Review: The Kinks - Kinda Kinks (1965)

Tracks: 1) Look For Me Baby; 2) Got My Feet On The Ground; 3) Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ’Bout That Girl; 4) Naggin’ Woman; 5) Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight; 6) Tired Of Waiting For You; 7) Dancing In The Street; 8) Don’t Ever Change; 9) Come On Now; 10) So Long; 11) You Shouldn’t Be Sad; 12) Something Better Beginning; 13*) Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy; 14*) Who’ll Be The Next In Line; 15*) Set Me Free; 16*) I Need You; 17*) See My Friends; 18*) Never Met A Girl Like You Before; 19*) Wait Till Summer Comes Along; 20*) Such A Shame; 21*) A Well Respected Man; 22*) Don’t You Fret; 23*) I Go To Sleep (demo).

REVIEW

1965 started out on a really high note for the Davies brothers: January 15 saw the release of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, which is, in a number of ways, one of the most significant songs in their entire career. For one thing, it became their biggest ever chart hit in the US (yes, even higher than ‘Lola’!), completing the hit trilogy with ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ and reliably securing a place for the Kinks in the rock history annals of the American critical establishment — one might argue that if not for the popularity of those early recordings in 1964-65, the latter might have easily slept out the already less-than-cool Britishness of ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ at the dawn of the new Psychedelic Age.

More importantly, it was just a new type of song — if we stretch out the application of the term for a mile, we might just as well call it the first «power ballad» ever written. While it began life on the umbilical cord of that soft, colorful, jangly arpeggiated lead line from the folk-pop circuit, it did not really deliver until brother Dave came up with the idea of adding (almost) the exact same hard-rocking, distorted sound of ʽYou Really Got Meʼ for counterpoint — and it is all but impossible to properly describe to which extent the song is elevated by the added boost of the grumbly "da-doom, da-doom" G-F riff. Basically, it combines the best of both worlds available to pop musicians at the time, and in a way that makes perfect sense: after all, why can’t a song be «soft» and «hard» at the same time? He loves her — that’s soft — but she just won’t commit — that’s hard — and there you go, simple as that.

You can see how rudimentary the pop writing approach still remains in some matters: for one thing, the lyrics, endlessly recycling the same chorus, the same single verse and the same single bridge, are even less advanced than the Beatles’ contemporary exercises in teen-pop (though they do fit in well with the musical mood). For another, the song delivers all of its goods exactly one minute into the proceedings, with no additional ideas for extra melodic and harmonic overlays (again, the Beatles were miles ahead here at the time, having already learned the lesson that if you end the song exactly the same way that you began it, you have not properly fulfilled your duty). Yet in that one minute, they manage at least two major feats — first, the phenomenal soft-hard juxtaposition, and then the declaration of one of the Sixties’ most beautiful musical instruments, namely Ray Davies’ breathy-nasal falsetto on the "it’s your life..." bit, which I personally will take over Paul McCartney’s and Brian Wilson’s upper ranges any time of day, given how it adds a whole extra dimension to the predictable «tenderness» effect. Which dimension? I’m actually still trying to understand that. It’s either a little bit of unsettling irony, or a touch of grim melancholy, or maybe both. When Paul and Brian go for falsetto, it’s like "you’re so beautiful, girl". When Ray does the same, it’s like "you’re so beautiful, girl, but the universe is expanding and we’re all gonna die". I don’t know about you, but to me this automatically makes Ray the coolest of the three.

For the record, the single also clearly established, once and for all, who of the two brothers would be riding first class and who would be taking coach: Brother Dave clearly takes the main responsibility for the B-side ‘Come On Now’, which, in contrast to the A-side, is a fun, but one-dimensional pop-rocker which, furthermore, commits the travesty of outright stealing the riff to the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ for its primary groove. Additionally, Brother Ray is clearly waiting for his Special One to come into his life, whereas Brother Dave is just waiting for some broad to accompany him to an evening dance party while she is too busy fixing her face... hey, what do you mean «it’s the same broad»? Oh, right, they’re time traveling and singing about Patti Boyd. It’s the frickin’ distance from ‘Layla’ to ‘Wonderful Tonight’ all over again. Anyway, good song, but nowhere near the monumentality of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, of course. (Might I also add that the backing vocals sound silly — it’s as if Dave were a Mafia guy and all of his henchmen were trying to break into the lady’s boudoir).

The success of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’ clearly showed that the group would go way beyond the one-hit wonder status: after all, ‘All Day And All Of The Night’ did milk precisely the same formula as ‘You Really Got Me’, but ‘Tired Of Waiting’ was already something significantly different — still linked to the previous hits with the same stylistic elements, but taking a distinct side turn and promising future creative growth without compromising quality. Naturally, this meant going back into the studio and making another album, and this time, actually going all the way trying to make it a proper album, rather than just a lousy collection of filler, hastily assembled around a hit single.

For all the progress that Ray and Dave Davies brought to the world during their peak period of 1966–1969, it can be very seriously argued that no other gap between any two of their classic al­bums required taking such a giant leap forward as the distance between Kinks and Kinda Kinks — and I know this is hard to believe just by looking at the uninventiveness of the actual album titles, but give them some slack for popularizing the letter K back in the day (I mean, why should the Klan be taking all that glory instead?). Even if there are relatively few truly timeless classics on Kinda Kinks that could match the power of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, what is important is that it finally sounds, on the whole, like a proper Kinks album, one where the band consistently comes into its own and nobody else’s style. This is, of course, a subjective judgement, but at least it is objectively backed by the fact that 10 out of 12 songs here are credited to Davies (usually to Ray) — compared to just five on the first LP — reflecting an exceptionally fast rate at which Ray was beginning to turn into one of Britain’s finest young songwriters, a fact that he himself could hardly have predicted even one year earlier.

Next to an entire load of botched, poorly thought out covers on Kinks, easily the only atavistic reminder of their crummy fumbling from yesteryear is ʽNaggin’ Womanʼ, rather an odd choice for a cover at this moment — originally recorded by little-known vocalist and harmonica player from Mississippi by the name of Jimmy Anderson, which even in its original incarnation sounded like an average wannabe-Jimmy Reed number. For his delivery, brother Dave once again selects his obnoxiously exaggerated nasal voice and pushes it so much further than either Jimmy Reed or Jimmy Anderson that I can almost literally smell bits of drunk vomit in the air, and it is not so much «authentic and gritty» as «stupid and nasty». I do appreciate Dave cleverly reproducing the proverbial «nagginess» of the woman in question with minimalistic, whiny guitar licks (as opposed to Anderson’s harmonica in the original), but that instrumental break is probably the only salvageable component of the entire disaster. Leave that back in 1964, will you, please?

On the other hand, they fare surprisingly better with upbeat Motown material, provided it has been properly Kinkified: Ray sings Martha & the Vandellas’ ʽDancing In The Streetʼ with plenty of idealistic-romantic aplomb, but it is the raw, swirling, scratchy rhythm guitar playing which makes the song — lacking either the budget or the experience to emulate the original’s glorious brass arrangement, the Kinks put everything they have into the guitar groove, and make it into a kick-ass sample of young British rhythm’n’blues. (I have no idea why the band’s biographers keep calling the cover bland and colorless: maybe they think that Ray’s nasal voice cannot convey the jubilant enthusiasm of the original, and they may have something there, but the tough rhythmic groove comes out as far more «street-wise» than Motown’s glossy original. If you want a truly bland cover of the song, check out the Tages’ version, which just hangs on one chord from start to finish).

Turning now to original material, it is true that, next to the ground-shattering breakthrough of ʽTired Of Waiting For Youʼ, the rest of Kinda Kinks may feel lackluster in comparison — and, well, it probably is, considering how much Ray used to berate producer Shel Talmy for forcing the band to record it in a mere two weeks’ time (for comparison, the Beatles would use the results from seven different sessions, extended over a three-month period, to put together their second LP). Even so, most of the originals still represent tiny slices of catchy, emotionally resonant pop-rock with all sorts of subtle twists, particularly the lengthy stretch on Side B which begins with ʽDon’t Ever Changeʼ.

Of the two truly ori­ginal compositions on Kinks, it is the ʽStop Your Sobbingʼ model rather than ʽYou Really Got Meʼ that Ray keeps following — maybe not exactly inventing the formula of «consolation-pop», but trying his best to associate it with his own name, once and for ever. Under his direction, the Kinks are building up their own little «safe space» on the market, a sort of musical shelter for all those young girls who, after having their hearts burned down by the Beatles and their other organs soaked wet by the Stones, could find peace and relaxation by gently weeping on Uncle Ray’s comforting shoulder (whether Uncle Ray had his own ulterior creepy motives staked out or not is an open question, but at least he was freshly married at the time). Although most of these songs are romantic, they are perhaps even less sexual in nature than those of the Beach Boys — not to mention the complete lack of any traces of misogyny or the slightest disrespect towards representatives of the opposite sex, so common among young British rhythm’n’blues players at the time (not least because they were following the role models of African-American bluesmen — there’s your ‘Naggin’ Woman’ for you).

Mr. Ray Davies ain’t no Jimmy Reed, though, nor is he John Lennon, Mick Jagger, or Eric Burdon. Instead of telling her that "it’s all over now", or that "you can’t do that", or that he’s "gonna send her back to Walker", or even that this happened once before when he came to her door, etc. etc., all Mr. Ray wants to do is to sincerely wish her a "don’t you ever change now, always stay the same now", to tell her that she "shouldn’t be sad", and to go on record with the confession that the only thing that holds him still is the memory of her sweet caress. In fact, if it wasn’t for the memory of her sweet caress, he would have probably asked for political asylum in the USSR while traveling through Sheremetyevo Airport in 1966 — after all, he’s got no time for Muswell town any more...

Exceptions still exist: the excruciatingly long-titled ʽNothing In The World Can Stop Me From Worryin’ Bout That Girlʼ does tell the story of a nasty two-timer who "just kept on lying" to poor Mr. Ray. But even with this kind of hurt, all it leads to is quiet heartbreak rather than anger — there isn’t a single insult in the lyrics, and the song, a minimalistic piece of blues-pop whose acoustic riff incidentally predicts the guitar melody of Simon & Garfunkel’s ʽMrs. Robinsonʼ three years later, is quiet, sulky, and sad, rather than vindictive. And on ʽSomething Better Beginningʼ, a song written so obviously in the style of the Ronettes that it simply screams for a wall-of-sound production which Shel Talmy cannot grant it, Ray is clearly singing about a break-up — but he never ever mentions who was the culprit, and the song on the whole is all about optimism and faith in, well, something better beginning. Note the little lyrical nod to the Beatles — "then I saw you standing there..." — which is most likely intentional, as Ray intends to emphasize the psychological distance between himself and Paul McCartney. The latter — silly naïve boy that he is — seems to think that "now I’ll never dance with another" (yeah, go tell that to Jane Asher), while the former — wise old guy that he is — is all about thinking ahead: "Each step that I took with you / Brought one thing closer to my mind / Is this the start of another heartbreaker?.."

It is precisely these little things which make all these tunes, as simplistic as they are on the surface, sound believable — almost from the very start, Ray is not interested in simply churning out one com­mercial, formulaic pop song after another; instead (somewhat similar to the role of the Shangri-Las across the Atlantic), his purpose is to think up short stories of realistic human relationships, and although at this point he was not yet fully consistent (stuff like ʽWonder Where My Baby Is Tonightʼ, unimaginatively attached to the riff of ‘Can I Get A Witness’ and chucked over to brother Dave to sing, is still fairly cartoonish), most of these boy-meets-girl stories are as true to life as the band’s soon-to-follow social miniatures of everyday routine in the UK.

From a pure melodic standpoint, Ray’s compositions for now are still arguably weaker than contemporary Beatles stuff, but already at this point the musical avatar of Ray Davies comes across as a living and breathing person asking for our empathy, whereas the true-to-life, psychologically believable personal sides of Lennon and McCartney would still take a couple years to truly emerge from under all the artistic craft (in a way, one might argue that it was not until the Beatles began to disintegrate as a group, around the time of The White Album, that their output became notably less theatrical in nature). It is from that point, for instance, that one should evaluate Ray’s many scathing criticisms of the Beatles in 1965-66 (see his notoriously devastating review of Revolver, for instance) — while jealousy was certainly one of the factors, the defining one was unquestionably the huge gap between the two bands’ musical ethics and aesthetics. Even at this dawning period of the British Invasion, Ray Davies could never have written ‘If I Fell’, and John Lennon could never have written ‘Nothing In This World Can Stop Me From Putting Together Such Long Song Titles’.

That said, for all the goodness contained within Kinda Kinks, it was a rushed LP, and the Kinks were still essentially a singles-oriented band at this point. Consequently, no other album in the band’s entire catalog benefited greater from the arrival of the CD era, when it became possible to expand it by including all of their singles released in between Kinda Kinks and The Kink Kontroversy — and so bear with me just a tad longer while I allow myself to drool a bit over the best of those, or maybe even a bit longer than just a bit, given that the bonus tracks almost double the length of the album, and almost each of those is a tiny gem in its own rights.

We begin on a relatively humble note with the double punch of ʽEverybody’s Gonna Be Happyʼ and ‘Who’ll Be The Next In Line’, both of them energetic pop rockers but not quite what the public was expecting from the Kinks in March ’65, because, come on, where is that ‘You Really Got Me’-style crunch? Have the boys run out of needles to stick in amplifiers? Not even Mick Avory, with some great proto-funky drum fills on ‘Be Happy’, could turn the tide of dissatisfaction. Honestly, while both songs are fun and catchy, they are also not particularly «Kinky» — each of them could be performed by the likes of, say, Cliff Bennett or any such second-rate British rhythm’n’blues performer.

But the great run is back after this relative setback. ʽSet Me Freeʼ brings back, loud and proud, the powerful crunch of the two-chord riff (G-Am instead of G-F this time), and while on the surface it seems to bring back the formula of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, emotionally it is completely different. It is, in fact, an emotional sequel to ‘Tired Of Waiting’: now that it finally becomes clear that the girl is going to keep the poor guy hanging for the rest of his life, he implores her to break the spell — which is, of course, impossible. If the G-F riff was that of heavy brooding, then the G-Am riff is the one of rattling chains dragging across the floor (and, in a rare case of modern technology improving upon an old classic, I think that the live performance of the song on the band’s To The Bone album in 1996, with Dave adding wholesale grungy distortion to the original riff, conveys that effect even more sharply). Even more effective is Ray’s singing — that moment when his choked, strained, almost glottalic plea of "set-me-free little girl" pushes high into the falsetto range of "...you can DO it if you TRY..." is a bitch to properly pull off, one of the greatest vocal tricks of his entire career and the #1 source of magic for this particular song, and by «magic» I do indeed mean «I have not the slightest idea why it moves me so much, but the doctor said it makes my heart jump, my eyes tear up, and my heart to go out there and bring a five-ton package of peace, love, and understanding for humanity». One of those field days for biochemistry, I guess.

The anti-climactic news is that the B-side of that single was ‘I Need You’, which not only shares its simplistic title with a better George Harrison song from the same year, but is actually a third stylistic rewrite of ‘You Really Got Me’; alas, unlike ‘Set Me Free’, it does not push its immediate stylistic predecessor to further heights and depths, but merely walks the same walk one more time. Ironically, the opening power chords feature a bit of stinging feedback which could have made the waves, had it been released half a year earlier; as it is, the trick seems to be fully derivative of the Beatles’ use of feedback at the start of ‘I Feel Fine’, further contributing to the humiliation of the song. Fortunately, a B-side is a B-side — if it’s good, you can quickly retitle it as «the second A-side», and if it’s not, you can quickly forget it ever existed in the first place.

The next single, while (on a personal level) not nearly as gut-wrenching as ‘Set Me Free’, was far more important for the history of rock music: ʽSee My Friendsʼ — one of the first pop songs to incorporate genuine Indian motives. Unfortunately, the Yardbirds beat Ray by a couple of weeks with their own ‘Heart Full Of Soul’, but you could at least argue that in spirit, the droning, meditative nature of ‘See My Friends’ brings it closer to the conception of a rāga than the Yardbirds song (an opinion shared by Peter Lavezzoli in his fairly monumental exploration, Dawn Of Indian Music In The West). Ironically, even though the Yardbirds did record a sitar version, neither of the two bands ended up having a sitar on the commercial recording, which still gives the final honours to the Beatles on ‘Norwegian Wood’.

Allegedly, the song was inspired by the band’s brief stopover in Bombay on their way to Australia, and Ray would later claim that its lyrics were a tribute to the death (in 1957) of his elder sister Rene — which, not coincidentally, makes ‘See My Friends’ deeply innovative for the band not only in terms of music, but also in terms of lyrical subject, going way beyond the boy-meets-girl theme. Subtly conforming to the age-old folk tradition, the droning lament depersonalizes the singer, with Ray relying on multi-tracked vocals, wedged fairly deep inside the mix and making him sound a wee bit closer to an actual group of chanting Indian fishermen than he might even have intended to. Small surprise that critics did not exactly get the song at the time, and the public bought fewer copies of the single than was expected (though it still reached #10 on the charts) — the whole thing was way too far ahead of the kind of sound that grabbed the public’s attention at the time.

Heck, even today, when listening to this stuff, I am not sure of what my exact emotional reaction is; maybe it is actually close to what I am feeling when putting on a Ravi Shankar piece — which would, in its own way, already serve as a major compliment to Ray Davies, though I have to warn you that I have not the faintest idea of what that feeling is. Pacification? Humility? Self-loss in the almighty Brahman? Let’s just admit that it was, and still is, a very cool way to sing about death (certainly a much less pretentious one than ‘Great Gig In The Sky’), and leave it at that. Also, the B-side sucks: ‘Never Met A Girl Like You Before’ starts out like it’s going to be a re-write of ‘Tired Of Waiting For You’, then quickly becomes a rip-off of the Beatles’ ‘She’s A Woman’, with throwaway lyrics and retarded vocal tones. But I guess if they’d made it the A-side instead, the single might have charted higher than it did.

Finally, the last single on this run is yet another important milestone: ‘A Well Respected Man’ is chronologically the very first in a long and honorable series of Ray Davies’ social portraits — it might not be the most melodically polished of them all, and, in fact, its strolling rhythm would eventually be recycled for superior creations like ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’ and ‘Dandy’, but a first is a first, and it allows us to put an approximate date (September ’65) to the emergence of Ray Davies as the Charles Dickens of Sixties’ pop-rock. The B-side, ‘Such A Shame’, is this time quite commendable in itself: the musical style of the song, all choppy power chords and complex, crashing drum patterns, puts it close to the 1965 pop style of the Who, but Roger Daltrey could never have conveyed an atmosphere of such depressed gloom as Ray was capable of with his "it’s a shame, such a shame, such a shame" mantra which he repeats and repeats mechanistically, like a punished schoolboy in the classroom corner.

For the sake of completeness, I also have to mention that the reissue adds two more tracks that were previously available on the 4-track EP Kwyet Kinks (also released in September ’65), which, in addition to ‘A Well Respected Man’ and ‘Such A Shame’, contained probably the first ever good song written by Brother Dave (‘Wait Till Summer Comes Along’, a pretty country-pop-rocker which he even manages to sing in an acceptable voice), and the wonderfully fussy ‘Don’t You Fret’, a song written by Ray in an almost Appalachian folk style and culminating in a crazy wall of sonic noise which would also have made the Who truly proud... except it’s all done with acoustic guitars. (There’s no evidence that they smashed them upon completing the record, either). Finally, last, but not least, is the previously unpublished piano demo of ‘I Go To Sleep’, a song that would be donated to the Applejacks (and still much later covered by the Pretenders); the Applejacks honestly completed the recording and made it publishable, but Ray sings the song far more beautifully, leaving behind yet another little melancholic masterpiece — which, for that matter, also concludes this behemoth of a CD on a surprisingly intimate, solitary note, something which probably would not have worked for the Beatles, but retroactively feels like a totally natural move for the Kinks. Slow this song even further down, polish its production, and it would not feel out of place on a classic cold, atmospheric album such as Brian Eno’s Before And After Science.

Altogether, that makes for 23 tracks worth of material and, as I already mentioned, probably the single most fruitful year for the Kinks in terms of their artistic evolution. At the end of 1964, they were a bunch of fashionably dressed young punks who had accidentally learned how to crunch a great distorted riff — nothing guaranteed that they would be coming here to stay, much less follow a Beatlesque model of constant evolution and self-improvement. By the fall of 1965, they’d learned to root out most of their early flaws, develop their own trajectory of songwriting, invent the power ballad, delve into Indian influences, and begin incorporating social critique and irony into the 2-minute pop song — and that’s just the major achievements, see?

From a certain point of view, everything that Ray would be doing for the next four years — the most glorious ones of the band’s career — would simply be perfecting and deepening the formulae developed during this period. And while the actual LP, as indicated above, does not yet reflect the band’s full potential, the magnificent run of singles from March to September of 1965 most certainly does. The only reasons why they still feel a bit like a rehearsal are technical — lack of experience in the studio, lack of technological breakthroughs, and the fact that pop music was still only on the verge of being recognized as a genuine art form. In late 1965, it was still possible for a band like the Kinks to write a song like ‘Never Met A Girl Like You Before’ (or for a band like the Beatles to write a song like ‘Wait’, for that matter). Fast forward one year, or maybe even just a few months, and you’d already need a band like the Ramones to do that kind of thing, which would be a whole other story altogether.