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.

Preservation, Act 2 (The Kinks, 1974)

Behold! The trilogy is complete! Actually, the decidedly-weirder second part of the Preservation rock opera is a very recent addition to my library, inspired by some serious Kinks-listening back when I reviewed Kinda Kinks here back in January. I (or anyone else) would be hard pressed to consider the two Preservation albums and The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society to be a true trilogy of albums beyond a loose theme. Let's take a look back on how the band that gave the world "You Really Got Me" also educated listeners on British social strife.

The seeds of the Preservation project began back in 1966 with a song called "Village Green". That song failed to make it to either Face to Face or the following year's Something Else, but finally found a home on the 1968 album that practically bore the name name, full title officially: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. It isn't really correct to call this album either a rock opera or even a concept album, though all the songs have far more pastoral inclinations than any other Kinks album and it isn't hard to explain each song as a character sketch that, when grouped together, present a stylized image of the traditional English village. Although there are some weird and unlikable folks living in the village (the "Phenomenal Cat" and "Wicked Annabella" for starters), it's not a dark album and is a pretty spot-on encapsulation of the isolation the Kinks were experiencing as their peers soaked in Monterey and the Summer of Love and were on the road to Woodstock. Thanks to a U.S. touring ban, the Kinks were cut off from the mainstream and forced into a diversionary track that extolled tea and tobacco over pot and LSD.

The Kinks left the village green behind on 1969's Arthur, a far heavier album that dealt with other social issues and openly identified as a concept album. In 1970 they were at long last free of the pesky ban and enjoyed a really big hit with the uncharacteristic "Lola", who hailed from Soho, not the village green. In the mind of Ray Davies however, he was a longing to get back to that village green, but, instead of just idly observing as before, he wanted critique the demolition of a way of life, torn asunder by the rapacious private investors (Mr. Flash) and an oppressive morally-righteous utopians (Mr. Black). A few years would pass...

In 1971 the Kinks switched labels from Pye to RCA. "Lola" was still red hot, so RCA was probably pretty excited to add the Kinks to their roster. However, they probably weren't aware of the wild ride Ray Davies was about to take them on. Initially it seemed like the Kinks were trending away from the concept albums. Muswell Hillbillies was lightly themed, but nowhere near the levels of what the Who recently turned in with Tommy. The album had a distinctly "country and western" flavor, but the Rolling Stones were effectively doing the same thing, so the label probably wasn't that concerned. The following year the band delivered a double album called Everybody's In Show-Biz which featured a lackluster set of studio songs and a truly weird live show with Ray Davies doing drunken renditions of "Baby Face" and "The Banana Boat Song" alongside highly re-worked classic Kinks material. Even still, RCA was giving the band a pretty wide berth. And then, Ray would really blow things open with a full honest-to-God rock opera, released in two parts over two years, boldly entitled Preservation.

Last year I discussed Part One, so I won't get too heavy on that. I hadn't even listened to Part Two back then, so it's a bit minimal. Anyway, Part One usually gets better critical response than Part Two. It has stronger songs that can stand on their own and it's just songs. Part Two right away starts off with the first of five "Announcements", introducing Mr. Flash's counterpart, Mr. Black. I cannot and will not attempt to defend the decision to insert narratives (the aforementioned announcements plus the track "Flash's Dream") into the opera only on Part 2. It probably would have been best to do no narratives at all, but I think it was done because without them the much weaker song set of Part 2 wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. In the first part it was pretty clear that bastard Mr. Flash, through uncontrollable greed, was going to destroy the tranquil life of the village, whose residents apparently only exist to be manipulated. Thanks mostly to the "overture" track, "Preservation", the scene is laid out pretty well, and it is also made clear that some kind of blowback was in the works against Flash. However Part 1 never reveals the answer to Flash, who by "intermission" is bulldozing everything in sight to a tune that, ironically, is a very important factor in the second part of the story.

Right away we learn the identity of Flash's adversary: Mr. Black. Sadly, for the innocent residents of the village, he is just as crappy as Flash, but also just as manipulative. Black shines a light in particular on Flash's absence of morality and uses this to launch a Ted Cruz-style moral crusade. Even the residents are sounding a bit more haggard in songs like "Scum of the Earth" and "Second Hand Car Spiv", probably just grist for Black's morality mill. By the end of stalemate-level fighting between Flash and Black, a deus ex machina moment hits Flash and he rolls over to Black and the Village War ends. Alas, if the villagers were expecting either "preservation" or "restoration", they were utterly betrayed as Black mows down everything in his creation of a theocratic utopia, both extolled in the brilliant "Artificial Man" and deplored in "Scrapheap City". In the end though it appears that Mr. Black's new world order is a sham, with curfews and rationing imposed to keep the peace. The album concludes with a new national anthem, "Salvation Road", which astute listeners will notice is the bridge music from the last song of Part 1, "Demolition". Make of that what you will.

One common theme about rock operas of the 1960's and 1970's is just how messed up the world is. It is no surprise that Preservation has a sad ending. The Pretty Things practically did a mercy killing of their tortured S.F. Sorrow, Tommy was a manipulated mess in the final number, and (many years later), Pink was dragged through hell and fascism in The Wall. I've made it a kind of rule not to seek out happy endings in explicit rock operas. Even Quadrophenia, once you get past all of the cockney and rainfall, isn't exactly a sweet tale. Apparently RCA didn't mind the terrible reception of Preservation and the Kinks would go on to create two more rock operas, both about as bitter as their progenitor. Never one to leave the village green totally behind, Schoolboys in Disgrace is actually a prequel to Preservation, featuring Flash as a schoolboy. Origin story alert!

Three consecutive rock operas were enough for RCA, who cut ties with the band following Schoolboys. Arista swooped in and picked up the back, but took a far more active approach in persuading Ray that the operatic track of the band through the mid-1970's was a losing proposition. While I'm not a great fan of label interventions, this was probably one of the more tastefully executed transitions, resulting in the Kinks return to "regular" albums, a style they would maintain until their ultimate dissolution in the mid-1990's. While the new approach finally made them a big success in the United States, only about 10 years later than all of their peers, it tore at the very fabric of the band. Longtime bassist John Dalton and keyboardist John Gosling soon exited. The keyboard role, for all practical purposes, was returned to session-level, while the bass player slot was a revolving door for a couple years until Jim Rodford (ex-Argent) filled it permanently. Later on, in the early 1980's, relations between drummer Mick Avory and Dave Davies, never that great to begin with, soured completely, resulting in Avory's ouster. He was replaced by Bob Henrit (ex-Argent as well!). The Rodford-Henrit rhythm section lasted through the band's final album, though Avory never entirely disappeared and was a mainstay at Konk studios. While there's been endless talk of a "reunion" (some of which involves only one Davies brother), nothing serious has come to light. All is desolate in the village green at present time.

Kinda Kinks (The Kinks, 1965)

The Kinks were criminally underrepresented last year, with only two appearances in the blog (Village Green Preservation Society and Preservation, Act 1), both of which left out the key early period of the band's history, and in fact both were key albums in distancing the band from those days.
Kinda Kinks, on the other hand, is probably the LP-length album that best represents all of the exuberance of the Shel Talmy-era Kinks, which I've also coined as the "K" era owing to the fact that every word in the first three albums (and most of the EP's) other than the word "the" start with the letter K.

The first album (Kinks) is heavily rooted in the band's early R&B repertoire, with Ray Davies originals competing with cover songs and shady knockoffs written by their business partners, many of which were name-checked in the 1970 song "The Moneygoround". Nicely tucked into the track listing was a song that had already made a huge splash, "You Really Got Me". That song helped the Kinks break free from a Beatles-clone existence, smashing their first two faltering singles into oblivion. While it hit, along with follow-up single "All Day and All of the Night", just a little too late for the first album, the second would benefit handsomely from the boost.

Since "You Really Got Me" was a Ray Davies original, the management and record label, Pye, were suddenly experiencing an unquenchable thirst for original Kinks material. Kinda Kinks would be far less covers-driven, though "Naggin' Woman" and "Dancing in the Streets" would sneak into the track listing. This is probably, if I read the liner notes correctly, due to the sheer difficulty of trying to create 14 fresh new songs in a matter of months. So in the end it was 10, with an assist from brother Dave, who at this point was doing more singing that writing, on one of them. Adding to the misery of having to write under the gun, the band must have also been forced to record the songs quickly, resulting in some sloppy production work from Shel Talmy. Also, about half the songs, though thoroughly infused with a sound only the Kinks could provide, are filler-grade stuff. In the middle of it all though all some key tracks: "Tired of Waiting For You", "Come On Now", and "Something Better Beginning", a track you can slow dance to. Director Wes Anderson would drastically elevate the status of the other hushed number, "Nothing in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' About that Girl" when he included it in the Rushmore soundtrack. "Don't Ever Change" isn't that great a song, but has an absolutely beautiful opening riff, which, alas, doesn't stick with the rest of the song.

As with most British bands in the mid-1960's, the LP's were often not the best representation of the band's best work. In the CD era this means that these albums have a lot of bonus tracks and many of them are better than the original album tracks. Thanks to a clutch of important singles and the EP Kwyet Kinks (God, those puns), Kinda Kinks has been greatly enhanced with their inclusion as bonus material. In fact, the first five tracks following the conclusion of the album are required listening for even the casual fan. "I Need You" alone (a B-side if you can believe it) probably launched a thousand garage bands in the United States, where the Kinks enjoyed an influence among musicians far beyond their own album sales. "Ev'rybody's Gonna Be Happy" and "Set Me Free" are quite possibly the best examples of what the Kinks could do in 1965. Meanwhile, "See My Friends" is the band's very first foray into Indian-influenced music, narrowly beating the Beatles and the Yardbirds to the punch though perhaps not as overt as what those bands would do initially. The Kwyet tracks are generally unremarkable with one giant exception. "A Well Respected Man" could very well be the template for about the next four Kinks albums, dripping with social commentary and exploring English music hall styles, something their rock peers hadn't considered. For me, it's probably the single most important track of the entire CD. Some other interesting aspects of the bonus tracks include the first fully formed Dave Davies song, and a demo version of "I Go to Sleep", a song Ray ended up letting others (Sonny & Cher) make famous.

In my early Kinks collecting (NOT "kollecting" - I am an adult), I let a greatest hits album cover for the first three albums until my voracious collecting of their later albums naturally led me back to picking up the others. In fact, I jettisoned the old CD once I got the actual albums, the mid-2000's reissue versions. However that CD was instrumental in getting me into the Kinks, so the uncertain consumer may be wise to start there, then go after some of the later albums, then come back around if still looking for more.

The third album, The Kink Kontroversy, the fourth, Face to Face, would continue to advance the Kinks sound pioneered by this album. However, even in the bonus tracks of this album, the listener can detect a continuous movement away from the "original" Kinks. The later albums feature more varied instrumentation and more wry lyrical observations, largely fueled by Ray's path to and from a nervous breakdown in 1966, combined with a crippling American touring ban. That, however, is another story for another album.

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society (1968)

If you haven't heard this album, you really should. The Kinks have a reputation, thanks to their biggest hits, of being a band that plays hard and fast, but the late 1960's were a quiet, more pastoral-sounding time for the band. In 1966, a U.S. travel ban combined with Ray Davies's having a nervous breakdown, set the band on a trajectory far different from their fellow British Invasion peers. Themes of tea, tobacco and British-ness in general dominated their albums of the late 1960's, all of which are now critically acclaimed, but at the time were miserable financial failures. This album represents the peak of these themes, pulled together in a loose concept album.

For landmark albums such as this I only accept the finest, which in this case is a 3 disc uber-deluxe edition, a mostly-noble attempt to bring together every track even remotely associated with the recording of this album. In total there are 62 tracks, which I think sets the record for amount of bonus tracks if you consider that for some the original album was only 12 tracks (though 15 was more standard).

Part of the reason this version is so massive for the sake of a single album is its complicated release history. The band recorded enough material for two albums, but something got mangled along the way and a few different editions (in stereo and glorious mono) popped up around the world. Attempts to collect the assorted variants have resulted in a bunch of CD editions of varying quality. My old copy slapped together the 15 track mono version with the 12 track stereo version, plus a mono version of the (sometimes) accompanying single, "Days". The problems with this version was numerous, with a song like "Mr. Songbird" being stereo-only and another like "Animal Farm" only in mono. This set eliminates all of that nonsense and does mono and stereo versions of every song. During this time, a number of oddball tracks were recorded that either never received a proper release or ended up on the bizarro Great Lost Kinks Album in the early 1970's. They round all of those tracks up here, which is nice, although I think a couple still remain under wraps. Also included, but not really essential, are alternate mixes of some of the regular Village Green tracks and some songs that were previously bonus tracks from other albums that got pulled into the orbit of this version ("Wonderboy" and "Polly" are from Something Else By the Kinks, "King Kong" from Arthur). I guess replication is better than elimination!

This album represented the end of the first era of Kinks history, with bassist Pete Quaife leaving the band for good and the band pursuing a heavier sound in the albums to come, all the while continue to advance various themes, some better defined than others.

Preservation, Act 1 (The Kinks, 1973)

If anybody needed a reminder by 1973 that the Kinks had moved a long way from "You Really Got Me" and all of those early hits, the ambitious two-part "Preservation" should have served that purpose quite well. In 1966, between a well-documented nervous breakdown by Ray Davies and a US performance ban, the band veered into quaint tea and tobacco territory, while their peers (The Who, the Rolling Stones, etc.) embraced LSD, pot, and flower power. In spite of producing some of the finest work in their extensive career during the following three years, the band nearly vanished from the public stage altogether. During these "kwyet" times, Ray Davies wrote a little song called "Village Green", which failed to make the cut for 1966's "Face to Face" or 1967's "Something Else". However the idea went into full blossom in 1968 with the release of their first concept album, "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society" (a full year before "Tommy", mistakenly called the first rock concept album). Like its two predecessors, the album basically went nowhere, and to add insult to injury, bassist Pete Quaife permanently left the group after its release. 1969's "Arthur" would continue the early concept album era of the band's history, but with a little more heft that "Village Green". In 1970, the group finally nailed their first big hit in years with "Lola" and was finally freed from the performance ban. The "Lola" album was somewhat of a concept album, but like the following two albums, it was more rooted in individual songs. In 1973, however, the "Village Green" idea came back more powerful than ever, launching four grandiose concept albums that largely wiped out their British fan base, but set the stage for a surprising resurgence Stateside.

Unlike many rock concept albums ("Tommy", "The Wall", "S.F. Sorrow"), Ray Davies' writing tend to explore issues we would normally consider kind of dull, at least in a musical context: imminent domain, corporate greed, unions and government takeovers, and so forth and so on. And unlike some albums of the period ("Thick As A Brick"), Ray was deadly serious about all of it! Although he may look at individuals in the community setting, the concept is not really about a single individual's story. If any individual dominates "Preservation", it's the evil Mr. Flash (corporate greed) and his death struggle with the yet-to-be-named and not-so-great-himself Mr. Black (socialist forces), with the villagers (the "sheep") being tossed about like pawns. This album gets heavily panned by the critics, but there are some really good tracks on here. You need to dig a bit through the schmaltz to find them, but a number of them hold up in their own right. As an album listening experience it is fairly enjoyable as well. I cannot speak for Part 2 (yet), but I know it was a different album than a mere continuation of Part 1, which left a lot of people confused. I will have to listen for myself, but it's high time I continue boldly into the wild world of 1970's Kinks concept albums. This remains the last Kinks album I got, and that was quite some time ago!