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Somewhere along the line Ray began to write songs. At first his
lyrics were the conventional boy-girl stuff of the period (though
laced with a rather unambiguous sexuality that was perfectly mated
to the sonic blitz that the band was laying down), but he soon
began to get itchy for something more serious. What he eventually
came up with, "A Well-Respected
Man", was a clever merger of his R&B roots with
his other major passion, the music-hall style, it was to serve
as a model for an entire school of British rock. Lyrically it
was vaguely Dylanseque, put purely Davies' own were the song's
wit and its particular kind of contempt of middle class values.
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From there Ray took off, turning out an uninterrupted series
of brilliant singles and albums on subjects as diverse as steam
powered trains, session men, lower-class drug addiction, and
the setting of the sun on the British empire. He became a sort
of rock n' roll reporter, filling his songs with telling little
character studies - as in "David Watts,"
in which he neatly skewers both the eternal golden schoolboy
and his own jealousy of him. And he couched it all in a verbal
style of almost Gilbertian cleverness: "We are the Custard Pie
Appreciation Consortium," he declares in one number. As Mendelsohn
( a much hated Kinks critic) observed:
"He was the first English Rock
essayist to blow the whistle on his society's shoddy execution
of its postwar dream of a classless society. He has been rock-in-general's
most loyal advocate of the little working people."
And more:
"Nearly all
that he has written, of course, he has written of with incisive
perception, colossal wit and profound humanism".
Amen
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Since Ray is also perhaps the greatest rock n' roll singer who
ever lived (!?), the possessor of dozens of different voices
that run the gamut from Howlin' Wolf to Marlène Dietrich,
this lyric genius should by rights have served to put the Kinks
up there with the major mythic figures of the past decades.
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No such luck however. In fact, sometimes
1966, just as they were beginning to perfect the new approach, their
work died an absolutely unheralded death in the USA, and it stayed there
buried until late 1969. Granted, the American audience often had its
head in the sand, but at least some of the fault is Ray's; he has obstinately
refused to be fashionable - he claims, for instance that he didn't even
listen to Sgt. Pepper until 2 years
later after it came out, and I believe him.
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This almost masochistic streak has run through much of his recent
work, which has become increasingly autobiographical: the post-Arthur
Kinks songs are more often than not concerned with Ray's personal
psychological problems as they are with the plight of the working
class hero. Ironically, as the Davies persona has emerged, the group
has begun to sell records again. Perhaps
time has simply caught up with them; these days, the sexual confusion
of the songs (Lola, you recall,
"walked like a woman and talked like a man")
and Ray's on-stage antics were, thanks to Alice Cooper &Co., not
quite so problematical. Or perhaps, more disturbingly, it's the old
Judy Garland fan syndrome: the perverse appeal of watching someone
of immense talent and sensitivity fall apart before your eyes.
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After all, Ray has gone so far to set
his own suicide note to music, and the counterculture has amply
demonstrated a taste for such ghoulishness. Or more likely,
it's just that the music the band has made since Ray allowed
himself the luxury of public self-analysis is in some ways more
brilliant than ever. I find myself playing Muswell Hillbillies
quite as often as Face to Face or something else, which leads
me to think that Ray as an individual is every bit as interesting
as Wicked Annabella, or Dandy, or Pretty Polly or any other
creations of the Davies fancy.
For whatever reasons,
people are aware of the Kinks now;their albums get respectable
FM airplay, their concerts are sellouts, and even Andy Warhol's
Interview has courted them - a far cry from the days when you
had to hunt around to find a copy of "Autumn Almanac"
or "Mr. Pleasant." Even if they started playing up to
their audience to extend that success (as witness the frequent
intrusions of bisexual chic on Everybody's in showbiz),
I for one do not begrudge it to them. I wouldn't cast my pearls
before swine either. It's a shame there aren't enough rock n'
roll fans of pure and noble breed to keep the Kinks in the pearl
business!
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