The Kinks: Preservation Alex Diblasi Prelude
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The Kinks: Preservation Alex DiBlasi Prelude: In submitting this for Dave’s site, I felt the need to pre-empt my essay with a few things. My senior thesis from Indiana University is also on the Kinda Kinks site, complete with neatly-formatted citations and footnotes throughout. This piece has none of those, with most footnotes included in the text as parenthetical asides. What follows is my entire lecture on the Preservation rock opera, which I used as a script of sorts during my presentation. That said, there is no real formatting, quotes are uncited, and as this is the transcript of a speech rather than a proper essay, it makes for a much more informal read. I do currently have several other projects in the foreground (including a cross- country road-trip that my fiancée and I are using as the impetus for a book), but I certainly plan on returning to this subject, whether it is for a music journal, a book chapter, or even a book in and of itself. I also want to give a few quick precursory shout-outs: Dave Emlen, for running the greatest Kinks website in the world; Ray Davies biographer Tom Kitts, to whom I am forever indebted as both a friend and an academic; Nick Triano, for being an all- round swell guy; and lastly, Jim Mello, whose essay on “The Two Walters” can also be found on Kinda Kinks, someone with whom I have recently reconnected after first meeting in 2009. I hope you like what you read, and I encourage you to contact me via Facebook with any questions, comments, or vicious attacks. (Not a lot of Alex DiBlasi’s out there, so I am relatively easy to find.) In The Kinks’ thirty-three years as a band, no era in their history is more dividing among both fans and critics than the period from 1973 to 1976, where Ray Davies wrote a series of rock operas, with The Kinks essentially serving as his backing band. The most ambitious of these is the Preservation saga, which spans three LP’s across two albums. Upon their release, Preservation Act One barely dented the American Top 200, while its sequel, Preservation Act Two, didn’t chart at all. In the time since their initial release, Preservation has come to hold an odd place in the band’s catalog, regarded by some as unnecessary and self-indulgent, and by others – like me – as “Advanced Listening.” Several naysayers of this era point toward a quote from Ray Davies, where he says something to effect that there was a period where he probably should not have been allowed to make records. As a counter to that, I would like to present some quotes from the notoriously mercurial Davies saying just the opposite. Davies says Preservation is his “lifelong project,” and this indicates just how central the concepts, ideas, and themes in the story and in the lyrics are to him and to his life work as a whole. He even calls Preservation “my trilogy,” with The Village Green Preservation Society serving as the first of the three parts. With Village Green, we have Ray’s first time addressing a lot of the ideas that would come five years later on Preservation: community, the working class, enjoying the simple pleasures in life, and nostalgia. While community, extolling the working class, and learning to disconnect from the drudgery of modern living were all topics embraced by the counterculture of the late 1960’s, it was the way in which Davies addresses these notions that set him apart. He views them as intrinsic to the past, using nostalgic remembrances to evoke a bygone time. Although Davies would later subvert nostalgia as a vehicle for satire, like the hyper-nationalistic narrator from “Victoria” or on “Muswell Hillbilly,” where Davies begs, “take me back to them Black Hills that I ain’t never seen,” on the Village Green album, Davies regards the past with reverence, even yearning for it. Given its time, released at the tail end of 1968, a year regarded by historian Mark Kurlansky as The Year That Rocked The World, a time when most of his peers were looking forward and ahead, nostalgia was a decidedly un-hip subject. Sure, there was an element of regression in a lot of British psychedelia, with Syd Barrett evoking childhood imagery on The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, for example, but consider the prospect of a rock musician looking to having a quiet life as head of household. Aside from Paul McCartney asking if you would still need him and feed him at age 64, who else but Ray Davies would have had the audacity to tell his audience, “Picture yourself when you’re getting old,” as he does on the song “Picture Book?” To quickly go through the next several years, in 1969 the band does Arthur, Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire. The album was meant to be the soundtrack to a movie on the British Granada network. No known script of the program exists, but if the album’s lyrical content are any indication, with its sharp critiques of consumerism, war, and the history of England, it is no mystery as to why Granada pulled the plug on production. Although the passing decades have relegated Arthur into the shadow of The Who’s Tommy, which preceded it by five months, it was a bold album for its time. The release of Arthur also coincided with the end of The Kinks’ ban by the American Federation of Musicians, which had been put into effect in late 1965. The ban kept The Kinks from performing or having their albums released in the United States. No longer having to pander to American sensibilities, Davies wrote songs from a distinctly British point of view, yielding what fans and critics alike regard as their golden era, beginning with Face To Face in 1966. Needing a big song to announce the band’s return to the United States, Davies penned “Lola” in 1970, which proved to be an international hit. Its accompanying album, Lola Versus Powerman & The Money-Go-Round, is a concept album attacking the seedy underworld of the music industry, some nine years before Frank Zappa did Joe’s Garage. The following year, The Kinks did Muswell Hillbillies, an album inspired by the emerging country-rock trend. What separates this album, however, from The Rolling Stones’ forays into country from this period is that The Kinks retained their Englishness. There are songs about tea, compulsory purchase (known in the United States as eminent domain), and mental illness. Moreover, Davies borrowed just as much from American country and folk as he does from a British genre of music called trad jazz. To augment this sound, Davies drafted a three-man wind section (trumpet, sax/clarinet, and trombone/tuba) for the album. On 1972’s Everybody’s In Showbiz, the wind section remained, essentially expanding the group’s lineup onstage to eight. The album itself is a double album. The first LP, offering new studio recordings, tackled the band’s newly found stardom in the United States and life on the road, with some of the tunes humorous while others are more contemplative. The second LP is a live disc, a true oddity for its time. Where The Who’s Live At Leeds boasted “MAXIMUM R&B” at a record-setting volume and The Allman Brothers’ Fillmore East featured some fluent jamming across blues, country, and rock, Showbiz features The Kinks playing the likes of “Baby Face,” “Mr. Wonderful,” and “The Banana Boat Song” amid some of their more recent tunes. This brings us to early 1973, when Ray and Dave Davies unveiled their very own recording studio in London, called Konk Studios. Aside from The Rolling Stones having their own mobile unit and the infamous basement studio in a French villa where most of Exile On Main Street was recorded, a band or artist having their own recording facility was incredibly rare. There are pro and cons to an artist having their own studio. On the one hand, the artist no longer has to worry about studio fees, nor would they have to rush through a few block-booked days in the studio to get all their songs recorded. The biggest perk is that with unlimited time, songs could be worked on and developed while in the studio. (Again, these may all seem like common practice now, but at that point, studio time was considered sacred for many artists. Even The Beatles had to occasionally schlep over to Olympic Studios if EMI’s facility was booked.) Perhaps the biggest potential drawback to the unlimited resources provided by having your very own recording studio: a perfectionist like Ray Davies could toil endlessly over his creation, and that is exactly what happened with Davies as The Kinks embarked on the sessions for Preservation Act One. At the time, there was no Act One; the plan had been for the group to release a double-LP containing the entire opus. In April 1973, RCA Records issued the band’s latest single, “One Of The Survivors,” backed with “Scrapheap City,” in anticipation of the new album. However, Ray scrapped the completed album as the result of it not being up to his standards. While redoing his new songs and struggling for new ideas, Ray suffered a major personal loss: on his 29th birthday, June 21, his wife Rasa left him, taking their two children with her. The following month, at London’s White City Stadium, Davies announced he was “fucking sick of the whole thing […] sick up to here with it,” and then, as the house music played over the PA – making Ray inaudible to all but the front few rows – Ray Davies declared he was quitting music.