A cut. A crack that can be heard. An electrical imbalance in the body. Like putting your fingers in a socket. Or more accurately: cut the cone of an amplifier speaker with a blade and pierce it with knitting needles so that the fabric generates sound when it vibrates. All this accompanied by a jazzy, but simple riff.
The result? “You really got me” by The Kinks. An innovative sound. A bare wire of just 2 minutes and 13 seconds. One of the most impressive songs in pop history. Composed by a gentleman, Ray Davies, leader of the group, who today celebrates 80 years. And who, however, has created not just one, but countless impressive, subtle and modern songs.
Proto-punk, precursor of heavy metal, garage inspiration of the first punk and even glam with albums like Lola. Admired by colleagues such as David Bowie, Pete Townshend of The Who, Metallica, Richard Thompson and the legion of what was Brit Pop, from Blur to Oasis. Knighted by the kings of England (such as Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton), Ray Davies: untitled patriarch of many genres, songs and styles of pop song.
Caught by The Kinks
“You really got me” It’s a “literal” song. It produces the same effect on the listener as its basic lyrics: “you shocked me”, “you left me speechless”, “you completely captured me”. That in a couple of weeks (it was released on August 4, 1964) it turns 60 will be just an anecdote, thanks to the unparalleled creativity of its composer Ray Davies, leader and lead singer of The Kinks.
Between 1964 and 1971, the pool of songs was inexhaustible.. Like Miles Davis, who wove the history of jazz from Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, John Coltrane to Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett, the “Ray Davies effect” perhaps achieved the same thing with rock, its artists and genres.
Van Halen, The Pretenders, Bruce Springsteen, Bebel Gilberto, Queens Of The Stone Age, Damon Albarn, David Bowie, Paul Wellercountless pioneer groups of the punkthe jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and even in Argentina, Sandro…No genre, style or country has escaped the influence of this exceptional composer.
From their simple early songs, like the raw, hard garage rock effervescence of “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” and “Till the End of the Day,” to the urgent beauty of “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”, “Stop Your Sobbing”, the classicism of “Lazy Old Sun” or “End of the Season”, and the English pastoral of “Village Green” and the album “Arthur (or the Decline) and Fall of the British Empire), Ray Davies is an author who seems like many composers in one. Even the beauty of lullabies like “Phenomenal Cat” or “Wonderboy” comes easily to him.
The Kinks: loved and banned
Ray Davies was almost as striking as Mick Jagger, and for identical reasons: delicate, slightly androgynous and very sexy. The Kinks were poetic, melancholic, witty, ironic and fiercely irascible at the same time. “Along with the Rolling Stones, I will always regard them as a primary influence.”
These generous words are from Pete Townshend’s autobiography, Who am I. When the “Tommy” songwriter began his career, The Who were called The High Numbers and were opening for The Kinks. Townshend was full of praise for Ray Davies, who called his song “Waterloo Sunset” a masterpiece. In the film QuadropheniaJimmy, its protagonist, spends his time humming “You Really Got Me.”
Indeed, The Kinks started around the same time as The Who, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. However, during one of their first tours of the United States, a true test and a claim to fame for any British Invasion group that aspired to conquer the world, The Kinks were expelled and banned from playing for five years. due to disturbances in their performances. This episode marked a turning point: it was the beginning of the end, or perhaps the beginning of something new.
Ray Davies: uncrowned king of England
“Banned” in the great northern country since 1965 and with almost no rotation of his albums there, Davies continued to strengthen his inner pen. The albums, without interruption (and with less and less success) were one gem after another. The Kinks were a band that was both “conservative” and revolutionary.. The magical year 1967, the one of the vibrant Technicolor explosion of psychedelia, with Pink Floyd’s debut album and the Sgt. Pepper’s…, The Kinks publish a masterpiece with a black and white cover: Something Else.
The thing is The Kinks were always “something more”. On the album she shines “Waterloo sunset”, a twilight song about two lovers, the Thames and Waterloo station, considered today one of the most perfect British songs. Damon Albarn would play her decades later alongside Daviesin a live version.
And Ray Davies, locked outside, perfects his sociological gaze. As the Buenos Aires on the t-shirt de Calé can see and capture in words and music images of the middle class, seen from within, as well as the upper class.
In “Dead End Street”, shows the dead end of the working class. In ““Sunny Afternoon”portrays the nouveau riche with verses such as “taxes have left me penniless / I only have my manor house left and I can’t sail on my yacht / My girlfriend has returned to her parents, and told them of my drunkenness and my cruelty” .
Village Greeninspired by a radio script by Dylan Thomas, ironically about the conservation of values such as “beer, Sherlock Holmes and Tudor-style furniture.” Victorianism and imperialist decadence extend to another perfect album, Arthur… or the Decline and Fall of the British Empirewhich also explores the experience of emigration to Australia.
Like a musical Harold Pinter, Davies observes with intelligence and sarcasm the complex relationships between the English social classes, like The servant by Joseph Losey could be sung and played on the radio. His vision, historical but always connected to the popular, makes him, in this sense, the most British composer of his generation.
He has been called “neo-Dickensian” for his ability to combine nostalgia and an imperialism that has already disappeared, along with his power of keen observation of flesh and blood people, such as lovers in the shadows, Terry and Julie, immortalized in “Waterloo Sunset”.
“Some of my songs are sometimes better company than real people. Many musical characters inhabit my world: they are good, bad, kind, evil and sometimes naughty,” he explains in his second memoir, American.
Ray Davies in an Argentine key: from Babasónico to Massacre
Mariano Roger, guitarist of Babasónico, obsessive fan of Ray Davies, shares with Page 12 His point of view:
“What fascinates me most is his customs, never flat, very British on albums like Arthur either Lola, where he portrays both working and rural people. She even addresses themes of bisexuality and homosexuality in an avant-garde way, both in lyrics and sound. His view of the neighborhood and the familiar is extraordinary, even in her psychedelic stage. In some way, she created an ‘English chabón rock’ in his lyrics, with a neighborhood touch, but paradoxical and deeply sophisticated.”
“Ray Davies is punk and Brit-pop. And something we discussed a lot with Carca is how the rhythm of ‘Lola’, probably one of the first songs about a trans girlcarries that boogie rhythm that would later influence T. Rex’s glam so much,” concludes Roger.
For Pablo Mondello, guitarist of Massacre, a group that recorded its own version of “You Really Got Me”, the contemporary connection with Ray Davies is through Blur and Oasis, and before, of course, through the Van Halen cover.
“What surprises any rock guitarist the most are his riffs. Until the use of the electric guitar disappears, The Kinks will continue to have a prominent place: short, clear and concise riffs that impact any rock lover. And not just because of their use of distortion: they were also pioneers in rock operas and the use of the sitar, just like the Beatles.”
Ray Davies, today
After Lola, the career of Ray Davies and The Kinks became a series of concept albums and rock operas that, despite always including good or very good songs, did not achieve great success. Always dealing with disputes and reconciliations with his brother Dave Davies, The Kinks stopped performing live as a group in 1996.
He survived being shot in the leg in 2004 while chasing thieves. that his girlfriend’s purse had been stolen in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Since then, he has continued his solo career with two albums to watch out for, Other People’s Lives and Working Man’s Cafealong with the album saga American, with members of The Jayhawks.
Today, the man who, with the ban on returning to the United States, explored British identity like no other musician, does not seem to feel nostalgic. When the magazine Vice asked him a few years ago what the problem of youth was, he only responded without believing himself to be anyone’s “father”: “They are like the youth of yesterday.”
David Bowie recorded more than one song by The Kinks and Morrissey in an interview said shrewdly: “A wit and witticism that no other group even attempted. Definitely memorable. I loved each of their singles but their success was so instantly accepted that no one took the trouble to analyze them.”
Ray will always be classic and modern. His first autobiography, X-Ray, begins almost in a suburban way with these words in chapter 1 titled I was born in the Welfare State: “My name is of no importance.” Beginning reminiscent of the beginning of the tango “Cantor de mi barrio”, popularized by Roberto Goyeneche: “My name is not important / the neighborhood singer usually calls me.”
Ray managed to turn Muswell Hill, (that “Penny Lane” from The Kinks), his London neighborhood and suburb to which he dedicated numerous songs, into (paraphrasing Marisa Monte) a “particular infinity.” A universe of own songs, more Kinksian that neo-Dickensian. But suitable for jazz, punk, heavy metal and any genre that arises.
That’s right and it will. Since its inception, at least 60 years ago when Ray Davies, who today celebrates 80 years, “completely grabbed us.”
