. Two weeks later, Martin Luther King, Jr., would lead a march through Memphis that would end with the death of a teenage boy and the injuries of sixty other people, and King, himself, would be murdered on April 4. On the 23rd, the cops would bring a violent end to a demonstration at Columbia University, and on May 6, student demonstrators in Paris would engage in their own revolutionary conflict against gas-grenade hurling officers. Andy Warhol shot on June 3. Robert Kennedy shot two days later to die on the 6. Protesters beaten by police in Chicago on August 28 and murdered by police and soldiers in Mexico City on October 2. And then on November 5, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States, ensuring many more dark days to come.

Review: 'God Save The Kinks: A Biography'

Despite their position at the forefront of British pop, The Kinks have never gotten as much ink as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or The Who. There have been a few slim biographies by Jon Savage, John Mendelssohn (both published way back in the eighties), and Neville Martin & Jeffrey Hudson, one exhaustive day-by-day guide by Doug Hinman, and perhaps most significant of all, landmark autobiographies by Ray and Dave Davies. That’s about it. Recognizing the void, Mojo writer and kultist Rob Jovanovic got to work on his own biography five years ago in an effort to bring The Kink kronikles up to date. It’s likely Jovanovic did not realize that at the same time, his fellow writer Nick Hasted was working on his own Kinks biography with input from Ray, Dave, and drummer Mick Avory and that You Really Got Me: The Story of The Kinks would beat his book to the shelves by two years. That must have been frustrating, especially since both books cover a lot of the same ground (they even come in at almost the same page count) with the major added bonus of those new interviews with the brothers Davies.

Here’s why God Save The Kinks: A Biography remains a relevant read for Kinks fans: more so than Hasted, Jovanovic looks beyond the core members of the band to explore the experiences of those not named Davies. Naturally, Ray and Dave remain the key players, as they should, and like Hasted, Jovanovic also gets quotes from Avory and bassist Pete Quaife’s brother David. However, we also get primary perspectives from bassist John Dalton, keyboardist John Gosling, and back-up singers Debi Doss and Shirlie Roden, whose contemporary remembrances and period journal entries commandeer the storytelling during The Kinks’ mid-seventies theatrical phase. The rest of the book is good too—a well-written, reasonably thorough blow-by-blow of the Davies’s activities and accomplishments alone and together up to the present day—but it is the expansion of the orbit from the brothers to their extended musical family that makes God Save The Kinks an essential companion volume to You Really Got Me.

Review: Ray Davies's 'Americana'

Ray Davies is the most British of British pop stars—even more so than his brother Dave, whose whiskey yowl owed too much to David Ruffin to wave the Union Jack as high. Ray’s slight Cockney inflection, his quiet-desperation perspective, and his obsession with village greens, cricket, and afternoon tea are as far removed from Jagger’s R&B poses as is imaginable. Yet Ray did make room on his records to give his jaundiced view of America as early as 1966’s “Holiday in Waikiki,” and he’d do it with greater focus on latter records such as Everybody’s in Show-Biz and Low Budget. Ray has even more right than other Englishmen to be skeptical of the states. America is where The Kinks were unofficially banned during four crucial years in the sixties. It is where he was asked that ever-original question “Are you a Beatle or a girl?” and where he saw a man shot and convulsing outside his New Orleans home. It is also where he himself was shot by a purse-snatcher in 2004. So the idea of Ray Davies writing a book called Americana must seem like some sort of great, big wind-up against we Yanks.

Track by Track: 'Something Else by The Kinks'

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, I’ve been taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.

Welcome to Daviesland, a kurious little nook of England where The Kinks secreted themselves some two years after being unofficially banned from touring the United States. Since that unfortunate event, in which Ray socked an insult-spewing musician’s union representative, the boys enjoyed a steady string of top ten hits in their homeland, but only managed to sneak into the U.S. top twenty twice with “A Well Respected Man” and “Sunny Afternoon”. 

Five Reasons Dave Davies Is the Most

As founding Kink Dave Davies celebrates his 65th birthday today, let’s take a look at a few reasons why we think he’s the most…

Slashing the Fart Box

Guitar distortion had been a tool of Rock & Rollers since before the genre even really began (check out Ike Turner’s work on Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” in 1951). Yet many credit “You Really Got Me” as the first instance of fuzzed-out guitars because the sound Dave Davies achieved on it was so unique. He’d been experimenting with guitar sounds since the age of 16 when he nearly barbecued himself by linking his little Elpico amplifier to a 60-watt Linear, a Vox AC 30, and a radiogram. When one of the wires crossed the transformer at the back of the Linear amp, Dave was blown across the room in a puff of smoke. That taste of electricity only electrified his curiosity, and he kept searching for the ultimate crunch, which led him to put a razor blade to the cone of his Elpico. He shredded it, and something new was born. While brother Ray was messing around with a new two-chord riff on the piano, Dave plugged into the amp he’d rechristened “the fart box” because of its funky new sound. Suddenly, the jazzy number called “You Really Got Me” came into focus as a monstrous rocker. Before long, the cagey techs at Gibson had commercialized Dave’s cro-mag amp modification with its first fuzz pedal, the Maestro Fuzz Tone and Rock & Roll forever changed for the heavier.

Got My Feet on the Ground

The fuzzy weight of The Kinks’ early hits dissipated as the ‘60s boogied on, and Ray’s delicacies, such as “Waterloo Sunset”, “Autumn Almanac”, and “Days”, replaced power-chord pile drivers like “You Really Got Me” and “Till the End of the Day”. For many Kinks fans, this period was the band’s finest, yet they never shed Rock & Roll completely. This is largely due to the increasing involvement of Dave Davies. As Ray’s songs grew more tender, Dave balanced them with the raging voice he was developing in nasty stuff like “Love Me Till the Sun Shines”, “Creeping Jean”, “Mindless Child of Motherhood”, and “Rats”. It is telling that Ray handed the heaviest number on the largely fragile Village Green Preservation Society, “Wicked Annabella”, to his younger brother. Dave’s raw, ragged voice was a potent counterpoint to Ray’s quavering whisper. His guitar work remained forceful even on the softest tracks. Dave was capable of ethereal beauty on occasion (“Strangers”), but he would always be the Rock & Roll heart beating inside The Kinks.

Dedicated Follower of Fashion

Between the sharp yet conservative mod styles of the early ‘60s and the “Showering and shaving is for pro-establishment scum” aesthetic of the late ‘60s, fashion exploded in a rainbow of vibrant shades, dazzling patterns, and daring shapes. Clothing choices traditionally limited to women were now fair game for the lads, who could be seen sporting great floppy hats, and according to “Dedicated Follower of Fashion”, “frilly nylon panties.” Ray may have intended his toe-tapping tune as a chastisement of trendy clothes horses, but brother Dave could have only regarded it as a celebration considering how he attempted to out-do his fellow fashion followers. Photos of Dave circa-1967 will reveal a chap dedicated to only the most outrageous of dress and grooming. Upon a figure sporting plank-sized muttonchops, the most severe hair-part this side of Oscar Wilde, and mascara-drenched eyes, Dave draped lacey Edwardian blouses, tinted goggles, flowing scarves, yards of paisley, skintight tartan trousers, and a stripy stove pipe hat. Like his buddy Brian Jones, Dave was confident and physically beautiful enough to always carry off the wildest fashion with utmost dignity.

There Is No Life Without Love

Brian Jones and Dave Davies nearly shared more than forward fashion sense when the Stone and the Kink flirted with a sexual liaison in the mid-‘60s. The potentially historic union was never meant to be, though Dave did not hold back when it came to other boys. During an age of adventurousness and experimentation, and years before pop stars like Elton John and Freddie Mercury stepped out of the closet, Dave Davies was freely engaging in bisexual dalliances with Swinging London figures such as Long John Baldry, who’d talk Elton out of an ill-conceived hetero-marriage and inspire the epic “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”. Dave Davies largely defines himself as heterosexual, but is unabashed about his affairs with men in his autobiography Kink. While old-guard rockers like Little Richard were futilely attempting to stamp out their true selves with the dried-out Band-Aid of religion, Dave Davies was doing as he pleased and didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.

This Is Where I Belong

Ray’s dominance of The Kinks was a sticking point between him and his brother, so you’d think Dave would have been over-enthused by the prospect of a solo record. This was Pye Record’s scheme to capitalize on Dave’s budding songwriting skills, as evidenced by his hit “Death of a Clown”, without unbalancing the power within The Kinks. Dave generally was allotted a track or two on the band’s L.P.s à la George Harrison. The formula worked well, so the label decided it made sense for Dave to branch into some extra-Kinks activities with an album of his own. The project was something of a ruse from the start, as Dave’s backing band was none other than The Kinks and Ray was on board to produce. In effect, Dave’s “solo” album would really be a Kinks album. But the record was not meant to be, largely because Dave preferred proper Kinks records despite the inflated role of his older brother. Pye continued to push for the disc, and Dave obliged by forcing out songs to his dissatisfaction. Much of his work during these sessions was stellar—“Mindless Child of Motherhood”, “Creeping Jean”, “This Man He Weeps Tonight”, “Lincoln County”—but his heart was never in it and the label eventually lost its zeal too. Although Dave would pursue solo projects with greater commitment in the years to come, he was perfectly happy remaining in the band. Fortunately for the rest of us, Universal Music finally released these sessions as Hidden Treasures late last year, indicating that he could have had a great solo career had he not been so loyal to The Kinks. The wait may have been tough for fans, but Dave’s loyalty is just further proof that he’s the most.

21 Underrated Songs by The Kinks You Need to Hear Now!

The Kinks are an uncommon group. A plethora of bands seem to sit under that name: the pioneering heavy garage rockers who forged “You Really Got Me”, the distinctly British craftsmen who fashioned “Waterloo Sunset”, the olde tyme big band that made Muswell Hillbillies, the theatre group that staged Preservation Acts 1 and 2, the arena rockers who bludgeoned their way through Give the People What They Want, the ‘80s poppers who made a splash on MTV with “Come Dancing”. The Kinks’ reputation is equally schizophrenic (acutely so; not to mention paranoiac). They scored a wealth of hits in their U.K. homeland and enough in the U.S. to make them more than a cult band on both sides of the pond. Yet The Kinks are a cult band because the mass of their discography—and the mass of their greatest recordings—are barely known outside their fanatical following. And most Kinks die-hards do not worship the band for “You Really Got Me”, “Lola”, or “Come Dancing”. It is their peculiar, unashamedly sentimental, quiet masterpieces that moved Rolling Stone’s Paul Williams to scrawl that Kinks fandom is not just an enthusiasm for “some rock group. It’s more like a taste for fine wines from a certain valley, a devotion to a particular breed of cocker spaniel.” Williams wrote this astute observation in his review of The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. If ever there was proof of The Kinks’ cultiness, it is the fact that their greatest album was a complete flop in both England and America. But the record has built a following over the years that now allows it to be spoken in the same breath as Pet Sounds, Revolver, Beggars Banquet, and Blonde on Blonde. As Ray Davies himself noted, “It’s the most successful failure of all time.”

So many of The Kinks’ commercial failures were artistic triumphs that they are poorly represented by the usual crop of “Greatest Hits” compilations. That means there are numerous treasures for the budding Kinks kultist to discover. The following is a starter list of twenty-one wonderful creations that never slipped onto singles or major hits compilations. For anyone interesting in traveling to the marvelously realized nation Ray Davies, Dave Davies, Mick Avory, and Peter Quaife founded, here are twenty-one splendid tickets.

1. “Wait ‘Til the Summer Comes Along” (from the E.P. The Kwyet Kinks) 1965

We begin in a suitably untraveled, leaf-strewn nook of the Kinkdom. A spot where younger brother Dave huddles with his acoustic guitar, fending off winter winds and dreaming of summer. Dave’s first solo composition (he’d co-written the pleasant pop piffle “Got My Feet on the Ground” with Ray for the Kinda Kinks L.P.) is strong and mature, highly reminiscent of John Lennon’s recent dark country/folk numbers on Beatles for Sale. In his autobiography, Kink, Dave explains that he wrote “Wait ‘Til the Summer Comes Along” “during a moment of depression and reflection” and that the song is “about loss and regret.” He was possibly reflecting on a girl named Sue, whom he’d gotten pregnant while still a teenager. His mother prevented him from seeing Sue again and kept him from knowing about his daughter for years. Dave's pain over the Sue situation inspired much of his work, and the first song in this sad series is likely “Wait ‘Til the Summer Comes Along” (“Can it be that she never wanted to break some poor mother’s heart”). If so, it is an ambiguous but suitably fine forerunner.


2. “The World Keeps Going Round” (from the album The Kink Kontroversy) 1965

After delivering the usual Mersey Beat sentiments of love and lust on big hits such as “You Really Got Me” and “Set Me Free”, Ray Davies started expressing a more

Review: Dave Davies's 'Hidden Treasures'

The Kinks were at a commercial low point but a creative high point in the late ‘60s. Ray Davies wrote an excess of songs during the sessions that would spawn his masterpiece. On their way to becoming The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, several of those tracks were considered for an alternate album titled Four More Well Respected Gentlemen. Ray pondered a solo album and schemed to make a full-length musical out of his Village Green concept (which he would realize less than spectacularly in the mid-‘70s). Amidst all this activity, Pye Records started pushing Dave Davies to make his own solo album to capitalize on the success of 1967’s “Death of a Clown”—a Dave and Ray-penned Kinks number released as a solo single under the younger Davies’s name. Despite his long history of begrudging his brother’s higher profile in The Kinks, Dave was not enthused about the project. He preferred placing his songs on proper Kinks albums.

The process of writing Dave’s solo record was a bit of a drudge, though the recording sessions with The Kinks as his backing band and Ray producing birthed a quantity of quality songs. Occasionally the chore-aspect was apparent in somewhat halfhearted, repetitive numbers, such as “Do You Wish to Be a Man” and “Are You Ready”. But the best of Dave’s solo material—the joyous “Lincoln County”, the desperate yet exhilarating “This Man He Weeps Tonight”, the Dylanesque “Susannah’s Still Alive”, the magnificently brooding “Mindless Child of Motherhood”—could go toe-to-toe with any of Ray’s songs of that same period. The Kinks were rarely more ferocious than they were on “Mindless Child” and the sinister rocker “Creeping Jean”.

Alas, Dave’s lack of enthusiasm and renewed commercial hopes for The Kinks following the release of Arthur: or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire in 1969 put the unnamed solo project to rest. Most of the tracks ended up on flop Dave Davies singles and Kinks B-sides. But fans have long wondered how that completed L.P. would have sounded.

As a sort of bonus companion to its recent wave of superb Kinks deluxe reissues, Universal/Sanctuary Music is finally giving us the best approximation of Dave Davies’s unfinished solo album with Hidden Treasures. Compilers Russell Smith and Andrew Sandoval based this new CD on a 1969 acetate of Dave’s sessions assembled by Warner Reprise. The thirteen tracks flow quite nicely, and though many of them were included as bonus tracks on those deluxe Kinks discs, it’s nice to hear them placed together. And there are quite a few rarities to uncover here. Though not Dave’s best songs, “Do You Wish to Be a Man” and the gospel-flavored “Are You Ready” have only previously been available as scratchy acetate copies on bootlegs. Much better is the newly unveiled “Crying”, a mournful but catchy track on which Dave gets off some rather Hendrixy rhythm licks. The B-side “There Is No Life Without Love” is presented in an unfamiliar stereo mix in which Dave’s vocal is pulled out of the mass of harmonies to the front line.

The compilers include a wealth of bonus tracks, including most (but not all) of Dave’s Pye-era Kinks compositions, mono alternative mixes of several of the core album’s tracks, a brassier mix of “Mr. Reporter”, and a scratchy early take of “Hold My Hand”. A “rare” studio version of “Good Luck Charm” is pitched as an unreleased track, although it sounds suspiciously like the one on the Picture Book box set. Aside from the latter two bonus tracks, Hidden Treasures sounds fantastic, with dense bass and crisp acoustic details. Russell Smith’s liner notes, which detail the recording and writing of these tracks extensively, are as worthy as the music they annotate. But the greatest pleasure is the wonderful music, and Hidden Treasures is a concentrated testament to the often-overlooked songwriting talents of Dave Davies.

Review: ‘You Really Got Me: The Story of The Kinks’

Power chord cro-magnons who grind out scrap-metal like “You Really Got Me” and “Destroyer” or sensitive fops who float out autumnal delicacies like “Days” and “Waterloo Sunset”? The Kinks’ career is a heap of contradictions both fascinating and disheartening. How could the soft-voiced soul famous for his empathy and his loyalty to tradition be so callous to his own brother? How could that beatific brother devoted to matters spiritual be so free with his fists? Listen closely to even the most fragile Kinks songs. Undercurrents of rage, regret, envy, and deep sadness are usually detectable. Perhaps that complexity is what so fascinates we Kinks fans.

Review: The Next Wave of Kinks Deluxe Editions

The Kinks entered 1966 as a radically different band. Power-chord pile drivers such as “You Really Got Me”, “All Day and All of the Night”, and “Till the End of the Day” gave way to sensitivity and social observation. These ingredients had already seasoned the more sedate moments on their earlier records, but they became The Kinks’ raison d'être on Face to Face. The band could still whip up a froth on stuff like “Party Line” and “House in the Country”, but the heaviness had dissipated. So had trivial lyrics about hand holding and all that follows. Ray Davies’s literate tales of self-pitying layabouts, wayward teens, and vain bounders placed him in the same league as Britain’s top composers. In his own way, Davies nearly matched Dylan in terms of influence on his mid-‘60s peers. He was single-handedly responsible for spearheading the wave of music-hall nostalgia and unapologetic Britishness that made London swing in ’66 and ’67. It is impossible to imagine The Stones’ Between the Buttons, Donovan’s Mellow Yellow, and even Sgt. Pepper’s without The Kinks’ inspiration. Yet few beyond their fellow musicians and hip music critics were aware of the full breadth of The Kinks’ greatness during this period, because they were still generally regarded as a singles band. A Musician’s Union ban from the United States further damaged their commercial potential.



Still The Kinks soldiered on, crafting an L.P. that should have been their masterpiece. Arriving in late 1967, Something Else by The Kinks develops upon Face to Face to formulate a perfectly realized microcosm of English life populated by a particularly vivid cast of characters. Peculiarly, Ray chose to tell his stories not from the perspectives of these golden boys and girls, but from drab, envious bystanders. As such, “David Watts”, “Two Sisters”, “Lazy Old Sun”, and “Waterloo Sunset” are among his most humane and finely detailed character sketches. Meanwhile, brother Dave—the Sybilla to Ray’s Priscilla—was developing into a fine songwriter in his own right with the comparatively extroverted rockers “Funny Face” and “Love Me Till the Sun Shines” and the sublime Dylan-pastiche “Death of a Clown”.



Something Else should have been The Kinks’ masterpiece because no band should have it in them to make a record of greater beauty or depth. That did not stop them from conjuring The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society a year later, and a more perfect pop creation is impossible to imagine. So magnificently realized, the album made decline an inevitability, and though Arthur or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire is wonderful, it does feel like The Kinks’ had passed the rainbow’s peak. Recorded as the soundtrack to an uncompleted television film, Arthur drags slightly because of the extended jams cut to fill out dramatic sequences. Yet Ray’s compositions continue to astound—“Victoria”, “Shangri-La”, and “Yes Sir, No Sir” certainly rate among his finest—and the band sounds positively elated to be back in harder rocking territory.

Village Green received an extraordinary sonic upgrade and expansion way back in 2004, but the other records that komprised The Kinks’ most kreative period were only available in poorly mastered, hard-to-find editions. Sanctuary/UMC’s new kampaign to refurbish The Kinks’ back katalogue (OK, I’ll stop with the K’s …) has finally bestowed the definitive editions of Face to Face, Something Else, and Arthur on a patient public. Well, as definitive as we’re likely to get. The sound of these discs cannot be improved. Like the double-disc editions of The Kinks’ first three records released this past Spring, these latest releases are dense and detailed. Each album is presented in both mono and stereo mixes, which is slightly redundant on Face to Face since several tracks on the “stereo” album are actually in mono. These numbers are given all-new stereo remixes as bonus tracks, though a quick listen will reveal why they were left in mono in the first place. Something Else is the record on which The Kinks were well represented in stereo for the first time. The mixes are unusually well balanced and full-bodied for the era. The mono version is still worth hearing for its fascinating alternate details, particularly apparent in “Lazy Old Sun”. Arthur was recorded after the proliferation of stereo, and the mono mix sounds lacking in comparison.

The compilers did a good job of sweeping together a bundle of bonus non-L.P. sides, alternate mixes, BBC cuts, and oddities (collectors will be pleased to discover “Sand on My Shoes”, an early version of “Tin Soldier Man”, and an acoustic version of “David Watts”). Still, it isn’t nitpicky to note that several great, lost Kinks classics still have not received official release. The scuttlebutt is that Ray blocked the inclusion of “Pictures in the Sand” and “Till Death Us Do Part” from the deluxe edition of Village Green Preservation Society for some reason, so he may be blameworthy for their non-appearance on these latest discs, too. Those divine songs would have been preferable to the alternate mix of “Drivin’” and backing track of “Shangri-La” included on Arthur. So would orphans such as “There Is No Life Without Love” and “I’m Crying” from Dave’s abandoned solo record featuring The Kinks as his backing band. Oh well. There’s always hope that these tracks may find their ways onto a deluxe edition of Lola vs. Powerman and the Money-Go-Round sometime in the future. Keep your fingers krossed.

Review: Kinks Deluxe Editions

Let’s just get right to it: The Kinks’ early work has never sounded as good as it does on Sanctuary/UME’s new deluxe editions. Until now, most of the band’s ‘60s records have sounded lousy on CD. First released on Castle Records in the late ‘80s when CD technology was still wetting the bed, The Kinks’ Pye catalog wasn’t subjected to a major remastering until 1998 when Castle put out its muddy mono mixes. Then in 2004, The Kinks finally received the care they deserve. Well, at least their best album did when Sanctuary released a sumptuous triple-disc edition of Village Green Preservation Society with a mastering job that couldn’t be beat. After a seven year wait, Sanctuary is giving The Kinks’ other albums similar treatment. Like that now out-of-print deluxe Village Green, these double-disc editions of Kinks, Kinda Kinks, and The Kink Kontroversy sound great; not unnecessarily loud, but louder, warmer, more detailed, and more fully dimensional than any previous versions. Stand back as Ray Davies’s harmonica slashes through the speakers like a straight razor on “Long Tall Shorty”. Listen to Dave Davies’s fingertips pulling off his acoustic strings on “Nothin’ in This World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl”. Get knocked out by the mighty thwack of Clem Cattini’s drum kit on “The World Keeps Goin’ ‘Round” (Mick Avory sat out Kontroversy).

Andrew Sandoval and Dan Hersch put a lot of care and consideration into their remastering job. The proper albums and singles are pristine, yet the guys allow a bit of noise to crackle beneath some of the bonus outtakes rather than compress the life out of them. Compare the rich sound of “Time Will Tell” on the deluxe Kontroversy to the brittle master on the Picture Book box set. Clearly Sandoval and Hersch made the right decision to favor 3-D sound over overly compressed cleanliness. Few of the bonus outtakes on these discs were previously unreleased, but they sound so good here that you’ll believe you’re hearing them for the first time.

As for the albums themselves, Kinks may be the weakest debut album by a major British band of the ‘60s, but it is delivered with plenty of punk energy and includes the monumental “You Really Got Me” and the pretty “Stop Your Sobbing”. Kinda Kinks leaves the R&B covers by the wayside to make way for Ray’s songwriting, which blossoms on Kontroversy. These are not The Kinks' greatest albums (you’ll have to wait until June for those), but the latter two are very, very good ones. The bonus disc of Kinda is a real rarity in that it’s actually better than the album it augments. That disc includes such wonderful singles as “Set Me Free”, “I Need You”, and “See My Friends”; the marvelous, acoustic Kwyet Kinks E.P.; and a superb selection of “How did these end up as outtakes?” outtakes.

Ray Davies to Turn Meltdown into His Personal Village Green

OK, so perhaps I've been reporting way too much on an event I can't even attend, but Jesus Christ! In an interview in the latest issue of Rolling Stone, Ray Davies revealed he'll be performing my personal favorite album in its entirety at his London Meltdown festival: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. So who wants to buy me a ticket to London? Anyone? Anyone?

Full Line-Up of Ray Davies's Meltdown Announced

Just a quick follow-up on last month's announcement about the Ray Davies-curated, "Ready, Steady, Go"-themed, Meltdown Festival that will be hitting London's Southbank Centre on June 11. Vicki Wickham, original "Ready, Steady, Go" editor and manager of the late Dusty Springfield, lent a hand in selecting the festival's final artist line-up, and our friends across the pond should be most pleased. The already-announced artists --Davies, The Fugs, Arthur Brown, The Alan Price Set, Yo La Tengo, Nick Lowe, Lydia Lunch, and The Legendary Pink Dots--will be joined by Eric Burdon, Sandie Shaw, Nona Hendryx of The Bluebelles and Labelle, Ronnie Spector, and reformed members of Manfred Mann, The Manfreds. My envy continues to grow.

Hendryx and Wickham

August 4, 2009: The Kinks A-Z

Today is the 45th anniversary of “You Really Got Me”, a revolutionary single that not only made the Kinks’ career (sorry… kareer) but also pioneered heavy metal, power-chord rock, heavy guitar distortion, and probably half-a-million other good things. In celebration of this milestone, I bring you…

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