Getting the Kinks Out

Are Preservation-period Kinks worth preserving?

by Michael Pelusi

It seems that every legendary '60s band gets a hip group of new followers these days, whether they deserve it or not. The Kinks' famous acolytes range from Blur's Damon Albarn to Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan. In their prime, the Kinks wrote smart pop with garage-rock guts. The various new bands that are borrowing from the Kinks, such as The Lilys and Olivia Tremor Control, are a testament to the potency of their sound.

If you've thought about starting or upgrading a Kinks collection, there are many new CD reissues to choose from. The truly dedicated can seek out imports of Castle Records' recent UK-only reissues from the band's years with Pye Records (1964-1971). Here in the States, Velvel Records recently began its reissue of the band's '71-'86 output with the rerelease of four albums: Muswell Hillbillies (1971), Everybody's in Showbiz (1972), Preservation Act 1 (1973) and Preservation Act 2 (1974).

Velvel's reissues are well annotated, with illuminating liner notes and photographs as well as lyric sheets. Each reissue also includes two bonus tracks, usually outtakes, live takes or single-only releases, but these rarely shed light on the making of the albums.

By '71, the band had already evolved from the early, choppy style of "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," to the rollicking "Sunny Afternoon," "Dead End Street," "Waterloo Sunset" and "Autumn Almanac." These songs highlighted frontman Ray Davies' gift for memorable melodies that drew from rock, British music hall and American pop. His dramatic lyrics captured the tiny comedies, tragedies and redemptions of British life.

In 1968, the band released what many consider their finest album, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. Although the concept piece did not follow a formalized plot, Village Green had a definite sense of place—a near-mythic rural England—as well as its own characters and distinct mood. In many ways, it rivaled landmark concept albums by The Beatles (Sgt. Pepper) and The Who (Sell Out). Despite this, the album flopped in both England and the States. Its follow-up, the even more structured Arthur, or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire (1969), might have given Tommy a run for its money if the accompanying made-for-TV movie co-written by Davies hadn't been canceled. Arthur did, however, slide onto the American charts, the first time the Kinks had done so since "Sunny Afternoon" in '66.

In 1970, Lola Vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, the band's biting look at the music industry, yielded one of its biggest hits on either side of the Atlantic: "Lola," a loving ode to a transvestite. So, when RCA Records snapped up the band in '71, they hoped for more quirky hits of this nature. However, as Davies says in the liner notes to the Muswell Hillbillies reissue, "I was terrified of falling into that trap that we'd slipped into in the '60s, where we'd deliver an album and they'd just promote the single. So with Muswell Hillbillies, I simply didn't want to write a deliberate Top 40 single on it. I wanted to focus on the album."

Muswell Hillbillies begins with two typically neurotic Ray Davies ruminations on Ray Davies—"20th Century Man" and "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues." However, as the album progresses, Davies opens his eyes to his surroundings, more specifically the town of Muswell Hill, where he grew up in post war England. From the vaudevillian black comedies "Alcohol" and "Holiday" to the working class pride of "Uncle Son" and "Muswell Hillbilly," the album continues the small-town mood of Village Green, but with a darker edge. Chief among the album's themes is the idea of urban renewal arising out of the wreckage of World War II bombings. Davies writes, "There were bomb sites everywhere. In other places they kept the old houses the way they were, and built new ones where the ruins had been. But 'round where my family lived, the local council obviously thought it was easier to clear the entire area and start again. There was just one problem. They forgot the people." With Davies and the band fusing American music styles (country and western, blues, ragtime) to a quintessentially British landscape, Muswell Hillbillies is true roots music; it's one man tracing back to his past to find out why he's so fucked up.

Muswell Hillbillies would prove to be the last truly cohesive effort from the band. From that point onward, tracking their career becomes a matter of finding excellent tracks on often maddeningly uneven records. The double-album Everybody's In Showbiz, half studio tracks, half live, continues in the bluesy vein of Muswell while purporting to comment on the drudgery of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. As expected, the album occasionally drowns in "poor-famous-me" self-pity. That said, Showbiz is not without its pleasures, though many of the best tracks sound like outtakes from other albums. "Hot Potatoes" winningly recycles Muswell's working-class blues. "Look a Little on the Sunny Side" is an amusingly snide music-hall jibe at the record industry à la the Lola album. Then there's "Celluloid Heroes," the only Kinks track of this era to achieve "classic" status (and heavy AOR airplay). The moment when Davies' opening line "Everybody's a dreamer and everybody's a star" pokes through a weave of acoustic guitars and piano is still one of the band's most glorious.

The rather loose conceptualizing of Muswell and Showbiz would prove to be a dry run for what Davies had in store—the Preservation albums. They were created out of an expanded live version of Village Green, enabling Davies to combine that album's bucolic small town with Muswell Hillbillies' concern over the exploitation of "the people." Preservation tells of the rise of a tyrant named Flash, who plans to turn the Village Green into a profitable, lifeless suburb, and of his fall, precipitated by a self-appointed revolutionary, Mr. Black. At the conclusion of this odd tale, Mr. Black assumes charge, resulting in a conditioned, Orwellian society of interchangeable "artificial men." Both albums contain tracks that reveal Davies' ability to write first-rate show-tunes. But the best songs, such as Act 1's lilting "Sweet Lady Genevieve" or Act 2's Stonesy "Money Talks," have little or nothing to do with the conceptual plot. And, especially on the double album Act 2, the second-rate show-tune quality of many of the tracks eventually sinks the whole saga.

Unfortunately, Davies' Broadway-esque ditties stilted the raw rock 'n' roll band—he pushed the plot forward to the exclusion of concerns like emotional resonance. The music on Preservation, by and large, lacks the very urgency that makes the Kinks' finest work so irresistible. None of their early '70s albums were big sellers, but the themes found there—working-class woe, corrupt bureaucracies, the loneliness of the rock 'n' roller—still haunt Davies. This continuing concern is visible in his 1994 autobiography, X-Ray, and in his recent series of solo acoustic shows; the fact that he hasn't quite worked it all out raises the possibility that he still might create something great, that there might be hope for him yet.