Ray Davies was a different sort, circumspect from the start, nostalgic and traditional by his nature.īy the time San Francisco’s acid rock scene had become the full-fledged vogue of the day, Ray had lost interest completely, instead moving purposefully backwards in his brilliant Victorian evocations of Village Green and the poignant tales of familial dislocations of Arthur. As the ’60s progressed and Swinging London became an ever more fertile playground for balls-out hedonism of every sort, Ray famously remained a sideline observer: the gently mocking scold of “Dandy” or the hand-wringing Cassandra of “Where Have All The Good Times Gone?” Nearly every musical figure associated with the free-love and Utopian antics of the mid to late ’60s eventually turned their attentions away, disillusioned and embarrassed. once famously described the function of political conservatism as standing “athwart history, yelling stop!” While Ray Davies would certainly feel little in common with Buckley’s blue-blooded economic values, there is perhaps not a greater description available for the overarching themes of his songwriting. Following a disastrous 1965 tour, the Kinks were functionally banned from the US for the better part of a decade, robbing them of the untold spoils of their contemporaries and perhaps further inculcating the deep, proud provincialism that would come to define the best of Ray Davies’ writing. Townshend himself, not a man lacking in self-regard, commented to Uncut magazine in 2004, “People in America talk about ‘the Beatles, the Stones, the Who.’ For me it’s ‘the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks.'”īut for moptop-crazed America during the middle ’60s, the version of Cool Britannia presented by the Kinks was a bridge too far - a confusing mélange of roughnecked working-class rage and foppish, pansexual dandy-ism that was as unkempt as the group’s thrillingly rambunctious live shows.
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Pete Townshend is often credited (if that is the right word) with marrying rock music to long-form narrative, but in reality the Kinks got there first, and often more effectively, on their series of plot- and concept-driven records beginning with Village Green Preservation Society released months before the Who’s rock opera Tommy. Meanwhile, Ray Davies’ fascination with the fading mores of Britain’s declining empire and sharp satirical pen pre-dated the Lennon-McCartney fancy for English picaresque.
The brash, stripped-down desperation of the Kinks’ classic early singles raised the bar for primal aggression in rock and roll, giving a green light to the Stones’ most lurid impulses. And yet, it is difficult to imagine any of those groups reaching their respective creative heights minus the inspiration provided by Ray Davies and company. Every last one owes a massive debt of gratitude to the boys from Muswell Hill.Įven during their seemingly out-of-nowhere flirtation with the American charts in the 1980s, the Kinks never approached the Stateside level of popularity achieved by the British Invasion Big Three of the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who. In the fifty years since their inception, there is essentially no rock and roll-adjacent genre or subgenre over which the Kinks do not possess a legitimate claim as crucial progenitors: punk, heavy metal, American indie, Britpop, alt-country, glam, pub rock, you name it. Most of all, it is the strange, ever-contradictory tale of a band with a legitimate claim to being rock and roll’s all-time best, but who are rarely included in that conversation. It is replete with astonishing displays of depravation, cruelty, love, compassion, and need. It is a thirty-year story of personal and creative highs and lows worthy of the Dickens characters they often dressed as. However, as with everything pertaining to the Kinks, the actual truth is far weirder and more fascinating.
These are the origin stories, the mythic ones, which condense real truths into easily accessible shorthand. Then there is the indelible, Old Testament-worthy tale of the Brothers Davies - Ray and Dave - two extraordinary talents whose nearly diametrically opposed personalities frequently brought them to blows or worse. Their initial creative exertions hold a thrilling mirror back to their inspirations overseas, supercharging the sounds of Little Richard, Hank Williams, and the Ventures with the riveted anxiety of a post-war youth culture on the brink of full-blown combustion. In some ways, the story of the Kinks feels familiar: In 1962, four working-class London teenagers besotted with American R&B and country music unite.
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