The Kinks Present Schoolboys In Disgrace Love the cover. Love the album. Certainly marks a return to that 'Kinks sound' after the last couple of albums. Dave's back rocking on lead guitar and some terrific songs helped by a nice clean production. What's there not to like? The second, and last, album in the The Kinks Present series. Terrific sound quality on vinyl and the opening track is a classic reminiscent of the earlier Days. Bring it on.
Something from the back cover band shoot should have been the front cover. I honestly don't think that Ray and Dave have ever been captured looking cooler than the duo shots from those sessions (as used by @Wondergirl in her profile pic). Although Angus Young was apparently already rocking the schoolboy look by this point, I don't think AC/DC had broken internationally yet so they'd have kind of got the jump on them if this imagery had reached wider exposure in 1975.
I love all the RCA-era Kinks LPs. They’ve been in heavy rotation on the Martyj turntable since I first acquired them. Of the six RCA releases, though, I consider “Schoolboys in Disgrace” the weakest. And as result my least favorite. Though not initially. Upon first listen, in fact, I considered it the best of the lot, possibly because it “rocked” more than the others in the most conventional sense. It took repeated listenings of the other 5 RCA albums for me to latch onto their subtle brilliances, their elevation in my personal rankings gradually demoting Schoolboys down the list. The reason? Schoolboys doesn’t challenge the listener to the degree the other RCA LP’s do. Schoolboy’s instant accessibility with its pleasing combination of it 50’s throwbacks and 70’s contemporary radio-rock is only that. It lacks the layered musical surprises one discovers upon repeated listenings of both Preservation Acts and Soap Opera, or the lyrical depth of Muswell. It’s the only RCA Kinks LP that doesn’t grow the more one listens to it. As of 2022, for me, the album is just sort of there. Don’t get me wrong—It’s a fun album and I still enjoy listening to it. There are some great tracks here, with “No More Looking Back” being bettered by only “Celluloid Heroes” as the strongest album closer of all Kinks 1970’s albums, Pye, RCA, and Arista combined. Yet it was the absolutely last Kinks album I felt compelled to update in my collection by supplementing my vinyl copy with a CD version. (In fairness, that was largely because for whatever reason it does not contain bonus tracks. What’s up with that, btw?) Schoolboys was conceived to be presented on stage as the latest Kinks musical play. But to approach Schoolboys expecting a similar linear narrative as the two preceding Kinks musicals does not work in the listeners favor. The album is really more of a song cycle on the topic of looking back on ones school days, much like “Everybody’s in Showbiz” was about a touring band experience. The schoolboy in disgrace ‘plot,’ as it were, is arguably only directly present in 4 of the albums 10 tracks. (Or, make that 9 tracks, as the finale is less a proper song as it is a throw-away reprise of the earlier “Education.”) Tracks like “Jack the Idiot Dunce,” “The Last Assembly” and “No More Looking Back” stand fine on their own. Give Ray credit, though. After Preservation’s overly complicated storyline and Soap Opera's cryptic protagonist, Schoolboys offers the slightest of plots: a student gets caught with a girl which leads to a humiliating punishment. It demands no more of the audiences’ understanding than that, no need to search for layered interpretation, (The “who cares?” tacked on nonsense of that student being Mr. Flash as a kid seems to only be present on the liner notes. It’s nowhere in the music or lyrics. It’s easily ignored. Let it go, Ray. Just let it go.) Here’s my retro-outside-the-box-thinking idea: What if this whole “in disgrace” concept—comprising “The First Time We Fall in Love,” “I’m In Disgrace,” “Headmaster,” and “Hard Way”-- had been combined into one big mini-suite, as a sort of “Quick One While He’s Away” type mini Opera? Name that track “Schoolboys in Disgrace.” Round up the remaining school themed songs and give the entire collection a different title. That approach might have 1) presented a more accurate reflection of what the LP comprises, and 2) lessened the confusion/disappointment of those listeners coming to the LP expecting an all-encompassing narrative like Soap Opera and Preservation. Just my two cents….which is probably worth even less than that!
On somedays Schoolboys is my favourite Kinks LP, honestly. They've brought the chunky rock back (though updated in a 70s format) but it's before they start watering it down with Clive Davis approved AOR influences on the next LP (spoiler: although they actually do have quite a lot in common, in my book Schoolboys into Sleepwalker is the biggest one LP to the next drop off in the Kinks career! I'm not proud, and I hope that this thread makes me reevaluate that, but it's always been that way). It's kind of the quintessential one album summation of The Kinks entire career in some ways: the rocking stuff has one foot in garage punk, one in stadium rock, there's a little theatricality and some character based joviality and at least one emotionally devastating blinder. Kind of makes sense as it appear roughly in the middle of their career arc.
I remember Dave being asked about this at the time of the reissue and saying there were no songs/outtakes left over from those sessions: though who knows for sure as Ray's so prolific, I could believe that: it seems a fairly focused recording project and I suspect that any additional songs Ray wrote in 1975 were probably carried over into the 1976 Sleepwalker sessions, an album which seems to have the most full song outtakes since VGPS (and for which the 1998 Velvel reissue only scratches the surface: they could do a box of Sleepwalker off cuts!). I guess they could have maybe added some live versions for the Schoolboys reissue though.
Re: The Mr Flash mention in the sleeve notes. I agree with everyone so far that it's tacked on and unnecessary, and doesn't enhance the listening experience at all. I mean, it would suggest that the listening order of this full (5 LP!!!) conceptual run would be Schoolboys, then VGPS, then Pres Act 1 then Pres Act 2. I doubt many fans have made a point to listen to the records in that unwieldy sequence. The Flash mention almost seems like a last little impudent two fingers up from Ray in defiance of those who disdained the concept era, before he acquiesces to public opinion and accepts he must go more mainstream.
As I say I'm not proud. Getting ahead of myself here, but I always think of Sleepwalker and Misfits as the 'boring AOR duo' of the groups career before things get more exciting again on the next 3 albums! Hoping to do some re-evaluation though!
I understand that. We'll see how it goes. I think Sleepwalker is very solid, and generally a better batch of songs, though 1 track bores me a little. Misfits .... I like it, but it is poorly sequenced and a couple of songs leave me scratching my head.
Wow. But then again, it takes all sorts and this is cool by me, aj. I'm just a bit, eh, SHOCKED by this:
well this is basically where i get off the kinks train , wait i think father christmas came out later no? anyhow i was seeing the kinks live from i think preservation act 1 era through schoolboys. if i am not mistaken they wore the schoolboys outfits but i may just be remembering promotional photos for the lp. they did a "greatest hits" segment then came out and played the album if memory serves( and the aforementioned playlist didn't hurt). again an album that would have worked better as a full blown stage production musical. i am looking forward to hearing what people think about the Arista years. i just never dug the way the band changed up there sound. and come to think of i may have seen them on the sleepwalker tour but there is not way to tell. why didn't i save my ticket stubs i ask you , why?
The notes in the CD booklet contain this passage: "...but despite the glimmering live versions culled here from the next year's Sleepwalker tour..." which suggests that the Schoolboys CD was intended to have some live tracks as bonus material, but they did not materialise.
That is quite a compliment as Jimmy Connors had a phenomenal double handed backhand. N.b. Ray wrote in X-Ray about in 1975 watching ageing, Afro American underdog Arthur Ashe take on and beat the heavily favoured #1 ranked wunderkid Jimmy Connors in the Wimbledon singles final. Ray related to Ashe and his journey (Not Jimbo) and IIRC this was around the time his father passed on?
Schoolboys In Disgrace: I hate the album cover and wouldn’t have been caught dead carrying this album about in real-time. Theme: after enduring a blow-by-blow replay of a single day in the life of a white collar office worker…I’m not exactly primed to have to undergo the same in-depth plunge on the school experience. My first time to hear this was just three or four weeks ago and my initial thoughts, already hazy as I’ve moved further into the discography, was 1) at least it’s a band again, 2) it’s kinda boring 3) there’s a few songs I really like (including one I knew from, it appears, The Knack cover version). We’ll see how things shake out. I’m not much of a 50s guy and timing-wise the school days theme couldn’t come at a worse time (an independent investigation report re: abuses at my old school was just released last week).
Here’s my take on the much maligned cover: While it’s not the strongest of designs (the composition seems a bit off balance, but basically okay) I don’t have a problem with the illustration itself. As much as LP art aims to reflect a rock groups identity, the implications brought with cartoonish artwork is a fair reflection of imagery evoked by the RCA era Kinks sense of fun and irreverence. It would never work for a prog rock LP, for example, but it does fit the Kinks. FWIW, the back cover group image of the band in schoolboy uniforms accomplishes the same thing. Were it on the front perhaps the cover would have been better received. There are even better outtakes from that photo session that were used on subsequence singles or compilations that are even stronger, such as the one ajsmith posted above. My bigger problem with the cover is the title design. It aims to establish a thematic school room motif to evoke chalk scrawled on a blackboard. Now, I’m coming by my preferences here as someone who deals with typography and art direction for the past 35 years when I say I hate—absolutely hate—typefaces that aim to stylize a replica of hand writing. That’s what the selected decorative typeface is designed for here with those sort of serrated ascenders/descenders. But it’s too stylized. Too sleek. It does anything but accurately capture the loose, imperfect "feel" of imprints from marks made by a piece of chalk. Bottom line: it's an ugly typeface . What it needed was not a type face, but an actual handmade approach, like on the cover of “Word of Mouth.” As for the logo, Kinks LP covers have tried many band logo designs over the years, from elaborately designs (Muswell HIllbillies, Everybody’s in Showbiz) to simple sans serif basic (most of the pre Face to Face releases). I can live with the majority of them. But this one—yuck. My least favorite of them all. Sorry for the side trip into the world of typography/design/art direction. I don’t expect most of you to care about this kind of stuff. But it’s so ingrained in me that things that miss the mark or can be improved do not escape my attention. I suppose there are people on this thread who might be professional recording engineers or music arrangers who come by a Kinks record where they zero in on the minutiae of their specialties with criticisms that would go over my head. That’s fine. I like that each of us can offer individual expert insights into these discussions to broaden our appreciation of the entire “Kinks experience.” (stick around until till we get to the cover of “One For the Road” and I’ll point out package design that works.) Now, as Rob Reiner as Marty DiBergi in “This is Spinal Tap” once said: “….anyway, enough of my yakking…” One last comment about those back cover photo sessions. Someone in the RCA publicity department must have done a remarkable job getting those into the hands of nearly every media outlet’s photo file. Those prints got a lot of milage for usage in concert promo’s and publication articles well beyond the “Schoolboys in Disgrace”/John Dalton/John Gosling era. They have continued to be used without regard to reflecting accurate band membership. I remember a San Francisco area publication reviewing a Kink concert in the mid 80’s—after even Avory was gone—using a school boys photo with the article. Or in 1990, when it was used in a magazine’s pictorial collage of bands who were to be inducted in that year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which I especially found odd since neither Dalton or Gosling were part of the ceremony, but Quaife--who was not pictured--was.
When I was 13 a local department store was going out of business and heavily discounting their stock. The record dept was heavily picked over but I found Schoolboys in Disgrace and Loverboy's first album. I had already bought Give the People What They Want but this was my 2nd Kinks record. I still have a soft spot for this one
The Kinks logo on 'Schoolboys' with it's rambunctious looseness, red colouring and the line down the middle of the lettering, does appear to be an attempt to approximate the masthead of a UK childrens comic of the time (as opposed to the cover of EISB, which derives from old-school 30s comics): see a 1975 Dandy below for comparison. It might have worked better if it was larger and the pastiche were more committed, but stuck in the corner it does look just tacky. Also (leaving aside the uneasy quality of how distraught he looks) I just don't think the art of the schoolboy is strong enough. I kind of wish they'd hired an actual UK comic strip artist from the DC Thomson or Fleetway comics stables: Leo Baxendale or Dave Sutherland or Tom Paterson or any of them really, who could have given the image the required character and vim.
There is a flatness that could have been approved, I'll agree with that. I'm not troubled by the flatness as is, though. You know what actually came to mind when I first caught glimpse of that art? The classic Coppertone sunscreen ad of the dog yanking down the girl's swimsuit.
Before speaking of Schoolboys I just realised I needed to post some UK singles that preceded this album and it's material in 1975. Courtesy of that late 80's/early 90's UK Record Collector photocopy of course!
I've read that CD booklet before but overlooked (or had forgotten) this revelation. FWIW, I've heard a number of bootlegs from this era and the live performances of Schoolboys songs don't offer much derivation from the studio versions. Could this be why the powers that be decided "meh...they don't offer anything new, so why bother?" I dunno, but I would still welcome it in my collection. At least Hard Way survived in the set list for several years and is rendered a little bit different, certainly more frantic.
