Ray Davies

He’d snuck into the front row to see one of his favorite groups perform when the ticket holder arrived. As he marched down the aisle back to the cheap seats he felt a beer can, the one the singer had been holding a moment earlier, land between his shoulder blades and spew its contents on him. Under the mistaken impression that my brother Rick was walking out on the concert Ray Davies snarled “Wha’, you don’t like the show?”

Anyone familiar with the Kinks knows that aggression- among group members and with the outside world, was part of the package.  Speaking by phone with the former lead singer and creative force of The Kinks one senses none of it, however. On tour to promote his current Storyteller recording, Ray Davies is thoughtful, pleasant and unaffected.  

You Really Got Me, banged out on an upright piano that stood in the family parlor, ignited The Kinks career. The year was 1964. Still teenagers, Ray , his brother Dave- along with drummer Mick Avory and bass player Pete Quaife followed up this hit recording with All Day And All Of The Night and Tired of Waiting For You. Although they became bona fide stars, The Kinks never quite established themselves as individuals in the public eye as members of some of the other “English Invasion” groups were able to do. The Beatles were the Revolution’s Trojan Horse-sweethearts who carried the anarchic Rolling Stones and The Who in their belly. Jimi Hendrix came back an expatriate, a great pearl coughed up on our shores from England, where he had gone to escape the stifling conservatism of the American music scene. Larger than life figures all. And there were The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Dave Clark Five and Herman Hermits and a pride of pretenders. They gave the blues back to America’s children.

If he lacked the charisma to hold the wider public’s attention through the down cycles that all creative artists experience, Ray Davies has nevertheless held on to a devoted following. And he’s kept working. Although The Kinks have not toured for several years Ray continues to compose songs- his catalogue currently holds more than 400 titles. In 1994 Davies released his autobiography X-Ray. Rather than reveal himself directly, Davies chose the artistic conceit of writing X-Ray  in biographical form. Set sometime in the future, an unnamed young writer transcribes conversations with the now aged artist, who provides details of his youth and a perspective on the history of The Kinks.

Violent outbursts between the Davies brothers feature prominently in that history. A boxer, soccer star and sprinter, in his early days Ray leaned heavily on his physical skills.  Here, this boy who was so emotionally troubled that “People spoke to me as if I were from another galaxy and did not fully understand the strange beings from Planet Earth...My loneliness was complete, and any comfort received from the outside was superficial only, because inside the safe world of my own invention, my soul could not be touched,” (p. 43) excelled. Competitive fire, and the will to dominate that had fueled his athletic endeavors stayed with Davies as The Kinks battled other groups up the charts, and each other for space on the lonely peak of pop superstardom.

Davies was on tour in Ashland, Kentucky when MIX tracked him down. Frank Sinatra died that day, and we began our discussion with Ray, speaking from his hotel room before heading off  to a sound check, reflecting the great singer’s legacy.

RD:  “I always find it strange to see the hulabaloo that surrounds the death of a famous person. Now people will realize what a great singer he was.”

MIX:  Sinatra was often quoted as saying that rock music was written and performed by cretins with limited talent, or words to that effect. He represented a booze and broads mentality that seems light years from the psychedelic mentality of the ‘60’s. And yet he was the ultimate hipster as well. How did you feel about his work back then?

RD:  “He was like a great actor, letting other people’s songs take him over. He’s a great example for any vocal stylist and a great tribute to the songwriters of his era. Writing a song is only part of it-you have to cast it for the right singer. He put life and breath into every song he sang.”

MIX:  The Kinks recorded on his Reprise label...

RD:  “Right.  I was young-19 years old, when I walked into the Reprise office. What a thrill!  On one wall I saw a picture of Frank Sinatra, and on the other a shot of The Kinks.  We all were thrilled to be on the same label as him.

“In many strange ways Sinatra was one of the most rock people alive, in the example he set with the way he walked, and handled himself with the world. He was a rock and roller.”

MIX:  Technically, The Kinks sound, especially the distorted guitar timbre your brother Dave favored, is about as far removed from the post-Impressionist orchestral colors of Sinatra arrangers like Nelson Riddle and Billy May as you can get. You describe the “green amp,” a tiny tube amplifier that Dave used, in some detail. How important was that amplifier to The Kinks’ sound?

RD:  “The green amp had a major impact. We were just lucky. We liked to play records loud on the radiogram and they all came out distorted. That was bound to have an effect on the way we conceived of music. The green amp, which we all plugged into, gave that distorted sound to our own performances.”

MIX:  You have your own project studio, KONK, in London. Have the new recording technologies affected your writing process?

RD: “Oh yes, absolutely. I have a ProTools set up, and ADAT recorders as well. These days you can record a vocal demo against a click track while time code is running and know that you’ll be able to throw anything into the mix later on. With the earlier analog technologies there was only so far you could take the overdub process.”

“I tend to get my best vocals first, and so I’ll often record them to an ADAT and then strip them and the click track off so that they can be dropped into ProTools. The computer helps a lot with writing.  I like to combine MIDI and analog recording into the process as well.”

MIX: Do you still use guitar strings until they break?

RD:  “Absolutely! I know a bass player-Herbie Flowers, a great English session musician, who has had the same strings on his Hofner bass for 20 years. He’s afraid that if he changes the strings he’ll lose the sound he’s got!”

MIX:  Shel Talmy was The Kinks producer through the recording of  Dead End Street. What did he contribute to the band’s sound?

RD:  “Shel’s a great producer. There are two schools of producers. Type A goes into the studio and dominates the proceeding, while the Type B producer disappears and lets the record take place. Talmy was one of those guys. My work was changing so quickly. Not to be big headed, but he found it hard to keep up with.”

MIX:  Do you produce your own recordings these days?

RD:  “Actually I’ve never recorded a solo studio album, but that’s something I’m planning on doing.”

MIX:  Anyone in mind you’d like to work with?

RD:  “As a remixer, Bob Clearmountain is great. My ideal producers would come in at the beginning, when I had the framework of the songs, and make suggestions. That person would then come back in several months, when I was ready to record. In the old days we knocked out records, but today the process is more like making a movie- you can’t have someone come in for three weeks and make a significant contribution.  I’m actually looking for a producer now.”

MIX:  A boxer wouldn’t seem your normal candidate for Flower Power icon. Is it fair to ask if sport engaged your violent side while art offered a way out of the arena?

RD:  “Winning in sport is like chart day-Tuesday, that’s when the rock charts come out. It’s great to be competitive when you’re in a forum that lets you play your game.”

MIX:  But it seems like playing the game wasn’t enough.  You say that “... I persevered with my sporting endeavours. One thing was certain; where I could, whenever I could, I needed to win.” Have the competitive fires cooled with age?

RD:   “I’ve learned over the years to take pride in the work itself, and not to worry about the chart game.”

MIX:  Were you ever contemptuous of the Flower Power children who shared none of your physical aggression?

RD:  “No, I understood them. My life, since childhood, has been characterized by a combination of sport and its opposite. The sensitive painter was what I was earliest on, and art helped form me as a person. I understood the sensitivity of flower power.”

MIX:  Wasn’t there a prominently outrageous aspect to The Kinks?

RD:  “Yes, the clothing and so on. But the outrageousness was part of the band, it was never really me.”

    5.

MIX:  There always seemed to be a balancing act-fey versus physical. Was camp behavior a way for you to exit the aggressive mode?

RD:  “That’s a fair point. I learned a lesson when I wrote Dedicated Follower of Fashion. That song was inspired by a real fist fight I had over fashion, but it was a humorous statement.”

“I wondered if the rugby guys thought I was weird. My manager said that those kind of people were the easy pickings-tough on the outside but soft inside. A lot of straight people were afraid to say what they really were. The overt camp attitude was a bit of the stereotype, to show that sensitivity exists in all people.”

MIX: Every artist goes through ups and down in the career cycle. The Kinks hit so quickly- were you glad when the bubble burst?

RD:  “Yeah, the first thing I realized was that I had three hits in Britian, and when the fourth (Everybody’s Going To Be Happy) got to number 29 everybody said it was over!”

“About this time I came to realize that there’s a fine line between being experimental and innovative in pop music. Take the Beatles. Ticket To Ride  had that great guitar riff and the dense textures. It was innovative, but still palatable to the audience. You have to give people something they think is different, but not too different.”

MIX:  What music do you listen to?

RD:  “I like to listen to the classical station in the car. I also listen to a lot of indy records-I veer to the indy scene rather than pure pop. I don’t listen to Janet Jackson, etc.-I hear enough of that in the gym.”

MIX:  Do you spend a lot of time in the gym?

RD:  “I broke my knee about ten years ago, and so I have to work out now. The kind of show I put on stresses my body, and I do about forty minutes of aerobic and light weight work several times a week to stay in shape. I also love playing tennis.”

MIX:  “Do you play a baseline game, or come to the net?”

RD:  “I’ll come to the net, but my strength is playing on the baseline, and it conserves my legs to hit from there. I have to look after the hamstrings, since I’m on stage for two and a half to three hours a night. I really bang my legs and heels.”

MIX: On your Storyteller CD you throw in a liberal number of Kinks tunes along with newer material. What’s it like to play songs written by a teenager?

RD:  “Depends on the song, really. I was a smart teen, and I also always wrote songs for parental approval, so they were older in a sense.

MIX:  What about the hippie credo “Don’t trust anyone over 30?”

RD:  “My dad was kind of square, but in a cool way, and I would always sit down at the piano and sing my latest song for him. As a result of working this way I didn’t write teen songs, apart from All Day And All Of The Night and You Really Got Me. If the song stands up I can sing it today.”

MIX: At one point in X-Ray you excoriate your young biographer for suggesting that you might have benefitted from more formal training in music. Is it fair to suggest that the top songwriters of your generation turned out their best work as youths, and that a lack of continuing study was partly responsible for the diminished quality of their later work?

RD:  “A lot of songwriters aren’t virtuoso musicians, in fact it’s very rare to find both in one one person. I took composition and orchestration lessons privately for 18 months when I was in my late 20’s. I could read, write and play four staves at a time but my private teacher said that the training was killing my natural feel.”

“I do think it’s important to accept new challenges. I was recently asked to write a choral piece, and I’d like to find the time to do it because, although there would be no money in it, composing the piece would stretch my brain.”

“The best musicians out there keep learning, and that goes for Ray Davies, for sure. Right now I’m trying to find out about the Russian music of the 1960’s-the stuff that was repressed. Earlier, Stalin had repressed Shostakovitch’s work, who nonetheless tried to get his message out through his music. I find that fascinating-I love political writing of that sort.”

MIX:  What’s the difference between a songwriter and composer?

RD:  “Good question. Song writing has a straight format-verse, verse, chorus, a, a, b, and so forth. The pieces are generally perceived to three to five  minute works. Composers work over longer stretches of time.”

“I write pop songs, but I tend to use a composing technique that takes a theme and develops it. Burt Bacharach is both a songwriter and composer.”

MIX:  You’re sometimes referred to as the Godfather of Brit Pop. Your early accomplishments are now a part of English culture. Have you in any way become the kind of character you lampooned in Well Respected Man?

RD:  “That song is a document that was saying ‘this is what you must never become.’ The tragedy is we all become something we didn’t want to be, that has to do with living, living in different ways.”

“I’m trying my best not to be respectable! I get the “Sir,” and “Mr. Davis” elder statesman stuff, but give me a break! I’m a person. I’m proud that people respect me for having travelled a certain distance in my life. I try to live as best I can and forget about the ballyhoo.”

“The business aspect of the world fills me with terror! I’m still an idealist in the sense that the creative work is most important.”

MIX: But you must be watching your investments. Perhaps even, “so conservatively!”

RD:  “Well, obviously I’d be a fool if I didn’t say that I had to pay the bills.”

Appeared in Mix June, 1998