Post by HollyH on Oct 24, 2007 11:24:44 GMT -5
Here's a nice new article just published:
The Kinks: The Real Life Soap Opera
October 24, 2007
by Denise Sullivan
Were it not for the cheap amp set up in the Davies family's Muswell Hill sitting room and young guitarist Dave's willfulness to go at it with a razor blade in the early '60s, the distorted, heavy metal riff that is known the world over as the heart of "You Really Got Me" may never have been born. But there are some additional, profoundly fateful moments in the Kinks story, like the point at which Dave's older brother, Ray, joins his band. Of course, the combustible combination of styles and personalities is what makes the Kinks the Kinks: the yin, the yang—and the elegant chaos from which seemingly effortless rock ‘n’ roll has flowed for over 40 years. But it hasn't been without a torrent of difficulties, strange turns of events, and mind-bending mayhem.
You could put it down to the rigors of rock ‘n’ roll or brotherly tension (like the type that's fuelled dueling sibling acts from Creedence to Oasis), but it appears that it was Ray's attempts to drive the band in a theatrical direction in the late '60s and early '70s that were partly responsible for driving a perfectly decent rock band to the edge of sanity and a near real breakup in 1973. Despite the massively creative, prolific, and influential output—from their distinctive guitar sound to the groundbreaking conceptual albums and theatrical production—all with a staunchly Anglocentric view (the very same approach that would later spawn Brit-pop), Ray simply would not rest until he successfully turned his rock into theater, while Dave was always more content to just rock.
In 1998, I spoke to both Ray and Dave in separate interviews about their band's high times and low ebbs, and, in particular, to Dave about a period in the mid-'70s that yielded the conceptual albums The Kinks Present a Soap Opera, The Kinks Present Schoolboys in Disgrace, Sleepwalker, and Misfits. The experimentations in theatricality (Everybody's in Showbiz and Preservation Acts 1) and the disappointments surrounding them nearly cost Ray his sanity. In 1973 he checked himself into a hospital. As for Dave's condition, he was seriously reconsidering his membership in the band, though he ultimately took a major role in nursing his brother back to normalcy post-breakdown. The resulting Soap Opera was conceived during Ray's difficulties and concerned "a rock star" who craves an ordinary life; it also marked the edge of a very successful run for the band as a live act, especially in America.
"I felt that could easily have been the swan song for the Kinks. That period when Ray was experimenting a lot and not really knowing what direction he wanted to take as a writer. I felt the band wasn't very cohesive, there didn't seem to be any spirit, and we were kind of going through the motions a little bit," recalls Dave. "Having said that, on reflection, it's quite an interesting album, Soap Opera. It was a chance for us to experiment a little bit differently with the stage production. It gave us a chance to sort of dress up in silly clothes and wigs and things, and it was quite fun actually to tour with it. It had an interesting side effect to it."
Soap Opera was released in 1975 and "Everybody's a Star (Starmaker)" was absolutely in step with the glam rock of T. Rex, Davie Bowie, and Roxy Music. "It's a very tongue-in-cheek, satirical look at the rock ‘n’ roll of that period—how people take themselves seriously. There was a lot of phoniness to rock ‘n’ roll… the glam rock thing was a particularly superficial period, although it was fun. A lot of Kinks music is political and social, but the root of the Kinks music is like folk music. It delves back into our past and our family. Ray and I are two boys in a family of eight and I'm the youngest. My family was very musical. My dad used to like to go to vaudeville and see comedians and play banjo, and my sisters liked everything from Perry Como to Fats Domino. It was really quite a cacophony of influences growing up, which luckily, I think we drew on a lot throughout our own careers."
At the time of our interview, brother Ray had published a fictionalized autobiography titled X-Ray and was finally staging his own show, Storyteller, a solo retrospective, featuring music and spoken passages with family and band reminiscences. It was running in small theaters to rave reviews. In the process of the intensive period of reflection, Ray says he started to discover things about his old work, like when 30 years after penning it, he realized that he'd written his song "Two Sisters" (from the album Something Else) about him and Dave.
"Last night before 'Two Sisters' I did 'I Go to Sleep.' You can tell, particularly with the response from the audience, they realize the connection it had with my life and why I wrote it. Things like that constantly come up," says Ray. The revelations allowed him to go in and tinker with the show, adjusting it to his liking. "I change things consciously and things change naturally; it's a combination of both those things. Unlike, say, if it was a regular kind of theater piece, you wouldn't be able to fit those changes in quite as easily. I remember doing a musical [80 Days] and we had about 20 people on the stage. We wanted to shift tunes around and put new things in, and it's difficult to do. But yesterday I went in and changed something, and it was just a quick rehearsal with the lighting person."
Following Soap Opera, in 1976 the Davies gave rock and theatrics another crack with Schoolboys in Disgrace. But instead of featuring his alter ego, Ray used someone else's story. "The actual theme is based on my personal schoolboy experience," says Dave. "I fell in love when I was 14 or 15, and she got pregnant, and it was a very big scandal at the time. We weren't allowed to see each other, and we were both thrown out of school. It was very autobiographical. Although it was Ray's observations, it was based on my actual life!
"What was very different there is that we'd come through an experimental stage and I felt more confident musically," says Dave. "I wanted to get out and play live, since that's the greatest place to be, in front of people. I'd come through a difficult emotional patch anyway. And I had a lot of emotional contact with the content."
The tour for Schoolboys was successful and the album was a delight: not only did it feature Ray's beloved thematic bent, saucy lyrics, and theatrical delivery, but Dave's guitar work was a perfect blend of riffing and lyrical melodicism.
"Schoolboys was an important and poignant record for us as a band. Musically, we needed to move on; we had the soap operas where the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing, and it was time to reestablish ourselves," says Dave.
They decided to concentrate on touring America, whose stages they'd been banned from for the entirety of the late '60s due to a confusing and still inexplicable situation with the musician's union. Energized by the new wave of bands in 1977 who claimed them as influential, the brothers came, saw, and conquered… and entered a highly successful late '70s and early '80s run that was further enhanced with the invention of MTV. Video turned out to be the perfect outlet for their theatrical side.
As the decades wore on, their recorded output diminished, and the brothers remained on and off again collaborators. There were a few more peaks, including the wave of early '90s Brit-pop they helped invent, and their 1994 acoustic reworking of old songs, To the Bone. And there have been some crucial valleys too, like when Ray was shot in the leg on the streets of New Orleans and Dave suffered a stroke, both in 2004. But by 2006, Ray had finally released his long-awaited solo debut, Other People's Lives and in the summer of 2007, Dave was up and running, fully recovered from right-side paralysis with his own new album, Fractured Mindz. Fate has been kind to the Brothers Davies; perhaps there's still hope for a reprise of the Kinks.
The Kinks: The Real Life Soap Opera
October 24, 2007
by Denise Sullivan
Were it not for the cheap amp set up in the Davies family's Muswell Hill sitting room and young guitarist Dave's willfulness to go at it with a razor blade in the early '60s, the distorted, heavy metal riff that is known the world over as the heart of "You Really Got Me" may never have been born. But there are some additional, profoundly fateful moments in the Kinks story, like the point at which Dave's older brother, Ray, joins his band. Of course, the combustible combination of styles and personalities is what makes the Kinks the Kinks: the yin, the yang—and the elegant chaos from which seemingly effortless rock ‘n’ roll has flowed for over 40 years. But it hasn't been without a torrent of difficulties, strange turns of events, and mind-bending mayhem.
You could put it down to the rigors of rock ‘n’ roll or brotherly tension (like the type that's fuelled dueling sibling acts from Creedence to Oasis), but it appears that it was Ray's attempts to drive the band in a theatrical direction in the late '60s and early '70s that were partly responsible for driving a perfectly decent rock band to the edge of sanity and a near real breakup in 1973. Despite the massively creative, prolific, and influential output—from their distinctive guitar sound to the groundbreaking conceptual albums and theatrical production—all with a staunchly Anglocentric view (the very same approach that would later spawn Brit-pop), Ray simply would not rest until he successfully turned his rock into theater, while Dave was always more content to just rock.
In 1998, I spoke to both Ray and Dave in separate interviews about their band's high times and low ebbs, and, in particular, to Dave about a period in the mid-'70s that yielded the conceptual albums The Kinks Present a Soap Opera, The Kinks Present Schoolboys in Disgrace, Sleepwalker, and Misfits. The experimentations in theatricality (Everybody's in Showbiz and Preservation Acts 1) and the disappointments surrounding them nearly cost Ray his sanity. In 1973 he checked himself into a hospital. As for Dave's condition, he was seriously reconsidering his membership in the band, though he ultimately took a major role in nursing his brother back to normalcy post-breakdown. The resulting Soap Opera was conceived during Ray's difficulties and concerned "a rock star" who craves an ordinary life; it also marked the edge of a very successful run for the band as a live act, especially in America.
"I felt that could easily have been the swan song for the Kinks. That period when Ray was experimenting a lot and not really knowing what direction he wanted to take as a writer. I felt the band wasn't very cohesive, there didn't seem to be any spirit, and we were kind of going through the motions a little bit," recalls Dave. "Having said that, on reflection, it's quite an interesting album, Soap Opera. It was a chance for us to experiment a little bit differently with the stage production. It gave us a chance to sort of dress up in silly clothes and wigs and things, and it was quite fun actually to tour with it. It had an interesting side effect to it."
Soap Opera was released in 1975 and "Everybody's a Star (Starmaker)" was absolutely in step with the glam rock of T. Rex, Davie Bowie, and Roxy Music. "It's a very tongue-in-cheek, satirical look at the rock ‘n’ roll of that period—how people take themselves seriously. There was a lot of phoniness to rock ‘n’ roll… the glam rock thing was a particularly superficial period, although it was fun. A lot of Kinks music is political and social, but the root of the Kinks music is like folk music. It delves back into our past and our family. Ray and I are two boys in a family of eight and I'm the youngest. My family was very musical. My dad used to like to go to vaudeville and see comedians and play banjo, and my sisters liked everything from Perry Como to Fats Domino. It was really quite a cacophony of influences growing up, which luckily, I think we drew on a lot throughout our own careers."
At the time of our interview, brother Ray had published a fictionalized autobiography titled X-Ray and was finally staging his own show, Storyteller, a solo retrospective, featuring music and spoken passages with family and band reminiscences. It was running in small theaters to rave reviews. In the process of the intensive period of reflection, Ray says he started to discover things about his old work, like when 30 years after penning it, he realized that he'd written his song "Two Sisters" (from the album Something Else) about him and Dave.
"Last night before 'Two Sisters' I did 'I Go to Sleep.' You can tell, particularly with the response from the audience, they realize the connection it had with my life and why I wrote it. Things like that constantly come up," says Ray. The revelations allowed him to go in and tinker with the show, adjusting it to his liking. "I change things consciously and things change naturally; it's a combination of both those things. Unlike, say, if it was a regular kind of theater piece, you wouldn't be able to fit those changes in quite as easily. I remember doing a musical [80 Days] and we had about 20 people on the stage. We wanted to shift tunes around and put new things in, and it's difficult to do. But yesterday I went in and changed something, and it was just a quick rehearsal with the lighting person."
Following Soap Opera, in 1976 the Davies gave rock and theatrics another crack with Schoolboys in Disgrace. But instead of featuring his alter ego, Ray used someone else's story. "The actual theme is based on my personal schoolboy experience," says Dave. "I fell in love when I was 14 or 15, and she got pregnant, and it was a very big scandal at the time. We weren't allowed to see each other, and we were both thrown out of school. It was very autobiographical. Although it was Ray's observations, it was based on my actual life!
"What was very different there is that we'd come through an experimental stage and I felt more confident musically," says Dave. "I wanted to get out and play live, since that's the greatest place to be, in front of people. I'd come through a difficult emotional patch anyway. And I had a lot of emotional contact with the content."
The tour for Schoolboys was successful and the album was a delight: not only did it feature Ray's beloved thematic bent, saucy lyrics, and theatrical delivery, but Dave's guitar work was a perfect blend of riffing and lyrical melodicism.
"Schoolboys was an important and poignant record for us as a band. Musically, we needed to move on; we had the soap operas where the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing, and it was time to reestablish ourselves," says Dave.
They decided to concentrate on touring America, whose stages they'd been banned from for the entirety of the late '60s due to a confusing and still inexplicable situation with the musician's union. Energized by the new wave of bands in 1977 who claimed them as influential, the brothers came, saw, and conquered… and entered a highly successful late '70s and early '80s run that was further enhanced with the invention of MTV. Video turned out to be the perfect outlet for their theatrical side.
As the decades wore on, their recorded output diminished, and the brothers remained on and off again collaborators. There were a few more peaks, including the wave of early '90s Brit-pop they helped invent, and their 1994 acoustic reworking of old songs, To the Bone. And there have been some crucial valleys too, like when Ray was shot in the leg on the streets of New Orleans and Dave suffered a stroke, both in 2004. But by 2006, Ray had finally released his long-awaited solo debut, Other People's Lives and in the summer of 2007, Dave was up and running, fully recovered from right-side paralysis with his own new album, Fractured Mindz. Fate has been kind to the Brothers Davies; perhaps there's still hope for a reprise of the Kinks.
