THE KINKS
Muswell Hillbillies (1971)
RCA Records
Produced by RAY DAVIES

If you look around at things that attract what is known as a "cult following" you will find that generally it is a desire for community that unites fans, not so much the content of the material, because almost invariably it is quirky or unfocused or just generally of a lesser quality than more universal works. The Grateful Dead, for example, were a business as much as a band and manufacturers of feel-good ambience as much as music. Star Trek is bound to have little resonance for those not raised to appreciate it, but its mythology is attractive to a certain breed. THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW is too mediocre for me to even explain its phenomenon, but I like watching the morons act it out.

If you think I'm being elitist, allow this much -- there is a kind of elitism to these fanbases, and there's also a scary degree of devotion that suggests emotional imbalances as much as it suggests a love affair with pop culture. People might watch the same movie, say STAR WARS, every day. They might have no awareness whatsoever of any music outside of, say, Jimmy Buffett or Phish or the Barenaked Ladies, and their large music collection could consist of nothing but live bootlegs of any of them, some captured personally while following a performer on tour. They might be able to recite The Hobbit word for word or rattle off every syndication cut in every episode of The Simpsons. This is the same mentality that produces the philosophy of exclusion in all social activity. The cultists flock together because they are unable to relate to anyone outside of the bubble.

To be fair, I might be considered a cultist -- for the Beach Boys, for Hitchcock, for "Peanuts" -- but I don't think I'm so obsessed with anything that I lose ability to look upon things with neutrality or to discover new artifacts or to live a life that isn't devoted to television or music or whatever. You can be a healthy cultist, and maybe everybody has that mild fixation on something. That in itself is not an issue. The community created by the severe cases is the problem, one that to my mind is potentially numbing.

MUSWELL HILLBILLIES is both the prime example of a "cult" album and an eloquent illustration of the properties of this distinctly 20th century phenomenon. What a "cult" amounts to is a group of displaced people unable to find some fulfillment in their own likes and dislikes... and so they band together, finding their own set of rules for conformity. Every religion has always been like this. Religion has now been replaced; we are walking pop culture trivia machines in our time, and it's not entirely a bad thing, but it can also be dehumanizing. The beginning of every cult is the unrest of an outsider. Ray Davies is the twentieth century man who doesn't want to be here.

There's something rather shocking about the way 1970 affected rock music, as if a number could really change the face of an industry. Maybe it was the breakup of the Beatles or maybe it was the expiration of everyone's record contract, but in the end, no one seemed to be operating in the same way after it was over. In the '60s, the Kinks were consistent and lovable even as, for the second half of the decade, they languished in obscurity. Their albums got weirder and weirder through the oblique concept album ARTHUR, dumping off the magnificently messy SOMETHING ELSE and the majestic, ethereal VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY along the way, but they always were varied and appealing, with nothing eluding them except mass success. Popularity did arrive for the final Reprise album LOLA VS. POWERMAN & THE MONEYGOROUND, a record that topped out with pop perfection, but it was too late. Davies was already too disillusioned to please anyone but himself anymore.

MUSWELL HILLBILLIES, the Kinks' debut on RCA, a company determined to get a modern makeover, is precisely the album no one wanted to hear in the '60s... light as a feather, absolutely inconsequential and more often than not just silly, it's the White Album if every song had been "Rocky Raccoon," save the fact that the Kinks' grasp on country -- sort of a wittier and more British Flying Burrito Brothers -- was firmer and more durable than the Beatles'. HILLBILLIES is very much an English folk album, but one that sounds too American to be genuine. It is deeply flawed -- overbaked at times, too insincere at others, underproduced and overly calculated, and sometimes just annoying -- in ways no other Kinks album had been flawed. That's why it quickly turned them into the official Cult Band of the '70s. Every goofy inflection, every gag lyric and every exaggerated country-western backing track was precisely the misunderstood exuberance that appeals to tiny pockets of people enough for them to devote themselves wholly to more of that sound. From this point on, the Kinks would not be a mainstream band seeking widespread popularity, whether they wanted to be or not; they were a cult group.

One reason the band could never be mainstream after this was their repetition of a few central themes. In this case the vital one is the depression of a historical outcast who wishes he lived long ago. The ideal was introduced as nostalgia on VGPS, as a reson for relocation on ARTHUR, but on MUSWELL it is the plight of every character. He's got "Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues" on one underwritten cut, is suffering from the misery of a "Complicated Life" elsewhere. The Kinks have sacrified joy and beauty for laughs and self-pity in a way that seems almost artificial, but "Complicated Life" is an enormously effective song as a result of the glimmer of sincerity in Davies' voice.

That sets it apart, because the voice is a problem, with the monotonous cutesy overtone it acquires in the pro-Prohibition romp "Alcohol" and the sweet "Holiday." None of his songs are bad but a few are indistinct when piled one atop the other; I can't imagine the band putting out "Skin and Bone" a few years earlier. The Kinks may have been prolific but they lacked adventure by now, again making them the definition of "cult band."

I'm not made of stone, of course; I can appreciate the need to tone down and do what you want, the return to the simplicity of sheer songwriting and timeless agitation. But Davies was better when he wasn't striving altogether for misfit status; he didn't have to try hard to be rock & roll's greatest outcast because "Waterloo Sunset" and "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" had sealed that long before. There's not a lot of musical imagination here, even if it is a blast to listen to for anybody who loves the band, and the man who was writing songs a year before about cross-dressing, music publishers, and apes is now just presenting the same themes over and over, and it's wonderful in small doses but amounts to nothing as a whole.

Until Side Two.

The second half of MUSWELL HILLBILLIES is the last excellent run of Kinks tracks until their move to Arista in 1977. "Here Come the People in Grey" is wistful but unnecessary; from there on, the album shoots into overdrive from innocuous thrown-out-once-a-year selections to a series of brilliant and almost timeless songs good enough to be genuine traditional folk. "Have a Cuppa Tea" is darling, "Muswell Hillbilly" an uplifting climax to the first part of a career, and "Uncle Son" careens and assaults with meditative pulse.

"Oklahoma U.S.A." really sticks out, and it's a song whose poignance lurks forever in one's mind, dwelling beyond the recesses of pop music. It is about the confusion that leads to a life led vicariously in pop culture, about a woman who "lives in a house that's near decay"... "but in her dreams she is far away" in the movies, in another country and another world, inside another person ("Rita Hayworth or Doris Day"). Too beautiful to come off as the joke that may have been intended, it turns into a moving, tearful moment of all-inclusive grace, making the point perhaps that any vehicle to happiness is a good one. The song itself reaches outside of the limits the remainder of the LP enforces, drifting ahead from a beautiful piano line with delicate vocals and strings and a creed to live by ("Our whole life we work but work is a bore / If life's for living what's living for?").

That is the album's best song. Its best performance is another matter. For all of the masks he wears on this album and in his career, for all of the anguish that lies just underneath the surface of it, misery and loss that Davies wouldn't dare to reveal for some time, "Holloway Jail" glimpses the truth. It's a desperate, maddening song, performed with gusto as if actual American blues, never hiding its meaning or emotional drive. Almost nothing that the band sings about on this record seems to mean much to them, but this song about a girlfriend who's fallen in with the law urges forth passion from all of them, and the result is almost too searing to fit in here, threatening to fall off the record or maybe just explode. It's a moment of riveting, wounding power.

The final and probably most important qualification for something to attract cultists is the most difficult one to pin down. It must be incredibly addictive, enough to pull in an unexpected crowd. No matter how much I object to the easy ambivalence of this record, it keeps me coming back all the time, and when all is said and done, that's enough for me.