Once A Thief A good topic, some good lyrics and Dave makes a great entrance with his opening guitar solo but.....the song just does very little for me. There are no great hooks or inspiration nor any horribly bad moments to complain of, perhaps the thief was time and this bit of Ray's that was lost? Anyhow a shot in the dark.......... A small repeated part of the lyric reminded me of a snatch of a song from Santana though when i figured out which one it's title was purely coincidental to this ones theme. One Chain (Don't Make No Prison) 1978 From Santana's Inner Secrets LP
Once a Thief My first reaction after two listens was meh. I’m certainly not disappointed that it was not on the album. Lyrically it’s not uninteresting to me, as I fall into the camp of it being about trust in a relationship, and how hard it would be to win it back after a transgression. Musically it comes across to me as generic 80s rocker. Not exactly that similar, but Huey Lewis’ Power of Love popped into my head. OaT is missing just a little Kinks secret sauce.
Yes, worth double noting, I loved the wording Avid Late Man used. I suspect any one of us Avid's on this thread totally understood that feeling (where my finance, who is in her very early thirties, hardly has a concept of an album, no less an outtake). I would submit that us music geeks are an odd but lovable bunch. May I suggest at the end, we create our own outtakes album (or, gasp, double), limiting the song choice to only the best of the best in our own humble opinion. I am imagining that if the The Kinks had done a Tattoo You style album of remastered, remixed, recreated songs as Mick Jagger and Chris Kimsey retooled Start Me Up and the other half baked Stones leftovers into a Tattoo You of their own, they might have pulled off their own late career resurgence. They didn't need it '81 the way the Stones did, The Kinks still clearly had the magic in their writing and arranging in my estimation (though others may differ on that thought), whereas Mick and Keith's pens seemed to have dried up. Nonetheless, to me an album or two of reworked leftovers, styled to have a consistent modern sound in the way the Tattoo You's leftovers were, could have been a big hit. Imagine taking the little known monster track like I Need You, giving it a modern G'n"R Appetite for Destruction sheen, and letting that loose on an unsuspecting public in 1988. ....but I ramble. Nice wording Late Man!
Once A Thief This is better musically than lyrically. Not that the lyrics are bad, they are OK, just sub par for Ray. It would have been fine on the album.
Fairly boring rock song, to be honest. At first I thought Ray was setting up a scenario a bit like "Budgie", the TV series he wrote the theme song for, but it looks like it's just a metaphor and we have a "I've been a bad boy and you won't let me forget it" (to which I say, why should she?) relationship song.
I know baseball is nearly unrecognizable from when we were kids, but one constant remains; 1 for 3 is a .333 BA, and will get your ticket punched for Cooperstown.
Whoops, you're right, Avid Pyrrhicvictory. I can only plead that 1. I'm bad at math and 2. I wrote my remark at 5 AM half asleep. Continuing the baseball analogy, the bonus tracks from the VGPS era are definitely in the Babe Ruth league.
As in “The Babe Ruth League is an international youth baseball and softball league”? Or as in ‘high level of play, at the level of Babe Ruth, the player’?
There's a whole bunch of songs that the Kinks never did that could have worked on something like that. I'm thinking of Ray songs such as "All Night Stand", "Strange Effect", "A Little Bit of Sunlight", "Time Will Tell" and heck, even "I Go To Sleep", even though the Pretenders did a version of it.
Once A Thief According to the inestimable Mr. Hinman this was to be the penultimate track on the album based on the proposed track list Ray submitted to Arista, replacing Cliches Of The World. Ray had actually intended Cliches for a film project, but since that never got off the ground, Cliches got added to the album and Once A Thief got locked away for a 16 year term. That first proposed track list never got to the acetate or promo stage apparently. And I also agree with @Fortuleo this track serves it's outtake status just fine and holds up to that. I can see why it didn't make the album, but it's a true final master outtake of which we have gotten very few over the years, so it was very welcome when it completed its sentence and got released in 1999.
To me, the funny thing is, the non album tracks and unreleased songs from the sixties could probably make several albums worthy of all time klassic standard. Dedicated Follower Of Fashion She's Got Everything Set Me Free A Well Respected Man All Day And All Of The Night See My Friends Dead End Street This is Where I belong I Go To Sleep Big Black Smoke Mr Reporter I'm Not Like Everybody Else Wonderboy Susannah's Still Alive Lavender Hill Act Nice And Gentle Berkley Mews Polly Autumn Almanac Did You See His Name? Days Mr Pleasant Misty Water Rosemary Rose Mr Songbird God's Children This Man He Weeps Tonight King Kong Anytime Mindless Child Of Motherhood Moments The Good Life Plastic Man Mr Shoemakers Daughter Animals In The Zoo The Way Love Used To Be Hold My Hand Dreams There's very little thought put into that, but between 64 and 70... and I'm probably missing stuff, and the sequencing is ramshackle, but I reckon you can put together three high quality albums from that material. I'm probably cheating with the Percy stuff, but after finally hearing it, it seems like it deserved a proper album, rather than just a movie soundtrack. Anyway, perhaps that would be a good topic for this weeks freeform Sunday?
Once a Thief First listen, I like it. Although I was wishing for more creativity in the rather ham fisted drumming. But still overall, a pretty cool listen for me. @Fortuleo likened it to "Fogerty-meets-Bruce-meets-eighties." I had a similar thought in catching a distinct John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band vibe. With a slight modification to the vocal, I could see this being on the Eddie and the Cruiserss oundtrack.
Ooft, that's what I'd call an upgrade! Cliches seems so much like the centrepiece of SoC that it's hard to imagine the album with 'Once A Thief' taking it's place. Wonder what the film project was? Could it even have been written for the Julien Temple/Mari Wilson/Orson Welles project posted upthread?
Once a Thief Doesn't sound demo-ish to me. It's got the backing vocals, the solo, the piano hits. I think the short instrumental bridge(?) just after the first solo should have been explored a bit. But then again the song is already 4 minutes long. Perhaps it's the overlay of the scenes from the Wire (one of my favorite shows of all time), but it sure seems like this would be good as a soundtrack/theme song! It's a bit generic 80s yes. It sorta has a Survivor-style backbone of the bass/drums. Probably doesn't get much more generic 80s rock than that. But it does sound good, and the backing vocals add that Kinkian touch, and some of Ray's lines work well with me. The opposites of "respected me" and "suspected me" is a good turn and rhyme. Very solid outtake.
I'm surprised that no-one else has yet commented that this sounds exactly like the song that Flash would sing having been released from reprogramming jail, and now trying to make his way as a member of society, but finding no-one will believe that he's a changed man.
Here’s a challenge for Kinks obsessives: would it be possible to construct a Preservation Act III: Back In A Flash out of 70s and 80s outtakes?
Once a Thief Agreed the music is just kind of there (other than the DD guitar stabs, which are nice) but I dig the lyric once a thief, always a suspect. My wife always says "I'm a Scorpio," as if that explains her preternatural ability to remember every detail of every single time I've said or done something to hurt her over the last fifteen years. There are certain areas in which I'll be on eternal parole, carrying a heavy burden of free-form guilt and a paralyzing horror of imminent re-incarceration. How many years must a criminal pay? Ian Hunter used an old idiom to good effect in Once Bitten, Twice Shy, but here RD invents a new one out of thin air, then uses it as the central metaphor for a solid love song. Perish the thought of it replacing Cliches of the World but you wouldn't hear any complaints from here if it replaced Bernadette.
Whoa! I hadn't realized that, but sure enough, I googled "once a thief, always a suspect" and literally every single hit was the lyrics to this song. That phrase is not used anywhere else (except this thread, perhaps now?). It makes perfect sense as an idiom, and I am surprised it is actually not a common one! Seems like it should be. Instead, we have the less clever "once a thief, always a thief".
