The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

I saw them once, like 5 years ago, it was a nice bit of nostalgia and singalong. I think they've been playing a straight greatest hits, with the same couple of deep cuts, for like… two decades (guess you can't call them deep cuts anymore, then!). They're a bit like their own tribute band. But the voices are there, the songs are superb, their bound and friendship are palpable, and Gerry Beckley remains a tremendous musician.

Thanks to @ajsmith, I'm enjoying the better versions of the Kinks videos. They really made some great stuff in this area, especially in the eighties. Ray was indeed thinking visual. As far the Sorentinos' tune, it's nice, though someone should tell them that on this Thread, every day is Ray Davies Day.

Thanks to @donstemple for making note of the fact Dave does the I'm Not Like Everybody Else signature/Zorro riff while Ray doesn't. Always love those astute tidbits observations, they tell a lot about how these guys' minds work and how they've managed to share (and now curate) their combined legacy with courteous respect. It's like two divorced parents that don't always get along too well but still know how to behave decently for all things regarding their children. "You take them this week-end, I'll get them the next, no problem!" And they don't fight over "properties" either. "You get the riff, Dave. No, no, I insist, it's yours!"

 

Avid Fortuleo, I dunno if every day should be Ray Davies Day, especially in light of Mick Avory’s remark in the VGPS documentary that everyone would work twice as hard if they celebrated Ray’s birthday

 

And this is why I send my quiz questions to you. Good catch!

 

Bands that turned into their own tribute band. Love it. Would make a great thread except it would have the potential to get contentious. Of course, one band that never did that in my view was the Kinks.

 

Pulse Magazine
May 1993

We look back to Phobia-era Kinks with this article, which is dedicated to @The late man (approx. read time 7 min.). Notable for it’s photographs of the brothers taken at Ray’s 15 W. 72nd Street apartment in NYC.

 

I swear I’ve read the dozens of comments about this Davis/Davies pronunciation question since the beginning of the thread with no idea whatsoever of the difference!!! I don’t have the slightest clue!

 

Well due to 54 years of Davies being the pronunciation in my world, I'm hard pressed to change it now lol

 

During my first week at a new house in Park Ridge, NJ, I bought that same sofa/love seat/ottoman set off a truck with North Carolina license plates, in April 1994. There was a caravan of trucks down in the center of town hawking furniture. A couple guys brought it all into the house and the bill came to probably three or four hundred dollars. My girlfriend at the time took this photo. Nice to know Dave and I both enjoyed lounging on our sofas in the mid-nineties. Our exquisite sofas, @Zeki.

 

I wonder if there is some conceptual continuity involved in this...

Plus I figured some folks would really like this couch
(though I would find sitting on Ray's face a little disconcerting lol)

 

I feel I've been round the world in 8 1/2 (really 9) Days and I thank an Avid Aussies Audio.

This USB is the gift that keeps giving as I put it in the car last Saturday week and ticking into its 3rd calendar week it still hasn't played through despite loads of daily driving.

It's Klearly a Kavernously Kompiled Killer Kinks Kollection Kleverly Kollated!

Live concerts, Radio Shows, Unreleased Musicals, Demos, Vintage & Modern TV Appearances, Dav/Ray as in both Dave & Ray Solo.

This little plastic joy must run over 10 hours, is this even possible?
As Austen Tayshus of "Austrayliana" might say; "How much can one u s B.B. Bear?"

Lost in Jules Verne now and in the morning I begin day 10 of my Kontinuous Kink mobile listening Kwest whereby I've become the long distance pianola player, repeating daily with the first sunny ray's!

 

Avid Pyrrhicvictory, thanks again for the gincy article. I also have some Pulse magazines laying around, but I don’t think I have that particular one. It does bring back great memories of going to Tower Records in Boston and Burlington, MA. I also like that piccy of yours. You do exude a sense of dignity that is lacking in Dave’s cover

 

It’ll be on The Quiz in four months so …study time!

 

I have been sitting out these last couple of live albums, but I do I have a picture of myself sitting on this couch! It's located at The Clissold Arms.

I haven't read many of the comments over the last week or so. I just didn't think I cared much about more live shows covering many of the same songs again. I did dip into a few songs this morning and I'm quite impressed with both of the shows. Now I'll have to try and go back and listen to all of the songs. Dave sounds really good in a few of the clips I listened to. I have been to The Belly Up once a few years ago. It's funny that it was once again to see The Church! It must have have been one of my last shows before Covid hit. It's a nice club located just a short walk from the beach.

Love the cleaned up videos that @ajsmith posted. I don't recall ever watching the video for "Sitting in the Midday Sun". What a great song! I'm happy The Kinks are getting some attention with this new compilation. Some lucky people out there will be discovering The Kinks for the first time.

 

Great & provocative post. I've noticed with my 7 year old (well she turned 7 yesterday) that she almost automatically sets off on alternate intellectual/emotional paths than her older sister. It's like, well big sister holds her feelings in, I'm going to shout mine to the skies; big sister is deliberate and organized, I'll be spontaneous and haphazard.

So maybe relatively early on Dave looked at his brother and realized the limits and pitfalls of constantly questioning yourself and slipping in and out of masks and being a perfectionist and was basically like, whatever Ray does, I'll do the opposite.

 

Funny you should say that, Avid Brian X. I see the same things w/my grandnephews and my grandniece. The younger ones are more energetic than their older siblings. My youngest grandnephew has this tendency to emulate Iggy Pop and take off his shirt and run around half naked.

By the way, Happy Birthday to your 7 year old. I hope she got plenty of cake, ice cream and presents.

 

For what's left of freeform Sunday, this present for avid @All Down The Line , with a question for avid @Fortuleo : wtf is this thing ?

 

The comments about 80 Days in that 1993 article are rather similar to how it was received in this thread!

So in 1993 Ray wanted to make a solo album. But by the time he had no choice but to make a solo album, he would rather have been working with the band again!

 

Stefan’s Voyage of Kinks Discovery, Part 3: Word of Mouth


By early 1991, I had just purchased my first CD player and had some kind of plan that I would, when possible, only buy CDs from then on. At the time, I owned one Kinks LP (UK Jive) and also had the albums Everybody’s In Showbiz, Sleepwalker, One For The Road plus the compilations A Compleat Collection and Lola, Percy & The Apeman Come Face To Face With The Village Green Preservation Society… Something Else! dubbed onto cassettes. As The Kinks’ back catalogue was so huge, I also figured I would only buy the albums after One For The Road. Famous last words…

In any case, I found a copy of Word of Mouth on LP for half the price and decided I would postpone my “CDs only” plan a bit, that the LP edition would be a good placeholder copy until a CD edition (if such an edition existed) could be found. I thought the album’s cover artwork was hideous and it also made me think of the cover artwork for The J Geils Band’s 1984 album You’re Getting Even While I’m Getting Odd (the one album they did without Peter Wolf, I love all their other albums but have never bothered with this LP). However, I suspected the music on Word of Mouth was better than its artwork so I bought it and now owned two Kinks LPs.

My first impressions were that it was a very strong rock album with no real bad tracks on it. I was not so keen on Dave’s “Guilty” but really liked all the other tracks and played the album a lot.

Back then, it was of course a fairly recent Kinks album and I only owned two Kinks LPs. I’ve been listening to it regularly since, but before this week it had been a while since I last listened to it. In the decades since I first bought it, I have bought all the other Kinks studio and live albums plus the solo albums, so Word of Mouth no longer has the status of being 50% of my Kinks collection and it is no longer a fairly recent album. I was curious to find out how it measures up to me in 2023.

I still think it is a very strong album without any bad tracks. “Do It Again” is a fabulous opener, catchy and immediate yet also quirky enough to keep me fascinated as a listener. The video clip is brilliant too. It beats me why it wasn’t a big hit and at least as well-known as “Come Dancing” or “Don’t Forget To Dance” (among rock fans in general, I mean). It’s nice that there’s a later version of it on To The Bone, it would also have been great to hear it at one of Ray’s live shows as a solo artist.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that the one song that has become a classic is “Living on a Thin Line”. And deservedly so. I think it is one of Dave’s best ever Kinks songs and has one of his best lead vocals too. It is very well-produced and still sounds timeless and fresh.

While I think all the songs are really good (I’ve warmed up to “Guilty” which has a very good chorus), I think the album is a bit front-loaded. To my ears, side A is stronger than side B but “Missing Persons” is a real gem. This is a song that should have become a classic, in my opinion, but it’s never been on any compilation has it? Was this song performed live at all after the Word of Mouth tour?

There is one song on Word of Mouth that has an extra poignant meaning to me and that is “Good Day”. Every time I hear it it takes me back to a specific time and place and brings back a lot of memories, both sad and happy ones. On July 11, 1999 I was just returning home after having visited my parents who were on a holiday at the beautiful island Gotland in the Baltic Sea. They had rented a small cottage by the sea for two weeks and I visited them for a few days. Upon returning home, I turned on the TV while I unpacked my bags. To my surprise they were talking about a long-time friend of mine who at the time was a quite well-known stand-up comedian and actor. He had also published two books. The person on the TV was talking about his career and at first I assumed they were probably going to do an interview or something with him about a new show or a new book perhaps. Then the person on TV said “L.L. was 27 years old”. That stopped me in my tracks right there – what did they mean by saying that he “was” 27 years old? I checked another channel and got horrific news: the reason they had talked about L.L. on the other channel was because he had been killed in a traffic accident that morning, apparently he had been on his way home from a show in Norway when he had a head-on collision with a horse transport. It was a huge shock – L.L. had just got married three weeks earlier and he and his wife were expecting their first child (their daughter was born six months later). I had first met L.L. at school when we were in our early teens. We became good friends and it was great to see him become such a successful stand-up comedian and actor. He was quite busy with his career but he was the kind of guy who remembered everything and everyone and would remember exactly what you had talked about with him in a previous conversation, even if had been months earlier and he had met hundreds of people in between. And now, recently married and with his first child soon to be born, he had been killed in a car accident. None of my family members or friends were at home that day, everyone was on holiday or somewhere else, so I had no-one to share the dreadful news with. To try and digest these news, I went out for a run. It was a gloriously sunny day, everything was green and blossoming, birds were chirping in the trees and it all felt so strange, like the weather was almost mocking me. How could it be sunny on such a day? I didn’t have any Walkman or anything like that with me, but as I was running the song “Good Day” was going through my head like an unwelcome ear-worm, over and over. Why that song of all the songs in my record collection? I had bought the Velvel CD edition a few weeks earlier, but that couldn’t be the explanation. When I returned home, I listened to the song on repeat several times. Despite its title, it is quite a dark song as I hear it and on this day it really resonated deeply within me and it was like a musical friend on that very traumatic day. It felt almost like the song was giving me comforting hugs, if that makes sense.

Whenever I’ve heard “Good Day” since, it reminds me of that awful day. At first, it makes me really sad as I’m reminded of his untimely death and how his daughter (now aged 23) never got to knew her father. But following those sad emotions, hearing the song also makes me think of all the happy memories I have of him and our friendship and the many great conversations we had. So “Good Day” is such a special song to me and it is a great comfort for me to know that this song exists.

 

Thanks!...
To think that as much time passed since this interview as between the beginnings of the Kinks and it...

He was already planning the Storyteller project.

And Dave worked on a script for a movie?? The Resurrected Clown, maybe?

"I think he's living in Los Angeles or somewhere ridiculous like that"...

 

Great story, Avid StefanWq. Word of Mouth is a rather underrated Kinks album and we spent plenty of time on it here. My condolences on the loss of your friend. I hope that his daughter is OK. At least poor Avid Pablo Fanques’ daughter had time w/him

 

@StefanWq. Sorry for your loss. But thank you for your poignant remembrance of your friend.

I too like Word of Mouth a lot.

 

And a shoutout to @stewedandkeefed . I rolled through your town four times on the Via train the past couple weeks. It’s funny, I grew up a half hour from there, but don’t know it at all.
Ok, back to the Kinks.

 

Woodstock, Ontario is the dairy capital of Ontario. We have a cow statue on the main drag. Toyota moved here a few years back. Clearly led us to getting not one, but two, Starbucks since 2020. But we now have to deal with traffic jams!