Something Else by the Kinks (1967)
Pye/Reprise
Produced by RAY DAVIES & SHEL TALMY
1967! The number that strikes terror in every amateur or professional rock critic's heart. The year that rock began to be taken Seriously, and to take itself Seriously, and the year that it simulateously started to Suck. I mean, honestly, can we now admit to ourselves how corny this shit is? SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND sounds like the background music for an Elks Club meeting. Syd Barrett's Pink Floyd is just as bad as any Pink Floyd, it just has the excuse of being led by a nutcase. The Doors have the enduring value of a Bazooka Joe comic strip. The first Dylan album that sounds like a bad joke, JOHN WESLEY HARDING, hit stores. Even reliables like Love and the Beach Boys went into indulgent mode, though Love immediately redeemed the excesses of DA CAPO with FOREVER CHANGES, and the Beach Boys thankfully didn't get the chance to release their PET SOUNDS jinx SMILE. Cream and Traffic are no good at all, and not ridiculous enough to be funny like the 13th Floor Elevators and the Seeds. The Velvet Underground's banana album sounds at times as silly as its dumbass cover art. Jimi Hendrix's career reads like a parody of what it supposedly defined.
Strangely enough, most of the British Invasion auteurs escaped this unscathed. The Beatles were starting to sound like the house band for the Mad Magazine offices, but otherwise, the Stones offered a psychedelic album that won't make you cringe, the Who enjoyed perhaps their finest hour with THE WHO SELL OUT, and then there were the Kinks, who make them all look pretty foolish.
Rock & Roll is a pretty indefinite form, the only requirement being that it defies convention. To me, the "psychedelic" abomination is not inventive or "new" at all. If you still think drugs breed creativity, compare Little Richard to the Grateful Dead (and I'm not saying Little Richard never did any drugs; you know what I'm saying, so don't be stubborn about it). The only thing drugs breed is pretension. The magnificent effect of drugs on pop music amounts to a lot of bad guitar solos, a lot of moving sound effects around from the left to right channels, and a hell of a lot of garish album covers. Plus every uber-conservative classical music analyst writing for every silent-majority paper in the country had to find their ticket with the younger set by weighing in on the grace of SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND. So the way to make great music and be taken as an artist is to turn it into a G-rated joke on '30s cabaret music?
The Kinks were never anything but the Kinks. They found their own conventions to defy. Ray Davies' songs are brilliant because they violate revisionist definitions of rawkenrawl as "lifestyle" by taking up Buddy Holly's offer that the music was for everybody. You can trace them back immediately to Holly, their values completely alien to the world on the other side of the Cool fence. So British they have a song called "Afternoon Tea" and a line about Saville Row, the Kinks' album is from another world that has nothing to do with either the pothead idiots in San Francisco or the sunglasses and speed and avant garde paintings of New York. They haven't shed their token "I'll help you guys along" producer just yet in favor of the genius of control freak behavior Ray Davies; both are credited on SOMETHING ELSE. They're still doing their rock moves, still sounding like the guys that chicks avoided at all costs at high school dances while they do it, shuffling around awkwardly in their classy suits pretending to be the angry young men. They are the angry young men but they find joy in that.
"David Watts" in a single moment defines everything right about the Kinks and wrong with the rest of the backward music industry in 1967. It comes from someplace real, as far away from "She's Leaving Home" - "Light My Fire" bullshit as you can get. Anger and joy, anger and joy. "I am a dull and simple lad" (and he knows it and that's something to sing about) "cannot tell water from champagne" (I'm glad I'm not alone, except I know the latter would give me a migraine). "I WISH I COULD HAVE ALL HE HAS GOT / I WISH I COULD BE LIKE DAVID WATTS." This is why I hate both machismo and staged male sensitivity; both are lies. If you're not angry and hateful sometimes, I don't think you're livin', and dammit, why doesn't David Watts deserve a lashing? He always gets what he wants, and more. "And all the girls in the neighborhood / Try to go out with David Watts / They try their best but can't succeed / For he is a pure and noble breed." This is songwriting. This is rock & roll for real people, not hipsters.
Ray Davies is lethal. He's got a sense of humor without John Lennon's preaching and Pete Townshend's incessant egotism and Mick Jagger's Mick Jaggerness. The band connects, they didn't write music in the interest of having it date itself in seconds. (I'm sure their rivals weren't trying to be disposable, but I don't think "disposable" is necessarily a bad thing for pop music if it means what I think it does.) The Kinks probably didn't set out to separate themselves, it's just natural. There they are, looking somewhat normal, standing in those suits playing their Sly, Eccentric music. The style of the mid-'90s ska revival owes a lot to this band, not to mention David Byrne, the way they wink and slide around while looking like government officials in the mood to party, probably about the rise of some stock options or something. They don't sing about how fucking sad it is when some girl runs away from home (at least not in the sickening straightforward way the Beatles did it), they don't sing about something ambivalent like how they want to "break on through to the other side" because they know that's just a way to hide having nothing whatsoever to say yet not wanting to sack your lead singer. They don't sing about trolls under a goddamn bridge or the pseudo-intellectual thoughts they had reading Lewis Carroll while on LSD or how hot vagrant hippie girls are. Ray sings about how it pisses him off that the kid next door is better at everything than he is.
When he ventures into the world of other characters, it's always vivid or incisive. "Two Sisters" is a poignant moment capturing the alienation between siblings, "Situation Vacant" a very well-told tale about a woman's endless manipulation of her son-in-law. "Harry Rag" follows several as they suffer through the consequences of tobacco addictions... and continue to smoke.
Some of my favorite songs on this album aside from "David Watts" are Dave Davies' chilling "Death of a Clown" and his Mancini romp "Funny Face," the beautifully stark "No Return," and two unapologetically slow, uncool songs -- "Afternoon Tea" and "End of the Season" -- that are each more engaging than at least half of SGT. PEPPER. And commonly called the greatest ballad in rock & roll history, "Waterloo Sunset" deserves all the platitudes. No pop song better captures the essence of humanity of which Ray Davies was the most poignant observer in his medium. It's about overcoming displacement, and like the Beach Boys' equally potent "In My Room," the gift of solitude. Very few people can write songs like this, but I wish more would try.
I also wish more people could even hum "Waterloo Sunset" the way they can hum "Penny Lane" and "Happy Together." The Kinks, despite sporadic novelty hits, have never really found an audience in the U.S. directly, but given the number of enormously popular bands that have committed more theft of them than a generation of file-sharers, they may as well be the most popular band in history. Everyone banking on Ray Davies' innovations understands the playful style but not what comes underneath it, so we end up with years and years worth of ridiculous, antiquated material from sadsacks like Genesis and Queen.
It seems clear, though, that the Kinks were always destined not only to be a cult band but to have a rather tiny cult. As one writer has said, the only Kinks fans that exist now are the hardcore ones. It's easy to blame this on the band's appeal but I blame the cloying music that has populated much of the rock era since 1967; they defy categorization with it so they are not exposed the way so many of those who robbed them are. But one listen to SOMETHING ELSE or even "David Watts" and I think more people would not only understand the Kinks, but adore them and throw "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the garbage.