In which actual essential albums are actually listed and they are all by the Kinks.
The Kinks
One:
John Lennon first used recorded feedback on purpose on “I Feel Fine,” but for one note for that lasted 5 seconds. Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” credited to Jackie Brenston may be the first rock and roll song ever and the first use of distortion.
But Dave Davies, out of sheer madness took his cheap little green amp and sliced its speakers and with his brother Ray invented all hard rock, metal, and punk. They recorded at minimum five masterworks in this style, were bigger than the Rolling Stones, Ray punched a union guy on their first US tour, the band got banned from the US. Ray moved on and didn’t use this style for at least another 12 years. Ray Davies should be worth $10 billion dollars just from all that came from that album, he is not. He could have kept churning out hits that were in that style and been worth way more than he is now. He didn’t.
If you want just one example out of hundreds, look at Green Day’s entire career especially this:
Someone if they cared enough to bother could turn that 26 seconds into at least an hour, but most people who could are usually just doing the same thing Green Day does or better just listening to the Kinks.
To their credit and most band’s credit when pressed they will admit it. Ray rarely got paid, but whether Ray cares is only known to Ray.
Two:
Three:
Four:
That picture is horrible. I don’t even think that it is very similar to the vinyl copy I own and treasure. You can’t tell by looking that it is called “The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.”
It had the audacity to include the title song lyric “God save little shops, china cups, and virginity” during the “Summer of Love.”
It was a complete flop, and seemed irrelevant in 1968 given the chaos of the world at the time, but also had the stanza:
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways, for me and for you
What more can we do?
Which was both a conservative and a progressive statement at the same time and a better message than most of those on albums that appeared to be so relevant at the time.
Currently it is the biggest seller in their catalog and indeed go ask Jeff Bezos what the fuck happened to your favorite little shops.
The most meaningful album to me in my life.
Five:
The best told, most accurately detailed, concept album of all time. Came shortly after “Tommy,” and makes “Tommy” seem scattered, overlong, and unfocused by comparison. Whether it was started or finished before “Tommy ” I don’t know, but clues that it would come were indeed evident as early as “Face to Face”
What I do know is that even Pete Townshend at his most arrogant will admit that everything he did followed what Ray did by about six months, mostly replacing Ray’s legion of attitudinal tones with sheer aggression.
This was exactly true until at least until 1985 when Ray made an album and a film called “Return to Waterloo,” and then Townshend followed similarly with “White City.”
Now that is touching and heartfelt. It is also very funny because legend has it that the Who were banned from all Holiday Inns.
From the song “Shangri-La,” as good a song as has ever been written about a common man and one with disgust, condemnation, anger, belittlement, but nothing but love and sympathy for its subject:
All the houses on the street have got a name
‘Cause all the houses in the street they look the same
Now that’s important to me, because although the houses on the street I grew up on did not have names, aside from their paint color they indeed all were exactly the same and I never realized it until I first heard this song perhaps four years after I had moved away from that street.
Everything that has to be said about modern life, said so with many different vocal tones and many different attitudes but he final message is clear and stunning.
“I keep turning out great art and you keep asking for hits. Fine here is a hit, but on the album it comes with I will proclaim it a hit before it is a hit, and then I will completely destroy you and your entire industry for the sheer greed and corruption that it exemplifies, while maintaining my sympathies for the working man. I will also show you how insane this world has made me and threaten to fly off on a jet and never return. Meanwhile, the song I wrote for you as a hit will still be pure art!”
There was no Part Two and one was never needed.
I discuss this entire era and indeed his entire career here:
Ray Davies Writing Hits When and Only When He Feels like Doing So
Seven:
“20th Century Man”
This is the age of machinery,
A mechanical nightmare,
The wonderful world of technology,
Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare.
This is the twentieth century,
But too much aggravation
It’s the age of insanity,
What has become of the green pleasant fields of Jerusalem.
Ain’t got no ambition, I’m just disillusioned
I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to be here.
My mama said she can’t understand me
She can’t see my motivation
Just give me some security,
I’m a paranoid schizoid product of the twentieth century.
You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough.
Girl we gotta get out of here
We gotta find a solution
I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to die here.
I was born in a welfare state
Ruled by bureaucracy
Controlled by civil servants
And people dressed in grey
Got no privacy got no liberty
’cause the twentieth century people
Took it all away from me.
Don’t want to get myself shot down
By some trigger happy policeman,
Gotta keep a hold on my sanity
I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to die here.
My mama says she can’t understand me
She can’t see my motivation
Ain’t got no security,
I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to be here.
This is the twentieth century
But too much aggravation
This is the edge of insanity
I’m a twentieth century man but I don’t want to be here
The last song of the album is called “Muswell Hllbilly” and starts off with this:
Well I said goodbye to Rosie Rooke this morning
I’m gonna miss her bloodshot alcoholic eyes
She wore her Sunday hat so she’d impress me
I’m gonna carry her memory ’til the day I die
A friend told me that he heard Bruce Springsteen say that he could match “Born to Run” if he wanted to but the taxation of the effort it would take would kill him. It nearly killed Ray. So perhaps that was him truly saying goodbye. He would write many more great songs, but two through seven was his zenith.
Six albums in five years and a streak unmatched for near perfection by anyone ever. Rob Reiner directed six amazing movies in eight years, which is the closest comparison I can imagine. Films are huge collaborative undertakings so Reiner had a lot of money and help, yet those films still pale to me compared to what the Kinks did from 1966-1971, and there are a ton of great songs that were left off of those albums too.
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