Well you've done it again @Fortuleo, really not much to add. And on balance yes, I really like this song. I love it? I may love it. There are so many little call-backs to previous modes and mannerisms; it feels light, yes, but not uninspired -- again, like Sleazy Town, fun and free. I think I'm just too in love with Ray's voice and with the person I imagine behind that voice to be objective about anything anymore. Ray sings it, Dave harmonizes a bit, I'm transported. Revision to my proposed album cover: The big towering letters that are office buildings full of bored workers surround a tiny little owner-operated video shop. Getting the feeling that Ray doesn't like when anything's knocked down or paved over, even if it's the factory that replaced the parking lot that replaced the dance hall that replaced the village green. But yes so far, I'm calling side 1 at least a concept album. One reason this song works is its context: In this increasingly atomized, sterilized, systemized world, we can only escape by putting something on our screens and pretending we're somewhere/someone else. Side note: Wish I could figure out how to add a pic here, but I was in a vinyl store today and saw something called "Great Kinks," with kind of a cool cover, released by WB in 1973. Not sure if I've seen it on this thread, but the track listing is fascinating: Side one - Till Death Do Us Part; Life Without Love; Lavender Hill; Groovy Movies; Rosemary Rose; Misty Water; Mr. Songbird; Side 2 - When I Turn off the Living Room Light; The Way Love Used to Be; I'm Not Like Everybody Else; Plastic Man; This Man He Weeps Tonight; Pictures in the Sand; Where Did the Spring Go? The owner raved about it -- they were selling it for $30.00. Bargain or rip-off?
Great Lost Kinks Album? If it’s a legit copy in excellent or mint condition, not a bad price these days IMO.
Yeah, that’s The Great Lost Kinks Album. The Kinks – The Great Lost Kinks Album (1973, Vinyl) - Discogs
Michael beat me to the punch! Too slow, old boom guy! Oh well… never let a decent scan go to waste, I always say. (OK, so I've never actually said that. Sheesh!) ~Huck
Yes, that's it, except the top area of the sleeve was so faded that the only words I could make out were "great" and "kinks." thanks all. will have to dig back in this thread and find these tunes.
If you have an interest in purchasing that copy you saw, make sure that it has the liner notes sheet w/John Mendelsohn’s rather, ahem, interesting remarks.
Avid Brian X, go to page 580 to find our discussion of the GLKA, which occurred last December and includes excellent posts by Avids Martyj and Fortuleo. The former post is so great that you and Avid Teddy B should get together and make a movie out of it.
some of those were covered here in 1968 chronology because they were featured on the VGPS 50th and recorded in 1968: Rosemary Rose - mono Misty Water - stereo - alt stereo Did You See His Name? - mono Till Death Us Do Part - stereo - Chas Mills vocal - Anthony Booth vocal Lavender Hill At the time, these were all brand new to me, and I firmly have Till Death Us Do Part now in my top 10 Kinks Kuts of all time! Just an incredible gold mine!
Well, I can’t speak for Avid Brian X, but I just turned 40 this year, and we are now at the point in the timeline where Ray is in his early 40s. Perhaps that is why I am also understanding the songs from 1983-1986 like Property, Don’t Forget to Dance, Going Solo…. I bring this up because a lot of folks have written things along the lines of “I didn’t give {song title here} a chance when this first came out, but now with a fresh listen I get it!” Ray was getting older, in his 40s, and maybe the listener needs to be past the young and innocent days to get some of this stuff now. As for video shops, I am old enough to have grown up in those days! Our local one was Palmer Video, which then got taken over by a Hollywood Video, and then some evil developer knocked down that entire ugly strip mall and made it into a parking lot with a multi-use retail/residential building. also, you can refer to my screen name as “Don Stemple” rather than “dons temple” (I just never figured out to change the spacing of the name here!)
Yes, don’t be misled by the 1973 release date. Everything here is from the 1966 Face To Face era through the 1969 Arthur era save for “The Way Love Used To Be” from 1971’s “Percy”. At the time of it’s 1973 release most of this was previously unreleased in terms of song and/or mix. All has since been reissued on the various Deluxe or Box sets.
No, I figure I'm on the slightly older side of this pack, born 1962. The young family fools a lot of people, though.
The Video Shop Again we have a song with an interesting opening. This one has kind of a ska/reggae type of sound. And again we have a song that doesn't really expand on its opening very much-the little interlude around the 2:50 mark is about the only distinctive thing. Another one that is too long as well. OK, but not great.
That is one epic story. & due to @Martyj's avatar, I can't help picturing Stan Laurel in a sailor's uniform, combing portside record shops, peeking longingly at his unplayed copy of The Great Lost Kinks Album, returning home at 2 in the morning to find his sister took his turntable, & finally playing the LP as an uncomprhending lunkhead gets more and more annoyed.
Here are the last 2 pages of my old Record Collector article on the Kinks UK singles. Apologies if the 1st had already been posted or the 2nd is marginally jumping the gun. N.b. IIRC i began posting these around the 7" release of "Apeman" so if anyone is interested in the UK 60's Pye single's comments i could perhaps work them in over future Sunday's?
When I first started buying Kinks albums in my teens, in the latter half of the 80's, in my corner of Northeastern Europe the only ones in circulation were the Pye and the then-contemporary London/MCA albums. So in rapid succession I bought everything from Face to Face through Percy, but also Think Visual, The Road and UK Jive. I never saw a single copy of the RCA/Arista albums until I moved to the US in the early 90's. I'm adding this caveat to allow that my view of Think Visual may be partially clouded by the sweet nostalgia of discovering my favorite band. Still, I don't hold UK Jive in particularly high regard, save for a couple of tracks. Which is more I can say about Phobia. Think Visual feels like a softer, gentler version of the Arista-era band, with the hard-rocking Kinks only briefly showing up. I prefer TV over any other 80's Kinks album, and the A-side in particular is, to me, their strongest since the A-side of... maybe Misfits? Yes, I realize this is not the consensus opinion. Even more blasphemously, I think The Video Shop is the best thing they did in the 80's. To me it is clearly the top track of the album, and their finest in many, many years. Musically whimsical and bouncy, rich with melodic ideas, lovely harmonies, the resonator moment, the Penny Lane-esque trumpet. Because of the arrangement and the length, the song feels somehow "bigger" than the other favorites of mine from the Arista/MCA years. Like a bigger production of, say, National Health. Musically, it might have fit somewhere in the Preservation era, with the Mike Cotton brass ensemble playing the synth parts. Lyrically, I love the mixture of cynicism (factory jobs disappearing, so the protagonist survives by selling bootleg escapism, free of consumer protections, further numbing the senses of the apathetic populace, who can't be bothered to fight for a better future) and genuine escapist romanticism (I relate well to the alluring promise of a good film or book to relieve the soul-sucking repetition of a humdrum life). While there are no heroes in this story, as usual, Ray's empathy is evident. The subject matter is only dated regarding the physical manifestation of VHS tapes and Blockbusters, but replace it with Game Stop, Netflix, sports betting and whatnot, and the basic proposition still stands. There are plenty of new things to immerse myself in, now without the need to even get up from my comfortable couch. To me The Video Shop is a late period masterpiece, the last one of those, though there are a few good songs still to come. Yes, I could nitpick about the synth and drum sounds, but if we are getting a genuine, old-fashioned Kinks epic in '86, do I really want to look the gift horse in the mouth that much?
Thanks, nicely-avatarred stranger, for saving me some typing effort by summing up my feelings on this song. Much as everything else on the album, this track barely raised my attention at first, but it has grown in my estimation as one that Pye-era Kinks would not be ashamed of. Even the much-used chord progression of the verse could not be held against it, since 60s Ray relied heavily on those (Mr Songbird uses the same or a close variation, I guess, but there must be others). There is a Village Green, Autumn Almanac feeling to it, even though the length (which surprised me, I don't really feel it) brings it nearer to Preservation-era Kinks. I bear no hard feelings toward the synth horns: I believe they are tastefully used, and I don't think it would be fair to dismiss them after I was almost fooled into thinking them real. I wonder if he used a mellotron? They sound really good for 1986 synth, don't they? As for the subject matter, I'm immune to the anachronistic effect: like Dr Manhattan in Watchmen, I tend to live simultaneously at all periods of time, and the video-club (thanks for the reminder!) lives both in the past, present and future for me. And from a 1986 perspective, we know waht the future is: all these unscrupled pirates who taped movies from TV have utterly destroyed the cinema industry and all movie stars are now living miserable lives in the street. How terribly sad. There was no TV at home, and of course no VHS, but my best friend had those, and I still have fond memories of the video shops in my city, and the hopes and disappointments raised by the presence or absence of such and such video tape... Such was the thrill of rarity, the one pleasure we seem to have lost nowadays, even if we still manage to muster some of it by taking part in Kinks forum threads and dream of unreleased 1972 concert footage or mysterious MIA 1981 musicals. I was trained as an economic historian, and I have a tenderness for fugitive economic phenomena born of passing social, political or technological conditions. Businesses that flower on a precise situation and disappear once the situation changes. In the mid third century AD, Roman emperor Decius persecuted the Christians in North Africa. He said, you guys can worship whatever deity you like, it's a free country, but you have to make sacrifices to the Roman civic gods as well. For the Christians, this was out of the question. Some endured persecution and martyrdom. But some bought fake sacrifice certificates to please the authorities while remaining faithful to their beliefs. Of course, once the persecution subsided, the survivors of those who took the hard line persecuted the certificate buyers for their unacceptable MORness. At least that's how I remember the story from my 3rd year History cursus (I had not majored in economic history yet). People and societies don't change that much, do they? Anyway, I love to picture the thriving sacrifice certificate business that must have been born and died in the few years the persecution lasted. It's not historically documented as a business, as far as I know, but how could there not have been such a one? Like the VHS, the surrounding conditions made it obsolete after a while, and the fake certificate traders must have moved to another business area. My first job was a creation of eco-technological conditions that lasted only for a few years. I worked in a tiny company that made press reviews for big corporate clients. I had to peruse the printed press in search for keywords defined by the companies we were working for (the company name, their trade, their competitors, etc). When I found one, I cut the corresponding strip from the newspaper (we must have had 2 copies of the main newspapers in case there was relevant stuff on both sides of a page). Then it was scanned and all the identified articles were sent either by fax or email before 8 in the morning. I loved that job, because I had to be there at 6 am, and I walked there in the wee hours of the morning accross some of the most beautiful streets of Paris. The business model for this job must have lasted 5 or 8 years at most, from 1997 on, with some necessary adjusments within this short time frame. I think you're missing another elephant: this is not quite a regular video shop, it's a makeshift store, with second hand or ripped-off stuff, and the business model is diverting a little bit of dole money to allow the unemployed a little escape. I don't know if this existed, but it doesn't matter: Ray is an observer of human nature, not of economic or political facts, even when he uses those as a canvas. Still, there may be a hint of Thatcher-era social commentary in the way the do-it-yourself self-entrepreneurship was encouraged and sometimes necessary to survive. Which is why to me this song immediately brought Stephen Frears' and Hanif Kureishi's My Beautiful Laundrette in mind. It's from 1985 (starring a young Daniel Day-Lewis) and I wouldn't be surprised if it served as a partial inspiration for Ray.
The Video Shop It's great fun, and a catchy bouncy tune. Another favourite from this album. In fact it toys with 'Lost And Found' for being my favourite. It's been a great Side One to the album, I'm leaning to it being the best Side One the band recorded in the '80s. Quite the historical record now too of course! Rather than people saying 'do you remember when we used to have a party line' (sadly no party [a-la Boris], but ours was with a neighbour across the road - so if they were on the phone, you couldn't be. You could listen to their call, or they yours) they'll be saying in years to come 'remember when you wanted to watch a movie at home, you'd rent it from the video shop?' One of the first videos I rented from a video shop was 'The Kinks - One For The Road'. Probably my earliest visuals of the band which were not from the 1960s in B&W.
Avid Brian X, you forgot who could play the “uncomprehending lunkhead”: Just because they are no longer w/us is no real problem these days. Think CGI!
OK, after reading this, maybe the Avids The late man and Fortuleo are the same person. At least the Avid The late man is taking up the slack while Avid Fortuleo is out in the US Wild West. When you had that first job, did this song come in your mind, the French equivalent of “Waterloo Sunset”:
I neglected to mention earlier how much I enjoy this couplet from "The Video Shop", from a poetic point of view: I was sitting by the telly with my brother, Kenny When suddenly the penny dropped telly / Kenny / suddenly / penny: In English, the "-y" sound can be tagged onto the end of a word to form a diminutive; the prominence with which these "-y" rhymes are presented immediately helps to establish the idea of the smallness of the protagonist's entrepreneurial endeavor. This idea is further emphasized by the word penny, one of the least denominations of money, almost not worth bending over to pick up of the sidewalk. In addition, the phrase "the penny dropped" informs us not only that an idea entered the head of our protagonist, but that this idea is an extremely modest one, given that the origin of the phrase is the mechanical vending machines in 1930s Britain that, if the penny did not become stuck in it's slot, would drop into the machine and bequeath an item of small value to it's customer. The phrase also gives us a hint that the protagonist's idea concerns the sale of modest items. Finally, from the perspective of phonology, in the phrase "the penny dropped", the onomatopoeic dropped makes an abrupt and dramatic end to the verse - especially in it's sharp contrast to the whimsical sound of the four, rhyming "-y" words preceding it (telly, Kenny, suddenly, penny - dropped); furthermore, dropped sets up for an excellent slant rhyme at the conclusion of the stanza, in conjunction with the revelation of the protagonist's grand idea: a (video) shop. Ezra Pound referred to poetry as "language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree"; I think Ray's lyrics here are a good example of what Pound is referring to. To further this point: I noticed a couple of Avids expressed some discontent with Ray's choice to use the word sleazy in "Welcome To Sleazy Town". In this vein, and to Ray's defense, I would submit that the word sleazy is packed with meaning, absolutely drenched in imagery of cheap sex and sin; and it's pronunciation, slee-zeee, perfectly reinforces the idea expressed by the word, and is ripe for exploitation by the poet or vocalist for effect. Similar to the word scrapheap in "Scrapheap City", it's an evocative, efficient and irresistible choice; Passaic, for example, unless one was familiar with the city, wouldn't deliver quite the same impact.
Since its Sunday, why didn’t I buy Think Visual? Above and beyond not hearing a strong single, my purchasing power was focused on non-legacy acts. Legacy-wise, I bought: Paul Simon - Graceland Peter Gabriel - So Steve Winwood - Back in the High Life Strolling Bones - Dirty Work (not their best but I still like it) Queen - It’s a Kind of Magic (not their best but I still like it) I was still in a Prince phase, so of course, from the pop world: Prince Parade Metal and hard rock were the real go tos: Maiden - Somewhere in time Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet (yup, I went Hair Metal) Metallica – Master of Puppets (Master! Master!) Poison – Look What the Cat Dragged in (yup, I went Hair Metal) Cinderella - Night Songs. (bad hair metal rep, but really just ACDC and Aerosmith rolled together) 5150 - Van Halen (I went with Eddie and Sammy in the divorce) Queensryche - Rage for Order Judas Priest – Turbo (not the best effort on their part) Tesla - Mechanical Resonance (if you like great 70s hard rock, here’s one you missed [NOT hair metal]) Triumph - Sport of Kings ( I have soft spot for Canadian hard rock, April Wine, Aldo Nova, rush etc, though this was not a good effort as they were verging on splitting up) Boston - Third Stage (after a 10 year wait, a few good tunes) Aerosmith - Done with Mirrors (after rehab and the break up, fun but not essential Aerosmith) …with a return to suvern rock and my first forays into country (living in CA to go to law school and a good friend in law school was into country, so off I went). 38 Special Strength in Numbers (ol’ school suvern – with too much sheen, their older stuff was better) Steve Earle – Guitar Town (if you like good rockin’ guitar based Country and don’t know this guy, you should) Dwight Yoakum - Guitars, Cadillacs Etc. (see immediately above, these two guys made me a true country fan when I never thought that was possible. Guitars all over the frickin’ place) Georgia Satellites – Debut (a new band’s debut, real southern rock, 15 years after southern rock’s heyday) Rap? Beastie Boys License to Ill (sheee's crafteeeee!) in retrospect, should bought the kink's album too. hindsight is always 20/20.
