The Kinks: Kinda Kinks

THE KINKS: KINDA KINKS (1965)

1) Look For Me Baby; 2) Got My Feet On The Ground; 3) Nothin' In The World Can Stop Me From Worrying About That Girl; 4) Naggin' Woman; 5) Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight; 6) Tired Of Waiting For You; 7) Dancing In The Street; 8) Don't Ever Change; 9) Come On Now; 10) So Long; 11) You Shouldn't Be Sad; 12) Some­thing Better Beginning; 13*) Everybody's Gonna Be Happy; 14*) Who'll Be The Next In Line; 15*) Set Me Free; 16*) I Need You; 17*) See My Friends; 18*) Never Met A Girl Like You Before; 19*) Wait Till Summer Comes Along; 20*) Such A Shame; 21*) A Well Respected Man; 22*) Don't You Fret; 23*) I Go To Sleep (demo).

For all the greatness that Ray Davies and his brother brought into the world in 1966–1969, it can be very seriously argued that, progress-wise, no other gap between any two of their classic al­bums is covered by such a giant leap forward as the gap between Kinks and Kinda Kinks — no matter how uninventive the actual album titles are. (They loved the letter K so much in those days, it's a wonder they never got officially endorsed by the KKK). Even if there are relatively few timeless classics on this second album, the important thing is that it actually sounds like a classic Kinks album, one where they really come into their own style, totally distinct from everybody else's. Most importantly, ten out of twelve songs here are Ray Davies originals — reflecting the amazingly fast rate with which Ray was beginning to turn into one of Britain's finest songwriters, something that he himself probably could not have predicted even one year earlier.

Perhaps the only atavistic remnant of their derivative fumbles is ʽNaggin' Womanʼ, quite a strange choice for a cover — recorded by little-known vocalist and harmonica player from Mississippi by the name of Jimmy Anderson that even in its original incarnation sounded like an average wannabe-Jimmy-Reed number. Brother Dave sings it in his exaggeratedly nasal voice that reminds even stronger of Jimmy Reed, but honestly, the Kinks could never properly mimick Jimmy Reed's nastiness, so the song sounds trashy, but boring (apart from Dave's minimalistic guitar solo, which is cute, but still incomparable to whatever a Brian Jones would do with this at about the same time). On the other hand, dance-oriented Motown material fares better with them, provided it's been properly Kinkified: Ray sings Martha & The Vandellas' ʽDancing In The Streetʼ with idealistic-romantic aplomb, but it is the raw, swirling, gritty rhythm guitar playing that makes the song — not having either the budget or the experience to emulate the original's glorious brass arrangement, the Kinks put everything they have into the guitar groove, and make it into a kick-ass sample of young British R'n'B.

But that's it for the covers. Excited by the commercial and critical success of their latest singles, Ray is now generating creative ideas by the dozen, the first of which, preceding the album by a couple of months, is ʽTired Of Waiting For Youʼ — a song that, from a certain perspective, could be called the first power ballad ever written, being rhythmically driven by the exact same hard-rocking, distorted sound that the brothers had found earlier for ʽYou Really Got Meʼ and ʽAll Day And All Of The Nightʼ. This time, of course, it overlaps with a soft and jangly lead part, but it is impossible to properly describe how the added boost of the distorted "da-doom, da-doom" riff elevates the song to the status of a classic anthem. You can see how they are still growing: the lyrics of the tune are rather inane (for a guy as gentlemanly and innocent as Ray, the implications of being "tired of waiting for you" seem rather embarrassing), the arrangement desperately begs for extra melodic and harmonic overlays that they do not yet know how to produce — but the introductory eight seconds alone, with the sweet and the grumbly guitar voices weaving together in perfect harmony, are musical genius; and the bridge section of "it's your life... and you can do what you want" is the first of many cases where Ray would be saving his dreamiest and most chivalrous bits for the mid-part, before pulling the listener back out into the real world for the regular verse-chorus stuff.

Next to the innovative breakthrough of ʽTired Of Waitingʼ, the rest of the album may sound a bit lackluster in comparison — and it probably is, considering how Ray used to complain about Shel Talmy forcing the band to record it in two weeks' time. But even if the other tracks do not feel so cathartic, most of them are still exhilarating, joyful, catchy pop-rock with all sorts of subtle twists, particularly the long stretch on Side B beginning with ʽDon't Ever Changeʼ. Of the two true ori­ginal compositions on Kinks, it is the ʽStop Your Sobbingʼ model rather than the ʽYou Really Got Meʼ one that Ray keeps following — not exactly inventing the formula of the «consolation pop song», but personalizing it. It's as if the Kinks, under his direction, were occupying their own little corner of the market, where all the young girls, after having their hearts burned down by the Beatles and their lower organs soaked wet by the Stones, could crawl over to Uncle Ray and weep on his comforting shoulder. All these songs are romantic, but perhaps even less sexual in nature than the Beach Boys — not to mention the near-complete lack of even the faintest traces of misogyny or even slight disrespect towards any representatives of the opposite sex. Yes, instead of telling her that it's all over now, or that she can't do that, or that this may be the last time, or that this happened once before when he came to her door, etc. etc., Mr. Ray is sincerely wishing her "don't you ever change now, always stay the same now", and telling her that she shouldn't be sad, and generally playing the knight in shining armor for all those little cuties who find them­selves used up and abandoned by the likes of John Lennon or Mick Jagger.

Well, there are exceptions, of course: ʽNothing In The World Can Stop Me From Worryin' Bout That Girlʼ does actually tell the story of a nasty two-timer who "just kept on lying". But even so, all this leads to is heartbreak rather than anger — notice that there isn't a single insult in the lyrics, and the song, a minimalistic piece of blues-pop whose acoustic riff strangely predicts the guitar melody of Simon & Garfunkel's ʽMrs. Robinsonʼ three years later, is quiet, sulky, and sad, rather than angry and vindictive. And on ʽSomething Better Beginningʼ, a song written so obviously in the style of the Ronettes that it just screams for a wall-of-sound production which Shel Talmy cannot grant it, Ray is clearly singing about a break-up — but he never ever mentions who was the culprit, and the song on the whole is all about optimism and faith in a new beginning.

The really cool thing about all these tunes, as simplistic as they are on the surface, is that they sound believable — from the very start, Ray was not interested in simply churning out one com­mercial, formulaic pop song after another; instead (much like The Shangri-Las across the ocean), he was interested in thinking up little stories of realistic human relationships, and although at this point he did not always succeed (stuff like ʽWonder Where My Baby Is Tonightʼ is still fairly cartoonish, for example), most of these boy-meets-girl stories are as true to real life as the band's upcoming social miniatures of everyday routine in the UK. Melodically, they are probably weaker than contemporary Beatles stuff, but even at this point, Ray Davies can already be felt as a living, breathing person deserving our empathy, whereas the personal-psychological sides of Lennon and McCartney took a couple years to truly emerge out of all the artistic craft.

That said, the Kinks were still a singles band at this point, and no other reissue in their entire catalog benefits greater from the presence of contemporary singles than Kinda Kinks. The bonus tracks almost double the length of the album, and almost each one is a gem in its own rights. We have ʽEverybody's Gonna Be Happyʼ, easily their most energetic and joyful rave-up with out­standing drum work from Mick Avory. ʽSet Me Freeʼ is, I believe, simply one of the greatest love songs of 1965 — I cannot understand how, by means of a simple two-chord riff and a vocal melody that seems to have been thrown together in a matter of seconds, they have managed to express the feeling of burning undivided love so perfectly, but so they have: the riff gives the impression of a ball and chain at the singer's legs, and Ray's throat pressure during the opening "set me free little girl..." is just one of those innumerable subtle moves of his that work their magic in ways you fail to explicitly notice. (Special mention should also go to the "you can DO it if you try..." falsetto upshot — I have no idea why this moment is so orgasmic, but there must be some awesome biochemistry involved in this transition from tense-and-throaty to falsetto... the idea of being set free and soaring up to high heavens, perhaps?).

Likewise, it would be impossible not to mention ʽSee My Friendsʼ — arguably the first pop song to incorporate Indian motives, although, unfortunately, the Kinks never went as far as to drag a real sitar into the studio (and so happened to cede the honor to the Beatles... again!): but the tune was inspired by the band's stopover in Bombay, and the guitars do play a bit of a raga, so it is an important point in the history of Eastern influences in Western pop music. More importantly, perhaps, it is the first Kinks single to dig into something deeper than boy-girl relationships: alle­gedly inspired by the sudden demise of Ray's elder sister, it is a song about death, obeying the age-old folk tradition of learning to cope with death and recognize its inevitability and transience, and, strangely enough, actually depersonalizing the singer this time: multi-tracked vocals are wedged so deeply in the mix that Ray Davies really does sound somewhat like a choir of fisher­men here, you know? Very atypical of the Kinks, and yet, still pretty Kinksy in terms of recog­nizable harmonies.

And then you can't go wrong with ʽSuch A Shameʼ (the deeply sung "it's a shame, such a shame, such a shame" chorus sounds as natural as shame ever comes), or with ʽA Well Respected Manʼ (the first triumphant appearance of Ray Davies as a social commentator, soon to be eclipsed with melodically superior creations, but already brimming with scorn and sarcasm), or even with the coldly melancholic, nostalgically beautiful piano demo ʽI Go To Sleepʼ that somehow predicts classic Brian Eno — slow it down just a little bit, give it better production values, and it wouldn't be out of place on the dreamy Side B of Before And After Science.

As I look over the 23 tracks on this CD one more time, other than ʽNaggin' Womanʼ, I cannot find a single genuine stinker — some relative lowlights, yes, but even when they are doing wimpy Peter, Paul & Mary-style folk-pop like ʽSo Longʼ, Ray's melodic twists and humble personality still make them winners. We could probably live without ʽI Need Youʼ as the third (and also least energetic) rewrite of ʽYou Really Got Meʼ, and I could certainly live with even fewer Dave Davies lead vocal parts (every time he begins to shout, he still ends up sounding like a very obnoxious teenager), but all of these are minor nitpicks. The truth is that by early 1965, Ray Davies had finally put both feet in the stirrups of his genius steed, and for the next five years, he'd be riding it non-stop, conquering all sorts of new heights. The only reasons that prevent the Kinda Kinks-era LP and single tracks from sounding as fresh and relevant today as the band's later output are purely technical — pop music as such had not yet turned into Art with a capital A, and although the Davies brothers were already lending their older colleagues like the Beatles and the Stones a solid hand in this, it would take a little more time to overcome the last technicalities. Even so, pop music in early '65 rarely got better than this, so a solid thumbs up here.