10 Songs is a weekly list of ten songs that happen to be on my mind at the moment. Given my intention to usually write these on Mondays, the lists are often dominated by songs played on the previous night's edition of This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl. The idea was inspired by Don Valentine of the essential blog I Don't Hear A Single.
This special 12-song edition of 10 Songs collects previous 10 Songs entries celebrating the music of THE KINKS! The collection appeared at Pop-A-Looza on June 29, 2021.
THE KINKS: All Day And All Of The Night
It's important to note the significance of "All Day And All Of The Night" in the story of how I became a fan of the Kinks. "Lola" was the first Kinks song I ever knew. My sister's copy of The Live Kinks was the first Kinks album I ever saw. But "All Day And All Of The Night" was the first Kinks track I ever owned, contained on the 2-LP compilation History Of British Rock Vol. 2 I received as a Christmas present in 1976, less than a month prior to my 17th birthday. Essential. And loud! The track was also on my first Kinks LP, Kinks-Size, purchased early in '77.
When I was in the process of becoming a Kinks fan at the age of 16 and 17 (circa late '76 and into '77), "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion" was a mystery track. I had seen the title listed in reference works, but it wasn't a Kinks song I knew, like "Lola" or "You Really Got Me," "All Day And All Of The Night," "Tired Of Waiting For You," "A Well Respected Man," or even "No More Looking Back" from Schoolboys In Disgrace. I recall hearing Status Quo's "Pictures Of Matchstick Men" on the radio, and wondering (with no real-world justification) if that might be "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion." I have no memory of where, when, or how I finally heard "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion," but I do remember that I was initially underwhelmed by it.
Well, that reaction sure changed over time. In the summer of 1979, the first time I saw the fab local combo the Dead Ducks, my pal Joe Boudreau and I bellowed along with the Oh yes he IS! as the Ducks covered the song. Many, many years later, I have a specific memory of strolling through a shopping mall with my wife and daughter as "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion" came on the sound system. Just as I'd done as a teenager, I began to bellow along, Oh yes he IS! My then-teen daughter was mortified. Hmph. It's as if she didn't think her Dad was in fashion.
For a very brief flash of time, "I Took My Baby Home" was the most exciting track that the Kinks ever released. It didn't have a lot of competition for that title, since it was the B-side of the very first Kinks single, and much more distinctive and interesting than the perfunctory cover of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" on its A-side. The Kinks' second single, "You Still Want Me"/"You Do Something To Me," paired a couple of fine beat numbers, though I'd say "I Took My Baby Home" was still the pick of this four-song run.
The Kinks' third single was the greatest record ever made, and its release ended the short reign of "I Took My Baby Home" as the best of the Kinks.
Nonetheless, "I Took My Baby Home" remains a superb rock 'n' roll track, with its strutting harmonica come-on and its euphoric tale of a helpless chap gleefully seduced by his girl (whose high-powered kisses really knock him out, they knock him oh-oh-over).
And it was one of the songs I acquired in my first year as a Kinks fan. I started with "All Day And All Of The Night" on a various-artists LP at Christmas of 1976, added "You Really Got Me," the Kinks-Size LP and maybe Sleepwalker before heading off to college the following August, and scored my first Kinks compilation album during the fall semester. This Kinks volume of The Pye History Of British Rock introduced me to "I Took My Baby Home," right alongside "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion," "Sunny Afternoon," "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," "Where Have All The Good Times Gone," and "Till The End Of The Day." I knew "I Took My Baby Home" before I knew "Waterloo Sunset," though I would discover that one soon enough. Not a bad way to get to know the Kinks, I say.
(And I still mentally change the song's line "And she put her hands on my chest" to "And she put my hands on her chest." Aggressive girl. I bet her name was Lola.)
I have a black t-shirt emblazoned in white letters with the Kinks' classic '60s logo. It's my favorite t-shirt. When I wear it, some random stranger will often notice it and express approval (even from a socially-distanced vantage point). I've had people insist I'm too young to even know who the Kinks are (which means I'm either older than I look, or that I wasted my money on those three Kinks concerts I attended; I enjoyed those shows, so I don't feel like I coulda been too young to know the Kinks at the time).
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| Yes, I DO wear this shirt all day and all of the night! |
This is not the first Kinks record that most passers-by will cite in reaction to my dedicated follower of fashion choice of wardrobe. "Lola." "You Really Got Me." One guy said "Come Dancing." Muswell Hillbillies isn't exactly an obscure record, but it doesn't usually come up in casual conversation out in the real world, the vast playground beyond our own shared but insular rockin' pop universe. I was pleased. And I made sure to play the album's title track on that week's TIRnRR.
I'm not 100% sure where I first heard the Kinks' 1965 single "See My Friends." I initially knew "See My Friends" from the great British group the Records, who included their version in an all-covers EP that came with the purchase of the Records' debut LP in 1979. My first exposure to the Kinks' original must have been Golden Hour Of The Kinks, a 1977 compilation I picked up as a budget cassette release in the mid '80s. With the possible exception of my bootleg live Flashcubes tape, Golden Hour Of The Kinks was my favorite cassette, even more so than the (then-) contemporary garage sampler Garage Sale. I listened to Golden Hour Of The Kinks over and over on the boom box my Uncle Carl gave Brenda and I as a wedding gift in 1984, with only a couple of Beatles tapes (Help! and Beatles For Sale) challenging its boom-box sovereignty. Golden Hour Of The Kinks hooked me on "Animal Farm," reinforced my adoration of "Days," "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion," "Till The End Of The Day," "Waterloo Sunset," "Dead End Street," "Shangri-La," and "You Really Got Me," and it introduced me to the original "See My Friends." Best cassette ever? A contender at the very least.
THE KINKS: Set Me Free
1977: I was just 17, if you know what I mean. And my girlfriend and I were moving way too fast. It was almost entirely my fault, maybe even my fault alone. But I had to stop it.
Over the course of '77, I had become a fan of the Kinks. In August, I went off to college with the tentative beginning of a Kinks collection, which included the Kinks-Sized, Sleepwalker, and possibly Schoolboys In Disgrace LPs. I was still learning about this great band and its cavalcade of wonder. Late in that fall semester of my freshman year, I picked up a Kinks compilation, The Pye History Of British Rock. That revelatory set included just two Kinks tracks I already owned ("You Really Got Me" and "I Gotta Move"), and introduced me to "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," "Dedicated Follower Of Fashion," "Where Have All The Good Times Gone," "Till The End Of The Day," "Sunny Afternoon," "The World Keeps Going Round," "So Mystifying," "Long Tall Shorty," and a superb, rockin' B-side called "I Took My Baby Home." Fantastic stuff, and an essential plank on my path to greater Kinks devotion.
And it included a song called "Set Me Free."
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| This was my first Kinks LP. Though my copy was considerably more beat-up than this one. |
THE KINKS: War Is Over
One recent week on his SPARK! radio show Radio Deer Camp, DJ Rich Firestone played the Kinks' "To The Bone," a cut that has never been played on This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio. And we've played a lot of Kinks songs over the past 22 years! The song is the title track from a 1996 2-CD US version of a live Kinks album released as a single disc in the UK in '94. The US version adds several tracks, but omits "Waterloo Sunset" and "Autumn Almanac," forcing fans (like me) to buy both versions. The US set also adds the two studio tracks that are the final Kinks recordings issued to date; Rich played "To The Bone" on Radio Deer Camp, and we played the other studio track ("Animal") on TIRnRR some time ago.
We still haven't played "To The Bone," but we did want to try to program a Kinks song that we hadn't played before. We picked "War Is Over," from 1989's UK Jive, which is my least favorite Kinks album. The song's fine. The album....
I was able to see the Kinks on the UK Jive tour. It was the third and final time I saw the Kinks in concert, and oddly enough the show occurred in the same week that I saw my first Rolling Stones concert. Kinks and Stones in a single week? Awrighty!
My first Kinks show was in 1978, and it was awesome; I told that story here. Seeing them a second time at a mid '80s arena show in Buffalo was less special, but still the Kinks. The 1989 show was weird. It was staged in a gym at the State University of New York at Oswego; the arena show felt impersonal, and this felt, I dunno, somewhere in between, but still almost haphazardly disconnected.
The show was sparsely attended, so lovely wife Brenda and I were able to get THISCLOSE to the stage where the Kinks--THE KINKS!!!--were playing. But it was the UK Jive tour. I have little memory of it. I can't believe I saw the Kinks at such close proximity, but that a combination of off-putting venue and a set list emphasizing a lesser album made the whole event seem so forgettable.
But it was THE KINKS...!
THE KINKS: Waterloo Sunset
It's one of the most beautiful depictions of burgeoning romance ever committed to song. And it's told, not from the perspective of the young lovers themselves, but from the viewpoint of a benevolent onlooker, wishing them well as they cross over the river, where they feel safe and sound.
I wonder what that onlooker would have thought of me when I was 18....
Our connection with the pop music we love is personal, deeply personal. We know that the songs on our stereo, our radio, our iPod, or our Close-N-Play aren't really about us, but we have license to incorporate them into our own experiences. We assign meaning. While the Kinks insisted elsewhere that it was only jukebox music, it is really so much more than that.
In the book, I place "Waterloo Sunset" directly after chapters about T. Rex, the Runaways, and "Sister Golden Hair" by America, a little trilogy threaded together with the memory of my near-disastrous freshman year in college, 1977-78. "Waterloo Sunset" follows with the potential for catharsis. Every day I look at the world from my window...Waterloo sunset's fine.
It's not the story Ray Davies intended to tell. It's the story I hear nonetheless.
The Kinks have come to be known as TIRnRR's house band, perhaps for no real reason other than we all think it's cool to celebrate the splendor of the Kinks whenever possible. The Kinks remain the only act to ever take over an entire episode of our radio show; in fact, we've done two all-Kinks shows. God save the house band!
Bert Parks' greatest hit. Sort of.
The Kinks' 1979 album Low Budget brought the group a commercial resurgence in America, moving them from modest concert halls to arenas. Its release was preceded by the single "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman," which was a seemingly incongruous mix of our dedicated followers of fashion with a disco beat. Faster than a speeding leisure suit, more powerful than a mirrored ball, able to leap over tall velvet ropes in a single bound, the record is flush with Ray Davies' characteristic cantankerousness, and it was accepted by rockers who would not have been caught dead with any kind of Saturday night fever. Disco? The Rolling Stones did it. KISS did it. Blondie had their first U.S. hit by doin' it. Even the razzafrazzin' Grateful Dead did it with "Shakedown Street," though every Deadhead I knew denied the fact and the beat. So why shouldn't the Kinks make a disco record? The Kinks pulled it off, and the Kinks got bigger.
And then...Bert Parks.
1979 was the final year that Parks would host the annual Miss America beauty pageant. He had been that show's host since about, oh, the dawn of time, and he was about to be kicked aside and replaced by someone younger, if not exactly hipper. "Hipper" and "Miss America beauty pageant" were definitely not two great tastes that taste great together. Actor (and former TV Tarzan) Ron Ely took over the job in 1980 and '81.
By '79, I was not in the habit of watching the Miss America broadcast. Whatever interest I could have derived from seeing pretty girls on my TV screen was overshadowed by the sheer hokiness of such an emphatically four-cornered spectacle. But that year, my girlfriend asked me to be her plus-one at the wedding of one of her dearest friends, so I accompanied her out of town for the event. We had some down time one evening, and we found ourselves watching TV.
Miss America.
Bert Parks.
The...Kinks...?!
No, Muswell Hill's finest didn't show up to warble "Theeeere she is, Miss America...!" That would have been odd, but interesting. Instead, Bert Parks himself lent his golden throat to a never-before, never-again, why-in-God's-name-in-the-first-place performance of "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman." Parks concluded the brief songlet by ripping open his shirt to reveal the Superman shield on his chest.
I was horrified. Transfixed, car-crash hypmotized, unable to turn away, scarred for life, damaged beyond repair, a gas-strike, oil-strike, lorry-strike, bread-strike pinned-in-place deer in the disco lights. Hey, girl. We gotta get out of this place.
You don't believe me? Lord, I wish it had only been the hallucination it seemed. But no! It was real. Check out this YouTube clip, and go directly to the 38:08 mark...IF YOU DARE!
God save the Kinks! From a previously-posted piece about my five favorite 1970s Kinks songs:
Other than Schoolboys In Disgrace, I mostly missed out on the Kinks' concept album phase. I saw Preservation Act 1, Preservation Act 2, and The Kinks Present A Soap Opera in the bins at Gerber Music, but I didn't hear any of that until many years later. And while I appreciate them and dig each of them in its own right, I can't rank them alongside the Kinks' 1960s album masterpieces like Face To Face, The Village Green Preservation Society, or Arthur.
With that said, "You Can't Stop The Music" is (along with "[A] Face In The Crowd") one of a couple of standout selections on Soap Opera. It serves as a de facto statement of intent, and a reminder of the resilience of the sounds we adore.
THE KINKS: You Really Got Me
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This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
The many fine This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio compilation albums are still available, each full of that rockin' pop sound you crave. A portion of all sales benefit our perpetually cash-strapped community radio project:
Volume 1: download
Volume 2: CD or download
Volume 3: download
Volume 4: CD or download
Waterloo Sunset--Benefit For This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio: CD or download
I'm on Twitter @CafarelliCarl.
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