DB's Song of the Day (day 264): "END OF THE SEASON" (1967) The Kinks

So . . . the autumn equinox is the 22nd. And that means today is the last day of summer, seasonally speaking. And tomorrow is the birthday of my old Philly friend Rick who, I know, performs a little ritual at this time of year: he plays today’s song to commemorate the end of the season.

The song is from Something Else by The Kinks, one of the albums of 1967 that just seems to get better with age, featuring a snappy selection of all the things The Kinks do so well, not least being their way of evoking various moods and subjects in the British way of life. The Kinks’ “End of the Season” is one of the best lyrical and musical representations of that little frisson—both a drop and a lift—that comes with the death of summer. And, while it may be a bit premature to say “winter is here, close of the play” that’s the way it feels, the older you get, when this time comes around. Winter’s first intimations are all it takes to say “so long” to summer.

Of course, since this is Ray Davies we’re talking about, the song is more than just a witness of seasonal change. It’s also about a guy losing his girl, and that guy is a rather tony type, the kind Davies was fond of satirizing. “I get no kicks walking down Savile Row” “Now Labour’s in, I got no place to go.” Rather jejune, hey wot? Feeling a bit de trop in the current climate—political and seasonal.

And that girl he once sported with as the summer dawdled away its daisy-chain days? “You’re on a yacht  near an island in Greece / Though you are hot, forget me not / I will keep waiting until your return.” Good luck with that—maybe next summer. Poor old duffer, going the rounds while his sweet squeeze disports herself where the pretty people go.

The song, in its arrangement, is suave as hell. And that’s something Davies got away with better than most: no need to get stuck in rocker or balladeer mode, Davies could write and record songs that sometimes sound like they should be showtunes. It’s the kind of song that would accompany well some well-heeled character’s glum soliloquy in an East End musical. You can even imagine Davies, in spats with a cane and a tux and top hat, softshoeing “Back in the scrub / On a wet afternoon / Down in the mud / Dreaming of flowers in June.”

I won’t go so far as to say I’m dreaming of June already. In fact, I’m sort of pining, in my inner landscape of memoried seasons, for fall in Princeton, where it was frequently wet but with what after-showers sheen. I find some of that sparkle in Davies’ tune, though that leaden opening sounds enough like London: “All the sky is grey / Summer birds aren’t singing / Since you went away.”

Yes, let’s just call that little absent belle Persephone, or Proserpine. And pine we shall.

Happy birthday, Rick, another season’s gone, another summer ended.

DB's Song of the Day (day 238): "YOU REALLY GOT ME" (1964) The Kinks

Fifty years ago today, today's song was released in the U.S. It was released earlier that month in the UK. It was the first big hit by The Kinks in both markets, and rightly so. Set it beside anything being served up by their contemporaries—blokes like The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, The Animals—and it kicks butt. Brothers Ray and Dave Davies came up with a signature sound that would mark The Kinks, suddenly, as a “heavy” band. Ray does the vocals and wrote the song. Dave—and not Jimmy Page, as has been oft rumored—plays the fast, distorted and twisted guitar solo. But what stays engraved in the brain after all the smoke settles is those fucking power chords, hammering away, and Ray repeating the song’s trance-like mantra: “you really got me, you really got me, you really got me.”

In 1964, British Invasion was the name of the game. The Beatles, with their Mersey Sound, were the top dogs, but Davies came up with a line that wouldn’t be amiss in a Beatles tune: “you really got me” is one of those odd phrases that seems self-explanatory but isn’t quite. Does it mean “I’m yours”? Does it mean “you get me”? Does it mean “you got to me”? All of the above? Such might be a cause for rejoicing, but Davies wisely makes it a source of cranking angst. “You got me so I can’t sleep at night.” The effects of this affair of the heart—and other organs—seems like paranoia, insomnia, anxiety attacks.

Ray Davies is sort of the last guy you’d expect to be intoning such distress—and that “oh yeahhhh.” It sounds as delinquent as teachers were always telling us guys with hair over ears and collars and bad grammar must be. Though they were Mods in their couture, The Kinks sound almost like greasers on this one, with that guttural guitar sound able to put uptight teeth on edge.

And how about that solo? It became instantly influential, so resolutely not cleaned up or given any prettiness whatsoever. It goes for the jugular—a brash attack on the niceties of courtship and the sense that young love is supposed to be mawkish and self-conscious. It sounds like different solos spliced together, it's so frantic. And Davies’s voice grabs you as if he’s jabbing at this girl who’s making his head spin. Of all the Brit bands of this time, The Kinks sound like drinkers. There’s often something boozy about Davies’s voice—like the “I always wanta be by your side” bit. And the way the overlapped screams come right before the solo—it sounds like the lads are in primal heat.

It’s a great rock track but it’s not the first song I heard by Davies, Davies and company. That was “Lola,” in 1970, another indelible riff song that made the charts. The Kinks could rock second to none when the mood was on them, and without the pretty harmonies of The Beatles or the showboating of Jagger or Burdon or Daltrey or any of the other big singer bands—like Van Morrison in Them and Steve Marriott in The Small Faces. The Kinks are one of the best bands of the era and my appreciation of their early work—from 1966 to 1971—continues to deepen as time goes on.

See, don’t ever set me free.

DB's Song of the Day (day 172): "WATERLOO SUNSET" (1967) The Kinks

Another day, another great Sixties’ songster. Today is the birthday of Raymond Douglas Davies, the lead singer and chief songwriter for The Kinks, the band he formed with his younger brother Dave on lead guitar. Davies and company jumped into the forefront of rockin’ rock bands with “You Really Got Me” way back in 1964. Today’s song is more reflective and indeed much more in-keeping with the main thrust of Davies’ music. “Waterloo Sunset” is a song about the urban experience, about young love, about a vision of communal life and one’s solitary place in it. Davies is a major songwriter of his generation because his songs aren’t just excuses for melodies and harmonies and the wonders of recording (in fact many major Kinks tracks could do with better recording tech), they are songs with themes. Davies almost always has something to say and a unique perspective from which to say it.

I didn’t get to know the quality—and range—of his songwriting until the late Seventies. At that point, the band had left Reprise (in the States) for RCA and RCA for Arista. They were on a bit of a comeback in as much as they seemed to have better studio privileges. But the main work of the band, and Davies’ best compositions, date from the Reprise and RCA years. Davies is still putting out records from time to time and has written a book I should get around to reading. Of all the rockers publishing books this decade, his, I suspect, will actually be well-written.

Discovering the earlier Kinks, from the perspective of the late Seventies, meant picking up The Kink Kronikles, a compilation double LP from Reprise that was packed with great songs, all out of sequence, of course. The liner notes were pretty good and the arrangements of the 4 sides showed some thought. It would be some time before I got around to hearing all the LPs that fed that mighty collection. One of the standout songs on that album, from one of the band’s landmark early albums is “Waterloo Sunset,” and the album is Something Else by The Kinks. The album is a charming collection of odd takes on Britain and its people. Davies, more than any of his contemporaries, The Beatles, the Stones, even The Who, got across a sense of the attitudes and outlooks, the trials and triumphs of standard-issue or at times extremely quirky Brits. By the time I got around to most of these songs I was steeped in the comedy of Monty Python and my fondness for how the Brits present themselves was well-established.

Davies can be very satirical when he wants to be, but he tends more toward the tongue-in-cheek approach. His irony can be sparkling, his sense of delicate phrasing surpassing The Beatles. Davies doesn’t write many songs to and about women—whether of seduction or complaint—that are so typical of rock and pop; he creates characters; he describes situations; he has a more novelistic sense of how lives are lived than most songwriters ever do.

In today’s song we have two situations compared. The situation of the speaker who doesn’t wander the streets and prefers to stay at home at night; and the situation of the couple, Terry and Julie, who meet at "Waterloo Station every Friday night.” The song opens with an establishing shot (if this were film) or a scene-setting description (as in a story) that begins poetically in the form of an apostrophe (to the Thames): “Dirty, old river, must you keep rolling / Flowing into the night?” It’s the tone of the poet who is about to consider the state of his fellow man. “People so busy, make me feel dizzy / Taxi lights shine so bright.” And we’re off. This is the modern metropolis and our guide is both a loner and a kind of omniscient eye who sees all. And one might as well say it’s possible that he’s just a retiring git in a bedsit, dreaming up his ideal couple doing ideal things on an ideal Friday in an ideal city. “As long as they gaze on Waterloo Sunset, they are in paradise.” That line—which joins Terry and Julie with the narrator—lets the sunset over Waterloo Station stand for the collectivity of the city. Whoever you are, whatever you’re after—we all look upon the same sunset each day in our particular locale. We are city-dwellers all.

The song actually begins with that descending intro on rhythm that gives ways to Dave Davies’ lead picking out the main melody. And a sweet melody it is, the kind that’s made for getting stuck in your head so that you’re whistling it or humming it on the Tube. I can stick to my faux Brit guns here because this song was a hit wherever Britannia flourishes—but not in America. The general population here just doesn’t get it. Song didn’t even chart in this crass country. Anyway, the pleasures of this song are great, but even a mere 10 years after the song came out the “sha-la-las” that introduce the chorus seemed quaint. But that’s not a complaint. The more this song fades into the past, the more dated it seems, the more powerful it becomes. Already it sounds to me almost as a song from the Twenties or Thirties sounded to me as a kid in the Sixties (when people like McC and Davies were stealing from their elders in the songwriting tradition). It’s ghostly. A vision preserved in a daguerreotype, but enhanced with power chords: “Every day I look at the world from my window / Chilly, chilly is the evening time / Waterloo Sunset’s fine.” One imagines the kind of dusk that comes in the early Autumn. It’s nice to be out and about, but you best take a sweater.

And the way those voices join and overlap and cadence their “ahhs” behind “Waterloo Sunset’s fine” gives us the song’s sense of paradise: it’s in a sound, in an almost choirboy sense of how to make harmonies lap at the throne of God. Then we get it: the God’s eye view: “Millions of people, swarming like flies ‘round / Waterloo Underground / But Terry and Julie pass over the river / Where they feel safe and sound.” This passage alone pretty much beggars most songwriters of Davies’ generation. Even if we feel “swarming like flies” is a bit of a cliché, there’s no denying that to hear it at this time in a song—that has been simply lyrical and evocative up to this point—deepens the effect and makes it more lasting. We are in a collectivity, alright, and we might as well be insects from the singer’s heightened position. He’s looking down on us all and on his heroes, the duo who pass over the river and off into the sunset. Singled out among the teeming mass of humanity the way lovers always single themselves out.

We then realize that the intention of the song is not to tell us a story but to capture the sort of thing that poets of the urban landscape like Edgar Allen Poe and Charles Baudelaire did. We see the fragile but meaningful connection within the everyday (the couple meets every Friday) as the world streams around them, with the sunset over the station giving us both the God’s eye view as well as the dominant visual rationale—think of Whistler or Turner, the painters of the sky over an urban space. We might be, after all, looking at a painting in which a stray beam of light (a ray), golden and godlike, falls upon Terry and Julie as a benediction from above, which the song itself bestows.

OK, enough of all this. I want to wander.  And I don’t need no friend . . 

Happy 70th, Ray!