"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Kevblog Archives
How I Discovered the Kinks
Posted 1:26 a.m., April 18, 2004
This is a reprint of a column I wrote for The Kinks Web Site on Sept. 8, 1998. I decided to re-run it here, because I like it, and because everyone eventually gets sick of politics (or ought to). In scouring the Kinks' site tonight, I learned the terrible news that lead Kink Ray Davies was shot in the thigh during an attempted robbery in New Orleans in January, and now he's back in the hospital because he's not healing properly. Get better, Ray!
Let's see, this story begins for me in the summer of 1977.
I had just gotten my first 8-track machine, I was 12 years old. Punk was happening, but I frankly found it a little frightening -- which was how the media coverage of the movement at the time wished for me to perceive it. So I paid it no mind, gave it no place in my sacred 8-track deck.
Little did I know how short a life-span this tape-eating machine would have; had I been aware I might not have bought nearly as many of those clunky infernal cartridges as I did, and I bought plenty of them. Still, I can thank my 8-track for introducing me to the Kinks.
As a pre-teen, I remained utterly malleable as far as music was concerned. I already owned tapes of "The Monkees Greatest Hits," Three Dog Nights' "Golden Biscuits" and "The Beatles 1967-70." I may have also owned McCartney's "Band on the Run," I don't remember, and perhaps even a Helen Reddy tape. But this stuff lost its steam quickly, and I became hungry for more. My cousin up the street obliged me by giving me a tape he hated, bearing a title something like "Big British Hits of the '60s."
It was a compilation that featured a wild assortment of material, from the Honeycombs' "Have I the Right," (great guitar) the Bee Gees' "Gotta Get a Message to You," The Crazy World of Arthur Brown's "Fire" and the Tornadoes' "Telstar." It even had a couple of buried chestnuts by later superstars (Rod Stewart, "Little Miss Understood" and Elton John, "Lady Samantha.") But the prize was a storming volcano of a song by the Kinks called "All Day and All of the Night," a lovable monstrosity that seemed loud when played at any volume. The Kinks taught me the true meaning of rock and roll with this buzzsaw of a tune.
In my little hometown in Northern Wisconsin, there was no such thing as a record store, and I had yet to discover the RCA Music Club. New music was impossible to come by, but one commodity that was available was Creem Magazine, which I regularly pilfered from the local five and dime (more punk than I knew was I). In 1979, a writer named J. Kordosh wrote a longish piece that for me was to become Holy Writ, a fascinating history of the Kinks. It contained a paragraph length summary of all of their albums to that time, up to "Low Budget."
So it was that I discovered the content and relative merits of the Kinks' full discography long before I heard all but one of their actual songs. (This was in the days when I still believed that "Tired of Waiting for You" -- the only Kinks song played on local radio in those days -- was in fact a Beach Boys song.)
It was Kordosh (who Dave Davies once referred to as "a fucking disease, BTW) who got me slavering over those great Kinks albums from "Kontroversy" through "Muswell Hillbillies" long before I would ever locate copies of them. Eventually, I found a copy of the Kinks' original 1967 "Greatest Hits" package (what the hell is "Wait til the Summer Comes Along" doing there?), and as a measure of my great devotion to my best friend at the time, I gave him the LP for his birthday. But he made a tape for me, so I now could get a better measure of what our boys were about. And I was only further transfixed.
The year 1982 finally rolled around, and by then I had managed to collect "Lola vs. Powerman," "Muswell Hillbillies," and the 1980 live album "One for the Road," all of which I played for helpless listening victims without mercy, at great volume. I actually used to run around with a tabletop Sony cassette machine playing these things like an evangelist trying to convert the unwashed masses (who I still maintain were tragically devoid of taste; Loverboy owned their sad souls).
The Kinks traveled to the Twin Cities (can't remember if it was Minneapolis or St. Paul) to grace our shores with their distinctive British presence, and I bought a ticket as fast I could locate one. It was only my third concert, after Cheap Trick and Neil Young, and I was nearly dying from anticipation.
The lads didn't disappoint. The show they put on that night, highlighted by a swooning version of "Celluloid Heroes" and the introduction of the not-yet-released single "Come Dancing," was probably still the best concert I've ever been to, and in subsequent years I've seen many (including The Trashmen and Buddy Guy just yesterday, fooking deadly). Emotionally, musically, every which way, the Kinks ruled my life that night, and they glowed within for weeks afterward. One complaint: I wished Ray would get over that Day-o thing, and just bloody play "Lola."
The expansion of my Kink-iness went into limbo for a period of months after that, though I did pick up both "Give the People What They Want" and "State of Confusion" immediately upon release. But collection of further material was impossible in the great forests of Northern Wisconsin.
That had to wait until I went off to college, where on the first day in my very wing of my very dormitory there lived a fellow -- subsequently dubbed "Kinko" -- who owned almost the full Holy Grail, every Kinks album from "Face to Face" (1966) to "Arthur" (1969). We became fast music and drinking pals, and my involvement with the Kinks passed from a mere dating courtship to a full-on musical and ideological marriage.
Today I can report that the Kinks and I remain happily married, at least this is so within the musical synapses of my brain. While I have found little use for their new music after 1988 or so, that is of little consequence. The Kinks, honorably, have found it's better to fade away than to burn out. And anyway, live at least, these fellows have plenty to offer.
I have now seen Ray and Dave live on separate stages -- which I think is a pretty good education in how these fellows function as a unit, Dave being the insistent, raving bruiser and Ray the thoughtful, melancholy, sexually befuddled elder statesman. My love affair with their work will probably continue on until I no longer do.
And what other group of musicians can lay claim to that kind of permanent devotion?
