Jeremiah Tucker: Book series revisits classic albums I like music, and I like reading. I especially like reading about music. So I’m not sure why it took me so long to dive into the “33 1/3” series published by Continuum Books.
Thirty-three and a third is the rotation speed of an LP, and each book in the series explores a classic album. The books are affordable ($10 new) and slender (normally around 150 pages) with authors that range from music journalists to novelists to other musicians. (For instance, Colin Meloy of The Decemberists wrote the book covering The Replacements’ 1984 album “Let It Be.”)
So far, there have been 49 books published in the series, with more due by the end of the year. The albums covered range from indie pillars (Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”) to worldwide smashes (ABBA’s “ABBA Gold”) to the greatest album of all-time, ever (“Pet Sounds”).
For my introduction to the series, I chose “The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society” or TKATVGPS for short. Andy Miller, a writer I’d never heard of, tackles this nearly perfect 1968 album by The Kinks with original interviews and an intimidating bibliography. I’d always loved this album, but I didn’t know much about its back story. Since my early 20s, I’ve grown to like The Kinks’ ‘60s output as much, if not more, than what The Beatles or any other band were doing at the same time, and TKATVGPS is a good example why.
Ray Davies’ band was scrappier, poorer and smarter than The Beatles, if less musically adventurous, and by the time TKATVGPS dropped, a lot less popular. By the end of the ‘60s, The Beatles were decked in full-on hippie regalia and embracing mysticism, transcendental meditation and psychedelia. Whether the ‘60s defined The Beatles or The Beatles defined the ‘60s, it’s difficult to argue that Lennon, McCartney and company weren’t completely of their time. Personally, I’ve always preferred artists who seem a little out of time, a bit displaced, and in late 1968, The Kinks were practically an anachronism.
Miller spends the first third of the book providing the background for TKATVGPS. Davies had originally toyed with the idea of it being a solo album or a stage show. Davies recorded the album over the course of two years, during which time the currency of The Kinks plummeted, making a solo career unrealistic.
TKATVGPS is a loose concept album about the people who live around a village green, a common area of open grassland traditionally in the center of an English village. There’s a great quote from Ray Davies that Miller includes in the book that sums up why I love this album: “I go out of my way to like ordinary things. I cling on to the simple values … I think ‘ordinary’ people are quite complex enough without looking for greater sophistication.”
Miller points out that TKATVGPS was all about ordinary people and things, and stood in stark contrast in a year “when musicianship for its own sake was on the rise and ‘feel’ was all.” In the midst of riotous change, Davies’ made a plea for “preservation,” specifically of an ideal past.
I’m not sure there is a opening song that sets the mood for an album as well as “The Village Green Preservation Society” does. The song manages to be simultaneously wistful and sarcastic, sincere and satiric. Aside from its lazy-day-in-the-park atmosphere, it’s essentially a protest song — albeit a fey one.
(“God save little shops, china cups and virginity” has to be one of the most brilliant lyrics in pop music history.) Miller writes that the group was mocking “the certainties of protest with a list of utterly idiosyncratic demands” but I think Davies genuinely wanted to preserve innocence of bygone days while acknowledging that it’s impossible. Throughout the album, Davies evinces the past while doubting it ever exists the way one remembers it.
When I was still teenager I could never get into this album, and I think it was because the apparent Englishness of it made it off-putting. Even though they are seamlessly integrated into unfussy pop songs, the sound of vaudeville and the occasional theatricality is awkward at first. But once you familiarize yourself with the village-green setting, the brilliance of Davies’ careful creation becomes apparent.
There are so many great moments: Davies‘ delivery of “when I feel the world’s too much for me I think of the big sky and nothing matters much to me” on the peerless “Big Sky”; that heartbreaking chorus on “All of My Friends Were There”; the cacophony shattering the reverie on “Sitting by the Riverside”; and the complex, staggered harmonies on “Starstruck.”
Miller does a good job of providing the stories behind each of these songs and putting them into context, but my primary complaint is that the book never builds to any satisfying climax or comprehensive conclusion. Overall, however, it was a fun read, and its real value — and the value of the “33 1/3” series — is it gave me an excuse to revisit one of my favorite records.
Address correspondence to Jeremiah Tucker, c/o The Joplin Globe, P.O. Box 7, Joplin, MO 64802