The Kinks - Album by Album (song by song)

You didn't somewhere manage a half Nelson?

 

I only go for a full Nelson or none at all.

 

Well then sir I'll behave!

 

Mindwash.

Come on Mammon, oh yeah
Ease my fevered brow

They lie to your face, tell you black is white
Cloud your vision with media hype
I've my own mind, I don't need programming
I've my own mind, leave me alone
I've my own mind, I don't need brainwashing
I've my own mind, mind your own

No more lying, no denying
No more crying, this is a mindwash

Just look around this city at these mindless clones
It's such a crying pity that they've got no souls
I'm my own man, don't need brainwashing
I'm my own man, leave me alone
I'm my own man, I don't need programming
I've my own mind, leave me alone

No more lying, no more crying
No denying this is a mindwash
Ooh, ooh
This is a mindwash

Life is hard but life's a dream
Gotta find out what's happening
Gotta look behind the scenes
Nothing is really what it seems

This is a mindwash, ooh ooh
This is a mindwash

They lie to your face, tell you black is white
Cloud your vision with the media hype
I've my own mind, I don't need programming
I've my own mind, leave me alone
I've my own mind, I don't need brainwashing
I've my own mind, mind your own

No more lying, no denying
No more crying, this is a mindwash
Ooh, ooh
This is a mindwash

Ooh
Ease my fevered brow
Ooh
Come closer baby
I need you come closer baby

Written by: Dave Davies
Published by: Dave Davies/Carlin Music

Another track that sounds like a demo....
We have an opening with some grunty guitar chording and a nice bit of lead, that leads into a more mellow verse... that seems like a variation on a blues/folk kind of thing.
Then the chorus comes crashing in.

This is Dave giving a big middle finger to society.

Essentially we have Dave complaining about the propaganda and media brainwashing that goes on.... it's probably a little harsh to suggest that folks participating in society as best as they're able are soulless.... lol
But this is Dave, so I understand where he is coming from.

Look I completely understand Dave's angle here, and yea, people should look behind the curtain and see the "all powerful" Oz, but the truth is, most of us are just too damn busy to spend all our time chasing down the truth about what is going on in the upper reaches of society... the world of politics and big business and their incestuous love affair... and it's probably by design....
But at the end of the day, I know where I stand, and they'll be answerable at the end of the day.

I find it funny when folks attack someone's comments about a topic, and suggest they are reading the wrong media or whatever... when the exact same accusation could be thrown back at them lol.

Anyway...
Dave seeks solace in some lovin' from his babe

 

"Mindwash"

This is one of those tracks that actually improves as it goes along - Dave's struggling with the vocal in the first verse, but by the time we get to the last verse he's sounding much more convincing. He does pretty well with the title hook throughout. The music is OK, has a nice slinky groove. Lyrically we're back to railing at an amorphous entity, but this one seems even more trenchant these days. I think this one's actually worth the effort if you give it a couple of plays.

 

They're back. "They", Dave's favorite people and favorite subject for songs. When I looked at the song list and saw this title Mindwash, well, I knew what to expect. What I didn't expect, is the nice swampy acoustic guitar backing that graces the verses, between the heavy riffs. A few members of the club said about one of the first tracks that a Muswell Hillbillies type of arrangement/playing would've benefited some of these songs and here, Dave, who's clearly an avid reader of our Avid prose, decided to oblige – we should thank him for it. I like some phrases here, especially "I'm My Own Man / Mind Your Own" which I find dare I say… clever, in the context of the song.

 

Mindwash

Whether Big Business, Government, Advertisers or Influencers Dave is back doing his Community Service warnings or should i say warrings?
Not a bad song with some nice changes as we go along despite another retread of You Really Got Me.
One last thing i will add is that when the guitars drop out, part of Dave's measured prose reminds me of Genesis..... That's All!

 

“Mindwash”: After a few songs w/a different lyrical slant, we’re back to Dave ranting about them, but in this song, the lyrics are somewhat palatable and the music OK. I really don’t see any recycling of the YRGM riff and it rocks to its own beat.

 

I watched The Sparks Brothers documentary last night. They were once known as Halfnelson.

 

‘Mind Wash’: not exactly a ‘top of the morning to you’ song. (I will say no more.)

 

Look late.

 

Mindwash

Well this is very different from the music in the show I saw last night, lol. I like this Dave track. Good crunchy guitar, lick not obviously recycled, check. It sounds pretty contemporary for a Dave song. Actually the "I've my own mind" chorus reminds me of that song by Lil Nas X song Old Town Road, so maybe there is some kind of country music tie in, lol. As we've come to expect lyrics about an anonymous, nefarious "them" from Dave, I don't mind it.

 

It may be a little late, but here is an interview I meant to post from 2013

https://www.salon.com/2013/11/09/ra..._still_perform_most_of_my_songs_with_dignity/

Salon magazine
article by STEPHEN DEUSNER

Ray Davies, the Salon interview: "I can still perform most of my songs with dignity".

In January 2004, Ray Davis lay in a hospital bed in New Orleans, in shock and out of his head on morphine for the gunshot wound he had just received. He was still officially anonymous, having given none of his information to the nurses when he was admitted into the E.R. Instead, he was known only as “Unknown Purple,” which had been written on his wristband. “In the files of Charity Hospital, that’s who I would be.” After doctors had taken X-rays and nurses had pumped the fragments of cloth and bullet from the wound, Davies was rolled out of the trauma room. “Then as I was being wheeled away on the gurney,” he writes in his new memoir, “someone asked me, ‘Would you sign this for me? I’m a fan.’ Damn. It was actually a copy of my X-ray.”

That incident makes for a bleakly comic scene in “Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story” (Sterling), which recounts Davies’ long and rocky relationship with the country that produced all the music he loves so dearly. The irony, of course, is that what inspired him nearly killed him.

Davies recounts that harrowing incident while also stepping even further back in time to recount the Kinks’ numerous tours of America. In the mid-1960s, the band was just one of many that traversed the Atlantic to make their fortune in the biggest pop market in the world. Their shows — marked by Davies’ incisive songwriting and riff making as well as by the onstage rows between band members — were legendary, yet the Kinks found themselves more or less kicked out of the country. Depending on which story you believe, the ban started when Davies clocked a union official who accused England of adopting communism or when the Kinks played a Dick Clark special without paying their union dues.

With a storyteller’s verve and a prose style as confident as his lyrical tack (which is rare among musicians), Davies toggles between the 1960s and the 2000s, when the Kinks were long defunct and he was only just getting around to releasing solo albums. He came to America to rev his creative engines: As he writes in “Americana,” “New Orleans was the starting point of all my musical aspirations: country music, Cajun music, Dixieland, boogie-woogie and soul, trad jazz, skiffle, bebop, rock and roll. It all came from somewhere, and it had to be in New Orleans. That’s why I went there.”

Much like his previous book, “X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography,” “Americana” reads less like a rock memoir than an epic roman à clef, and Davies comes across as a protagonist who’s not intended to be fully sympathetic. He portrays his own inner life richly, with little preening or self-justification. “My work was not only defining me as a person,” he writes, “it was becoming my whole life and dictating my future as a human being — which was not entirely helpful to my own well-being.”

Davies recently spoke to Salon from his home in London, holding forth on the documentary aspect of his songwriting, the allure of American music, and all those rumors of a Kinks reunion.

At what point did the theme of Americana suggest itself as an organizing theme for this book?

I did a tour with a book called “X-Ray,” and there was this show called “Storyteller” that I did. There was a song that set the scene for that American tour, and it was called “Americana.” It was about the Kinks’ trials and tribulations from our first tour of America. So the title was there right from the get-go. I thought about calling it something else from time to time, but “Americana” summed it all up to me. It’s not just a style. I think it’s a whole package that we have to embrace in America. It’s such a massive country, and there are so many cultures within it. It just seemed to me to be the word that summed up everything that’s good and bad about the place — all the inspiring and depressing times I’ve had here. It sums up everything — even the Kinks.

On your solo albums as well as Kinks album like “Muswell Hillbillies,” it’s not just in the lyrics that the idea of Americana comes through. It’s in the music, which plays around with country & western, R&B, blues, even rockabilly.

I think you’re correct, because like I say in the book, it’s a musical culture. America inspired me to start writing songs. I have English influences, of course, but as far as America goes, it was blues, country and all that. But I’ll never be a country singer. I don’t have the chops for that. This book is in a strange way a celebration of a band that nearly stuck together through thick and thin. We wouldn’t have done it without American music.

I’m always surprised when a songwriter is a good prose writer. Can you talk about these two pursuits and how they differ?

Well, I never thought I was writing prose. I think I write in hooks, but in prose the hook is a longer passage than it is in a song. Songs are more abbreviated and concise than prose. You’re throwing more suggestions up in the air. Prose can take you deeper into another world. But songs, because of the way they’re structured, leave more to the imagination. I don’t know the secret, but my feeling is that prose writing can still leave the imagination to work. I have lots of new lyrics and new songs bookending the various chapter headings. I say in the book at one point, songs are like my diaries. They’re friends to comfort me when I get lonely. Songs are like companions to me. The thing I wanted to do with “Americana,” I wanted to share with the reader my personal diary-style songs that I wouldn’t normally put on a record. I write the way I think and sometimes a song sums up my mood.

Those songs play a pretty crucial role in the book, almost like direct dispatches from your past self.

I get songs that I abandoned 25 years ago, and they’ll pop into my head suddenly. When that occurs, it reminds you of that time so many years ago. So they’re very important parts of my personal makeup, which is why I felt it was appropriate to use them in the book. Songs are better company than people. You go into a bar and you’re sitting there drinking and feeling lonesome, then you put on a great record and it changes everything. They can bypass every emotion because they’re from another world. Sometimes, they’re counterpoints to the real world. Sometimes it’s a song unrelated to a person’s situation and it can get out of a mood or into another way of thinking that didn’t exist before. That’s why people say music is a soundtrack to people’s lives. A song will never let you down … unless it’s a bad song.

What’s it like, then, to live with a song like “Waterloo Sunset” or even “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” for so many years? What does it mean to sing your own songs when you’re in your 60s as opposed to when you were in your 20s?

When I started out, I tended to write for people who were older than I was. “Sunny Afternoon” is for a generation older than me. But one difference with me is, I’ve never been a teen idol. Things like “Waterloo Sunset” were never going to turn me into a sex symbol. I don’t sing, “Come on, baby, come into my Chevy and rock out tonight.” Although it would be great to do that for a laugh. I generally write songs that are about emotions in people that are kind of timeless. So I can still perform most of my songs with dignity.

Do those older songs reveal new facets or new meanings to you over time?

They don’t normally change, but I change, of course. My interpretation of them changes. When I work on tour, I work with the audience and sing to the audience, and every audience has a different overall personality. I don’t tailor the show to that audience, but it keeps the music fresh to me. It’s like singing a song fresh for the first time. I just put myself in the position where this is the first time I’ve ever sung on “Waterloo Sunset” or “You Really Got Me,” for example.

In the 1960s it seemed like so many kids in the U.K. were inspired by America and especially by American music — blues, jazz, zydeco, r&b. Do you see this as a generational story as well as a personal story?

My daughter’s 15, and she wants to go to America. I think America symbolizes freedom, opportunity and the chance to discover the unknown. It’s always been that way. Hollywood portrayed it to my generation, and now television portrays it to my daughter’s generation. Like it or not, America is just an inspiring place. It’s a great culture because of its music. Because it’s such a wild place, people in Europe still want to go there. It fulfills that role for many, many different types of people.

The book’s account of your shooting in New Orleans is incredibly harrowing — not just the attack itself, but the immediate recovery in the hospital. Can you talk about revisiting that event?

It was actually quite tough for me to write. At the time I kept a diary, so I had initial notes. I tried to be more cold and journalistic about it — detached from it as much as possible — because I didn’t want too many emotions to pour in. In the grand scheme of things, what happened to me is what happens to people in the world all the time. It’s like having a toothache compared to what happens every day in the world. What it was for me, I think, was not just a physical thing. It was the world telling me: Something can happen to you, and it will change your life. Maybe the world was sending me a signal, apart from these people trying to rob me. It was sending me another signal from somewhere. All the frustrations I had from being banned in America, all the work it took to get back into songwriting again — all that came to a head in that moment. The symbolism of it was quite devastating, as was the actual physical reality of it.

So you were actually taking notes while you were in the hospital?

I took only bare-bones notes, but still it helped me get centered. There’s a song called “Morphine Song” and a few others that I wrote in the hospital — "Charity," I think it was called. Making notes was the only way I could stop myself from getting all freaked out. That’s what I do — make notes. Actually, some of them rhyme quite well.

“Americana” really emphasizes the degree to which you document your own life — in songs that everybody knows, in songs that nobody will ever hear. You mention it’s a means to prove to yourself that you exist, almost like an existential creative crisis.

Oh boy. I know what you’re saying. It was an identity crisis. That was intended while I was writing it. The "Unknown Purple" reference — for about an hour after I was admitted to the hospital, I was unknown, even to myself. Maybe I did want to get lost. Maybe I did want to rediscover who I was after a life of touring and wanting to be noticed. Part of the job is to stand out, but I’ve always been very relaxed doing press and having my picture taken. In that case, there’s no choice. But I’m a very private person, and I do a job where you have to be visible. I feel like I have a problem with that.

There are new rumors circulating about a possible Kinks reunion. Can you comment on that?

I can’t really because I haven’t talked about it really to anybody else. I’ve heard the rumors and when somebody spouts rumors, I like to step back. I just have to finish promoting the book, and I think I’m starting a record soon. But if you think what happened to me in New Orleans was traumatic, a reunion would be worse. But it really depends on whether there’s good music in it. Good new music. It might just be in a bar somewhere.

Will the new solo album draw from any of the songs quoted in “Americana”?

I think there are 22 new song references altogether. I was thinking of doing a soundtrack to the book. Some of those songs are really still with me, and I wrote some special ones while I was writing the book, too. So writing this book and writing songs have been running parallel.

 

Mindwash

From the title I'd have expected a synth style 'synthwash' similar to the ending tracks on both 'Bug' and 'Franctured Mindz'. But no, a rock filled rant against Dave's favoured targets.

Dave's vocal seems to improve as you go along. Yeah, it's OK. Whether it's a mindwash or a brainstorm, I'm not sure.

 

Mindwash

Another song built on heavy riffs and ranting lyrics about "them". It feels very much like a kind of song Dave has done numerous times before. While this one is passable, to my ears it lacks a good melody and sounds rather directionless. I do like Dave's singing though - very good indeed. And nice to hear some acoustic guitar in the mix as well.

 

Ray's comments here are very reminiscent of Dave's reflections on his stroke.

 

Mindwash

Yeah, due to that title there was never a doubt about what this song was going to be about lyrically.
We know at least two whole albums are defined by these topics, but it’s amazing how many songs Dave has written with these same themes over and over with practically the same lyrics. How many have there been? Someone here (not me!) should try to figure that out and count them up. Could be a future Kwiz Kwestion. It’s like Dave is mindwashed and brainwashed into doing these topics so often. He can’t help himself and he can’t stop. There has to be some irony in there somewhere.

The vocal delivery is Dave’s attempt at rapping to some extent. Like other songs here, the harsh mostly non-melodic vocal ends up suiting the song. The softish acoustic juxtaposed with the loud dirty electrics gives it a grunge approach. There is also a harmonica buried in there too but it’s mixed so low it’s barely noticeable, so that should have been higher in the mix to provide this track some added color. The demo quality still bugs me but by this point in the album you’re used to it.

I had a hard time with this track the first few times I heard it but I agree with @ARL that more listens has helped improve this one to my mind and it has seeped a little deeper into the brain. Maybe that was Dave’s cunning plan all along. There has to be some irony in there somewhere too.

Contemporary interview done during the promotion of the album:

Interview: The Kinks’ Dave Davies on Rippin’ Up Time, HD audio, and more | Digital Trends

 

Between The Towers.

Mind turned a dream that rouses me from my aching sleep
Can it be?
Caught in between depression and the joys of the world
Forgotten memories
Between the towers

I see a vision from a dark and ancient time
She is staring at me from in between two peaks
Can it be?
She is watching me
In her hands it seems like she has
An answer to everything, a solution to nothing

Darkness spreads its spurious reach
In my wakefulness I see we are asleep
Oblivious to the towers and what they portend
I see the world in a perpetual dream
Between the towers

Mmmmm
That rouses me from my ageless sleep
Can it be?
She watches me
In her hands it seems like she has
An answer to everything, a solution to nothing

Darkness spreads its spurious reach
In my wakefulness I see we are asleep
Oblivious to the towers and what they portend
I see the world in a perpetual dream
Between the towers

Be ever watchful in the world of dreams

Written by: Dave Davies
Published by: Dave Davies/Carlin Music

This is one of Dave's more odd tracks... and you'll know what I mean by the time we get to the second set of lyrics....

We open with a little guitar buzz and then move into a melancholy piano ballad.

This is a sort of poetic look at good and evil as far as I can tell... Portend, leans towards being the coming of a cataclysmic event... and Dave is using somewhat opposites to paint this picture ... depression and joy... awake and asleep ... an answer, but no solution ...forgotten memories...
We have this reference to two towers, but seemingly no direct idea of what they are... but from the way the lyric reads, it seems like they represent polar opposites ... and with the use of the phrase "and what they portend", it seems to point towards a confrontation of some sort.

Certainly with a minor rewrite she is staring at me from between two peaks could give the song a lascivious tone, but that doesn't seem to be the message here.

An odd lyric, that seems to be trying too hard to be poetic, but I do really like the "An answer to everything, a solution to nothing" line....

So musically we have that dirge-like piano ballad opening...
When we get to what I assume is the chorus, we get this weird choice of springy synth sounds that dance in direct contradiction to the piano ballad opening.
Like some kind of weird cartoon movie or something.

The bridge has some guitar chords, and scratched out lead notes....
Then we move back into the rather odd march of the toys in toyland springy synth sounds...

and we ping pong out of the track...

This one is just weird and a little morose.

 

Hmm, ahem, ok… This is one where the polite response will be to say something along the “kudos to Dave for trying something different” lines. Another way of saying that it’s pretty bad, really. I had the outmost difficulty to make it all the way through (couldn't do it twice). Didn’t like anything, not the voice, not the lyrics (except the line @mark winstanley mentioned), not the piano, not the synths parts, not the melody (melody ? what melody ??). But… kudos to Dave for trying something different. I guess.

 

"Between The Towers"

I had a first go at listening to this last night when I was in a semi-awake state, and it sounded surreal and difficult to make sense of. I've tried a couple more times this morning while wide awake, and it still sounds surreal and difficult to make sense of. Some of it seems like it's being made up as it goes along, and some isolated bits sound as though they're going to develop into something - that something being the Glamour track "A World Of Our Own", which is vastly superior to this one. It's difficult to find the positives here.

 

Mark, thanks so much for posting the Ray interview. That’s a great line about how his songs are like friends. As luck would have it, I just received a copy of the Americana CD yesterday.

 

“Between The Towers”: Sadly, I have to go along w/my fellow Avids on their opinion of this song. It seems like a million years since “Death of a Clown” or even “Trust Your Heart”. The MST3K concept of deep hurting applies to this song.

 

‘Between The Towers’: oh, for crying out loud.

 

Between The Towers: I started to write some joke about how the aliens told Dave to write this for the explicit purpose of giving us a great Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moment in the latter days of this thread, but I couldn't tell the joke properly so I just gave this lame summary of a joke idea instead. Take that as a meta-commentary on this song. Yeesh.