Fall is hands-down my favorite season. I mentioned that to my husband the other day and he huffed and said, "I guess." But it isn't up to him; it's MY favorite season.
First, because it's the time of year when you go back to school, and I was always that annoying girl who couldn't wait for school to start again. (Cue up the Staples commercial.)
Second, I have a fall birthday (October 8 if you have your calendar handy), and third, I grew up in Indiana where the fall colors are every bit as awesome as they are in New England. Though, lucky me, I now live in New England where I can enjoy them there too.
Plus I wrote my college thesis on John Keats, whose ode "To Autumn" is on my short list of the greatest poems of all time.
So naturally this Kinks song should tick all my boxes. But oh my brothers and sisters, it is a Kinks song, written by the Kinks' presiding genius Ray Davies, and therefore . . . well, sit back and strap in.
It opens with timeless pastoral charm: “From the dew-soaked hedge
creeps a crawly caterpillar"; "Breeze blows leaves of a musty-colored
yellow"; his friends gather for “tea and toasted
buttered currant buns.” The sound is an old-timey music hall softshoe, with corny
horns, plinky piano, and sugary backing ooh’s; good times, good times.
But once Ray Davies has hooked us, he begins to sneak in class details, the satire layering in plumping rhythms: “I like my football on a Saturday, /
Roast beef on Sundays, all right. / I go to Blackpool for my holidays, /
Sit in the open sunlight.” (Any Ted Lasso fans here?)
In the last verse, Ray
lets his narrator hang himself: “This is my street / And I’m never
gonna leave it,” he stoutly declares, “And I’m always gonna stay here /
If I live to be 99 / ‘Cos all the people I meet / Seem to come from my
street”). Well, yeah, if you never go anywhere else, that’s who you’re
bound to meet, innit?
This single was released October 13, 1967. I see it as an answer to the Beatles' single "Rain," which came out in May 1966: The Beatles dreamily sitting in an English garden, waiting for the sun, while the Kinks -- blocked by a US ban from touring internationally -- focused on the guy who swept the garden's leaves into his sack. Yin and yang.
But what strikes me most in 2021 is how eerily well Ray Davies captured the owner of that garden, that little tract of English earth. Far from being a nature lover, a friend of the planet, he closes himself off from everything outside his garden gate. He votes for Brexit; and if he's American, he votes for white supremacy, for anti-vaxxing, for Trump.
Deep breath.
On the other hand, it's just a brilliant pop song, where moon-and-June love lyrics have been thrown out the window in favor of sneaky satire and a damn good pub singalong.
God save the Kinks.
Wednesday, November 27, 2019
"Thanksgiving Day"/ Ray Davies
I'd like to think that Ray Davies did this on purpose -- sat down and thought, "What holiday doesn't yet have too many songs written about it?" And when he realized how few Thanksgiving songs there are, he decided to write one, hoping for that late November airplay.
I'm not much of a radio listener, so I don't know whether his stratagem worked. But I do know that this has become my go-to song for the Thursday before Black Friday.
But trust Ray Davies not to slack off, to keep at it until that song had some meat on its bones. And of course, as he homed in on the holiday, he just couldn't help himself: Instead of going all sentimental, which would have been the obvious easy choice, instead he made it about loners and misfits -- the universe Ray understands best -- struggling to find their home against all odds. The feast they find isn't Hallmark-perfect -- no Martha Stewart perfection, no Instagram fantasy -- but it's what they need.
If you want to know more, here's what I wrote about this song a few years ago.
But maybe it's enough just to listen. Having just come back from a four-day Kinks trip to London (of which more soon), for now I'm happy to let his songs simply melt into my consciousness.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Friday, November 02, 2018
Juliet, Naked
Okay, I finally saw it. (Pay per view alert!) I can't even explain why it took me so long, considering how absolutely this film dovetails with everything I'm about. But a few thoughts:
1. Nick Hornsby is my favorite living writer. I'm not claiming he's the greatest literary talent or anything like that, but everything this man writes makes utter and perfect sense to me. This blog owes its existence to his book Song Book; I've read everything he's published. And of all his novels, Juliet, Naked is quite possibly my favorite. (Notice how I hedge my bets, because, jeez, I love everything he's done.) Nick, if by any chance this blog post surfaces on your feed -- please do let me know. I promise I won't get weird.
2. Kinks world lives. Casually, walking through Waterloo Station, a snippet of dialogue -- a throwaway, really, if you didn't know better -- mentions that the station is a big deal if you're a Kinks fan (KAPOW). Later, Ethan Hawke performs "Waterloo Sunset" at a local gig, and it's almost unbearably beautiful.
3. Chris O'Dowd is so underated. So many of us have connected via fan websites; O'Dowd plays a superfan we can all identify with. I love how his passion for the music, versus his cluelessness in life, is so delicately delineated. His face registers all the nuances of a response to music that is heartfelt and yet, hell, totally beside the point. Except okay, but whoa . . .
4. And the songs? If you're gonna do a movie about an elusive rock talent, you gotta line up some quirky folks to write his songs. Monsters of Folk's Conor Oberst and M. Ward, Robyn Hitchcock, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy-- I've written about them all over the years. Click on their links in the column to the right. This film totally gets the music right, which buys it major cred.
5. Okay, now I get Ethan Hawke. He started out so young, and so beautiful (really, those cheekbones are so unfair), I never thought much of him. It wasn't until I saw Boyhood a couple years back that I realized he is actually an actor of a very high degree. Here he's playing a grizzled, washed-up musician who dropped out of the biz and disappeared 30 years ago, inadvertently gaining a cult following. He's a mess of a human being, and Hawke plays it to the core, never making excuses for him. All right, Ethan, now I officially forgive you for Great Expectations.
6. Gotta stand and face it -- life is so complicated. One of the things I most love about Nick Hornsby's novels is that there are no pat solutions -- lost loves lead to new opportunities, and we all pick up our sorrows and move on. I love how this film doesn't settle for a cheesy plot resolution, but still leaves us encouraged for the next chapter. Viva life!
Well, the votes have been cast and counted, victory and concession speeches made, and the president-elect is beginning to show his true colors by a steadily-growing list of political appointments.
You can find all that news elsewhere on the web. Here, we talk about the Kinks.
1979. What a year. We had the Iran hostage crisis, Three Mile Island, the Twinkie defense, the Unabomber, the Greensboro Massacre, the Chrysler bailout, and the rise of the Sandinistas. (C'mon, folks, if you don't know, Google it.) Etan Patz disappeared, Mardi Gras was canceled, and a school shooter in San Diego said she did it because "I don't like Mondays." The economy was floundering, the energy crisis led to long lines at the gas pumps, and massive anti-nuclear and gay-rights marches filled the streets. It wasn't the end of civilization, but it kind of felt like it. And for me, returning to the US in 1978 after two years abroad, it was culture shock indeed.
[Granted, it wasn't all bad. The Salt II agreement and the Egyptian-Israel Peace Treaty were signed. Michael Jackson released Off the Wall. The Susan B. Anthony dollar and the Happy Meal were introduced. So...um...yay for those.]
Never a man to shy from social commentary, Ray Davies filled the Kinks' 1979 LP LowBudget with pointed songs about the state of the world. This was their third album for Clive Davis' Arista label; the pressure was on to create anthem rock and disco-friendly tracks (methinks our Ray suffered many a sleepless night trying to satisfy those demands). But political satire was Ray Davies' home court, and Low Budget may be the Kinks' most political album, in a broad-stroke kinda way. He addresses inflation ("Low Budget"), UK health care ("National Health"), gas prices ("A Gallon of Gas"), the fitness craze ("Wish I Could Be Like Superman").
Still, it's a bit of a game-changer to find the ultra-Brit Ray Davies writing a song like this, addressing the rest of the world from an American standpoint. Remember, though, Ray had been living in New York for a while; Low Budget was recorded in New York. And so we can forgive him for writing a song that's totally in the American voice.
I happen to love this track. I am no fan of arena rock or disco; in fact, Low Budget was the album that at the time made me fall away from the Kinks. (Just Google what else was happening in music in 1979 before you judge me.) But now that I'm back in the fold, I recognize this track for what it is: What the French would call a crie de coeur, a cry from the heart.
Ray summons up the comic book hero Captain America -- and corny as he may be, the message is plangent. Yeah, the guy's a straight-arrow dork, and for years now we've been dissing straight-arrow dorks. But they're the ones we depend upon to hold the door and carry our bags for us. And when the chips are down....
All the power chord riffs are there, plus a hot sax solo in the middle eight (twice!). And there's the eerie call-and-response, where Ray sings "fallin'" and brother Dave chillingly echoes it an octave higher.
"I remember / When you were down / And you needed a helping hand / I came to feed you" -- hello, Marshall Plan. I wasn't around then, but even as a child of the 1960s I knew that the US had bailed out its European allies in their post-war straits.
I'll admit, I have no idea whether the US actually applied to its European allies for help in the dark days of 1978-1979. So the line about "Now I call your office on the telephone / And your secretary tells me that she's sorry / But you've gone out of town" -- this could just be Ray Davies' imagination running wild.
Still -- those alliances should still matter. The fact that our President-elect has no idea how to navigate them is downright terrifying. And their economic systems depend upon ours more than ever.
So hello, rest of the world. Anything you can do to give us a boost would be welcome. Several of us (most of us, really, as the popular vote would attest) feel like we're in free-fall mode. If anybody has a safety net to offer...
In times of trouble, there's always a Kinks song to salve the soul. Or else get you fired up to make some changes.
If you don't know the Kinks' albums Preservation Act 1 (1973)and Preservation Act 2 (1974), then you should. Because 40-odd years ago songwriter Ray Davies predicted the rise of a Trump-like demagogue and the social devastation it would wreak for the trusting working- and middle-class voters who bought his line of BS.
The lyrics really say it all. Here's the worrisome chorus:
You'd better run, you'd better fly. Hide your daughters, hide your wives. Lock your doors and stay inside Here comes Flash.
There's no way that you can win, You must obey his every whim, Or else he's going to do you in. Here comes Flash.
My first thoughts upon waking up the morning after the election were sorrow and sympathy for the legions of Trump supporters who honestly believed that he could restore American jobs (forever lost to computerization) and repair the economy. (Tax cuts, yeah, but only for the top 10%, followed by stagflation and the disappearance of cheap imported consumer goods after trade agreements are nixed.)
Yes, he promises the world. But can he deliver?
He will smile at you, be a friend to you, Then he's gonna screw you just like that. He is going to use you, his heavies will abuse you, And then he's gonna lean on you, Here comes Flash.
And what is becoming even more painfully clear is that Trump's cadre of "outsiders" (once you subtract the sleazy deeply-connected lobbyists who have wormed their way into his transition team) include a fair number of hate-mongering thugs. Here's Ray's analysis:
He is gonna rough you up, Duff you up and touch you up, And then he's gonna screw you up. Even though he's mean on you, There's nothing else that you can do Just sit back and take his abuse.
The jagged, frenetic energy of this track, the hysterical falsettos of the vocals, telegraph panic in the streets. And let's remember where Ray Davies came from -- a working-class London family displaced by slum clearance, union loyalists, Labour party die-hards. Even after Ray ascended into the privileged classes due to his enormous talent, he never lost his sympathy for the common man, the working joe, the guy in the street.
Who will soon enough begin to feel the sting of betrayal.
Once we loved and trusted him, Now his thugs and bullies make us live in sin. They suppress us, oppress us, molest us, possess us.
Mark my words. Or if you don't believe me, go download (or buy in CD!) this preternaturally prescient rock opera and just see how it all turns out.
1966, The Kink Kontroversy. Scrambling to remain "relevant," Ray was looking for a template for satire, and he found it in Bob Dylan (listen to this song; he could segue any minute into "Like A Rolling Stone"). It's got that twang, that talking blues thing: "Well, lived my life and never stopped to worry 'bout a thing / Opened up and shouted out and never tried to sing."
While Dylan is skewering some old girlfriend, Ray is skewering himself -- or at any rate, some fictional version of himself, your prototypical 60s British rocker. Now, he laments, the musical trend is running on empty: "Wondering if I'd done wrong / Will this depression last for long?" But the gutsy wail of the chorus is totally heartfelt: "Won't you tell me / Where have all the good times gone? / Where have all the good times gone?" I love how matey and boozy the Kinks sound on the chorus, with its lurching rhythm, the chromatic melody sliding back and forth between F and G. Discordant and sloppy, with those trademark crunchy riffs, it's like an old-fashioned pub singalong.
Long before "American Pie," Ray Davies cleverly name-checks other artists' work in his verses -- the Rolling Stones ("Time was on our side and I had everything to gain"), the Beatles ("Yesterday was such an easy game for you to play"). In verse three he goes more autobiographical -- "Ma and Pa look back at all the things they used to do / Didn't have no money and they always told the truth / Daddy didn't have no toys / And mummy didn't need no boys" -- but he's also making fun of people who live in a fantasy past (nostalgia ain't what it used to be).
Ray Davies has always had a complex reaction to nostalgia. On one hand, he longs to live in the past, when life was less complicated (the chimerical hope of "Make America Great Again"); on the other, he's suspicious that the past can be a prison. (The whole Village Green Preservation Society album is Ray's conflicted dance with nostalgia.) "Where Have All the Good Times Gone" sits right on that fence; it's an obituary for the British Invasion and a declaration of independence, but it's also tinged with regret. The good times were good, and he owes that musical revolution everything. But now it's time to move on.
So you've got two choices: Live in the past, or embrace the possibilities of a more vital future.
I know which option I voted for on November 8th. So how about you?
26 days, 26 artists from A to Z. Yeah, I know I dropped the ball for a few days, but I'm back and raring to go. The Kinks / "Who'll Be the Next in Line"
Well, who else did you expect I'd choose for K?
Okay, here are the bare facts: March 1965, B-side to "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy," but then some shit went down and in July 1965 it became the A-side when it was released in the U.S. Not that it made that much of a splash, because by then the Kinks were banned from the U.S. for reasons still unclear. We U.S. fans knew "All Day and All of the Night" and "You Really Got Me," and maybe even "Tired of Waiting." But after the ban, finding a Kinks song on the radio was anything but easy.
Yet I know I heard this song on the radio in 1965, and it was definitely on the 1966 U.S.-only The Kinks' Greatest Hits, which I kept stealing from my big brother Holt. It wasn't like the Kinks' other early power-chord tracks -- "You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night," "Tired of Waiting" -- it was edgy, and jazzy. I believe this was my first inkling that these guys were going to be interesting enough to listen to for a long time. (Though I don't suppose even then I realized I'd still be listening to them 40 years later.)
Here are the underpinnings: an insistent 4-note bass motif; a speedy nervous tempo that's all fits and starts; a chromatic melody that hovers obsessively around the same few notes; and Ray Davies' whiniest, most fretful vocal to date. "Who'll be the next in line?" he agonizes. "Who'll be the next in line for heartache? / Who'll make the same mistakes I made over / You?" (I love how Ray's vocals dip in a swoop on "li-ine.") It ping-pongs back and forth between just two chords -- G to C -- and the verses are nothing but questions. This girl has really tied him up in knots, hasn't she?
In the bridge, the melody jumps briefly to a higher note, as if he's fighting through to a moment of clarity: "One day you'll find out when I'm gone, / I was the best one you had, / I was the one who gave you love." But even there, he's singing in a listless monotone. He says these things without really believing them, or without believing they'll make a difference.
That's where he is right now: numb, confused, queasy. He's not 100% out the door, but he can read the writing on the wall. And you know what? He's beginning to realize that she's just not worth it anymore.
Now, in 1965 every pop song was ostensibly about girls and boys, but the songwriters--guys like Ray Davies--had other things on their mind, which often secretly inspired those songs. So here's my alternate take on "Who'll Be the Next in Line?": What if it's really about Ray's anxiety about losing his grip on pop fame?
After all, there were dozens of talented young bands swarming around, hoping to dethrone the stars of the moment. (The Kinks themselves had been those hungry youngsters only a few months earlier.) With such a talent glut, the record companies were quick to boot any band the minute their records stopped selling. The formerly hot Kinks were on thin ice. Who could blame Ray Davies for wondering who the next "it" band was going to be?
Expressing adolescent anxiety, of course, was the key to the Kinks' success. In "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," the raging hormones of love torments the song's singer. "Tired of Waiting" is one long groan of frustrated lust. And after this would come songs like "Dead End Street" (anxious about being broke), "Sunny Afternoon" (anxious about being rich and then losing it), "Shangri-La" (anxious about losing touch with his roots), "Lola" (anxious about his sexuality) . . . well, you get the picture.
But here's what made it work: It felt authentic. It never seemed that Ray Davies was cynically pandering to his teenage audience. No, he was tuned into their insecurities because he shared their insecurities. He was just lucky enough to be able to express it, to speak for the losers and misfits in a way the Beatles, the Stones, and The Who never could (though The Who sometimes came close).
And which of us doesn't still have a tiny whiny voice inside complaining, "But it hurts! It's not fair! You just don't understand! Someday you'll be sorry!"
Which is probably why I'm still listening 40 years later.
Friday, June 24, 2016
"Shangri-La" / The Kinks
In the wake of the Brexit vote...
I'm a Kinks fan, and will be until the day I die. So when the Davies brothers' country does something so weird, so inexplicable, I can't help but turn to their vast catalog of songs to figure it all out. And this gem, from September 1969, leapt into my mind this morning, as soon as I learned of the Brexit result. Because how else can we understand the middle-class-(or-aspiring) Englishman whose home is his castle?
These late 1960s Kinks satires of English life -- these were the songs, much more than the power chord hits ("You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night") that made a Kinks fan of me. From the barbed comedy of "Well-Respected Man" (1965) to the ambivalently sympathetic "Autumn Almanac" (1967), singer/songwriter Ray Davies saw all too well how England's class system was playing out in real time. And if you look at the map of who voted to stay in the European Union, and who voted to leave -- well, it pretty much plays along class lines.
Granted, I'm not sure that "Shangri-La" -- from the enormously underrated concept album Arthur -- even qualifies as satire. The melancholy minor-key melody sets us up for something entirely different. That first verse is unbearably poignant: "Now that you've found your paradise / This is your kingdom to command / You can go outside and polish your car / Or sit by the fire in your Shangri-La." This isn't just some snide put-down of middle-class complacency -- though there's surely a strain of that in there -- it's also an epiphany about the moment when one's dreams ring hollow. "Here's your reward for working so hard / Gone are the lavatories in the back yard / Gone are the days when you dreamed of that car / You just want to sit in your Shangri-La." I love that detail about the lavatories -- talk about fixing a cultural reference in one sharp stroke. And I think of young pop star Ray Davies, living with his wife and kids in a mansionette in North London, inextricably severed from his working-class roots and still not feeling ready to join the upper class that he'd been taught since childhood to abhor. (Never mind that his posho managers hadn't managed to get him his fair share of songwriting royalties -- forcing him to file a lawsuit that's apparently still a landmark case in British law.) Oh, the satire comes stealing in in the later verses, as Ray describes the "little man" catching his commuter train and fretting over his mortgage; it's a pathetic trade-off, on a time-installment plan: "Got a TV set and a radio / For seven shillings a week." Then Ray pans out, almost cinematically, for the wide-angle view: "And all the houses in the street have got a name / 'Cos all the houses in the street they look the same ' Same chimney pots, same little cars, same window panes" -- that's such a resonant observation, about the English penchant for giving their houses cutesy names, even in a cookie-cutter development. It's details like that that make Ray Davies one of our greatest living songwriters. Eventually Ray does dismiss the character as "Too scared to think about how insecure you are / Life ain't so happy in your little Shangri-La." But I don't know -- I still think he's identifying with him, and more than a little bit. Because it's the poignancy of the first verses that stays with me, in the end. And here's the Brexit paradox: People who aren't happy with their tiny slice of the pie honestly do think that by building a wall they can make their pie bigger. Which, alas -- those of us who have studied economics know -- is just not the case.
First of all, I'm freaked out that it's 2016. But I'm moving past that, truly. And offering a panoply of tunes to make your June celebratory to the nth degree.
1. I'm On an Island / The Kinks
From Kink Kontroversy (1965)
Oh, my man Ray Davies, the presiding genius behind the Kinks. And here, even as early as 1965, he was sectioning off the experiences. I've heard that he will only ever sing this song on Iceland, the island for which he wrote this tune. Damn, I have a whole cabinet of Icelandic experiences, but Lord if I don't want to go to Iceland ONLY to hear Ray sing it.
2. Wake Up / Alan Price
From Rising Sun (1980)
Alan, you'll never know how much of my life was devoted to chasing you down, But here's a taste -- and a pretty good tune to connect to your iPhone alarm.
3. Man in the Bottom of the Well / Bill Kirchen with Elvis Costello
From Word to the Wise (2010)
Elvis, Nick, Bill. Need I say more? I cannot help but dig those majestic riffs, climbing out of the depths of whatevs..
4. Mondays / Killer Tuesday / Black Uhuru
From Liberation: The Island Anthology (1993)
I do love the random logic of the shuffle. Because how else would we get this exTREMEly copasetic track, which does go on and on, but hey, what else did you have to do with your time?
5. I Swear I Saw Christopher Reeve / Jill Sobule
From Dottie's Charms (2014)
A Midwestern interlude, courtesy of my girl Jill. Who seriously I just. I've never been there but I know the place like the back of my hand. Check it out.
6. Staten Island Baby / Black 47
How much do we love Larry Kirwan's celebration of the Irish-American experience?
10. House of the Rising Sun / The Animals
Lord. So much began here. Honor paid to Eric Burdon's iconic voice, but also to the rest of the Animals (including oh yes my hero Alan Price.)
Sorry. I forgot to open the door on my advent calendar yesterday -- too caught up in the big buzz in Kinkdom. Last night in London, Dave and Ray Davies sang together on stage for the first time in nearly 20 years. And if you've been following the soap opera of the Davies' brothers lifelong love-hate relationship -- well, you'll know this is major news indeed.
So really, there was no other holiday song I could write about today...
The Kinks have never been big on sugary sentiment, so of course if they were going to do a Christmas song it would have to be something with a thrashing beat, some scathing social commentary, AND -- if we're lucky -- a Ray Davies sigh of sorrow for a world's that gone downhill.
Well, this 1977 single has all that. The basic scenario: The narrator wistfully remembers childhood Christmases when he believed in Santa Claus, even though he knew it was his dad behind it all; but now, a grownup, he's working as a department store Santa and -- no Miracle on 34th Street nonsense here -- he's getting mugged by a pack of street urchins.
That's the infectious chorus -- the sneering Cockney chant of those little punks: "Father Christmas, give us some money / Don't mess around with those silly toys / We'll beat you up if you don't hand it over / We want your bread so don't make us annoyed / Give all the toys to the rich little boys." (I can attest: This is an absurdly satisfying thing to sing aloud with a pack of other people.)
Next, Ray takes down the commercialization of Christmas, with all its crass marketing targeted at kids: "Don't give my brother a Steve Austin* outfit / Don't give my sister a cuddly toy / Don't want no jigsaw or monopoly money / All we want is the real McCoy."
And for these left-behind kids, the "real McCoy" is . . . a job for their dads. (Remember 1977 in England? Labor strikes, protests, riots...) Aw, gee -- but before we can feel too self-righteous, Ray adds, "But if you've got one I'll have a machine gun / So I can scare all the kids on the street." He may sympathize with their poverty, but he's also repelled by the street violence poverty breeds. Talk about Dickensian Christmases -- this is the real spirit of Charles Dickens.
It could be a downer, but it's such an exuberant rocker you can't help but sing along with its goofy energy. The sweet angel-chime tinkling of a glockenspiel is swept aside by Dave Davies's shrewdly snarling guitar riffs, slicing aggressively through the mix; there's a great snappy drumbeat, and Ray's voice punches out that chorus with gusto.
When he gets to the last verse, his God-bless-us-every-one send-off is surprisingly heartfelt: "Have yourself a merry merry Christmas / Have yourself a good time / But remember the kids who got nothin' / While you're drinking down your wine." Not exactly a feel-good ending. But who expected that from the Kinks?
* Note: NOT Stone Cold Steve Austin, the wrestler-turned-actor, but the bionic superhero played by Lee Majors in the Six Million Dollar Man TV series, which was still on the air in 1977.
What? The only Fountains of Wayne song you know is their one pop hit, "Stacy's Mom"? Now that's a shame. Permit me to widen your horizons, with not one but ten FOW tracks that prove their genius...
From Sky Full of Holes (2011).
For anyone who loves (as I do) the Kinks' incisive portraits of English suburbia -- "Well-Respected Man,""Shangri-La," "Autumn Almanac"-- becoming a Fountains of Wayne fan is a natural. FOW's songwriters Adam Schlesinger and Chris Collingwood have, along with Ben Folds, carved a niche as our top chroniclers of modern American middle-class life. Each of their songs is a finely observed short story; "Stacy's Mom" is just the tip of the iceberg.
Somehow Schlesinger and Collingwood still remember perfectly what it is to be a suburban teen or twenty-something. But this lovely track from their most recent album, Sky Full of Holes, shows that they get grown-up life just as well.
Don't be fooled by that title. Our hero is an ordinary sort of family guy, fumbling for his keys in the parking lot. (Predictably, his rowdy kids totally don't get it -- to them he's just a dad joke.) It's only in his mind that he's a superhero. Although, admit it -- in our celebrity-obsessed culture, don't we all long to be larger than life? And how beautifully this track skates the line between buying into his fantasy and rejecting its premises.
But then, they throw in a curveball. In verse two, we learn that our action hero has been visiting Mount Sinai hospital (God is in the details: local NYC-metropolitan reference) for some tests. Suddenly the phrase "racing against time" takes on a whole new meaning.
Gulp.
This is where Fountains of Wayne shines: In taking the lives of ordinary just-like-us folks and giving them voice. As that chugging power-pop setting uplifts and resonates, how could we not love this guy, doing the dad thing, cherishing his action-hero dreams, but still coming smack up against the all-too-grown-up reality whatever those scary tests reveal?
Do we not all know heroes like this? And do we not love Fountains of Wayne for putting them into song?
Sunday, August 23, 2015
"Sitting in the Midday Sun" / The Kinks
Okay, MINOR Kinks track. Preservation Part 1 if you want to be precise. An album that was delivered to me at college, because I was the de facto college newspaper music reviewer in 1973 and that was the record album that they were desperately trying to sell.
And, oh, by the way, I had already been converted to an insane Kinks fan, so of COURSE I was going to review this album, and review it well.
But -- let me go on record with this -- in the 42 intervening years I have seen absolutely no reason to alter my critical assessment.
The Kinks' resident genius Ray Davies adopts in this album the wistful persona of The Tramp (a character who inexplicably fades from view in Preservation Part 2, an album which has its own glories.) I'll confess it here: I like Preservation Part 1 more than Preservation Part 2. And perhaps it's because the Everyman figure of the Tramp gets lost in PP2. We need that Everyman perspective to help us negotiate through the property struggles of Preservation Part 2, as the real estate developers (hello, reality check: WHO ELSE WOULD BASE A WHOLE ROCK OPERA ON REAL ESTATE NEGOTIATIONS?) scheme to destroy communities.
And after all, it's the Tramp who sings "Sitting in the Midday Sun." It's a brilliant antithesis to the Kinks's huge hit "Sunny Afternoon," where the singer is ostensibly scaling things back, but he's still
got the yacht, the stately home, et cetera. In "Sitting in the Midday Sun," he has totally let go, meditating upon the "currant bun" (Cockney rhyming slang for "sun"), giving up on all the rest.
There's an almost Beach Boys groove going on, "with no particular purpose or purpose / For sitting in the midday sun." There's the background singers, the twee organ, the whole sense of a track waiting for the resident genius to sign off.
And the resident genius is Ray Davies. Which, basically, tells you all you need to know.
Okay, over the rules One More Time. Not the The Best Opening Riffs-- too many songs, too little time -- but 25 Favorite Opening Riffs, in five 5-riff installments. The arbitrary rules: 1. One riff per band. 2. Doesn't have to be a guitar riff, but vocals don't count. 3. Has to be a true opener -- the very first notes of the song, proclaiming this song's distinctive DNA.
Remember how, back in the day, AM radio DJs used to gab during song intros, trying to sneak a few more words of banter/announcements/advertising messages?. That used to drive me crazy. Transistor held up to my ear, I wanted to prove my pop savvy by being the first in the room to shout "I love this song!"
I know I said I was leading off with the "no-brainers." But some of you may have noticed -- and, if you're anything like the music fans I think you are, been distressed by -- the absence on that list of the REAL no-brainers. Which are, forthwith and henceforth...
Sunshine of Your Love / Cream
Sheer genius here, to double the bass riff with the electric guitar -- a particularly fuzzy guitar as well, with a wah-wah pedal and Marshall amps. The great bassist Jack Bruce wrote that commanding riff and it dominates the song -- those first four notes (LISTEN HERE!) sliding seductively into a dark downward spiral, over and over. Every bassist I know has learned this riff -- but it just doesn't sound the same without that scratchy guitar on top.
NOTE: Invoking the "one riff per band" rule, I decided on this rather than "Layla," even though they're by two different Clapton bands. Sorry, Slowhand, but the competition was fierce.
Satisfaction / The Rolling Stones
Oh, the one-riff-per-band thing made this very tough. So many great Stones riffs -- but in the end, how could I have picked anything else? Talk about fuzzy guitars -- Keith Richards added a fuzzbox to his Gibson to get this snarling, snarky tone just right. It's only three notes, up and down a tiny minor-key scale, but how perfectly does it encapsulate the song's theme of pent-up frustration -- up and down, over and over, never breaking out of that narrow range. It makes me want to smash things -- which is, presumably, the point.
You Really Got Me / The Kinks
Oh, why did I impose that one-riff rule? Well, basically, because otherwise this entire list of 25 might well have been nothing but Stones, Kinks and Queen riffs, with a Beatles tune here and there. But of all the great Kinks openers (and yes, I AM prejudiced in this matter), how can we deny the riff that started it all for them? As with the previous two songs, the distinctive tone of the guitar makes all the difference; in this case, the mutilated amplifier of Dave Davies, turning his electric guitar into an angry buzzsaw. Ricocheting between two notes, with just enough syncopation to sound erratic and dangerous, it's an aggressive cry of sexual frustration that will not be denied.
Summer in the City / The Lovin' Spoonful
How long does it take the Lovin' Spoonful to claim your eardrums? Two notes plus one drum-whack. True, the notes are ominous, swelling organ tones and the drum-whack is punitive to say the least. But oh, for sheer economy of effect, this gritty urban anthem of seizing conditional pleasure scores BIG-TIME. Considering that everything else this band had released was mellow jug-band stuff -- "Daydream," "Do You Believe in Magic" and "Younger Girl" -- this hard-hitting 1966 urban song reminds us that the Lovin' Spoonful were originally a New York City band. And their reward for working so hard? Their only #1 hit.
Hard Day's Night / The Beatles
BEST OPENING RIFF EVER.
Okay, I too resist the idea that the Beatles get to win all the prizes. Even though I was a true Beatlemaniac back in the day and still adore my Chosen Beatle (Paul McCartney), I would love to spread the accolades around. But let's face it: with one discordant guitar chord, the Fabs announced that their hit record was going to be better than your hit record, and they were right. They win for sheer economy of effect; they win for the streamlined drive of the track that followed. This song is a relentless, exhilarating ride into the heart of pop and out again. It was the title track of the first LP I ever owned (note: the American version, really a film soundtrack, but I so loved that movie) and I would love to be objective.
But I can't.
But really: One chord and you KNOW what song this is.
And isn't that the definition of a great opening riff?
You all know that riff -- surely one of the Top Ten Greatest Opening Riffs ever. Chances are you even remember the first time you heard it.
But bonus points to you if you first heard it in 1964, either after August 4 in the U.K., or after September 2 in the U.S.
Note that I have opted for a video that simply plays the record, not one of the many great live performances on YouTube. Growing up in Indianapolis, this was what I heard, endless times that fall, on the car radio or coming out of the little transistor radio I hid under my pillow at night after lights out. Oh, sure, I saw them sing it on Shindig and Hullabaloo the next winter, but then the ban happened and the Kinks weren't so easy to catch in the States. It would be another 12 years before I finally got to see the Kinks live. And yes, I believe they did sing "You Really Got Me" that night in London.
It's a song that never grows old.
Granted, when it first came out I was too young, really, to Get It. It disturbed me, in fact. I preferred the cheerier tunes of the Beatles or the haunting romantic sound of the Zombies. (And if the Kinks disturbed little pre-teen me, imagine how I felt about those rowdy Rolling Stones.) It wasn't until "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "Well-Respected Man" that I really became a Kinks fan -- it was their satiric, oh-so British side that won me over. But in retrospect, I believe that it was "You Really Got Me" (and the follow-up "All Day and All of the Night" and "Tired Of Waiting") that first planted the hooks in me.
Out of the box, you're slammed with that guitar lick -- chugging, harsh, insistent -- full of youthful aggression and a refusal to stand down. But in my humble opinion, the genius of this song lies in pairing that dirty Dave Davies lick with brother Ray's pleading, morose vocal. "Girl, you really got me now / You got me so I can't sleep at night" -- he really does sound as if he hasn't slept in weeks.
Despite starting with such a punch, the song continues to build from there -- not in power but in frustration. Key changes shift groaningly upward, and the volume ratchets up (think of how you tend to talk louder when you suspect you're losing an argument). And the melodic line, so chromatic, circles miserably around a few close notes -- what a perfect evocation of someone who's got himself into a corner he can't get out of.
It's a marvel of vitality, urgency, immediacy, and dead-on emotional truth. Drums slap, an electric piano hammers on his head like a woodpecker. Ray's pleas turn to a snarl, then a wild yelp. Yeah, sure he insists, "Don't ever set me free / I always want to be by your side" -- but he does NOT sound happy. (How delicious it was a few months later to hear the sequel "Set Me Free" in which lovesick Ray finally calls for mercy...).
Fifty years ago? Nah. This song could have been released yesterday.
For this shuffle, I made a special curated playlist of songs about freedom and America, for your listening pleasure.
Note that the links (click on song titles) now go to YouTube rather than Amazon. Three reasons: YouTube gives you the full track, not just a sample; none of you ever buy the Amazon tracks so I'm not getting any revenues anyway; and my Best Food Writing book is now being published by a Hachette subsidiary that potentially may get screwed by Amazon. So until YouTube turns out to be a tool of the corporate machine (any day now...)
Because this is what it means to live in America today -- figuring out whether Facebook, Amazon, Google, or Apple is The Man. (Disclaimer: It's definitely not Google because I love Google....)
1. "Time I Took A Holiday" / Nick Lowe
From Dig My Mood (1998)
Oh, yes, let's start things off slouchy and mellow. (Note: loads of chat before they get to the song, but ohmigod do we not love Daryl Hall too?) "It's time I took a holiday / Before I blow my top / I've got to kick my shoes off / Before I drop..." Nick's vocals make it clear he's not relaxed yet (dig the unresolved chords building up urgency), but he's gonna be very soon. "I gotta get some attention / In my baby's arms...." Volunteering for duty, Mr. Lowe!
2. "America" / Simon & Garfunkel
From Bookends (1968)
A seminal song from my angsty teen years -- as I explain here. And while we're on the subject -- is this the same Kathy's as in "Kathy's Song"? Was she pissed off when Carrie Fisher entered the picture?
3. "Fourth of July" / Dave Alvin
From King of California (1994)
America as most folks know it. "Hey, baby, it's the Fourth of July," Dave implores her, adding (a telling detail), "Whatever happened, I apologize." Dammit, it's supposed to be a holiday -- why can't they get in a happy place? I love how he sets this all-too-real scene: "On the stairs I smoke a cigarette alone / Mexican kids are shooting fireworks below." Been there.
4. "The Only Living Boy In New York" / Simon & Garfunkel
From Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)
On a day devoted to independence, here's a song about breaking free. "Tom, get your plane right on time.." What a lonely, existential song this is, and yet how full of hope. "I know that you've been eager to shine now." Bio notes: Tom was Art Garfunkel's name in the early S&G iteration Tom and Jerry, and while he was off in Mexico making a movie (Catch-22) Paul Simon was back in NYC, writing wistful songs about their impending break-up. Maybe it's those plush background ah's, all full of spacey cloud-surfing promise, but somehow I get the idea that Tom's gonna make it out okay. Even though quite possibly Jerry had all the talent....
5. "Summertime" / DJ Jazzy Jeff & Fresh Prince
But hey, July 4th isn't just a holiday -- it's shorthand for THE summer holiday, height of the sizzle and shizzizzle, and let's sample this early rap classic, full of urban heat and real-time celebration. WAY before Will Smith jumped the shark. Fire hydrants shall be opened -- let the tar roof barbecues begin.
6. "Political Science" / Randy Newman
From Sail Away (1972)
Lest you be feeling patriotic on this most American holiday, here's our national Snarkmaster, laying on us a political treatise with seven delicious layers of irony. Really, when Randy Newman gets in gear, he takes no prisoners. "They all hate us anyhow / Let's drop the big one now." This calls for a roundtable of pundits to discuss amongst themselves.
7. "Livin' in America" / Black 47
From Fire of Freedom (1993)
If America is truly a nation of immigrants -- a piety seldom remembered on July 4th -- then let's have a very ambiguous Irish take on what it feels like to live on the edge of American affluence. "In the cold daylight / I feel like shite" -- telling it like it is. Riding subways, minding other people's children, laboring like a navvy -- "Oh, mammy dear, we're all mad over here / Livin' in America."
8. "Disney's America" / Graham Parker
From 12 Haunted Episodes (1993)
It takes a transplanted Englishman like Graham Parker to see America clearly and whole. I can just imagine GP and his wife taking the kids to Williamsburg and having this brilliant vision of how the whole thing went down. Please, if you listen to nothing else, listen to every word of this brilliant song.
9. "Gotta Be Free" / The Kinks
From Lola V Powerman and the Moneygoround Part 1 (1970)
This Americana-tinged track (a hint of Muswell Hillbillies to come?) from Lola V Powerman, Ray Davies' lament about how the music industry had screwed his band. All quite true, of course, but as a listener this is my take-away: Freedom at any price. It was 1970, after all, and whether or not we were legit hippies, we all wanted to be free. And isn't that what Independence Day is all about?
10. "Live Free or Die" / Hayes Carll
From Flowers and Liquor (2007)
While we're in a country frame of mind...a little sneaky satire from Hayes Carll, about a prison inmate's view on freedom. Mayhap you have never thought about why being in a New Hampshire prison is especially tough: "Live free or die / Oh Lord tell me why/ Can't they say "Seat belts fastened" or "Oklahoma is OK"? / "Vacationland" sounds mighty great / Wouldn't mind stamping out "The Garden State." Because we can't all be free, even on July 4th.
On the occasion of the 70th birthday of Ray Davies, once and future frontman of the Kinks....
"See My Friends" / The Kinks
Not only do I love Ray Davies, I also love the many amazing friends I've made over the past decade of following Ray, on-line and in-person and in any other configuration you've got. (You know who you are, Kinksters.)
And so this one seems a particularly apt birthday tribute to The Man Who Makes It All Worthwhile.
It's fascinating, really, when you listen to this track, to realize that Dave Davies isn't playing the sitar; he's just faking it on a regular electric guitar. The shimmery-spangly weirdness of this raga is the same, and in true Kinks fashion, if they only did one psychedelic track it would be a real humdinger. The Kinks were always great musical chameleons, borrowing from music hall here, jazz there, blues here, country music there. Even if psychedelic raga wasn't their signature sound, when they turned their collective hand to it they were bound to nail it.
Not only nail it; nail it. What Ray somehow intuitively grasped was the power of the circular form of the raga, like a poetic villanelle. Sure, the modern Western verse/chorus-verse/chorus-bridge-verse/chorus form implies a progression of thought, but the Eastern form allows us to return over and over to the undeniable truth of loss. So what if we don't end up anywhere different?
Just try singing this song -- it's incredibly powerful. It's almost mandatory to throw your heart into the recurrent phrases and chord shifts. Everything always shifting and morphing -- how psychedelic is that?
Ray say he wrote this in Bombay, listening to fishermen's voices floating over the water. In 1965, everybody who was anybody was going to India in those days for spiritual enlightenment. But in true Ray Davies fashion, at the same time he was emotionally being pulled home to England; those mournful voices triggered him to brood over the death of his sister Rene, who died when he was 13. Rene was the sister who bought him his first guitar; this had to have hit him hard.
"She just went," Ray muses in the second verse; "She just went / Went across the river." Crossing the river, a classic image of death. Though Ray darkly follows that up with "Now she's gone / Wish that I'd gone with her" -- whoa, nothing like a little suicidal note to skew a song. But hey, it's the 60s, we were all into that then.
Ray's no fool; the lyrics are ambiguous enough to let listeners apply it to a romantic break-up ("she is gone / She is gone and now there's now one left / But my friends"), but the emotional reality of this song for me is that of a mourner. That melismatic melody line, keening from one note to another nearby note -- isn't that the wail of grief?
Maybe I hear that especially hard because I'm still mourning my brother, who died in March. But Ray, too, recently lost another sister, Joyce, as a result of which he couldn't make it to his June 12th induction into the US Songwriters Hall of Fame. We're on the same page, Ray. I'd like to think that this song comforts you now as it did then.
Apparently this is a thing now on Facebook -- Throwback Thursday. Everybody's doing it. But I'm not like everybody else, so I'll call mine Reverb Thursday...and try to remember every week to post an updated version of an earlier blog post about a song I love. So why not start with a Kinky favorite? "Holiday Romance" / The Kinks Might as well give in to it.
The thing is, when I regress into non-stop Kinks listening, it's not the hits like "You Really Got Me" and "Waterloo Sunset" -- I'm talking oddities like "Holiday Romance." This is Ray Davies at his music hall best, with corny strings and tap dance rhythms and campy voices and all. It's a novelty song from their Soap Opera album, right smack in the middle of Ray's theatrical period. Even on Soap Opera, a high-concept story about an ordinary man who is transformed into a star (or is the other way around?), "Holiday Romance" is a strange interlude.
It's one of Ray's many escapist fantasies -- a tale of a flirtation at a dowdy seaside resort, with its own weird sort of Edwardian naughty-postcards charm. It's all about trying on other lives, a tried-and-true Ray Davies theme. He lapses fondly into clever Noel Coward-esque patter, with a histrionic upbeat: "I -- had -- a -- brrreak for a week / So I booked my seat / And confirmed my reservation." You can almost imagine his arched eyebrows as he sets the scene "at a quiet little seaside / ho-tel." The indelible way he sings that "ho-tel" -- well, I tell you, that's how we tell a true Kinks fan, if he or she sings that line just so. No other intonation will do.
Our hero arrives at the resort "just in time for the dinner gong / Ding-dong!" If this were a movie, it'd be in black-and-white, but stylishly lit; the staginess of it all almost fits better into a silent movie, or one of those herky-jerky little films you'd watch on a scope at an old-timey amusement arcade.
The shot zooms in on his love interest: "Then I saw Lavinia / Standing at the bottom of the stairs / And I fell for Lavinia / The moment that I saw her standing there." Echo of the early Beatles song? Maybe, but even closer is this song's affinity with Magical Mystery Tour's deliberately nostalgic "Your Mother Should Know." ("Let's all get up and dance to a song / That was a hit before your mother was born..."). The difference is that Ray doesn't bother with the ironic parentheses -- he just projects himself right into that other era and goes for it.
There's something deliciously fey about the mincing way Ray sings, "Lavinia looked so divine / As she walked up to the table to dine / And then Lavinia's eyes met /Mine!" Ah, that falsetto trill at the end is just priceless; Tiny Tim couldn't have done better. With all due histrionics, he wonders, with a suitable flutter in his voice, "Can this be love / Can this be lovey-dove / Or just a holiday romance?" He jumps up to another register to reiterate, "Can this be long-lost love at last / Or is it just a flash in the pan?"
His excitement is so endearingly innocent, an innocence he carries on as they dance ("after cheese and liqueurs) to the hotel band ("We did the foxtrot, samba, and danced through the night"). In later verses, they stroll on the beach and drink lemonade, and he says to himself, with a frisson of delight, "I thought, 'I must be on a winner'." That's probably my favorite line, followed closely by "And my holiday treat was / Com-plete." How he manages to make all this sound so lascivious and yet so quaint is beyond genius.
It's a hazy out-of-time idyll, even for our hero, who knows perfectly well that this will only last for the week. He ties it all up with a lovely comic bow at the end, when, in a Monty-Pythonish female warble, Lavinia pushes him away and trills, "Better stop, / My husband's coming to collect me today." Breaking his rhyme scheme, his syncopation, completely puncturing his balloon, she appears in her own skin for the first time, and Ray lets the mask slip just enough for us to wonder if she's actually a silly cow. But who cares? It's such a tidy ending! With a cascading embroidery of strings, he pans away, waving a handkerchief in farewell. Nothing will ever spoil the perfection of this little romance. No ties, no regrets -- ah, that's what we all need, isn't it?
Okay, it's not the first song I'd play to try to convert somebody to being a Kinks fan. But this is the sort of stuff that made a Kinks fan of me, for better or worse. What a hopeless case I am.
Saturday, February 08, 2014
52 GIRLS
Four Kinks Girls
I know that this is Beatlemania Weekend -- the mass media have decreed it so and won't let us forget it -- but I've already done my Beatles girls, and it's time for the Kinks. (Who also have a 50th anniversary coming up this year, in case you didn't know.) And just to expand your horizons, no "Lola" and no "Victoria" -- the Kinks had plenty of other girl songs without those two obvious hits.
"Rosie Won't You Please Come Home" -- Face to Face (1966)
Track two on the Kinks' fourth album, this was inspired by Ray and Dave Davies' older sister Rose, with whom Ray was particularly close -- as a boy he even lived for a time with her and her husband Arthur (yes, he of the album Arthur) -- before they moved to Australia. And now he misses her something awful.
But in a very un-pop-like twist, we don't get the kid's perspective, only the lonesome family waiting at home. (A year later, the Beatles would steal, er, adapt this idea for "She's Leaving Home.") Though it's sung by Rosie's brother, he ratchets up the emotional blackmail by telling her "Mama don't know where you've been." And I love that line "Your room's clean and no one's in it" -- that's indeed what the mopey brother, still kicking around home, would notice.
Rosie's been gone for two years, "miles across the sea," and Ray -- working in social commentary mode throughout this album -- portrays Rosie's desertion as a bit of social climbing: "Since you joined the upper classes / You don't know us anymore" and "You tried to change your life." But homebody Ray can't even imagine her new life, he's so stuck in his -- "Christmas wasn't quite the same," he muses woefully, and he's willing to bake a cake -- how domestic is that! -- to lure her home.
The chugging guitar, the minor key, the jazzy modulations, the baroque electric piano counterpoint -- it's all so wistful. Will Rosie ever make it home?
"Polly" -- Something Else By the Kinks (1967)
And another runaway! (I sense a theme.)
Now Ray is the omniscient narrator, observing the family drama, and the sound is entirely different -- brittle, ironic, in a major key, with a rat-tat-tat drum and electric piano overlaid with clanging harsh electric guitar. Because now we are in the world of the defiant girl -- "She tried to make the swinging city scene" -- and it's not a kind and gentle world. (A companion song, though it never made it onto the album, would be the B-side of "Dead End Street," "Big Black Smoke.") "And now there's not a place that Polly hasn't been." Hmmm...as in "she really gets around, wink wink"?
This time the story has a happy ending, even if it feels a little too pat -- Polly "breaks the chains" and comes home to her Mama and Papa. Our narrator applauds, naturally, after tut-tutting in every chorus, "I think that pretty Polly should have stayed at home." Of course this is ironic -- or is it? I don't know -- there's always been a recluse side to Ray Davies.
Listening to Ray's campy mincing vocals, I wonder if he was inspired by something theatrical -- possibly Polly Peachum in Brecht-Weill's Threepenny Opera, or at least the 1962 German film version (which would a year later inspire Donovan to write "Lalena" -- did everybody in the 60s steal their ideas from Ray Davies?)
"Monica" -- The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
And speaking of prostitutes . . .
If the Village Green album starts out as a nostalgia-tinged portrait of pastoral innocence, on Side Two that runs completely off the rails. We see the voracious groupie of "Starstruck," the navel-gazing hippie of "Phenomenal Cat," the drunken singer of "All of My Friends Were There," the witch of "Wicked Annabella." Then this sweet Caribbean-tinged samba starts, and we see this streetwalker, ready for her close-up -- "Under a lamplight / Monica stands at midnight."
Ray sings it so earnestly, it seems like poetry -- but practical Monica doesn't buy that hooey. "Morning to moonshine," he croons, then, undercutting his own lyricism, "Monica knows every line. / Don't ever propose / 'Cause Monica knows, you know. / She'll turn up her nose / And say what a fool you are." God forbid he should be such a fool.
And yet he does love her; in the chorus, he's practically baying to the moon with desire: "I, I shall die / I, I shall die / If I should lose Monica." (Love how he uses the Caribbean inflections there.) And in typical Ray Davies symbology, he casts his vote for the night against the day: "You take the sunshine, / I'll take the nightly shadows. / 'Cause everyone knows / That Monica glows at night." Sorry, Monica, but that's not just a line -- it's sheer poetry.
Add this to the short list of sincere love songs from Ray Davies -- it may not be autobiographical, but it sure does ring true.
"Sweet Lady Genevieve" -- Preservation Pt. 1 (1973)
Did someone say sincere love songs?
Okay, yes, Ray is playing a character here -- the Tramp, who wanders in and out of the Preservation social satire, a ragged misfit commenting on the political struggle between good, evil, and hypocrisy. The theatrical flutter in his vocals, the Muswell Hillbillies-style country wheeze, should be distancing devices.
But I don't think so. He's not trying to cover up that he's been an asshole in the past -- "Once under a scarlet sky / I told you never ending lies, / But they were the words of a drunken vagabond / Who knew very well he would break your heart before long." That "scarlet sky" may be alliterative, but it's also a mark of shame. He admits to drunkenness, to lying, to hypocrisy. In every verse he confesses more -- he's been impetuous, he used her, her led her on, he was being sly, he was a rogue. He's beating himself up with all this honesty, the words piling up in a rush. I feel a glint of true soul-searching there on the part of Raymond Douglas Davies.
And that's all in the past, he vows. "This time I'll give you some security / And I won't make promises I can't keep" -- surely someone who recognizes his faults so well can reform, right? Weeelll...
True, this song tells us more about him than about Genevieve. Only toward the end does he describe her shyness, her innocence, and then only to make excuses for himself. (The back-sliding has already begun.) Still, we know she's sweet and somewhat refined -- a "lady" (I assume he calls her Genevieve for the Arthurian ring to it) -- and the earnestness of those drawn-out refrains "Sweet Lady Genevieve" is convincing.
Notice how he drops the word-crammed syncopation for simple straightforward rock as he woos her in the bridge: "Let me rock you, hold you / Take you in my arms. / Forgive me, please / Smile away all your sadness, put your trust in me." (Love how the second time around, he flips the pronouns to put the burden on her: "oh love me, please / Take me in your arms.") That sadness in her smile really seems to get to him. He wishes he could be better, just for her. Can he?
Well, I won't spoil the ending for you. . . .
31 DOWN, 21 TO GO
Friday, May 31, 2013
"I'm Not Like Everybody Else" / Dave Davies
I can't BELIEVE I haven't written before about this most iconic Kinks song. It's been colonizing my earwaves ever since Monday night, when I was thrilled to see Dave Davies play his first US solo show in ten years at the City Winery. Okay, so he's not quite the unbridled raver anymore that he was in his prime -- but which of us is?
And despite the public feuding between the Davies brothers, Dave didn't try to distance himself from his Kinksian past -- he charged lustily into the classics like "You Really Got Me," "Till the End of the Day," and "All Day and All of the Night," among others. "Death of a Clown," of course, the song Ray wrote for Dave (to be honest, Dave probably co-wrote it, not that Ray would ever give him credit). I still remember Dave snarling at Ray when he was introduced as "Dave 'Death of a Clown' Davies" -- who but a brother could turn your solo hit into an insult?
Ray also says he wrote "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" for Dave, often introducing it at shows by saying -- fondly, in fact -- "You know, Dave really is not like everybody else." Kinks fans have adopted this as their mantra, proudly asserting their misfit status, and we often use it to describe Ray as well. But watching Dave sing it the other night brought home to me that he is the original rebel that the song celebrates.
Written somewhere at the end of 1965, recorded in February 1966, and released as the B-side of "Sunny Afternoon" (June 1966 in the UK, July in the US), "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" started off as a young man's howl of dissent, with lines like "I won't take all that they hand me down," "I'm not gonna take it all lying down," and "I don't want to live my life like everybody else." (Live, as I recall, the Davies brothers both throw in lines like "I don't want to get a job like everybody else" as well.) Fist pumping in the air, Kinks fans love to sing along on the defiant call-and-response refrains, trading shouts of "Like everybody else" with Dave (or Ray, whichever you're watching).
The song's a little more complex than that, of course. It dials down to a surprisingly tender second verse: "But darling, you know that I love you true, / Do anything that you want me to, / Confess all my sins like you want me to," until he reluctantly pushes back: "But there's one thing that I will say to you." (Ominous retard, beat, beat, then kick it out!) "I'm not like everybody else, I'm not like everybody else..."
Those pesky women, always trying to tame a wild man! In the last verse, he's even more willful, rejecting her efforts to get him to settle down, stop all his running around, et cetera. It's a brilliant sleight of hand, a love song that's at the same time a cry for freedom. Compare this to the one-note snottiness of the Rolling Stones' "Get Off My Cloud" (not a bad song on its own terms, but still) -- the emotional depth of this one is light-years beyond.
Of course, we fans love to sing it out lustily, and we love the Davies brothers for continuing to keep it in their set lists. The young man's howl of defiance is now an older man's rage against the dying of the light -- and you know, it's even more moving in that context. Dave Davies was nearly sidelined forever by a stroke in 2004, but he taught himself to walk, talk, sing, and play the guitar all over again. He's back, and he's still busting out of the bonds of convention. God save Dave Davies.
Monday, May 13, 2013
"Sunny Afternoon" / The Kinks
By chance it IS a sunny day today, although a little chilly for May. Still, that's not why this song popped into my head and will not be budged.
It began a few days when, someone asked me to list my top ten favorite Kinks songs. I realized that "Sunny Afternoon" is perhaps their only genuinely big hit (#2 in the UK, #14 in the US) that still makes the list for me, no matter how much it's overplayed. Then today, posting This Day In Kinks History on the Kinks fan forum, I discovered that today is the anniversary of the day, 47 years ago, when the Kinks went into Pye Records Studio #2 to record this song.
Or rather, re-record it -- in 1966 Ray Davies was just beginning to become the studio perfectionist who would later hold up their classic album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society for months, eventually releasing it by chance on the same day as the Beatles' White Album. Ah, the history of the Kinks is full of such disastrous decisions.
But in the case of "Sunny Afternoon," Ray knew what he was doing. He brought in session keyboard whiz Nicky Hopkins to add some plinky good-time sounds, played on a Hohner Melodica. Those iconic pub-sing-along backing vocals were dubbed in by Ray, Dave, and Ray's wife Rasa. "'Sunny Afternoon' was made very quickly, in the morning," Ray recalled in a Rolling Stone interview. "It was one of our most atmospheric sessions. . . . Pete [Quaife] went off and started playing funny little classical things on the bass, more like a lead guitar, and Nicky Hopkins was playing 'Liza'. . . .Little things like that helped us get in the feeling of the song."
At the time, Ray recalled, he was listening almost obsessively to two other artists -- Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan (now there's an odd couple for you). I can hear Sinatra's impact in the campy croon Ray puts on; Dylan probably accounts for the sly satire on Britain's Wilson-era tax policies. (George Harrison's "Taxman" was written the same year.) But as always, the whole is so much more than the sum of all these parts. And the minute that great bass line begins -- two notes plopped wearily on each step of a descending minor scale -- I'm hooked.
Just watch the Kinks cavorting in the snow. But, wait -- I thought this was supposed to be a sunny afternoon? Well, the song was a summer hit, but the Kinks didn't make this video until the following February, for a Belgian TV show. The contrast just underlines the delightful irony of this song.
"The tax man's taken all my dough / And left me in my stately home..." Beneath the satire, of course, Ray Davies was as always working out his personal issues. In 1966, Ray was up to his eyeballs in lawsuits to recover withheld royalties from music publishers and former managers; no wonder he felt a stab of sympathy for the property-rich, cash-poor singer of "Sunny Afternoon." And if that felt like a betrayal of his working-class roots, even more need to work out his anxieties in satire.
No wonder Ray had suffered a nervous breakdown only two months earlier, which explains the wail of "Save me save me save me from this squeeee--eeze" in the bridge. Nothing like turning your own existential despair into comedy. And in the second bridge, he changes it to "Help me help me help me sail awaa-aay" -- the trademark Kinksian longing for escape. When conflicts and pressures pile up, introvert geniuses like Ray Davies often long just to run away.
I suspect there's another autobiographical hint in verse two: "My girlfriend's run off with my car / And gone back to her ma and pa / Telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty"? It would be seven more years before Rasa Davies would finally move out, taking their two daughters, but there's already probably a sting of truth to this detail. I picture Rasa in the studio, listening to Ray deliver those lines with a mocking flutter in his voice, and wince on her behalf.
So here we've got a song about lazing on a sunny afternoon, living a life of luxury -- it should be a mellow blissed-out song. Instead, it's built on a minor-key bass riff, with jerky rhythms and ping-ponging melodic intervals. This guy is at the end of his rope, moaning and miserable. In a way, this is the comic bookend of "Shangri-La" -- now that he's found his paradise, his reward for working so hard, why the hell is he unhappier than ever?
And then here's the genius part. Ray Davies managed to pack all of that psychological complexity in this song -- and STILL made it one of the most delicious singalongs ever. The tongue-in-cheek humor, the bouncy arrangement, and the cheery harmonies turn it all into tailor-made for hoisting a pint. The Kinks may be dancing in the snow, the tax exile weeping in his beer, but all I want to do is croon along with a grin on my face. Give Ray Davies life's lemons, and he'll turn them into the most delicious lemonade ever.
