It's interesting that '20th Century Man', though it was played live in the 1971/2 timeframe, doesn't appear to have immediately become a set staple like other Muswell songs such as 'Alcohol', 'Skin and Bones' and the title track, and only really seemed to take off into becoming a keystone live track in the stadium era. I wonder if the earlier live versions included the bridge?
All Day and All of the Night My favorite of the Kinks big early power numbers, this song never disappoints live. This received some airplay on WNEW and it always gave me a chill to hear in public. I’ll just second everything @mark winstanley said and move along. 20th Century Man Did Ray have Celluloid Heroes on his mind when he introduced this one? This ain’t no twentieth century boy, either, as much as I love T Rex. No, this is heavy social commentary slipped into a punky rock gig. Yes, that bridge is vital but I don’t think it returns in live performance until Ray resurrected it for his Storyteller shows and stuck it at the beginning. Check out this song on the Chicago Riviera Theater bootleg from ‘87 for an even tastier performs Dave.
All Day and All of the Night Ray’s spoken word introduction – great! Dave’s chunky guitar tone – great! Mick’s pacing – great! The band’s backing vocals – great! Ray’s “get ‘em off” before the solo – great! Dave’s solo – great! Ray’s “hey-o’s” – even they work! Summary: great version 20th Century Man Here we have one of the biggest gaps between the live and studio versions. On Muswell Hillbillies – their most laid-back album - 20th Century Man is the closest to a rocker yet the dominant guitars for the first two-thirds of the song are acoustic. Fast forward eight years and they have gone for a showcase for Dave with a riff-heavy sound throughout. I still like it a lot but I’m also a little disappointed we don’t get the same build-up and release of the studio version. [edit: I've just read Mark's review where he highlights the build-up and release at the end of the live version - I was thinking more of the segue from acoustic to electric in the studio.]
Welcome to the SHF, many (if not most) new CD's are viewed as compressed or brickwalled here by the afficianados and don't get started on talking DR numbers!
For all the Low Budgeters out there I just spotted this at the supermarket at $ 1.75 a pack! Sorry I blurred the 20% off Polo Mints.
I hope then you spared yourself reading the 2021 Tattoo You Remaster with Bonus Studio Cuts & Wembley Concert Thread!
I don't know if it helped but I searched for it in Spanish, which I don't speak. My daughter told me years ago that she watched movies on YouTube that had been removed (for copyright reasons I guess) but were still available in subtitled form if you looked for them in another language.
All Day And All Of The Night This rocks of course though i can't be under any illusions it matches the Klassic studio Kut and I won't even mention Ray saying Day-o though Dave-o would be wholly more appropriate as he is the star of the show here!
"All Day And All Of The Night" You can't really go wrong with this song however much you try to rock it up, and they certainly rock it up plenty here. Suddenly it doesn't really sound like a 60s song any more, and it's easy to see how the riff could be repurposed on the next album. Bags of ferocity in here and they certainly don't sound like a nostalgia act.
20th Century Man Funnily enough I like all versions well enough but I am actually closest to Ray's Storyteller version if only as that was where I heard it first and got used to it. I like the bridge but like the live rock assault also and let us not forget that here they were born to be wild!
If you fear all your cups running over please refrain from reading the Cynthia Plastercaster RIP thread!
That’s not blathering, that’s just a great analysis of the album and song. I am right there with you, at this point in my life the stones and The Who were starting to feel somewhat passé, I had moved on to harder rock and heavy metal, yet these Kinks releases (Sleepwalker, Misfits, Low Budget, OFTR and the upcoming GTPWTW all felt of the time. As a 16-year-old kid, none of this Kinks material felt like a sellout, it just sounded like damn good rock ‘n’ roll!
It didn't sound old or struggling either. If I hadn't known they were a sixties band, I would have thought they were a lot younger.
Both of these tracks today come from the March 79 show at Rutgers University so they date from when Edwards was the keyboardist so the keyboards we hear are studio overdubs later by Gibbons/Ray. All Day And All Of The Night of course is always a crowd pleaser and the energy here is great! However, I will say that this would be one of the performances I would cite when I talked about the drumming being a little loose. Some of the fills are a little clunky but it's live and frantic so the energy and atmosphere outweighs that aspect and I won't bring it up again! I do hear some keys low in the mix at some points, but if they had overdubbed anything here it would have been louder in the mix so I'm guessing whatever we do hear here for keys is bleed from other mics from the original recording. 20th Century Man - I won't get into the studio version vs the live version here. What I will bring up is that for all three tracks recorded at that March 70 Rutgers show (this one, All Day above, and the earlier The Hard Way) this 20th Century sounds much different. We know the keys are overdubbed as I mentioned but I think there is more. Dave's guitar sounds quite different to me across these three tracks. It's much cleaner and less raunchy and placed in the mix differently. In fact all the instruments in most of the song sound much cleaner and smoother than the other two tracks recorded at this gig. There's also some weird effect being applied to the bass drum which you can hear clearly at the start when it's just acoustic guitar and drums. I can only describe it as a "boohm" sound like you would hear in a rap song from an electronic drum or drum box. Not passing judgment here as most live albums have studio overdubs and fixes, but I wonder how much of this song is actually live. No other live versions on the web to compare to. Ray should have saved the disco version comment for this song with that synth sequencer . This track was omitted from the initial CD releases of the album due to "time constraints" but it would fit as it was added back to later CD reissues. The whole album clocks at just under the 80 minute CD limit with a couple to spare.
"All Day and All of the Night": Like "You Really Got Me", this is a song that you have to expect in a live Kinks set list. The second punch of the Kinks' one-two punch to chart stardom and rock and roll history, it sounded ferocious when it first came out in 1965 when its competition included the Dave Clark Five, Herman's Hermits, Gary Lewis & The Playboys and dare I say it, the Beatles. Fifteen or so years later, when the competition is now Foreigner, KIDS, erm, KISS, AC/DC, and Aerosmith and their ilk, this song still sounds ferocious in a contemporary manner, like a restro modded vintage Jaguar XKE. "20th Century Man": A song that I think is the Kinks' version of "Won't Get Fooled Again", the quiet, acoustic resignation of the original has been replaced by a measured anger and a determination to fight in the face of heavy odds. A surprising choice for this album, it does work despite the removal of the bridge and it adds to the diversity of Ray's songs in this particular album, as our Headmaster has pointed out in his elequent write up.
Two other Snowfall crew members, besides myself, purchased different configurations of the Tattoo You 40th mess—and we all sent them back for a refund (thank goodness for Amazon!) as did a camera operator friend on a different show who subsequently borrowed my original ’81 LP just to make certain his hearing wasn’t going bad. Shockingly compressed… the worst yet from these folks. I don’t get it. As I don’t often listen to much after Black and Blue (other than an occasional dip into Some Girls), until they get around to issuing It's Only Rock 'n Roll (a spotty album in the first place) or Black and Blue box sets, I’m done even trying. I have everything The Rolling Stones ever released on the original albums, EPs and 45s and, as I haven’t been much impressed with most of the reconstituted/overdubbed bonus tracks, I guess I’ll save my dough just in case another Be-Bop Deluxe-related (Red Noise) box pops up from Esoteric/Cherry Red!
"20th Century Man" It was well-documented in this thread how I wasn't much of a fan of Muswell Hillbillies - it shows how much (i.e. not very) I've listened to that album that I can't actually remember how the bridge to this song goes at the moment, or indeed where in the song it appears. Thus, when I've just listened to the live version, I really didn't notice what was supposed to be missing! This version certainly rocks in a similar way to how Low Budget rocks - indeed with the mention of "aggravation" in the last verse we have the missing link between Muswell Hillbillies and UK Jive. It's undoubtedly a powerful performance, and a good selection for the album. Perhaps I need to go back to the studio version first of all, then re-listen to the live version to appreciate the differences.
