Life Goes On Ray resignedly submits to the idea that no matter what curveballs life throws at you (detailed in the previous songs), and no matter how badly you might want to jump off the cliff and simply end it, the world just keeps going 'round. This might be a song about the band as well -- he's losing two members that have been Kinks since the Lola days, and that does complicate matters, but ultimately he's just going to keep on keeping on. I can't decide if that verse about not being able to kill himself because the gas got turned off is morbidly funny or morbidly tragic. Probably both -- it's a commentary on how we're all only livestock to the ruling classes, valuable only as workers and consumers. Musically it's solid, if a little overlong -- it's in the middle of the pack as far as the songs go on Sleepwalker. The highlight for me is Gosling's little farewell organ break in the middle. I like the strumming too.
As we pass into the 800s in pages, we finish off Sleepwalker with another song that for me is good, likeable, but not quite in the upper tier of the Katalogue. Overall, I’m somewhat surprised of the mixed reaction to Sleepwalker, even though I’m one of the folks having that very reaction! I guess I don’t think there’s a truly great song on here, but also I don’t think there’s any real misses either. It all lands somewhere in the middle. I do have some minor quibbles with the mix. Despite that the band plays great, Ray does some of his best vocals. And yet, it’s not an albumI feel I’m likely to return to. Ive always preferred Misfits, but there’s definitely some real misses on there for me. Will be interesting to see if I still hold that view after we’ve gone through it.
Having reevaluated the songs on side 2, the fact that the last one is a bit tepid music-wise is less annoying than it used to be. I'm getting used to being let down by Ray on the closing track. I guess he never really ceased to view his albums as movies, and the last song often has an "end credit" feel about it. The words are nice, though. I always prefered Sleepwalker to Misfits, and for the moment the chances are good it will remain so. Some of the outtakes that we're going to see in the following days could have improved the album, though. I agree with those Avids who see it as good but devoid of high peaks. Some albums are consistently good, some have peaks and valleys (the studio Everybody's in Showbiz, for instance). I used to think Sleepwalker had a few small hills and wide valleys, I see it now as a pleasant plateau, on fresh autumn windy late afternoon with cloudy skies patched with blue.
I may have rolled some eyes the other day when I raved about "the artistic sensibilities of the Davies brothers", but Life Goes On has a couple examples of what I'm referring to. First, it's Dave's use of the dropped-D tuning on his guitar. Tuning the low E-string down a step requires loosening the tension on the string, which gives it a deep, buzzy sound when strummed freely, as it rattles off the frets and in harmony with its neighboring A string. It's a deep, rich sound, somewhat growly and menacing, and is a nice counterbalance to the gentle electric piano - to me it symbolizes the hard reality that underlies the beauty of existence, as Dave works those low-register riffs and hits that open D string throughout the song. Next is the use of what I thought was an accordion, but in any case it's an instrument that uses respiration to function - you can hear it breathing in and out as it creates it's soothing tones, symbolizing a living human perhaps in contemplation of the inevitability of its final breaths. I find that it's common upon repeated listens to discover subtle touches like in Kinks songs from any era - tasteful artistic choices that compliment the story of the song without distracting from it.
I like a handful of songs on Sleepwalker pretty well and of those I probably like Life Goes On the best. I love the arrangement. I would never say that Sleepwalker is one of my favorite Kinks album but it sure sounds pretty good as it plays and I like it the best out of any of the Arista albums (although my favorite songs released during their Arista tenure are on other albums).
My first go-round with the album so I don’t have a “used to think” look-back point. I’m still in the “a few small hills and wide valleys”, with a couple of deep chasms, stage.
Interesting point. The Beach Boys relied heavily on session musicians. Neil Young recorded one of his best (and most famous) albums with session musicians (Harvest), and I believe it did a lot to enhance his songs (I'm not a big Crazy Horse fan) (I know real Neil Young fans don't like Harvest but I'm not a real Neil Young fan) (also, I used to work in the same company as a former Crazy Horse bass player. Well, OK, it was a different Crazy Horse) (Oh Lord, the Wikipedia page tells me he died 2 years ago. That's really sad. How kinksian, I make a joke and it ends up in sadness). I think the same of Lou Reed's first album, but that's not a very popular opinion. Anyway, session musicians can do a great job, they're paid for it. Nicky Hopkins was a Session Man, wasn't he.
"Life Goes On" was a stand out song for me ever since I first heard it back in the day. It's a great closer for the album and the lyrics are rather thoughtful. I also enjoyed the lines about being too broke to kill yourself. That gave the song a bit of a Woody Allen spin for me (to you younger Avids, he was rather popular back around that time, probably at his creative peak & influence with Annie Hall). The closest that Ray admitted that he did the same was during his nervous breakdown of early 1966, when he put a telly while the Kinks were on into his oven. Sleepwalker to me is a solid album, as many of the other Avids have already said. I think that it and Misfits are sort of transitional albums from the RCA years to the rather more commercially successful years of Low Budget and beyond. It's amazing that Ray was able to make these albums in the midst of of group turmoil, w/long standing members leaving, a bit of instability in the bass position and even Mick Avory's absence in Misfits. It was rumored that the famed Christmas concerts of 1977 would be the group's last. Despite all that, the Kinks managed to pull themselves together and enjoy their biggest commercial success since 1965.
Sleepwalker is not a great record, no, I don't think so. The mix isn’t too good, you get this jarring high-pitched synth on half the tunes, the drums often sound like bongos (when it’s not actual bongos being played!), some of Dave’s guitar tones are a bit too much of their time (not on the last song, though, thanks for the technical explanation @Luckless Pedestrian). About the peaks and valleys, no real Everest here either as far as I'm concerned, but still some (stormy) sky-high beauties. Two songs are a bit meh for my taste: Mr. Big Man and Brother. But to be fair, by my own thread counts, most of the participants found a couple of songs to be problematic or grating for them. Some didn't mind mine but hated Stormy Sky and Sleepless Night, or talked of blandness referring to Juke Box Music and Life on the Road. For the first time, it’s almost impossible to really dig it all, and I think it's down to the record being indeed synonymous with the radio sounds of 1977, sounds that most rock enthusiasts were taught to despise or to be wary of: for the elders among us, it was the moment a lot of their sixties heroes started to dramatically lose steam and matter less (stop being “important” as @Martyj put it) ; and for the second generation, well, they were growing up with punk rock, so they wouldn’t have bothered with soft, yacht, AOR, MOR, country or even “classic” rock in the first place… After our song-by-song deep dive, it seems to me Ray modeled each track after a certain staple radio style of the time. Springsteen epic, soft rock, yacht rock, California pop, proto-disco, power ballads, adding a bit of Dylan here, some smooth claptonisms there, some Wings, Doobie Brothers, Steve Miller, a touch of Crosby, Stills, Nash and a zest of Young etc. Track after track, the LP can be enjoyed (or not so much) as a bona fide 1977 FM radio program. Some genres are missing ? In the next few days, we’ll notice they're almost all tackled in the outtakes!! Of course, the radio program's a late night one, nightlife and its creatures being the main unifying motif, when you don’t sleep because you can’t, won’t or just don’t want to. I think in that way, the LP's quite an understated success. It knows how to insinuate itself under the listener's skin, to install this nightly, insomniac mood. In a way, it’s almost a whole record set underneath a neon light. Walking the city, driving around it and allow its surreal/unreal atmosphere sink in. Too much light, too much brightness, where there should only be darkness. It’s not a natural light record, it’s set in an artificial hyper reality – and I swear I just typed those words without even thinking of tomorrow’s outtake, Artificial Light. Anyway, this artificial flavor proved to be a two-sided sword. My guess is it was indeed designed that way by Raymond Douglas Davies. We've talked of his ability to ape any music style, old and new. I wouldn't be surprised to learn he knowingly used the popular sounds and radio formats of the day to please the label, renew the band’s success, but also in part to mock the label's wishes, not unlike Neil Young would do a few years later with his rockabilly stuff. If Townshend & co. hadn’t done the “sell out” thing ten years before, Ray could’ve called it “The Kinks Sell out”, complete with voices of late-night DJ’s introducing the tunes in a husky tone, to put his nightly feel as well as his satire across. And it would probably be considered a much better record nowadays, one that could be understood as an attempt at surviving and subverting the contemporary styles with the usual Kinks twist, this unparalleled ability to create multiple entendre, multiple meanings, multiple layers. As their first song-oriented record in exactly ten years (!!) and last with this line-up,, it’s clearly a transitional LP, showing a band in search of a grand vision, one that could replace the theater concepts. Ultimately, they wouldn't find it. Ray gradually settled for a new "chronicler of its times" personae, leaving his delusions of grandeur and attempts at remaining a visionary artist behind him (as far as the band was concerned). I don’t blame him for that, I really don’t. I think it was the right move. In many ways, it would eventually allow him to free himself from his preservation and music biz obsessions and expand his range of subject matters.
Mark, I hope that you & your misses have a great time at the Nick Cave concert, enjoy yourselves, but please consider staying overnight instead of driving back the same night. There are too many crazies on the roads that late at night.
Session musicians are good at producing immaculately played characterless mush, as they did ad nauseum in LA studios throughout the 70s - give me Crazy Horse and Maureen Tucker (and Lou Reed himself, for that matter!) any day of the week.
This is addressed mainly to Avid Ajsmith, the intrepid chaser of old telly footage, although everybody else can join in. A few years ago, I was at my local Newbury Comics when I saw a DVD called "The Kinks the Live Broadcasts" which had a very early piccy of them on the cover. From reading the back cover, I was lead to believe that it consisted of footage from the 60s to the present. When I finally saw the DVD, I was simultaneously disappointed and happy at the same time, which is strange. There were no footage from the 60s. There was the Supersonic clips of YRGM/ADAOTN, "No More Looking Back" & "Sleepwalker". There was also a clip of "Lost and Found" from The Tube. There were also the following which were done circa 1978 since Gordon Edwards was part of the band: "Waterloo Sunset" (acoustic w/Gordon Edwards) "Lola" (same as above) "Celluloid Heroes" (ditto) "Life On The Road" "Misfits" "Live Life" What I'm wondering is what program did the above performances come from? There's nothing in Doug Hinman's book about them. Were these clips privately done by the Kinks to be popped in various shoes, erm, shows, a la the Beatles clips done in late 1965? These clips are probably on YouTube.
Avid Fortuleo, that "Kinks Sell Out" idea is brilliant. Too bad Ray didn't think of it. I can imagine the front cover looking like The Nightfly by Donald Fagan, with Ray at the turntable.I can also see Ray making comments like Tom Waits in Night Train to Memphis.
"Life Goes On" I knew it! Now he ends the album completely ripping off Stephen Bishop with the chorus "on and on and on and on"! That was just a joke, or was it? I love the little bounce of the electric piano and Ray delivers a great vocal and melody. No use runnin' 'round lookin' scared, Life could get you when you're unaware. One day it's gonna come, so you better accept it. Life will hit you when you least expect it This part screams Tom Petty to me. I think Tom was listening very carefully to The Kinks albums throughout the years. I read an article where he mentioned the album Lola as being a favorite of his. That little Dylan style drawl that Ray delivers becomes a Petty staple. "Life could get you in your underwear." This song goes on a little too long, but sometimes life feels that way. It's also the last song on the album so I have no problem with them stretching it out a bit. It wraps up the album with a thankful feeling that I still like The Kinks. This album may be a disappointment for me, but there is enough here to recommend. I do wish the next bonus song made the album. I am going to include it in my top five for my playlist. With only nine songs on the album, it gives me more reason to think they should have combined it with Misfits for an impressive double album. The songs on Misfits would have balanced it. As it is, it will be interesting to see where this album ends up after we discuss the rest of the discography. Usually these discussions bump an album up, but I feel like this may have knocked this one down a notch. I'm ready to move on! Top five for my Sleepwalking Misfit playlist. 1. Life On The Road 2. Sleepwalker 3. Full Moon 4. Life Goes On 5. Artificial Light
Life Goes On This does a bit of a Doobie Brothers 70s groove going, but the lyrics and vocal melody is just pure Ray. The bit of country-ish/southern-ish rock sound is not new to the Davies brothers, and musically/lyrically I don't see this too far off from the Muswell Hillbillies / EISB era Kinks. To me, this does sound like Klassic Kinks transposed just a bit with the late 70s electric piano beds. The "my bank went broke and my well ran dry..." verse has this beautiful (non-70s-electric) piano backing to it that is great. The rest of that verse has Ray's dark humor which almost made me do a spit-take when I actually realized what he saying about the gas supply! The little electric piano hits that sort of stop/start with "dut, dahh.... dut, dahh..... dut dut, dah..." does to me sorta symbolize the life going on, there will be some hiccups, the time signature may change, but the end of one measure always leads into the first beat of the next measure. Thematically, is this almost like a sequel to 1965's The World Keeps Going Round: You worry 'bout the sun What's the use of worrying 'bout the big ol' sun You worry 'bout the rain The rain keeps falling just the same You worry when the one you need has found somebody new Times will be hard, rain will fall And you'll feel mighty low But the world keeps going round You just can't stop it The world keeps going round Like the Earth had done 12 times by 1977, Ray has come full circle.... I think this song works very well as an album closer. I really have greatly enjoyed ALL of Ray's album closers thus far, so I will not attempt the challenge to rank those. As far as the Tom Petty comparisons, I am of the age where I grew up with late 80s/early 90s Jeff Lynne-produced Tom Petty, so I don't hear my Tom Petty music here. But if this is what Petty's first album sounds like, maybe I need to do a song-by-song review of that! I do hear some similarities to Petty's vocal style in this song, though.
Ha! Sorry! This song always reminded me of Tom Petty, but then I realized the two songs surrounding it also did. I like Tom Petty! I’m just not a huge fan and don’t listen to his albums frequently. He kind of falls in an overrated category for me, but he has a handful of great songs. His debut is tops for me, but I imagine every album probably has something to recommend. He would be a good candidate for a song by song thread!
Nice essay. Well thought out. For me, there’s nothing new that sticks…and I’m not talking about my endless playlist prattle. On ‘Schoolboys’ I may have sneered at ‘Jack, The Idiot Dunce’ but, at the same time, it stuck in my head for a week. And I’m singing it , albeit quietly (!), at this very moment. ‘The Last Assembly’? I know it and can hum a section or two. Not on this album. No ear worms for me past the title track and ‘Jukebox Music’ (and half the time, on the latter, I break into Jukebox Hero by mistake). I can force myself, if I think long and hard, to recall Life On the Road (phew! that’s a playlister) but nothing else. And this is the first time that’s happened.
Life Goes On A good catchy, happy feeling song about our final finality, ah then that's something only our Ray could pull of..... and so par for the course!
Seconded on a Tom Petty song-by-song. Life Goes On Suicide is a tough subject. I've had a couple friends make that choice, and edged a few steps towards it myself half a lifetime ago. If any songwriter I know of set out to write a song about a friend killing themselves and their own suicide attempt -- along with a general philosophical treatment of the meaning/meaninglessness of life -- I certainly wouldn't expect it to sound like this, or to have a joke in the middle (or handclaps!). I can't figure out if the lightness/levity mitigates or adds to the heavy emotional impact of the song. I just know that when Ray sings no matter how hard I try/it seems I'm too young to die - depending on my mood - I'm either laughing out loud or on the verge of tears. So again a song that refuses to demand a specific, singular emotional response. A good half the time we've been exploring this album there's been an ominous drumbeat of war in the background, and I can't help thinking about the people of Ukraine when the song winds up w/ this: Tornado, cyclone and hurricane Can batter the houses with the thunder and rain. Blizzards can blow; the waves hit the shore, But the people recover and come back for more. Somehow the people fight back, even when the future looks black. Life goes on and on and on.
Sleepwalker LP Like @markelis, my initial inclination with this cassette/LP was to play the four faster tracks. I'm sure I heard bits of Brother and Sleepless Nights, but not enough to give them a "soundtrack of my life" feel. And within six months of getting Sleepwalker, I'd discovered Kronikles (and committed in a big way to punk/new wave), so even the faster songs were soon buried under a new set of musical obsessions. I still have the vinyl, but pretty much the only song I played of it as I moved into my 20s was Mr. Big Man. Revisiting it, & discovering the slower songs for the first time, I'm deeply impressed. Weirdly, though it isn't a concept album, it all feels very much of a piece, it's all nighttime and powerful natural forces and contradictions. & again there's a Jekyll & Hyde feel to it -- lyrically as well as musically -- songs that are at first deceptive (Life on the Road is an easy breezy touring song, Juke Box Music is telling us to shut up and dance), then jarringly contradictory, and finally just beautifully apt, because what definitive musical or lyrical statements can really be made about freedom, music, brotherhood, suicide, etc? This deepest of deep dives with people who know such an incredible amount about music has been a very enlightening exercise. I can't knock Lola v Powerman or Soap Opera out of my top 5 Kinks albums to make room for Sleepwalker, but it's right up there. Maybe 6th after those 2, Arthur, VGPS and Face to Face. The mini-kontroversy about whether or not this "sounds like the Kinks," whether it's their sell out LP, etc has led to some great insights, not only about the Kinks & Ray but about genre and '70s rock in general. Agreed that this album is partly about giving Dave some rope, and man that guy is an incredible guitarist. I'm guessing that as I start playing this album as a whole on heavy rotation I'll be listening to it mostly at night. I love Ray Davies, man. He's one of the few singer/lyricists who feel like a fellow-traveler, a brother, someone I know and love. So happy to re-integrate Sleepwalker into my personal canon.
the smart and impassioned commentary here re SLEEPWALKER is proof that likely ANY record if given enough sympathetic careful attention and thought, one can find nice/interestings things to say about it. Problem for me with this record, in my bottom five of Kinks, is that to me good pop-rock music needs to deliver on at least first five encounters some surface sense of interest or compelling content in music, melody, or lyric, and nearly all of the songs on this, rare in a collection of Davies songs, don't work on that level for me; and the ones that separated out can have some appeal, as this thread taught me for example "Stormy Sky" does, just get buried under the ehhh generic sodden murk of the LP experience as a whole.
