At 50, Kinks’ masterpiece on societal decline newly relevant
One could feast on the music of 1968 without ever needing to refill the trough: The Beatles’ White Album, Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland,” Aretha Franklin’s “Lady Soul,” the Band’s “Music From Big Pink,” Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.”
And that doesn’t even scratch the surface for a year that included enduring recordings of all manner by acts big and should’ve-been-big: the Stones, Cream, the Byrds, the Velvet Underground, Miles Davis, the Mothers of Invention, Dr. John, Randy Newman, Scott Walker, Otis Redding (sigh…), the Zombies, Simon and Garfunkel, the Pretty Things.
Listen to some of these recordings collectively, and you can feel the dark turn that followed the previous year’s horribly named Summer of Love. 1968 was the Autumn of Hangover, by comparison, a course correction from the love fest a year earlier. It resulted in a grayer music, but music that felt less leashed to fleeting stylistic flourishes of 1967.
Among the masterpieces celebrating their 50th anniversary this year is the Kinks’ “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society,” an album that landed with a thud in the States upon its release in 1968 for a variety of reasons, including a cumbersome title, a thematic current that would be more relatable in the United States decades later and also some industry complications that seem petty now.
But “Village Green” has also proved to be one of the best and ageless of those records, which is why it has just been reintroduced on its 50th anniversary. The album was reissued this month in two new formats: a two-disc set that pairs the original album with some unreleased songs and demos from the era, including “Time Song,” which tied into the concept album’s theme about the reverberations caused by the slide of the British Empire. And those who have for years revered “Village Green” can now obtain a super-deluxe version that is stacked with five CDs, vinyl pressings of the album in stereo and mono album, and 45s of its singles.
If that feels like a lot of fuss for a record that yielded zero Top 40 singles in the States, well, the “Village Green” that frontman Ray Davies envisioned proved resilient and prescient in its own understated way.
“It’s an amazing acknowledgment that people still are interested,” Kinks drummer Mick Avory says. “I think Ray is as surprised as anybody. Years went by, it was a cult album and then something bigger. It just never went away. People are still really interested in it.”
Ray’s brother Dave Davies, the Kinks guitarist, says, “It was a complicated thing to describe at the time. On one hand, it felt like us trying to move into the future while also looking back at a past that didn’t mean a lot to people who listened to the radio in America at the time. But it was a reflection of who and where we were at the time. So we tried to integrate old and new. I don’t think people were really aware of that then. But now they love it.”
Empires in decline
Songwriter Randy Newman a few years ago wrote a song in which he declared “the end of an empire is messy at best.”
The music of “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” laments societal change in England as an empire heads toward autumn. And as social tumult consumed the States, such understated and melancholy thematic fare simply wasn’t at the forefront of hotter discussions.
But as author and sometimes music critic Jonathan Lethem told me earlier this month while talking about “Village Green,” “One of the things the English have on us is that they’re way out ahead on the empire-in-decline curve.”
Admittedly, empires decline in different manners, dependent on their culture and economic and social structures. Fitting, then, that the Kinks’ album was more melancholy with a British stiff upper lip, compared to the petulant and angry pouting that engulfs a culture across an ocean decades later.
A pastoral folksiness runs through the record, which runs contrary to the Kinks’ reputation as a tightly wound progenitor of the British Invasion.
Ray’s meditations on people and structures gone was mirrored by the guitar parts played by his brother, whose visceral, serrated work just a few years earlier helped define the sound of rock ’n’ roll on songs such as “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night.” They were no longer singing three-minute garage-rock songs about girls. They were summoning ghosts.
“Everything was psychedelic,” Dave says. “That wasn’t what we were going for. We wanted it more mystical. Something that captured this feeling of lost innocence. This idea of embracing the new but missing the old.”
“Ray was never one to follow a trend,” says Avory, the Kinks drummer. “He always tried to set one. When you got a trend, something in fashion, at that time, it was very difficult to break it. … But he was more interested in telling a story with some quality. Not a throwaway. I think that’s why it had a different sound and feel, all part and parcel, from what we did before.”
Sounding loose
There were indications before 1968 that the Kinks were headed in a different direction.
The band formed around its sibling core in 1964 in Muswell Hill, in the northern part of London. By October that year, the Kinks were rock stars thanks to those singles, “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” which played well in Britain as well as the States, where each broke into the Top 10.
The turgidity of the music hung like a gray cloud around the band, even after the songs finished. The Kinks were famously among the most internally pugnacious bands in rock history. Their reputation likely played a part in being banned from touring the States just as the group found its groove. So from 1965-69, the Kinks were a nonpresence in the U.S., which explains a four-year blackout from the charts.
Which doesn’t mean the Kinks stopped making music. And perhaps the insularity back in England helped them. Because the band found itself distanced from trends of the day.
The 1966 single “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” may have been written as a swipe to trend-following British listeners, but the Kinks in the late-’60s found themselves freed of connection to what was in vogue
‘Everything was psychedelic. That wasn’t what we were going for. We wanted it more mystical. Something that captured this feeling of lost innocence. This idea of embracing the new but missing the old.’ Dave Davies, The Kinks guitarist
in North America.
Albums “Face to Face” in 1966 and the aptly titled “Something Else” a year later showed a group uninterested in hitching its wagon to any pre-existing trend.
The sound on the album is interesting. Though the Beatles’ White Album — also released in November 1968 — was informed by a ramshackle looseness, likely a response to the every-hair-inplace quality of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” a year earlier — the Kinks played songs that sounded loose.
I brought up Al Bowlly, the popular ’30s British vocalist, and Dave Davies’ came alive. “Yeah!” he said. “We wanted people to know the influences from the past were important and that we were reintegrating them. We had vast influences as kids. It was a big family. My sisters all played piano and sang. My dad played the banjo. Obviously, the blues and Chuck Berry were a big influence, but so was skiffle and all this stuff we heard growing up. It was a wealth of influence.”
Avory pointed out that Davies was a fan of American vaudeville, which can also be heard on the record, as well as old musical theater. “Imagine a bar band,” he says, “but rehearsing a bit more. Because all these great ideas needed to come out.”
That instrumental approach was inviting and engaging, giving the record an almost informal vibe, which gently obscured just how specific the themes in the songs were.
“There’s something particular about English nostalgia,” Avory says. “That’s what Ray was writing about. We were very English people, interested in our culture. And there are things that change and they’re good, and there are things that change and they’re not for the better. Buildings become boxes. Ray looked at the idea of a Village Green and all these things that went with it. It was quaint. But it also made you think about change. Things move on, but it’s not always a progression, is it?”
Hope for more?
Both Avory and Dave Davies suggest that the specificity of the album — based on Ray Davies’ observations about England in the ’60s — aren’t caged by the era. Both mention “Time Song,” one of the newly released tunes, as resonant in the wake of Brexit.
If there existed a wistfulness about the characters in and around the Village Green back in 1968, imagine now. Are any left?
“You’re absolutely right!” Davies says. “Who knows? All the world is a stage, right? But some things from that record outlive the characters. Questions about how we fit into our own world. Especially now. Certain things remain the same. There are times I still feel like a kid. At the same time, I’m an old man. Things go away, things get broken. But the spirit in life can remain the same.”
Neither Dave Davies nor Avory would offer much about the murmurs over the past few months of a Kinks reunion. Both of them and Ray perform live from time to time, just not together. Dave has been plugging a great “new” album called “Decade” that compiles some of his best ’70s work. His brother’s remarkable work has sometimes shadowed Dave’s, though Dave contributed Kinks standards, including “Strangers” and “Death of a Clown.”
“I go back to the UK in a week, and Ray and I will get together and see what we can muster up,” he says, a phrase that holds little excitement for anybody who knows about their combative past.
So there’s no reason for hope, seeing as Dave is 71 and both Avory and Ray are 74. Sometimes the water wipes away the bridge. But Dave’s even-keeled and almost nostalgic tone offers some hope. And he’s quintessentially British, so even his farewell after a conversation with a complete stranger has a certain politeness that allows a fan to think maybe they’ll be back.
“We may hear more about it someday soon,” he says. “But thank you for talking to me today, my friend.
“Cheers.”