The Kinks, "A Well Respected Man"

It's hard for me to pick just one Kinks song to write about for this blog, and I'm toying with the idea of devoting more posts to individual songs because Ray Davies is just so freaking brilliant that you can't just talk about one of his songs. But assuming that the "Kinks-a-palooza" runs out of steam before it gets out of the station, I think I've got a good one here to sum up why the Kinks rock.

There's quite a few things that I consider distinctly English: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, those novels of Graham Greene's that are set in England (though the expat novels do a good job in carrying Englishness around the world), and the songwriting career of Ray Davies. When the Kinks started in 1964, they came over to America as part of the "British Invasion," but an issue with their travel visas kept them from touring the States between 1965 and 1968. And while you could easily see an American blues/R&B influence in most British rock acts (with an acknowledgement of many of those band's members' Irish heritage mixed in as well), the Kinks never really seemed anything other than English kids, talking about life in England, with a respect for the fact that America was "the tops" in terms of pop culture but not really embracing the idea that they had to forsake their Englishness for success. Let the Yardbirds and the Stones eulogize dead bluesmen; the Kinks would rather sing about Queen Victoria and tea with the parents.

Of course, a mere surface reading of the Kinks' most famous songs would seem to yield the notion that they were fuddy-duddys, adults in a kid's world who distrusted "fun" and "illegal narcotics" because that got in the way of football or fashion. Then again, you should be clued in by Ray's playful vocals that he's in on a joke at the central figure's expense, especially in "A Well Respected Man." If the lyrics don't give it away, the very brilliant opening riff by Ray's brother Dave is a tip-off that some well-intentioned satire is about to be underway.

When I was first getting into British rock of the 1960s, the Kinks were sorta like the odd men out; they went to art school like the Who, but there was nothing "maximum R&B" about their sound (apart from the first song that got them noticed, "You Really Got Me"). If they had Irish blood in them like the Beatles or the Stones, they didn't advertise it much. Their very image, of dandy Edwardian-types lost in the melee of pop-music-crazy Britain and its fashion-conscious "mods," wasn't likely to inspire hero worship from red-blooded American males. But there was something just a little off about them that appealed to me. I loved the Beatles and the Who, but the Kinks were kind of a guilty pleasure, as English as English rock and roll could get.

"A Well Respected Man" may well be the highpoint of their Sixties career (they carried on, off and on, through the Seventies and Eighties before the Davies brothers couldn't stand one another anymore and called it a day in the Nineties). Other candidates might come to mind amongst Kinks-krazies, but for me everything that makes the Kinks so frustratingly fun to love (their refusal to abandon what they know, which was English provincial life and the class structure that dominated it, while tweaking their nose at the well-respected man who sounds like a mama's boy and a basket case of unacknowledged lust: "He adores the girl next door/'cause he's dying to get at her"). Their gift is in crafting lovingly amusing portraits of small-town people whose lives revolve around the telly or whatever social clubs they belong to, with nary a thought for the tumult in the world around them. Maybe that's the key to their timelessness, the lack of timeliness in their most well-known songs. Mick and the boys might be street-fightin' men, but Ray would prefer to thumb through his autumn almanac and take a holiday.

I might just have to return to the Kinks again at some point, violating the now somewhat arbitrary rules of the premise that Jonathan Garren established sometime last year (back then, of course, I had a working iPod and iTunes library, so a lot has changed about how the songs get picked anyway. Why not repeat an artist or two?). I don't have much in my record collection beyond the BBC Sessions CDs and their "Singles" release, but those really have plenty that I can cover, from "Waterloo Sunset" to "Lola." Yep, I'm not done with the Kinks yet, so expect something else by Ray Davies to crop up in the next update which I know you are all breathlessly awaiting...