by Andy Miller
The other snap is of Gwen and Rene, two more Davies sisters. Dave thinks the photos date from around June 1957. Within weeks, Ray would turn thirteen. For his birthday Rene would buy him a Spanish guitar. Then, against doctor’s orders, she would go out dancing to the Lyceum Ballroom in the Strand, where she would collapse on the dance floor. She died that night. “What dreadful mixed feelings my brother must have experienced on that following morning,” writes Dave Davies. “For months he had been on and on about that bloody guitar . . .”lxv
So the gaiety of ‘Picture Book’ — “a paper hat, kiss-me-quick” song as Ray described it — masks an even greater sense of personal loss than that portrayed in ‘Do You Remember Walter’. To Ray Davies, the photographs are reminders both of happier times and of time lost, an ambivalence more fully expressed in ‘People Take Pictures Of Each Other’ (on This Is Where I Belong, Bill Lloyd and Tommy Womack’s “brave” cover version of ‘Picture Book’ concludes with a snatch of the latter song). Also recorded by The Kinks at this time was the marvellous ‘Pictures In The Sand’, released only briefly on The Great Lost Kinks Album. The song shares ‘Picture Book”s seaside setting and end-of-the-pier musical jollity, and also its quiet desperation; although these pictures aren’t permanent like photographs, they still can’t picture love, in the here and now, vanished or taken away.
* * *
The opening trio of tracks on TKATVGPS had no equivalent in the pop scene of 1968, chart or underground, in either sound or subject. This wasn’t merely unfashionable; it was anathema to the prevailing rock culture of the time, one that embraced Concepts but struggled with ideas. In a year when musicianship for its own sake was on the rise and “feel” was all, when people could conceive of nothing finer than to boogie with Canned Heat, Davies makes it plain that everything on TKATVGPS — arrangement, performance, production — will be the servant of the song, and the songs will be about ordinary things and everyday people: “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 . . . We do a lot of stompy things. The rhythms are reminiscent of the Twenties. I like the old days. Everybody does — in song.”lxvi Ignoring what was happening around him, Ray Davies pursued his particular vision to its conclusion and in doing so consigned the LP to swift obscurity and broke The Kinks.
But what more could he do?
Johnny Thunder
Another track selected for Four More Respected Gentlemen and both incarnations of TKATVGPS, ‘Johnny Thunder’ neatly fits Davies’ original “town and the people who live there” conception of Village Green, as LP, stage musical or whatever. “It’s about a rocker,” he said. “I wrote it after Wild One (sic.) was released.”lxvii László Benedek’s 1954 film The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin as the leaders of rival biker gangs, had been reissued to London cinemas in early 1968. Brando’s character is called Johnny, and it may be Brando that Davies had in mind as his model for Johnny Thunder (try swapping the names around the next time you’re singing along).12 “He’s the local hound — a real swine,” Dave told Disc and Music Echo, before reassuring readers “but he’s inside at the moment!”lxviii
‘Johnny Thunder’ is one of the more straightforward songs on TKATVGPS, with few production tricks and a rare solo vocal from Ray, his first on the album not to be double-tracked at any point. Acoustic guitars, bass and drums are joined by Dave Davies’ treated and tidy guitar part, mixed almost out of earshot — a shame, as the countermelody that accompanies the chorus and “thunder and lightning” refrain is delightful. The brass band-like wordless vocal line provides a melodic flourish, while once again the rhythm section has been given some space to stretch out and The Kinks’ harmonies are characteristically imaginative (if a little ragged).
Davies’ portrait of the rebel motorcyclist who rides alone, subsisting on nothing but the elements, is so idealized as to be untrustworthy (an unreliable narrator is another literary aspect of the songs on TKATVGPS, notably ‘Village Green’ itself). The inhabitants may not be able to reach Johnny, but he is a much-loved feature of the town nevertheless — he is even in Helena’s prayers. Johnny, like Walter, has sworn to be free, and in the process has been turned into a perfectly preserved — and thus neutered — icon of rebellion, just as pictures of Marlon Brando in The Wild One eventually decorated a million bedroom walls. God bless him indeed (and tudor houses, china cups, virginity etc.). The character, fleshed out somewhat, reappears as ‘One Of The Survivors’ on Preservation Act 1.
According to Dave Davies, the original ‘Johnny Thunder’ attracted the attention of a longstanding Kinks’ admirer: Pete Townshend of The Who. Davies alleges Townshend so liked the song’s dramatic opening riff that he quickly recycled it in his own work — after all, The Who’s guitarist had form where The Kinks were concerned. He openly admitted to modelling ‘I Can’t Explain’ on The Kinks’ first few hits, and Dave suspected Ray and Pete’s mutual friend Barry Fantoni of “conveying our ideas to Townshend”. Dave declines to say exactly where this new “tribute” occurred, but listeners to Tommy, released just six months after TKATVGPS, may detect some similarity between ‘Johnny Thunder’ and parts of ‘Overture’ and ‘Go To The Mirror!’
Ray may have agreed with his brother. Speaking to Rolling Stone in November 1969, by which time Tommy, rock’s much-hyped first opera, had become a sensation and turned Townshend and his group into superstars, Davies had this to say on the subject of ‘Johnny Thunder’. “It’s not a cowboy song,” he told Jonathan Cott, pleasantly. “It would be nice to hear The Who sing it.”lxix
Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains
From thunder and lightning to ‘Smokestack Lightnin”. ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ was a very late addition to TKATVGPS and evidence suggests it was probably the last song to be composed for the album. Like ‘Big Sky’, it was recorded in October 1968, after the cancellation of the original twelve-track edition. In several respects, the song is uncharacteristic of the album as a whole — its R&B derivation, its live-sounding performance and its four-minute length are all atypical13 —but in another it is the quintessence of Davies’ writing for this project. On a LP full of deceptively acidic songs, ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ may well be the most corrosive of them all.
The Kinks, in common with many of the pop era’s finest groups, emerged from the Rhythm and Blues boom of the early sixties. Among the most totemic R&B favourites was a sinister, sensual half-shuffle called ‘Smokestack Lightnin” by Chester Burnett a.k.a. The Howlin’ Wolf. By 1963, the song was a staple of every self-respecting British R&B band’s act. The High Numbers performed ‘Smokestack Lightnin” at their unsuccessful Abbey Road audition in October 1964. In Southampton, there was even a group called The Howlin’ Wolves (later to change their name and find brief fame as reluctant psychedelic nabobs Simon Dupree and the Big Sound).
It may be nearly fifty years old, but the original ‘Smokestack Lightnin” is a jawdropping record, a despatch from some sweltering, moonlit chamber, sung with the kind of elemental, roaring fervour that only Don Van Vliet, alias Captain Beefheart, has ever seemed able to match. In comparison, recorded British beat boom versions of the song tend to be either long on fretwork and short on menace (The Yardbirds) or well intentioned but hopelessly callow (Manfred Mann).
By late 1963, Howlin’ Wolf’s original recording of ‘Smokestack Lightnin” was in such demand that Pye issued it as the lead track of a moderately successful EP. Six months later — around the time The Kinks were fighting with the same label to get ‘You Really Got Me’ rerecorded with more power and atmosphere — the company issued ‘Smokestack Lightnin” again, this time as a single. Howlin’ Wolf, six foot three and nearly three hundred pounds, made a memorable appearance as the surprise guest on BBC TV’s Jukebox Jury, where he towered over the suddenly quaking members of a panel who had just voted his greatest hit a ‘Miss’.
By
mid-1965 however, the R&B scene was in decline as pop proliferated and groups increasingly came under pressure, often from their own management, to compete with The Beatles and write their own pop-orientated material. Out went the repertoire. In X-Ray, Davies recounts Hal Carter’s advice to the Kinks about tailoring their stage act: “Cut out that ‘Smokestack Lightning’ number. You’re not doing yourselves and anybody else any favours by playing that.”lxx Meanwhile, The High Numbers, now with a new name and a record deal, were changing their tune(s). “The Who are having serious doubts about the state of R&B,” their manager Kit Lambert told Disc. “Now the LP material [for My Generation] will consist of hard pop. They’ve finished with ‘Smokestack Lightning’”lxxi.
So in 1968, by basing ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ on an instantly recognisable riff from four or five years earlier, Ray Davies was blowing the whistle both on himself and his R&B contemporaries. There are jokes and allusions to ‘Smokestack Lightnin”, and the scene in general, scattered throughout the song. Like Howlin’ Wolf’s original track and subsequent covers of it, ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ chugs along in E major. At 2.21, Ray Davies can distantly be heard emitting a scrawny falsetto howl, more afghan hound than wolf. From 3.41 to 3.44, The Kinks double the tempo for two bars, Pete Quaife leaping an octave to play a distinctly Chuck Berry-like bass line. In the third verse there is a lyrical allusion to ‘Train Kept A-Rollin”, recorded by The Yardbirds and famously performed by the Jeff Beck / Jimmy Page line-up of the group in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966).14 And throughout, there is Ray, huffing and puffing away on the harmonica — double-tracked in places: how else do you blow lead and rhythm simultaneously? — like it was 1963 again and The Kinks were back in the pubs and youth clubs of Muswell Hill and East Finchley.
“This was a case of the idea coming before the song,” Ray Davies told Melody Maker when the album was released. “Again, like the ‘Walter’ song it’s really about not having anything in common with people. Everybody wanted to know about steam trains a couple of years ago, but they don’t any more. It’s about me being the last of the renegades. All my friends are middle class now. They’ve all stopped playing in clubs. They’ve all made money and have happy faces. Oddly enough I never did like steam trains much.”lxxii
The correlation of steam trains and R&B in ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ is inspired, both in its witty juxtaposition of such distinctly English and American archetypes, and in the hesitancy it expresses on behalf of its author. Look, Davies says, you, we, loved this music but there is something increasingly ridiculous and misplaced about our love — an English middle class, middle-aged ‘Smokestack Lightnin” is about as authentically bluesy as the Titfield Thunderbolt. I am the last renegade; how absurd that is.
Accordingly, on record the track hovers between paying homage to the R&B sound and spoofing it. Although The Kinks play it straight, some aptly locomotive touches have been added to the arrangement. The group locks into the well-worn groove, picking up speed (and handclaps) as they go. After throwing some ascending chords onto the fire (2.56 to 3.05), they race through the song’s final minute, grinding to a halt with a final puff of smoke from Mick Avory’s cymbals and kick drum.
It should be too contrived for words; what prevents it from collapsing into novelty is, once again, Davies’ lyric, and the despair that runs just beneath its surface jocularity and pride. Like Johnny Thunder, the Last of the Steam-Powered Trains is a rebel, a survivor, who has avoided becoming bourgeois and grey like his friends. Sweat and blood, soot and scum. But such freedom comes at a cost. He is kept in a museum; preservation is driving him mad. By the time he composed the song, Ray Davies had been writing Village Green material for two years, and ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ reiterates its central dilemmas with wit and assurance. How do you reconcile your past and present? How do you stop the weight of experience from dragging you under? How do you keep rollin’ when all you want to do is stop?
Reports of the death of British R&B would prove to be greatly exaggerated. In the same month that The Kinks cut ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’, thereby bringing to a close the protracted sessions for TKATVGPS, south of the river at Olympic Studios in Barnes, Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page’s new group was recording its debut LP. In a mere thirty-six hours, the irresistible force of Led Zeppelin remade rhythm and blues as hard rock and, in doing so, invented the 1970s. The first song the group ever played together was ‘Train Kept A-Rollin”.
‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ became a fixture of The Kinks’ live act when they returned to America in October 1969; at the Boston Tea Party on the 23rd it was their opening number. Tapes reveal that the record’s ironies and nuances have all been ditched in favour of some fully-fledged and unfortunate Zeplike noodling. The song has become the sort of blues workout Davies originally sought to lampoon. By the end of the tour, on the stage of the Fillmore West, San Francisco, it stretches to seven tedious minutes; at the same venue a year later it has swollen to a mind-numbing eleven. Ray bellows the words, jumbling and repeating the lyrics; Dave gives full rein to his incipient guitar heroics. “I was walking in a field one day,” yells Dave Davies at one point, bafflingly, “and I happened to look up at the sky. And man, you know what I saw? I SAW AN ALBATROSS!!!” Cue seven minutes of maximum heaviosity (and boredom). It must have sounded great if you were stoned, or one of the musicians, or both.
Coincidentally, Bay Area extemporisers The Grateful Dead regularly featured ‘Smokestack Lightnin” in their interminable concerts. It would be nice to think that The Kinks’ “coals to Newcastle” live performances of ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ in San Francisco were extending the song’s satirical reach; in fact they were just playing to the long-haired, droopy-lidded gallery. By chance, the song fitted the back-to-rock-basics mood of the times.
One last thought: in its acknowledgement of pop’s inevitable greying, ‘Last Of The Steam-Powered Trains’ has proved to be gloriously predictive. Magazines like Mojo and Classic Rock, with their emphasis on classicism and authenticity — even iconoclastic movements like punk and techno are now revered for their classicism and authenticity — are like museums of rock music, with figures like Ray Davies and albums like TKATVGPS their prize exhibits.
Big Sky
Ray Davies wrote the immortal ‘Big Sky’ on the balcony of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. “I spent an evening with all these people doing deals,” he said. “The next morning at the Carlton Hotel I watched the sun come up and I looked at them all down there, all going out to do their deals. That’s where I got the “Big Sky looking down on all the people” line. It started from there.”lxxiiiIn his liner notes for This Is Where I Belong, Davies says he watched the sun set, not rise: whatever, the combination of the awe-inspiring skies above the Mediterranean and the businessmen below in their suits and ties was enough to make him consider the existence of “a being somewhat bigger than all of the hustlers around me.”lxxiv He completed the resulting song quickly, boarded a plane and brought it back to London.15
‘Big Sky’ is not a song about God, but about how human beings cope in a world where God is seemingly unconcerned at their plight. The Big Sky is not dead but preoccupied,’ benign but indifferent. For Ray Davies, this is a cause for celebration, or at least consolation. The Big Sky is so big, our troubles are small in comparison — and these too shall pass. Freedom comes to everyone in the end, whether we want it or not. Until then, don’t let your sorrow get the better of you. The song is a memo both to himself and the Big Sky over his head. It is as good as anything written in the 1960’s, by Lennon and McCartney, Bob Dylan or anyone else.
As noted above, ‘Big Sky’ was recorded in October 1968, just weeks before the final version of the LP reached the shops. As such, it represents the high point of Davies’ creativity in the Village Green period and also its final flowering. He would go on to write great songs, and The Kinks would continue to make good records, occasionally great ones, but
the rhapsodic, sweeping ‘Big Sky’ is the last in a line of Kinks classics that began with ‘Sunny Afternoon’ in 1966 and which, because of the fundamental change in the way Davies viewed his writing and career after the failure of TKATVGPS, the group never quite regained.
Why did Davies wait nine months before cutting ‘Big Sky’ with The Kinks? The simple answer may be that this pillar of . . . The Village Green Preservation Society is not really a Village Green number at all (unless you think the Big Sky is looking down on Johnny Thunder, Walter, Wicked Annabella et al). It shares few of the LP’s preoccupations with memory and desire and may, like ‘Picture Book’, have been intended only for Davies’ “private collection”; alternatively, it may have been earmarked for the solo album which, in early 1968, Davies still hoped to make. However, by the autumn, with his solo project a distant memory and Pye rejecting his request for a double album of the songs he and The Kinks had been safeguarding for nearly a year, Davies seems to have realized that if ‘Big Sky’ were to be heard at all, it would have to be on TKATVGPS, and that a new Kinks LP could only benefit from its inclusion. So, at the last minute, The Kinks returned to Pye Studio 2.
A fittingly divine inspiration seems to have visited them there, for the Kinks’ version of ‘Big Sky’ contains some of the most beautiful, thunderous music they ever recorded, aligned to a vulnerability and warmth no other group — and I mean no other group — could ever hope to equal. It is a perfectly balanced production. On the one hand, the mesh of clattering drums and electric guitar never threatens to overwhelm the melody; on the other, the gossamer-light harmonies, Ray and Dave’s vocal line traced by Rasa Davies’ wordless falsetto, are bursting with emotion. When most of the instruments drop away at 1.20, the effect is effortlessly vivid — two lines where Davies’ performance is both nonchalant and impassioned. The result is wonderfully, enchantingly sad, made more so perhaps by the knowledge that The Kinks will never again sound so refined or so right.
