Lives on water, feeds on lightning

ThRiLLpiLLow (the band I play guitar and sometimes sing in) played a few Kinks songs the recent Kinks Night at the Elevens.  One of them was "Picture Book," which my band in high school used to play all the time.  And I mean all the time, because we pretty much only knew three other songs.  But the recently heightened profile of obscure Kinks songs is a little unsettling to me.  It's like if your cat ran away and then suddenly appeared in TV commercials.

I vividly recall the first time I heard "You Really Got Me" when I was seven, and I thought that the backing vocals sounded like Muppets -- bitter, frustrated Muppets, not contended-ass twee Muppets.  But it wasn't until I was 17 that I started investigating the Kinks in earnest.  I'd been unhealthily obsessed with XTC a couple of years earlier, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to discern the appeal of their highly-anticipated Oranges and Lemons, only to finally conclude that they had settled into a workaday pattern of Professional Beatlesque Songwriters; they may as well have been writing commercial jingles, which was about the level of depth and insight of their new songs.  Oranges and Lemons also had the unpleasantly unintended effect of revealing the flaws in records of theirs I'd previously found flawless.  I once wrote that "their clever quirkiness was starting to curdle into smarmy cutseyness."  I just wasn't interested in being in on Andy Partridge's in-jokes anymore -- he seemed more interested in trying to convince listeners of his cleverness than in just being clever.  The Kinks filled certain gaps left by XTC, and they represented something far more open and welcoming, but almost secretive; you were invited to their party, but unlike with XTC, the purpose of the party wasn't to make snide comments about the parties you weren't invited to.  The secrecy was heightened by the fact that, in the late 80s, the Kinks couldn't get arrested.  About half of their records were out-of-print (and impossible to even find used), and the current incarnation of the band was busy desperately trying to scale the arena scaffolds that their peers the Rolling Stones and the Who were perched atop.  This meant that, even to the band themselves, those mid-60s records didn't exist; playing long-unavailable fey obscurities to arena audiences wouldn't have helped their standing in that area.  If these records were anachronistic in 1967-69, they were positively invisible in 1989.

My brother had cassette dubs of two of these records, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire).  I only knew one song between them ("Victoria" from Arthur), but was immediately struck by Village Green's simultaneous delicacy, nastiness (the little guitar-and-drums skirmishes that introduce each chorus of "Do You Remember Walter?"), and swing; as delicate as the songs were, they always swung.   

It took me a couple of years, but I snapped up every Kinks album I could find, thinking that each one had to at least have a couple of songs that could stand proudly with their peak material.  In a few cases, most records only had one such song (Give The People What They Want's "Better Days," State Of Confusion's "Come Dancing," Phobia's "Scattered").  Two records I only listened to once (Soap Opera and Preservation Act 2 -- I don't think I even listened to that last one all the way through).  And one discovery, Sleepwalker, became an obsessive listen.  I still don't entirely know why.  The only song on it that sounded to me like it could have been a holdover from the Village Green era was "Full Moon," and the approach was strictly late-70s LA Studio -- a reverb-free slickness that conflicted nicely with the determined drunkenness of the playing.  It was one of those records that I was lucky to hear when I heard it, and I don't know if I would have had the same reaction if it had hit me at any other time.  I wouldn't necessarily be able to defend it against criticism; I wouldn't necessarily think doing so would matter one way or the other.  I'm not able to be objective about it, nor would I want to be.

Things ended badly between us, though.  The last record of theirs I got was 1978's Misfits, which I bought in 1991.  I more-or-less knew what to expect from it, an AOR approach with the possibility of a decent song or two.  What I didn't expect was racism.  From "Black Messiah":

Everybody talking about racial equality
You hear everybody talking about equal rights
But white's white, black's black, and that's that
And thats the way you should leave it
Dont want no black messiah to come and set the world on fire

That just about killed my interest in them stone dead.  It could be argued that "Black Messiah" was written from the perspective of someone other than Ray Davies; after all, character studies were his stock-in-trade.  But the same could be said about the unrelentingly racist rantings of Axl Rose (in Guns 'N' Roses' "One In A Million") and Lou Reed (on "I Wanna Be Black"), and I'm not prepared to cut either of those two shitheels any slack.  In a way, I felt a certain sense of betrayal (not to mention confusion, as Davies had long talked about making a film about Charles Mingus, who was as outspoken in his anti-racist views as any musician), and I wasn't able to seriously listen to them for years (it was also rumored that they'd played in South Africa during apartheid, but they have strenuously denied this).

Next thing I know, years later, I heard "Picture Book" in an ad for HP Printers, which reminded me that I used to be nuts about them (uh, the Kinks, not HP).  But it's like how I can't really enjoy Seinfeld anymore; knowing what we know about Kramer, it seems tainted.   Adding to the confusion is Davies' recent (and, I have to say, heartening) declaration in Rolling Stone: 

Another reason I wanted to move to New Orleans was to escape Tony Blair.  I'm a socialist, and Labor is not socialist anymore.  The working man is still downtrodden and unheard.  And now they're vanishing.  Blair came in and it became uncool to be working class. ...when you forget your origins -- that's bad.  That's why I don't fit into this culture anymore.  I take the side of the underdog.

I'm still confused, but their great records are still great, and ThRiLLpiLLow was happy to be a part of the tribute.  Being in a room full of Kinks-o-philes was exactly halfway between joyous and bizarre.  The highlights of the evening for me were: Rick Murnane's renditions of "Come Dancing" and "Juke Box Music," bucking the evening's trend of sticking to songs from the 60s ("Juke Box Music" worked surprisingly well with just acoustic guitar and voice); the Novels charging through "Berkeley Mews," complete with barrelhouse piano; School For The Dead using "Waterloo Sunset" as a pair of very stylish, and confident boots; the Fawns playing "Starstruck" and a crashing "I Go To Sleep"; JC Hammer bravely tackling "Australia"; Ella Longpre's stunning "Sitting By The Riverside," with just voice and glockenspiel; and Sitting Next To Brian's "Too Much On My Mind," one of my all-time favorites, done expertly.

And now I'm going to Princeton, New Jersey, to play a solo percussion + electronics concert.  See you tomorrow.

Comments

[cassette brother]

Actually, it was Village Green on one side and Lola vs. Powerman on the other, which I sought out because each had received 5 stars from the RS Record Guide (blue cover). I got Arthur on vinyl shortly thereafter. Lola, it seems, has fallen in critical estimation since then, probably because its subject (the unfairness of the music biz and music unions in particular -- gee, where'd they come up with THAT?) is both insular and self-pitying. Still, it has some of their best-ever songs, including Get Back in Line and This Time Tomorrow.
Relatedly, I heartily recommend the "Celluloid Heroes" comp of their RCA years (2001 edition). It rescues some great tracks from the Preservation projects, like "He's Evil" and "No More Looking Back."

[Matt]

You're right about the cassette. I had Lola on CD (I think it was the second CD I ever bought). I don't think it's THAT insular, although "Working In The Factory" from 1987 was pretty much a one-song less insular summing-up. I might get Celluloid Heroes, although I remember Schoolboys In Disgrace as being surprisingly consistent. Speaking of changes in critical estimation, it seems that Soap Opera, of all things, has been favorably revisited (I can't remember exactly where), probably because of that Converse ad. I remember being so repulsed by the album that I think I sold it a week later, and this was when my interest in the Kinks was at its peak.

[Matt]

And I just realized I erred in saying that Misfits was the last Kinks album I bought. I got the Did Ya EP in 1991 and the Phobia album in 1993, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else (though each contained one surprisingly good song -- "Look Through Any Doorway" on Did Ya, and "Scattered" on Phobia).