I know we're on an audiophile forum. I'm no audiophile myself but I hear sound, and this LP's is the audio equivalent to sandpaper or broken glass. Abrasive and not easy on the listener's eardrum's membrane. And on purpose, too ! But the songs (maybe not all of them but today's not the day to make picks) are often spektakular. My own history with the record is nothing of the sort. I bought this and all the post-RCA records not too long after I first discovered the band (1989). I was buying the first Pye CDs as they were released and would raid the vinyl sales bins and wipe them clean of all their later Kinks titles that were still not available on CD (at least in France). That's where I got this one. Weirdly, I never bothered to buy the post-1976 later Kinks records on CD, I had the Come Dancing comp, I thought I was all set in the CD department. But then, there was almost a ten years gap at some point when my turntable was broken and I didn't fix it. So for a number of years, those LPs were stored somewhere but never listened to. The irony is some of these discs, the ones I thought I didn't need on CD, are now some of my most cherished items : because I've kept them, whereas all the titles I bought on CDs I gave away my vinyls of (and had to buy them again in recent years after beating myself up – I mean how dumb can you be ! ). So when I got my turntable up and running, those Kinks LP's were some of the first I rediscovered, with great pleasure and anticipation. And some of those have become huge favorites of mine. I mean "favorites" as in "when my family's not around, I'll play Give the People What They Want instead of Lola if I'm in a Kinks mood". That kind of favorite… I don't want my wife's and kid's eardrum's membranes to suffer. My own ? They can handle it. They want to handle it. Give the eardrums what they want! I've always thought the title was Ray taking the piss at his new found success and I felt it was at the same time typical Ray panache and Ray self-destructive behavior (these things often go hand in hand, dont they ?). Then I came across the very same 1981 Creem interview @mark winstanley quoted above, and here's what Ray had to say about it : « Something I really deplore about the title of the album is that people might say, "Hey, here are the Kinks giving the people what they want." » This freaking guy ! "Deploring" how his own title could (and obviously would) be received… Come on, it's the Kinks we're talking about ! Their titles are often about the band itself (Muswell Hillbillies, Misfits, Schoolboys in Disgrace…) when the band's name is not downright part of the title (Something else, Village Green, A Soap Opera etc.). So there, I thought it was "The Kinks Give the People What They Want". I didn't notice they used two different colors to differentiate the band's name and the album's title on the cover. We'll see what @Martyj has to say about that. Anyway, some songs are there and "fit in". While some definitely "stand out". We're now firmly in the era of "highlights". And they are indeed high and their light shines bright. As an album, I don't rank it as high as @ajsmith but the beautiful way he's just expressed it makes me salivate for what we're about to experience in the song by song format in the next couple of weeks…
Give the People What they Want Welcome to The Arista Years, Part 2. The Kinks three underrated post-“One For the Road “albums feel more unified…more sonically consistent..more of the same band… than the three previous explorative, evolving studio efforts for the label. It feels to me like the Arista years overall approach was to search for and find a formula that works. They found it with the one/two punch of Low Budget/One For the Road. Once this formula was found, they stuck to it. This did not naturally settle with a restless artist like Ray Davies. Running in place was not his style. Yet this phase of the band’s career dove-tailed nicely with an emerging outlet that allowed Ray to keep his ambitions moving forward: the potential for combining Kinks music with video. Thus, the early 80’s were poised to repeat the Kinks of the mid-70’s with conceptual theatrical shows being replaced by conceptual videos. Ray’s frustration quickly came to the fore. Ever since “Face to Face” he’d always thought in the long-form. No doubt emboldened by the “let’s-also-release-a-concert-video-and-see-what-happens” approach of “One For The Road, the grand scheme Ray had for a follow up was an album length conceptual video and record tie-in. But unlike the RCA years, at Arista his ambitions were reined in and allowed only if they made business sense. And ‘business sense’ circa 1981 were videos shot as singles promoted one at a time on video channels, not full length video albums. The remnants of this thwarted idea—slightly less than half of GTPWTW—are meta-themed songs that look at a ‘The State of Our Rock Band’ and it’s place in modern media, or something tangentially related (**) : Around the Dial Give the People What They Want Killer Eyes Predictable Back to Front (**two other numbers that fit this concept—“Entertainment” and “Noise” were held back from the album. The rejected acetate version of this album, which has come out bootlegged, contain slightly different mixes and a few alternate lyrics. Most interesting is a 7+ minute version of “Around the Dial,” in which that radio dial intro becomes a full half of the song. It’s all a curious peak at Ray’s first idea.) These ‘conceptual’ tracks combine the heft and crunch of the new Kinks with something that comes across like the Kinks of old, although I can’t quite put my finger on a description. Maybe it’s as simple as music created by an inner motivation? There’s just something that feels “right” when Ray is chasing his carrot rather than simply following Clive Davis’s dictum to ‘give people what they want.’ The rest of the tracks on GTPWTW are outliers of varying merit that could fit on any Arista album. I look forward to the track by track discussions because these songs seem unfairly marginalized simply because they are on an Arista album. Yet…it is an Arista album, so there’s that. (insert winking smiley emoticon here.) I bought this record in “real time” (meaning when it was freshly released rather than after the fact) but don’t recall the circumstances. But I do recall logging in lots and lots of headphone time with it, absorbing it every bit as much as the classic Pye and RCA lps. I couldn’t recognize any slippage at the time—I was way too much of a Kinks partisan in 1981 to question quality—but in retrospect I can acknowledge now that a few spots of mediocrity here and there prevent it from being considered top tier. But it’s not a bad disc at all. It vies for their very best among the Aristas. (My rankings are undecided.) A personal anecdote concerns my friend Mike. I turned him onto the Kinks while we were in college. GTPWTW was the first Kinks lp he bought in real time. I was riding with him in his car early morning when “Around the Dial” was on. We had a red light at the Ball State University ‘scramble light,’ the busy intersection on campus where foot traffic and street traffic converged, a few hundreds of souls cluttering the area during the 5-10 minute window between morning classes. Mike said “these sleepwalking @**holes need to hear this song…” rolled down his window and cranked it to a level that would have made the guys in Spinal Tap proud. All these years later I can’t hear the song—or album—without recalling this moment. The cover is obvious in its meta-messaging: Ray fleeing from the messaging, acknowledging pandering to public desires is something a self-respecting artists shouldn’t do. Is he running in guilt, hoping no one notices… or fear? The graphic of the title shape forms a dagger in his back—a meta-hint that Clive Davis guidance has betrayed him as an artist? I find it a bit too heavy-handed to come across as clever. Still, it’s an adequate design though not spectacular. Unlike “Low Budget” its simplicity in composition doesn’t work in its favor. It doesn’t give the viewer enough to distract from how “flat” it is in both its depth of field and color scheme. Overall its not a not bad cover… just disappointing in how much better it should have been, especially on the heels of four great consecutive Arista covers. Bring on the first track. I look forward to the one-a-day.
GTPWTW(the album): Destroyer was all over the radio in the Northeast (quadrant of the US, that is). I’m sure some on here are going to pick at the modified but recycled riff and/or the revisit to the Lola and ADAAOTN lyrics, but not me, I was just excited to hear the kinks rocking out on the radio again. Needless to say, I was first in line to buy the album on release date (no, I don’t think anybody else was in line, at least not in Manchester, Connecticut at the Record Breaker in the Manchester Parkade). This was yet another Kinks album that I loved. No complaints about the album cover (although in retrospect, it is arguably pretty unimaginative), no complaints about the contents (although in retrospect, there were a bunch of songs that I had skipped in the 40 years since the album was released and I am only just discovering them over the past few weeks as I get ready to revisit GTPWTW due to this thread). Let the dissection begin, the production may be a bit thin, jagged and (nowadays) dated sounding, but the songs will survive and, in fact, thrive, in my estimation. After loving the Low Budget album and seeing them live for the first time on the Low Budget tour, this album was exactly what I wanted then and I still feel that way today.
I might not be contributing much to the reviews of this album as I really don't like it much. Like all of these post-concept album albums I hadn't heard it until this year. The first thing I noticed was the sound of it, which is harsh and irritating, and relentlessly harsh and irritating to boot. The last three songs are interesting but "Destroyer" is the single worst track I've ever heard from the Kinks.
Give The People What They Want: I listened to this for the first time a couple of months ago and found the only song I knew was ‘Destroyer.’ Not sure from where so it must be the radio. Anyway, initial thoughts were positive. Subsequently, I realized what the lyrics were on one track…and was repelled. Since then I’ve realized there’s another track that has hard-hitting lyrics (forget which one but just was struck by it when I was playing it s couple of days ago). So it appears it does fit the lowest denominator niche that has been referenced above. Overall, though, I have five tracks singled out as possibilities…which is a sign of something good.
Give the People What They Want: Finally. This is where I started seeing the band live, although a quick Google search tells me that show at Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, PA was January 1982. I would see them again there on the following tour. Bryan Adams opened? Man, I can't even remember him playing. What was really shocking to me was that I was in some puritanical bubble regarding The Kinks. Until this album, most of my friends and classmates were not Kinks fans. They were surely aware of the singles and album tracks from recent albums on FM radio, but they weren't fans in that "need to own every album" sense the same way I was. They surely weren't plundering the bargain bins for the concept albums or trying to piece together the string of much harder to find later 60s albums. The parking lot was where I got that rude introduction that not everyone was dissecting the mysteries of "Autumn Almanac." It was seemingly filled with drunken, partying frat boys, in full on "rock and roll" mode, drinking, yelling. "Destroyer" was the song of the day, and that seemed to connect a lot of these folks to modern-day Kinks, and somehow to early Kinks, too. I guess also maybe the live album and harder edge of Low Budget brought them into the fold? All I knew was that I found it disturbing that a-holes like this were Kinks fans, too! I'd expect this at a Billy Squier concert, but The Kinks? In retrospect, just by listening to the music, I can hear now how much it made sense that guys like this were going to Kinks concerts. Of course, I was overjoyed to see The Kinks, among my first concerts. It wouldn't have occurred to me how much of their current sound was tailored towards someone just like me, on the cusp of college age, just enough FM radio knowledge of the band's history, but immersed in their more recent shift towards a "modern" sound. I loved the album at the time but don't find myself yearning to hear it these days. For me, this felt like the start of the 80s trilogy (People/Confusion/Word of Mouth) ... where some have noted, it all sounds the same now! To a point, I agree. But it also seemed like a formula that allowed Ray to breath, still write relevant lyrics and have fun playing louder music that probably touched some nerve leading all the way back to 1964. That's what I hear most now, how this era of Kinks was in some ways trying to grab onto that rock energy they started with, simply because it now fit with the times, that retro/new wave, skinny ties and bar shades era, with bands like Cheap Trick bridging the gap between hard rock and new wave. Ray seemed to really enjoy the styles of the time, still young enough to wear this stuff and not look like an idiot. A lot of aging rock stars were in this place, mid-to-late 30s, seasoned, could easily hang it all up right now, but wanting to have recording careers and keep it going. The Kinks fared better than most. They weren't quite as iconic as The Stones and The Who, and not carrying that burden of expectation. Their Arista reinvention seemed to allow them to somehow feel younger and lighter. Good things were coming.
Give the People What They Want Though I never did buy this album in real time...I think I was into the Who around this era, Destroyer was omnipresent on the radio. And I LOVED it!! Adored it. Still do. But we'll get to that song in detail shortly. the other song I knew quite well was Predictable as that new cable channel MTV played it a lot. I'm sure I thought Ray was dreamy. But also found the video entertaining and could relate to the lyrics. I imagine that Better Things was played a bit, but it didn't grab my ears like Destroyer did. Better Things is obviously a slower and less rockin' song and I may not have been in the head space to totally appreciate it, like I do now. I see others mention that this album is harsh on the ears. It's only been recently that I looked at the entire album and I don't remember thinking that at all, but will try to keep an ear out for that. The cover...it's not bad, but it's not great. Kinda of dull to my eyes. I feel like the spray paint on the wall stuff had been done by the punks already, so it doesn't seem that inspired. I'm excited to explore this album more closely. This is still my Kinks, so let's go!
I don't want to get into it too much at the moment, because it won't even be this week that we talk about it, but it will be interesting to see how it pans out.... Ray seems to have gone out of his way to confuse and obfuscate some of the meanings in some of these songs... The whole idea of Give The People What They Want is a bit of a ruse here... Art Lover is not a song about a pedophile.... Art Lover is a song about a divorced father who only gets to see his daughter on a Sunday, due to the conditions of the divorce. When you look closely enough at the lyrics, it actually becomes clear, but Ray intentionally seems to have set it up in a manner that makes people think the worst "Come To Daddy" literally means, come to daddy, not the perversion it was turned into.... Give The People What They Want.... as much as folks say they want peace, love and happiness, they spend most of their time investigating the dirt... we slow down to gawk at accidents, we watch folks do stunts... seemingly, just in case they die... we gravitate towards the lowest common denominator more frequently than the higher ground.... The whole album is a statement taunting the listener in many ways, and Ray does an incredible job of it.... that's why the alternate meaning of the song Better Things is such a brilliant closure to the album. It's like "ok, you seem to relish and encourage all this crap, how about being an optimist instead, and Perhaps tomorrow you'll find better things.... but even that song isn't quite what it seems. This is a stunning piece of work that challenges, and really questions the internal thinking of the listener that's paying attention.
I’m familiar with most of the songs on Give The People What They Want but had never listened to the album from start to finish, until this morning. My first impression is: masterful songwriting, one of Rays best efforts - a classic album with one true masterpiece (Art Lover). I have no issue with the sound quality, it works well in context. Destroyer is the only Kinks song I remember hearing on the radio when I was young, Ray shouting ‘ERE EHT GOES LIKE THIS!! really left an impression on me lol! It was still a few more years until cable TV arrived in our town so I never saw any of the Kinks videos. The Kinks were basically invisible to me until only a few years ago. A rich vein to uncover so late!
I'm back from my "walkabout". As I said earlier, I picked up a bunch of stuff recently that engaged me more than Glamour, including a box set of 60s Manfred Mann (very underrated group) and several Sparks reissues, including Lil Beethoven, which I consider a modern classic of theirs. Anyway, it's time to discuss Give the People What They Want, an album which I consider to be their Peak Arista Album. I think I first heard "Better Things" in a hospital waiting room while visiting a friend there. I believe it came out in the UK a few months before the album proper and WBCN was playing it. I did enjoy it and couldn't wait to get the album, which I duly purchased once it came out, either at my local Lechmere's or Strawberries, both now long gone and missed stores. It came out in August, just in time to start my sophomore year in college. I remember playing it once in my dorm room and noticed that Dave's guitar was sounding pretty snazzy when I realized that the additional buzz was due to the fire alarm which was on! GTPWTW was a popular album, with Destroyer being played a lot on WBCN. They played the Boston Garden in October 1981, my very first Kinks concert. I went with my old high school friend John, who went with me to my previous two concerts, both by Devo. I remember the security people patting down the attendees to the concert for booze and drugs except for me. John said that I looked like I didn't have anything on me. The opening act was some band named Red Ryder, starting a tradition of have no name bands opening up for the Kinks whenever I saw them, except for Tonio K in 1988. Our seats were way up in the balconies so high up that you almost could fall down just leaning over. The Kinks played a set of songs from the then new album as well as old favorites and they encored with "Twist and Shout", which was probably their tribute to the recently departed John Lennon. This was the only time I saw them with Mick Avory playing the drums.
!!! I remember Red Rider. I had the album with ‘Human Race’ on it. Loved it. Haven’t thought of ‘em since…the mid-80s!
There were other tracks recorded or demoed in this 1980/81 era that have seen official release but we already covered those earlier (Nuclear Love, Duke, Maybe I Love You, Stolen Your Heart Away - all on the 2008 Picture Book box set). The early version of Massive Reductions from the Low Budget sessions but not released until this period is different not only in personnel from the later 1984 recording, but there is a whole bridge in this early version that was not kept for the later version. There is one alternate version of one of the album's tracks that saw later release and since I could not find this version on YouTube, I have taken matters into my own hands and will upload that myself and share when we get to it. Otherwise there are no other alternate versions/mixes or remixes for any other tracks on this album unless you count the strange slightly early fade of Better Things that was on the original album, but I don't count that. State Of Confusion will more than make up for this after the dearth of such things here, ha ha. Yeah, Hynde is on Add It Up of course but not the others, The only other credit on this album outside of the band is Sarah Murray, backing vocals on Yo Yo.
From Americana, Ray on the sound of Give the People: I wanted it to sound as though the listener were sitting in the fiftieth row at one of our venues. We were playing large arenas at this time, and the front-of-house crew said the sound at row 50 was an incredible combination of punch and echo. We'd get the power from the front of the stage combined with the ambient echo from behind as the sound bounced back from the rear of the hall. I needed to re-create this in the studio, so Konk engineer Ben Fenner and I devised a new way of recording. We put up corrugated metal on walls of the studio so the reflected sound slammed back around the room as it was triggered by the snare drum. This provided the kit with an overwhelming wallop as Mick hit the drums.
If you're a fan of the movie Vision Quest, like I am, "Lunatic Fringe" by Red Rider is the key song in the soundtrack. Pre-solo fame Tom Cochrane. I'm sure the Canadian contingent is aware!
Give The People What They Want is the first Kinks studio album I experienced in real time. "Destroyer" was all over the radio. I saw the SNL appearance live. "Art Lover" is my favourite song on the record even though it has a certain amount of notoriety. I think it is one of Ray's most poignant songs but also it is one of his most easily misunderstood. I have played it for people and some get the creeps. Generallly, I prefer the songs that made it to the Kinks show (just listened to the newly circulated Mike Millard capture of the Hollywood Palladium 1981-08-19) so revved-up songs like "Around The Dial" and "Back To Front" have caught my attention as I listen to a lot of live shows in general. Another song that was in the show, "Yo-Yo" is also one I like. I generally thought the writing was a step up if the music itself was not as strong to many ears (complaints about the sound duly noted). It got my attention and I have been on board ever since. Not their greatest album but a good album.
Give The People What They Want I've well documented before how this was the first of the Arista albums I heard, back in about 1986. Coming after listening to four of the RCA albums, which I found crusty, old-fashioned, boring and inaccessible, Give The People felt like a breath of fresh air. It was this album which encouraged me to continue with the latter-day Kinks albums, and led to the situation which persisted for the best part of 30 years where I had all of the Pye albums, all of the Arista and beyond albums, and the bit inbetween was something I preferred to pretend didn't exist. My memory tells me that I taped a copy of this album at the time, although I can't find that tape anywhere. My records show that I bought the CD in 1996 - I can't believe that after my initial reaction I would have waited 10 years to acquire a copy, so that taped copy must have existed. Although this album was a big hit with me at first, it tended to slip down the rankings as I acquired later albums, and I haven't listened to it that much in recent years. However, I listened to it again last week and that was a revelation. There is a real electric tingle and frisson, a garage rock feel about the performances and production on this album. The Kinks sound young and vital again - they are playing energetic, modern rock 'n' roll and playing it well. They sound like a band that is enjoying their greatest period of success for some time and it sounds like they enjoyed making the record. Yes, it's a long way from "Waterloo Sunset" and the village green, but this is an album which needs to be appreciated on its own terms. There is a lot of bludgeoning rock on here and plenty of shouting, but also more moments of subtlety than I remembered. At the moment I would say that it is my favourite of the four Arista studio albums that we have covered so far.
My first studio album bought in real time after getting OFTR. Also the first tour of theirs I would see. I m pretty sure Gowan opened, who was a solo Canadian artist who later went on to be the lead singer for Styx. That was also the show that Pete Quaife came out for the encore. But I missed it! I had to literally run to catch the late night train home as I didn’t live in Toronto at the time. I think I still have the concert tee shirt. I’ll also note that we didn’t get no name openers here in Toronto. The next two tours were INXS and Midnight Oil, iirc. Then TonioK. Can’t recall the tours after that. Ok, the album. I loved it at the time. The high school band covered Destroyer. Haven’t listened to it in years though. I’m not expecting to love it, or maybe not even like it much as we go through the day by day. But I will try to be open and give each song a fair listen. After all Better Things are coming.
Just dropping a line to say that Dave is the cover guy of the latest Shindig! magazine, w/an article about his work.
I first became aware of The Kinks in 1981. I was one of those kids who got into The Beatles after John Lennon's tragic killing. I was heavily into collecting Beatles records and reading Beatles books during early '81; in reading these books about the rock scene of the 1960s and '70s I became familiar with the names of other bands as well. I recall one writer making the pun that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" is "Kink-y", meaning not only the weird subject matter but also that it was in the style of one of the Kinks' "music-hall" songs. Later that year, "Destroyer" was the first Kinks song I ever heard, and I'll talk more about it when we get to its entry here in a few days.
Give the People What They Want As I wasn’t thrilled with Low Budget, which I heard upon its release when my brother bought it, and, not having cared for the title cut of GTPWTW, thinking it was a sure sign the Kinks had “sold out,” I never, until today, listened to the whole album. Prior to today, I was familiar, as I said, with the title track, which I did not like, and Destroyer, which also didn’t do much for me. I was also well familiar with Around The Dial, and Better Things, both of which I love. Having written the album off, based on the two songs I didn’t care for, I was pleasantly surprised to find another song I liked many years later, when the algorithm on Pandora played it for me - Art Lover. I’m guessing it was too creepy to get played on the radio. So, color me surprised that I thoroughly enjoyed my first complete album listen today. I guess I bailed out on the Kinks too early! I really looking forward to the song by song this week. Still really busy at work, but I’ll follow along as best I can.
Not to go down the rabbit hole, but the first song I knew by them was Lunatic Fringe from ‘81. That was what they were probably touring when diskoJoe saw them as the opener. That one stands tall in my memory and it was embraced by fm radio (at least on the east coast of the US. I had Human Race too, also good stuff. Tom Cochrane, the singer, had a big solo hit a decade later with Life Is A Highway.
Haven't listened to the whole album but, Destroyer - classic Kinks Art Lover - awful. No idea why Ray rates it so highly. The most cringeworthy lyrics ever, no matter what the intention was. Too creepy to be sentimental or heartfelt and not creepy enough to be dark or edgy.
I'm looking forward to discussing this album, though with some trepidation! I'm only familiar with the tracks on the Come Dancing comp - every now and then I check Ebay and Discogs for a copy but, by the time you add postage to Australia, it's usually a surprisingly high-priced CD. Maybe this thread will convince me that it's worth the coin. Edit - for all of the above I got mixed up with State of Confusion, which I bought on Amazon last November and it's never arrived. Having two albums with Very similar covers is a bit confusing (hence the album title?)!
