Day after day they send my friends away
To mansions cold and grey
To the far side of town
Where the Thin Men stalk the streets3
While the sane stay underground . . .
1. 1965–68: Here Comes That Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit.
– Emily Dickinson, c.1864
Making love with his ego, Ziggy sucked up into his mind
Like a leper messiah . . .
– David Bowie, 1971
Each [LSD] trip is just a side street, and before you know it, you’re back where you were. Each trip is more disturbing than the one that follows, till eventually the side street becomes a dead end.
– Pete Townshend, 1969
The spring of 1965 was a dangerous time for the more delicate English psyches, especially if they were inclined to treat their mind as just another Petri dish. The increasingly wide availability of the still-legal high LSD and a propensity for ‘free spirits’ to dispense it freely – and even secretly, by ‘dosing’ drinks with dissolvable tabs of the stuff – made every hip London party that season a potential minefield for the right-minded.
Two parties, in particular, seem to have had lasting consequences for those in the upper echelons of the new rock aristocracy. The first of these was held on 8 April at a society dentist’s home in Hampstead, where two Beatles and their wives were attendees and unwitting guinea pigs. For George Harrison, the effects were cataclysmic: ‘I didn’t know about acid . . . There was no way back after that. It showed you backwards and forwards and time stood still . . . It cuts right through the physical body, the mind, the ego. It’s shattering, [it’s] as though someone suddenly wipes away all you were taught or brought up to believe as a child.’ The experience affected Lennon just as deeply. Although in terms of his song-writing it would not become manifest for a few months yet, within eighteen months he would travel all the way from ‘Help!’ via ‘She Said, She Said’ to the full-blown psychedelia of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.
The other party, held in folk-rocker Dylan’s suite at the Savoy Hotel on 21 May, was to welcome Bob back after a brief European break prior to his first-ever TV concert, to be broadcast by the BBC in two parts over the coming weeks. Dylan himself was no stranger to LSD, having taken his first trip on a New England concert tour in April 1964, but he had wisely limited his consumption and there is no evidence he had yet experienced le dérèglement de tous les sens – the kind of Rimbaudian trip that really did leave one ‘demented . . . destroyed in his ecstatic flight through things unheard of, unnameable’.
Well, something happened that night, because the following day the BBC broadcasts were postponed and Dylan was being rushed to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington suffering from ‘food poisoning’. Whatever his true ailment, and food poisoning seems most unlikely, he was soon back at the Savoy, attended full-time by a private nurse, laid up in bed for a week. During this time he occupied his shattered mind by penning what he later euphemistically described as ‘this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took “Like a Rolling Stone”’. This particular stone turned out to be solid rock.
Dylan was not the only one at the party that May night who emerged from it changed for all time. Also in attendance was someone who, pre-Beatles, had been considered the great white hope for British rock. Vince Taylor, one of those swept away by the British Invasion tide, is now largely remembered for a single song, his classic 1959 single ‘Brand New Cadillac’, and as the inspiration for two others, David Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’ and Van Morrison’s ‘Going Down Geneva’. At this time he still had an audience on the continent, where old rockers had not fully faded into obscurity, and he still had a record deal with French label Barclay. And so it was that he appeared backstage at the Locomotiv in Paris the following night, looking more like a tramp than a rock & roll star. For his then-drummer, the night was etched on his memory even three decades later:
Bobbie Woodman: Six o’clock in the evening on Saturday, we’re all sitting there and in walks Vince – shoes filthy, he’s got this big roll of crimson material under his arm, his hair he hasn’t washed. He’s got this bottle of Mateus wine in his hand. He’d been to this Bob Dylan party in London and someone told him, ‘This is LSD, try one Vince.’ He tried one, thought it was so good [that] at the same party two hours later he said, ‘Could I have some of that before you guys go back to the States?’ . . . [Backstage in Paris,] Vince [now] said, ‘You all think I’m Vince Taylor, don’t you? Well, I’m not. My name is Mateus, I’m the new Jesus, the son of God.’
When questioned by the band about their fee, Taylor threw some banknotes on the floor and set light to them, proclaiming, ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ What happened next is shrouded in myth, but either that night or the next he apparently took to the stage in a white robe and preached to the audience, informing them that he was Mateus the Messiah. The rest of the residency was cancelled and Taylor returned to England, where he was persuaded to enter a psychiatric clinic. It didn’t do the trick and, according to music journalist Kieron Tyler, he ‘spent the next four years drifting from café to café in London, subsisting on a diet of wine, acid, speed, eggs and religious visions’.
By now, few of the new wave of would-be pop stars knew or cared who this dissolute figure might be, save for a young David Bowie, who met him in the La Giaconda café some time around 1966–67, and later recalled, ‘He said he was [either] an alien or the Son of God – but he might have been both’ – a most telling aside. Bowie would eventually claim that this sighting of Taylor provided the first building block for his very own ‘leper messiah’, the equally ill-starred Ziggy Stardust:
David Bowie: He always stayed in my mind as an example of what can happen in rock & roll. I’m not sure if I held him up as an idol or as something not to become. Bit of both, probably. There was something very tempting about him going completely off the edge. Especially at my age then, it seemed very appealing: ‘Oh, I’d love to end up like that, totally nuts.’ Ha ha! And so he re-emerged in this Ziggy character. [1990]
One can’t help wondering what would have happened if it had been Dylan, not Taylor, who in late May 1965 announced he was in fact the Messiah. As it is, Taylor proved to be just the first in a long line of LSD casualties in English pop echelons that by the end of 1967 would resemble the queue for the Marquee toilets on a busy night. By then, even the music papers were prepared to print the news. The Kinks’ Pete Quaife told Melody Maker readers in November of that year about how LSD had ‘changed a lot of good blokes, who everybody rated, into creeps. Instead of expanding minds, LSD seemed to close minds into little boxes and made a lot of people very unhappy. [But] you still can’t beat going to the pictures, a couple of pints and a fag. The Kinks all agree that Sunday dinner is the greatest realization of heaven.’
What Quaife omitted to mention was that The Kinks’ own singer-songwriter, Ray Davies, had already proved conclusively that one did not need a tab of acid to set the English creative mind on auto-destruct. He had managed his very own nervous breakdown in March 1966 without the slightest help from mind-expanding stimulants. Unlike Taylor’s, this was a breakdown everyone had seen coming though, when it happened, he went to some lengths to play it down in the music media.
Ray had been wondering ‘When?’ all his life, admitting in his 1994 autobiography, X-Ray, ‘I spent [all of] my early childhood waiting for signs of abnormality to show.’ He had even briefly attended a school for disturbed children at the age of eleven. By the time he joined his brother Dave in The Kinks (in time to write and sing their first three hit singles – released between August 1964 and January 1965, and charting at number one, two and one respectively) his manager, Larry Page, was ‘aware that Ray had a history of mental problems. I wasn’t aware of it
right away, but I soon was . . . [because] Ray would always come up with some reason not to turn up at shows.’
In X-Ray, Davies would reveal he had first ‘freaked out’ after a May 1964 show in Redcar when, walking with his then-girlfriend ‘along the beach in the moonlight, I suddenly started screaming . . . I blamed it on the moon, the drink and my sister emigrating to Australia. Anita blamed it on . . . my overwhelming fear of failure . . . my complete and utter insecurity and lack of confidence in myself.’
At that time he was a failure – the band’s first two singles, including the self-penned A-side, ‘You Still Want Me’, had both tanked. But by March 1966, with eight Top Ten singles to his name, he had no reason to feel this way. Yet he still felt a profound ‘lack of confidence’ and it all came to a head on return from a six-date tour of Switzerland and Austria. Although he made light of the significance of his first serious crack-up at the time – even doing a light-hearted interview with NME’s Keith Altham the very day he was diagnosed by a doctor with ‘nervous exhaustion’ – he later admitted the breakdown was no joke:
Ray Davies: I had to come off the road. I was ill. I cracked up . . . I was a zombie . . . I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and I woke up a week later with a beard. I don’t know what happened to me. I’d run into the West End with my money stuffed into my socks, I’d tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist, and driven off somewhere. And I didn’t know. I woke up and I said, ‘What’s happening? When do we leave for Belgium?’ And they said, ‘Ray it’s all right. You’ve had a collapse. Don’t worry, you’ll get better.’ And I just sat in a room in darkness at the middle of the day, and I would eat salads and go to bed early. The first music I heard was a Frank Sinatra album. I couldn’t listen to anything to do with rock ’n’ roll, it made me go funny. [1977]
Aside from Sinatra, Glen Miller and Bach, Davies also spent his time listening to Dylan’s first (semi-)electric album, Bringing It All Back Home, non-stop, and in particular, ‘Maggie’s Farm’. He later asserted, ‘I just liked its whole presence.’ One suspects it was Maggie’s message, not the medium, that really got through to Davies, particularly the couplet, ‘She says, “Sing while you slave,” and I just get bored / I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.’
He would have been entirely unaware that Dylan had written ‘Maggie’s Farm’ just four months before he also briefly decided to quit making music, having found it to be ‘very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you, if you yourself don’t dig you’; or that it was the six-minute song Dylan began penning during his May 1965 recuperation that made him change his mind. Or, indeed, that it was with these two songs Dylan announced a new, electric self at the 1965 Newport festival, thus turning pop on its formerly empty head, and giving Davies and all fellow singer-songwriters a licence to write about whatever they damn well pleased.
By June 1966 Davies had penned his own declaration of independence with which he announced a return to the public arena, only to hide it away on the B-side of the next Kinks single (and their third number one). Caught up in the rearside grooves of the crumbling stately home that is ‘Sunny Afternoon’, he put ‘I’m Not Like Everybody Else’. Here, at last, Davies finally allowed his dissatisfaction with his unhappy lot full rein. Indeed, for a while it seemed like the real Ray was only on offer to actual owners of Kinks records, as they alone had the opportunity to flip them over. Thus, the November 1965 classic ‘Till the End of the Day’ kept itself sunny-side-up to garner radio play reserving the recondite ‘Where Have All the Good Times Gone?’ purely for purchasers of Pye product.
And when ‘Sunny Afternoon’ was succeeded by the equally magnificent ‘Dead End Street’, it was B-side ‘Big Black Smoke’ that really showed Ray laying waste to any allure the big city held (‘She took all her pretty coloured clothes and ran away from home . . . for a boy named Joe / And he took her money for the rent / And tried to drag her down in the big black smoke’). Relentlessly driving his songwriting muse, Davies refused to admit that a sustained break was in order. Only belatedly did he admit, ‘I thought that I had recovered sufficiently to continue work, but I discovered that I was forgetting people’s names and walking into walls.’ For the first time he took to self-medication, with predictably disastrous results, ‘I stayed at home and started drinking heavily, until I couldn’t walk at all.’
‘Sunny Afternoon’, which took an altogether different approach to songwriting that would make him feel alive again, was his way of turning things around. As he commented in 1977, this remarkable A-side, ‘[all] about a man who [had] made it . . . wasn’t a factual thing. It was the idea, the picture . . . I was getting away from making statements that were natural to me. I started to have characters. I had to invent a character to sing, . . . “Save me”.’
The change in worldview was also flagged on a couple of cuts on the album Pye released in October 1966 on the back of the success of ‘Sunny Afternoon’, even if Face to Face continued to mix songs of personal disintegration like ‘Too Much On My Mind’ and ‘Rosie Won’t You Please Come Home’ with pre-breakdown ephemera (‘Dandy’ and ‘You’re Looking Fine’). And rather than include heavily sarcastic attacks on his fellow man, such as ‘Mr Pleasant’ (‘about a man who’s kind to everybody on the exterior but doesn’t realize the pitfalls and traps involved in being superficially happy’) and ‘Mr Reporter’, Davies held them back, afraid that they would come across as ‘totally hate-orientated’.
In fact, condescension towards working stiffs was fast becoming another necessary subtext to mid-Sixties English pop. Even The Beatles had started putting songs such as ‘Taxman’ and ‘Dr Robert’ on their latest long-player, but Davies had yet to make an album that was an entity unto itself. And he duly acknowledged as much. By February 1967, he was already calling Face to Face ‘more of a collection of songs than an LP’. The next album would, for sure, be more than a ‘mere’ collection of fine songs.
After the failure of Face to Face, Ray spent a whole year putting together the magnificent Something Else, which was eventually released in September 1967 on the back of a run of singles that were frightening in the perfection of their conception. But although ‘Sunny Afternoon’, ‘Dead End Street’ and ‘Waterloo Sunset’ had all proven huge commercial (and critical) hits – as had brother Dave’s first foray into singledom, ‘Death of a Clown’ – the album containing the last two of these, along with twelve more gems from Davies’ endlessly plentiful locker, was another resounding commercial flop.
As such, despite ongoing singles successes, by the start of 1968 The Kinks were in crisis. No matter how many carefully crafted three-minute masterpieces Davies could construct out of his personal insecurities, the British popscape had changed for good. In post-Pepper Albion, it was album acts who got treated seriously, and, more importantly, got off the ballroom/package-tour merry-go-round that had already brought Davies to the brink of mental collapse twice. Pye, wholly unaware of the shift, issued the embarrassingly anachronistic ‘in concert’ album, Live at Kelvin Hall, in January 1968, complete with fake audience screams, as if it was still the era of Beatlemania.
Davies, still fearful of another nervous breakdown, decided to get back to his English roots – and away from the big black smoke. Returning to a song he had recorded in the aftermath of his 1966 mental collapse, ‘Village Green’, he began to conceive of a Village Green Preservation Society whose house-band would be The Kinks. According to brother Dave, discussing the project before its appearance, ‘It was originally Ray’s idea to do it as a stage musical . . . It’s about a town and the people that have lived there, and the village green is the focal point of the whole thing.’ For Ray, there was a therapeutic purpose underlying the whole exercise:
Ray Davies: Village Green was in some way an album of repentance, if you like; we’d been a bunch of incredibly big-time young guys, and it suddenly occurred to me when I got home after s
ome tour or another. I thought about how I’d been interested in getting whatever I could, and that I’d been turning my back on the things I grew up from . . . It was sorta like the prodigal son suddenly discovering the world he’d been ignoring for so long; these things that were really valuable. [1972]
As a prelude to the album’s appearance, in late June 1968, Pye issued Davies’ most original single to date, his first fully fledged valedictory to days of yore, ‘Days’. But it was a year too late – an accusation levelled at it the very week it was released, by none other than Keith Moon, who, in Melody Maker’s Blind Date column, dismissed the song as ‘pretty dated, like one of the songs Pete [Townshend] keeps under his sink’. The plaintive ‘Days’ was actually a rather desperate song, with Ray describing it to official Kinks biographer Jon Savage as ‘like saying goodbye to somebody then afterwards feeling [this] fear: you actually are alone’.
As such, it would have been the more natural follow-up to ‘Dead End Street’ than ‘Autumn Almanac’. But Davies was no longer in sync with the times. And The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (VGPS) would prove another step back, when the world was expecting him to take two steps forward. Talking to The Onion in 2002, Davies fully owned up to the charge, ‘I withdrew into my little community-spirited . . . my trivial world of little corner shops and English black-and-white movies. Maybe that’s my form of psychedelia.’
All the Madmen Page 3
