Live at Kelvin Hall (The Kinks, 1967)

First, a blog update of sorts. As one can plainly tell from the ever-dwindling content here, my heart has sort of wandered away from the project. I've got some ideas for 2016 to refresh things a little, but clearly I can't keep up with the drumbeat I set for myself. Hell, I can't even conceive of how I managed to blog sort-of-daily on albums through 2014. All I can say is shifting priorities, as with everything, are behind the changes. My plan at this point is to finish dialing up the random albums weekly and I'll mop up in 2016. The books will be dealt with as time permits, since I never plan to quit reading and I'm not under any self-imposed timetable (though I try to shoot for one a week, something I've failed to do since 2012!).

But enough of this hand-wringing, let's talk about the Kinks!

Live At Kelvin Hall (released as The Live Kinks in the United States), is one of the earlier fully-live albums. Technically, they were beat to the punch by The Rolling Stones' Got Live If You Want It! (with the amusing alternate title Have You Seen Your Mother LIVE!), which was released a few months earlier, but the that recording was particularly notorious for faking some of the tracks. In that case studio recordings were augmented with canned audience noise. The Kinks weren't entirely innocent here either, but the unusually lo-fi sound strangely plays in their favor. The instrumentation is fairly rough and the audio quality is downright awful in places, but this gives it an air of authenticity. The audience noise is clearly faked in a many if not all places, obviously looping around in jarring fashion. Upon the most recent listen, the vocals seem freakishly close to the studio versions. Now I know that some/many bands can do a masterful job replicating their studio sound on stage, but the rough-and-tumble image of the band doesn't support that the Kinks were such a band, not to mention later genuine live recordings by the band vary moderately from the studio versions. The band enjoyed a good deal of audience participation and general goofing off, which leads me to think that they probably weren't overly concerned about note-perfect replication.

In spite of its groundbreaking status as a live release, Live at Kelvin Hall was a bust. It didn't even see the light of day in the UK until early 1968, a full year after the performance itself. Yet, for Kinks fans it is a wonderful document to have, capturing the band somewhere between two of their most inventive albums, during that strange period of time where they were banished from the United States. Not too far removed from Beatlemania, the "screaming girls" audience is still in command, but the song selection favors the two most recent albums. Only Ray Davies could get an arena full of teeny-boppers to merrily sing along with "Sunny Afternoon" like they were playing "I Want to Hold Your Hand" (girls: "I've got a big fat mama trying to break meeeeee!! AAAAAAAAAA!!!!"). With "Waterloo Sunset" and "Village Green Preservation Society" still to come, I can only imagine what future performances had in store for these fans.