Writing about The Kinks as an American feels wrong. Bloody wrong, if you will. It’s like Guy Fieri attempting to articulate the culinary appeal of toad in the hole. (What is toad in the hole? No clue. It came up when I Googled “weird and gross British food.”)
The Kinks are the quintessential English rock band. The group celebrated for not singing in the American accent that was de rigueur for British Invasion bands coming out of the ’60s. The ones who talked constantly about the class system and pubs and music-hall culture and the fall of the British empire. The bloody Kinks, man! (Did I just say “bloody” too much?)
For an American who loves The Kinks, part of the attraction has always been their aggressive Englishness. For us Yanks, it isn’t relatable at all, but it definitely is exotic. Of all the canon boomer guitar acts, The Kinks are the least overexposed. Their songs aren’t crammed down your throat like the warhorses from The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, and Zeppelin. They seem, almost, like an indie-rock band, particularly if you were part of the generation (as I was) whose initial exposure to The Kinks came from Wes Anderson needle drops and Sleater-Kinney album covers.
Put another way: The Kinks are famous, but their music isn’t especially well-known outside a handful of canonized classics. Therefore, the time is ripe to explore this brilliant band’s work in the form of a list.
I have been ranking all day and all of the night. And now I’m tired of waiting for this column to be shared!
Let’s talk Kinks!
PRE-LIST ENTERTAINMENT PART 1: THE DEFINITIVE RAY DAVIES QUOTE (AND A TONE SETTER FOR THIS COLUMN)
Excerpt from an interview by Jonathan Cott for Rolling Stone, from the November 10, 1969 issue.
Rolling Stone: If people are second class, and if, when they start making it, they become dedicated followers of fashion, what alternative do they have, given the way things are?
Ray Davies: Be like me and be unhappy.
PRE-LIST ENTERTAINMENT PART 2: “BUT IN HER DREAMS SHE IS FAR AWAY …”
When Ray Davies dies — this also applies to his brother, Dave — the obituary will note that the distorted guitar sound and insolent vocals of their first big hit, 1964’s “You Really Got Me,” helped to invent heavy metal and punk. That’s Rock Knowledge 101. But Ray’s attitude toward traditional pop stardom is even more important. Of the many things The Kinks can be credibly credited with inventing in rock music (playing with/hating your brother, relating more to old people than young people, sexual repression as the most extreme form of sexual perversion, following up a poorly received rock opera with an even more disliked rock opera) Ray’s professional ambivalence is the most crucial. Back when The Beatles were still playing the lovably cheeky mop tops in the British press, Ray was calling up English music newspapers to deny rumors that he was leaving The Kinks — rumors that did not really exist until Ray made a point of disavowing them. In fact, he would not leave The Kinks until well past the point that most people still cared.
This was just one of the many contradictions that defined Ray and his band. For starters, he did not look or act like a pop star. Ray Davies thought of himself as a “normal” guy and he (mostly) presented himself as a “normal” guy. And then he plugged in and played songs about how he wasn’t like everybody else with a lopsided grin that scarcely concealed endless depths of reactionary rage and unrequited longing. Always a writer at heart, his central dilemma was that of the lonely, perpetual observer, the person who is deeply wary of people but also instinctually empathetic of the most flawed individuals, though only when regarding them from a distance. And that set a template for a dominant form of pop stardom for left-of-center artists for the next sixty-plus years.
I get that part of The Kinks. But I will never understand them like a British person can. I acknowledge this. Bangers and mash don’t flow freely in these American veins. My only saving grace is that Ray is as obsessed with America as many of us Americans are obsessed with The Kinks. As late as 2017, he was still musing about various strands of Americana — a word that just so happens to be the title of his last two solo albums. “Kentucky, Montana, Sierra Nevada, just the words are so evocative,” he told The Guardian. “And I loved those American place names that Chuck Berry would reference. It’s not the same when you’re singing ‘from Walsall to Shepperton to Milton Keynes.’”
Years earlier, one of his characters dreamed about America. “Oklahoma U.S.A.” is about a workaday schlub (the classic Kinks protagonist) whose mind lingers on the 1955 movie musical Oklahoma! as a respite from daily drudgery. “But in her dreams she is far away,” Ray sings. “In Oklahoma U.S.A. / With Shirley Jones and Gordon McCrea.”
Hey Ray, to quote one of our favorite mutual songwriters: I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.
50. “Life Goes On” (Live on The Old Grey Whistle Test version, 1977)
The studio take is from Sleepwalker, the first of the so-called “arena rock” era albums The Kinks put out in the late ’70s and early ’80s. It is preceded by the following incarnations of The Kinks: 1.0 (1964-67, aka the “exquisitely dirty and snarky rock songs” era), 2.0 (1968-72, the “good concept albums” era) and 3.0 (1973-76, the “questionable concept albums” era). I prefer this take from the British music TV show The Old Grey Whistle Test because it’s not quite as slick as the Sleepwalker version, and also because it spotlights Ray’s love/hate relationship with his own audience, songs, and persona.
“Life Goes On,” he tells us, is “about a man who tries to commit suicide and fails […] a nice, happy sort of song.” He suggests that the audience start clapping along. “If you don’t know it, learn it,” he adds, pointedly. He’s smiling but it looks forced. Then he starts doing that “clap your hands above your head” thing that arena-rockers do. When the audience finally complies with his wishes, he immediately motions for them to stop. He’s embarrassed and annoyed by his own pandering.
Another Ray Davies contradiction: “Love me! Okay, now stop loving me!” The song reiterates the message. It’s about how bad things happen in life, but that is okay, because nothing really matters in the long run. Is this comforting? Or is it just profoundly sad? These are not the right questions as it pertains to the worldview of Ray Davies.
Comfort and sadness are not binary alternatives here. If you are content with your lot in life, you are a sucker. But if you strive for something better, you are pathetic. The common denominator in either scenario is common human ineptitude and misery. Though if you see it just as misery that means you don’t have a sense of humor. If you don’t know that, learn it.
49. “She’s Got Everything” (1968)
Before we get too deep into psychoanalyzing Ray Davies and the psyches of those of us who connect with his songs — it’s a rich text, so get prepared to go uncomfortably deep — it’s worth pausing for a moment to recognize an important fact about The Kinks: They rock. And that is a big part of why they matter. They simply rocked harder than nearly every other band that ever lived. Even when they seemed to not like rocking so hard, which for Ray was most of the time. They rocked even when they ruthlessly self-sabotaged themselves. (“Ruthless self-sabotage” was another Kinks innovation for rock bands.) The Kinks could relegate a song like “She’s Got Everything” to B-side status — on the “Days” single, pret-tay pret-tay good 45 RPM record there! — and still set a template for power-pop bands for decades beyond 1968.
48. “I’m On An Island” (1965)
This song does not rock, exactly, but it does illustrate the secret sauce for many great Kinks rock songs. I refer to the mix of acoustic guitar and snappy snare sounds, which you can hear on “I’m On An Island” and countless other ’60s Kinks tracks. After the proto-punk scuzz of their early hits was abandoned by Davies, in part, because he thought The Who jacked his vibe lock, stock, and barrel when they issued their debut single “I Can’t Explain,” he moved on to a janglier and more thoughtful sound that retained the original thwack bounding out of their music’s punishing bottom end. No matter Ray’s acoustic ax, there’s nothing “folk rock” about this sound. The trebly timbre is incredibly metallic, even when electric guitars are mostly absent.
It’s there on “I’m On An Island,” which is as close to a lovelorn ballad as there is on early albums like the transitional The Kinks Kontroversy. Though the lyrics, in typical Ray Davies fashion, can be read in multiple ways:
But there is nowhere else on earth I’d rather be
Then if my long, lost little girl was here with me
I’m on an island
And I’ve got nowhere to run
Because I’m the only one
Who’s on this island
The question is: How does he feel about being on the island? Does he really want the “lost little girl” with him? Or is he happy to have nowhere to run?
47. “Destroyer” (1981)
Ray was still on an island in 2011 when, again, he was profiled by The Guardian. The article begins with a poignant scene of Ray in a neighborhood pub — the writer notes he lives “barely a mile from where he was born” in north London — where he effortlessly blends in with the crowd. “It’s a pleasant surprise for people, when they find out who I am, and what I’ve done,” Rays says. The intention is to illustrate Davies’ enduring everyman quality, which contrasts starkly with surviving British rock peers like McCartney, Jagger, Richards, and Townshend.
But it also shows how less famous Davies and his band are. Ray has always been more aware of this than his fans, who view The Kinks as giants on par with the other English rock behemoths. In that Rolling Stone interview, when Jonathan Cott casually asserts that “for a while, when you started, The Kinks were to as much as The Beatles and The Stones,” Davies swiftly corrects him. “No, we weren’t, never. ‘Cause I think we were more unpopular than they were.”
Ray, as always, chooses his words carefully here. “More unpopular than they were,” he says. If he had said “less popular,” that would be putting The Kinks on a sliding scale of likeability. But Ray instead put them on a scale of unlikability. Because he understood that what he was doing in The Kinks, right or wrong, was not as broadly appealing as what the competition was serving up. His songwriting style — regionally specific, temperamentally contrarian, insistently melodic but defiantly unromantic, even on the pretty songs — was designed to not appeal to the masses.
That changed somewhat during the arena-rock years, when The Kinks finally were big enough in America to headline Madison Square Garden in 1981. (The Stones launched a massive tour of football stadiums the same year.) I like this period of The Kinks, particularly the run of underrated early ’80s albums kickstarted by Give The People What They Want. But there’s no denying that they dumbed down considerably during these years. The album title wasn’t wholly ironic — Give The People What They Want sounds like a thinking-man’s Kiss record, which is what a lot of ticket-buying American rock fans wanted at the time.
But Ray, at least, had a sense of humor about the situation. Hence “Destroyer,” a self-referential and self-satirizing headbanger that crossbreeds “You Really Got Me” with “Lola” for an anthem about a middle-aged rock star drinking and drugging himself to death.
46. “He’s Evil” (1974)
The Kinks embraced dunderhead rock at the end of the ’70s after putting out a series of poorly received rock operas in the middle of the decade. The proudly blue-collar Ray Davies, staunch opponent of elites, somehow felt compelled to craft grandiose multi-album song narratives that were more akin to Andrew Lloyd Webber than Big Bill Broonzy. The two-part Preservation records released in 1973 and ’74 mark the apotheosis of this trend, representing a line of demarcation between regular Kinks fans and true believers who can breakdown the byzantine adventures of Mr. Flash and Mr. Black. Personally, I prefer to cherry-pick the best songs from these LPs, like this snappy neo-classical prog-rock gem, and ignore the larger conceptual trappings.
45. “Everybody’s A Star” (1975)
At his best, Ray contains his storytelling and world-building instincts to concise three or four-minute rock songs. In that format, he represents another starting point — this time, for literary-minded songwriters with unbeatable narrative powers and impressive vocabularies. Randy Newman, John Prine, Warren Zevon, even Bruce Springsteen — they all learned something from Davies about how to place fully realized characters in evocative settings with just a handful of well-chosen words.
Not that Davies always saw those qualities in his own songs. If he had, he might have stopped writing one of the worst Kinks albums, Soap Opera, after more or less summing up the concept with this swinging rocker.
44. “Susannah’s Still Alive” (1967)
The central dynamic of The Kinks — the tumultuous relationship between brothers and Ray and Dave — is best summed up by an anecdote shared by Ray about the death of their mother. “I was in New York cutting a record,” Ray said, “and he was by her bedside, and he rang me and he said: ‘She’s dead.’ I said: ‘Will you check?’ And he said: ‘I’ve checked already.’”
“Will you check?” sounds like a particularly dark-humored Kinks lyric. But Ray admitted that this story signified his relative lack of maturity compared with his younger brother and lead guitarist. “In some ways, he is more adult than I am,” he confessed. “He took care of all the things I should have taken care of. He’s more grounded than me, but in other ways […] he’s out there with the fairies.”
Ray and Dave were pitted against each other early on, starting with Ray’s hurt feelings over no longer being the baby boy in a family otherwise composed of much older sisters. Later, when both boys became music obsessives, Ray would manipulate Dave into buying the records he liked so he could spend his allowance on other things. As adults, Dave was generally warmer, more socially outgoing, freer sexually, and also highly reactive to his brother’s slights, real and imagined, which he would counter with fists and passive-aggressive quotes in the press.
As a songwriter shackled to an undisputed genius, he was destined to be overshadowed in the thankless George Harrison “kid brother” role. Only in The Kinks he was literally the kid brother, which made him a target for ridicule. (Like on the back cover of The Kinks Kontroversy, where it says he “moans on his own” on the endearing Dylan homage “I Am Free.”)
I’m also a kid brother, which might be why I have always had a deep love for the Dave songs. Like the lumbering “Susannah’s Still Alive,” technically credited as a solo Dave joint with all of The Kinks (including Ray) backing him up, a promotional gambit likely deployed to exploit Dave’s boyish, wild-partying rock star charisma.
43. “Love Me Till The Sun Shines” (1967)
“Susannah’s Still Alive” demonstrated that Dave, like his brother, could write hard-hitting rock songs about unconventional rock-song subject matter. In this instance, it was about an old woman pining for a former lover. “She sleeps with the covers down / Hopin’ that somebody gets in / Doesn’t matter what she does / She knows that she can’t win.” The song was inspired by Dave’s real-life thwarted love affair with his teenage sweetheart. The couple as separated by their parents after the girl became pregnant when Dave was just 16, a traumatizing event that inspired countless songs.
Dave was also capable of writing the opposite kind of song, à la a horned-up rocker in the mode of “Love Me Till The Sun Shines” that derived far outside the experiential purview of Ray’s married suburban lifestyle.
42. “Holiday In Waikiki” (1966)
“Love Me Till The Sun Shines” is a track from Something Else, the first Kinks masterpiece released in 1967. At the time, the album was largely ignored in America, as it was released during what amounted to a four-year ban on the group touring this country. The boycott stemmed from The Kinks’ behavior on their 1965 US tour, when they alienated local unions to such an extreme degree that a conspiracy was hatched to withhold future work permits from the musicians. The last straw occurred in Los Angeles, when Ray punched an AFTRA representative pressuring Dave to sign a contract. (Ray claimed the union man provoked the band with epithets like “fairies” and “limey bastards.”)
Before they were temporarily banned from America, they managed to wrap their tour with a trip to Hawaii, including a stay in Waikiki, which Ray and his wife Rasa loved. Not that you would know it from this song, in which Ray slanders the tropical island as an overly commercialized tourist trap where the hula dancers are actually from New York City and a “genuine Hawaii ukulele” will cost you 30 guineas, which I assume [ugly American voice] is a lot of money.
41. “Yes Sir, No Sir” (1969)
When Rolling Stone interviewed Ray in 1969, the article presented the band as making a comeback of sorts, even though they were already in the middle of their creative golden era. Their new album Arthur (Or The Decline Of The British Empire) was well-reviewed by the magazine, with Greil Marcus declaring it the year’s superior rock opera to The Who’s Tommy.
Did Ray instantly think back to the swagger-jack that was “I Can’t Explain” when he read that? Or were there other, more pressing miseries to contemplate on that particular day? Either way, Arthur truly is one of the great Kinks albums, and probably the best in terms of telling a coherent story, a dubious standard for assessing rock operas but an accomplishment nonetheless. This begins early in the record with songs like “Yes Sir, No Sir,” which depicts the punishing conformity of military life with the sort of mundane specificity that would only be matched nearly 20 years later by Stanley Kubrick in Full Metal Jacket.
40. “Here Come The People In Grey” (1971)
While it doesn’t make any grand political proclamations, “Yes Sir, No Sir” can be construed as an anti-war song, particularly when coupled with the third track from Arthur, the heartbreaking casualty number “Some Mother’s Son.” (More on that later.) That the release of the album coincided with the Vietnam War — as well as The Kinks’ first US tour in four years — shouldn’t be underestimated. Ray might have been writing about World War II, but this was still edgy subject matter for 1969.
It also might have seemed out of character for a band frequently classified as conservative reactionaries. Certainly, there are those on the right that have eagerly adopted The Kinks as their own. When The National Review compiled their list of the 50 greatest (so-called) conservative rock songs in 2006, the author noted that “it would have been easy to include half a dozen songs” by The Kinks. (They settled on two: “20th Century Man” and “Two Sisters” — the latter choice suggests a reading woefully deficient in irony.)
Given his often-contradictory statements over the years, I can’t definitively judge Ray Davies’ politics. (Dave the bisexual spiritual quester is a different story.) But his songs certainly have a small-c conservative point of view, especially in comparison to his peers. Take “Here Come The People In Grey,” a diatribe against intrusion by inept government bureaucrats set to a smoking Chuck Berry riff.
39. “Alcohol” (1971)
Another song from Muswell Hillbillies, The Kinks’ “country” record and the commonly recognized end to their artistic prime. It’s also a track that a National Review reader might be inclined to read as right-wing: Ray presents the lyrics as a pious sermon warning about the dangers of substance abuse.
Here is a story about a sinner,
He used to be a winner who enjoyed a life of prominence and position,
But the pressures at the office and his socialite engagements,
And his selfish wife’s fanatical ambition,
It turned him to the booze,
And he got mixed up with a floosie
And she led him to a life of indecision.
The floosie made him spend his dole
She left him lying on Skid Row
A drunken lag in some Salvation Army Mission.
It’s such a shame
On the page, it looks like a clear-cut cautionary tale. But there are two problems with this interpretation. One, The Kinks were a notoriously drunken band. (Ray himself was falling back onto the amplifiers while performing in concert around this time.) Two, the music replicates the feeling of being drunk, and makes the listener want to get drunk himself. Truly, speaking from experience: It’s such a shame.
38. “Celluloid Heroes” (1972)
From Everybody’s In Show-Biz, the half live/half studio double-record considered slightly outside The Kinks’ artistic prime that I nevertheless love. It’s one of rock’s great “on the road” albums, only Ray (of course) isn’t concerned with the typical “on the road” subjects: drugs, groupies, spiritual burnout. Ray instead got more granular with his tour talk, grousing about backstage catering and the boredom of hanging out in a hotel room.
That is, except for “Celluloid Heroes,” where Ray takes a wider view of stardom, describing walking down Hollywood Boulevard and staring at the names of bygone actors and actresses etched in the sidewalk. The metaphor is not subtle — those who walk among the stars are destined to eventually be trod upon by normies. “And those who are successful / Be always on your guard,” Ray sings. “Success walks hand in hand with failure / Along Hollywood Boulevard.”
37. “A Long Way From Home” (1970)
In that Old Grey Whistle Test episode from 1977, Ray drolly introduces “Celluloid Heroes” by noting the commercial failure of Everybody’s In Show-Biz in the UK, an extremely Ray Davies-esque move. Meanwhile in America, Ray’s public bitching about the music business proved to be more successful in the early ’70s. At least that was true when it came to Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneyground, Part One, his most “inside baseball” concept album, which bombed in his home country while doing better in the US than any Kinks record since the mid-’60s.
Of course, that had a lot to do with the hit title track, which had nothing to do with the overall concept. (More on that song later in this column.) Then there’s “A Long Way From Home,” one of the album’s more tender and least embittered tracks. Ray sings from the point of view of the rock-star protagonist’s boyhood friend, who warns that despite “your car and your handmade overcoats” that “your wealth will never make you stronger.” Not that the actual Ray Davies ever needed to be reminded of that.
36. “Better Things” (1981)
Loving Everybody’s In Show-Biz makes you a serious Kinks fan. But stanning for ’80s Kinks records puts you in an even more exclusive strata — the “person nobody wants to stand next to at parties lest they attempt to sell you on Word Of Mouth being criminally underrated”-level of Kinks freak. Adam Schlesinger was that level of Kinks freak. Back when rock fans were just getting around to rediscovering the greatness of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, the co-frontman of Fountains Of Wayne was making a case for deep cuts from Give The People What They Want.
It makes sense for a songwriter who wrote the greatest Kinks song of the aughts not actually produced by The Kinks. (I refer, of course, to “Hackensack.”) FOW’s cover of “Better Things” is most associated with the band’s Conan performance in the wake of 9/11, and the song’s optimism — which seems uncharacteristically pure for Ray — still feels like a tonic.
Forget what happened yesterday
I know that better things are on the way
It’s really good to see you rocking out
And having fun
Living like you’ve just begun
Accept your life and what it brings
I hope tomorrow you’ll find better things
I know tomorrow you’ll find better things
35. “Animal Farm” (1968)
Speaking of Village Green: I would love to mount a critical case that any other Kinks record is more deserving of being designated “best.” But I can’t. The record store clerk in your past was right all along — this is the best and most perfect of all the great Kinks albums. Every time I put on Village Green, I keep waiting for a song to not knock me out. And that song never arrives. Even when I try to conjure all my powers of Ray Davies-inspired skepticism, Village Green defeats me with its unrelenting and absurdly high quality. Setting aside the melodies — which really shouldn’t be set aside, because they are flawlessly immaculate — what makes these songs so rich is their multiple layers of meaning. Ray is indulging in nostalgia, while also showing the shortcoming of nostalgia, while also not caring about those shortcomings, while also indicating the sadness of not caring.
Just listen to “Animal Farm,” a back-to-the-land song typical for the time in which Ray promises to “take you where real animals are playing / and people are real people, not just playing.” Rhyming “playing” with “playing” — it doesn’t get more carefree than that!
34. “Arthur” (1969)
The only problem is that “Animal Farm” is named after an allegorical novel by George Orwell about an idyllic animal community slowly undone by political power jockeying. Like David Lynch — another great artist sometimes branded as a conservative — Ray Davies has an instinctual love of the suburbs that is coupled with an equally strong artistic impulse to zoom in on manicured front lawns to reveal the teeming masses of insects fighting for their lives beneath the surface. Hence this song, the title track from my second-favorite Kinks LP, which sums up the fruitless life of an anonymous nobody whose “life was overtaken / by the people who make big decisions.”
To return to an earlier question: If people are second class, and if, when they start making it, they become dedicated followers of fashion, what alternative do they have, given the way things are?
The answer, if you are Ray Davies, is that you take the piss out of everybody that you can.
33. “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” (1966)
This song has the funniest origin story of any Kinks song. Long story short: Ray throws a party for some “Swinging London” types. One of these hipsters makes fun of Ray’s dorky pants. This pisses off Ray, who kicks all the hipsters out of his home. He then retreats to his typewriter and fires off an angry screed mocking all his newfound enemies: “He thinks he is a flower to be looked at / and when he pulls his frilly nylon panties right up tight / he feels a dedicated follower of fashion.” That’s some quality hating! He subsequently sets this screed to music and “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” is born.
32. “See My Friends” (1965)
“Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” can be taken, if you’re so inclined, as more evidence of Ray Davies’ conservative posturing. But what then to make of “See My Friends,” one of the most forward-thinking songs of the band’s ’60s period? It was innovative musically, beating The Beatles and Rolling Stones when it came to integrating Indian music sounds into rock. And then there was the lyrical content, which Ray insisted was about his own confused sexual identity. The actual words are vague in that regard: “She is gone / she is gone and now there’s no one left,” Ray sings. “‘Cept my friends, layin’ ‘cross the river.” But when talking about the song with an interviewer, Ray claimed that he once told his first wife Rasa, “If it wasn’t for you, I’d be queer.”
31. “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” (1966)
In a 2020 interview, Ray argued that the tour boycott was also related to an incident on the music variety show Hullabaloo where Ray danced with drummer Mick Avory, cheek-to-cheek, while on camera. “Everything we could do to annoy people, we did at the time,” he said. “Nowadays that would be acceptable. Not then.”
Given that context, perhaps this song can be taken as a more artful articulation of what Ray was trying to tell his wife:
But darling, you know that I love you true
Do anything that you want me to
Confess all my sins like you want me to
There’s one thing that I will say to you
I’m not like everybody else
I’m not like everybody else
I’m not like everybody else
I’m not like everybody else
30. “Sitting In My Hotel” (1972)
(It should also be pointed out that Ray Davies, highly complicated and perpetually self-contradicting man, was not so enlightened on matters of sexual orientation in the early ’70s that he wasn’t above denigrating the lonely rock star in this song from Everybody’s In Show-Biz for “prancing ’round the room” and then dropping a derogatory English slang term for gay person. Alas, it’s also implied that he is probably writing about himself and his own conflicted feelings about his status and ego, so the layers go ever deeper.)
29. “Sweet Lady Genevieve” (1973)
“Sitting In My Hotel” was subsequently re-released the following year as the B-side to “Sweet Lady Genevieve,” a track that Jeff Daniels in The Squid & The Whale would classify as “the filet of the neighborhood” when it comes to Preservation Act 1. Among Kinks Konnoisseurs, it is rightly considered one of the band’s great “lost” songs, a folk-rock beauty that sounds like a leftover from the Lola/Muswell Hillbillies era.
28. “Sunny Afternoon” (1966)
“Sweet Lady Genevieve” has been described as a love song to Rasa, who in the manner of other rock-star wives in the mid-’70s was in the process of extricating herself from her famous husband at the time. Some music historians, including Andrew Hickey of the excellent podcast A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs, have theorized that Rasa played a more direct role in shaping Ray’s songs during their marriage. On “Sunny Afternoon,” for instance, you can hear her doing background vocals, and it was apparently her suggestion to add the “in the summertime” hook to the chorus. Hickey suggests that Rasa likely made other contributions to Ray’s songs, pointing out that his best output coincides with the happiest years of their marriage in the back half of the ’60s.
27. “20th Century Man” (1971)
“The thing that’s most notable about his post-Rasa songwriting is how much less compassionate it is,” Hickey states. This is his most insightful point. Assuming their marriage was already on the rocks by the time of Muswell Hillbillies, it makes sense that this is where Ray’s anti-government cynicism also became more prominent, as it does for countless other divorced (or soon to be divorced) dads throughout history. On the lead-off track “20th Century Man,” Ray complains about how modern writers can’t compare to Shakespeare and how contemporary painters leave him cold next to Rembrandt and Da Vinci. “Got no privacy, got no liberty / ‘Cause the twentieth century people / Took it all away from me,” he sings.
I might argue with him, but I’m reminded of an earlier, crucially important point about The Kinks: They rock. And this song, especially, rocks.
26. “Till The End Of The Day” (1965)
The degree to which Ray Davies was influenced in his songwriting by his wife gets harder to quantify with each passing second we get from the ’60s. But what’s indisputable is that Ray’s songs changed in clear and obvious ways early on in the 1.0 era, from the simple and repetitive numbers that made them hitmakers on both sides of the Atlantic to the more lyrically sophisticated tracks that established The Kinks as beloved cult heroes forever more. “Till The End Of The Day” came at the end of the former period, when they were still recycling variations of “You Really Got Me” with slightly diminished but nonetheless potent returns.
25. “This Is Where I Belong” (1965)
Those early Kinks songs are as elemental as rock music gets. The riffs are direct and primal, and the lyrical sentiments are plainspoken and relatable — each embodies the natural youthful drive to get laid as much as possible. Which is why those songs remain some of The Kinks’ most enduring; their claims to “inventing” punk and metal start and essentially end with that music. But the emotional connections that The Kinks have made — the ones made roughly 12 inches above the crotch — concern their inherent affinity for the underdogs, outsiders, and misunderstood freaks of society. “This Is Where I Belong” is one of their earliest anthems aimed at this constituency, and among the greatest. (Special shout-out to Nicky Hopkins, the legendary session pianist who played on all the most important Kinks records of the late ’60s, for laying down the sick harpsichord riff.)
24. “Picture Book” (1968)
A very fine example of the patented “acoustic guitar plus drum thwack” sound that’s integral to The Kinks’ music. Ray’s paranoia about being ripped off by more successful bands — going back to The Who and “I Can’t Explain” — played out again with “Picture Book,” 32 years after the fact, when Green Day borrowed the riff for “Warning.” Hilariously, Green Day was sued by a different band that stole the “Picture Book” riff, presumably because they had the foresight to plunder The Kinks first. The suit was eventually dropped.
23. “Do You Remember Walter” (1968)
There were no such legal fireworks regarding this song and Jeff Lynne lifting the opening piano lick and drum roll for “Mr. Blue Sky.” To be fair: “Mr. Blue Sky” is probably a better song than “Do You Remember Walter,” so all’s fair in love and rock music. Nevertheless: No. 23 on a list of Kinks songs puts you at No. 1 on a list of songs by practically any other group.
22. Where Have All The Good Times Gone” (1965)
David Lee Roth, an honorable gentleman among scoundrels, was decent enough to just cover this Kinks golden oldie on 1982’s Diver Down, rather than rip it off, handing Ray a portion of those sweet early-’80s Van Halen multi-platinum royalties. Though, in a typical madman flourish, he also affixed a nonsensical exclamation point to the title. Thankfully, he practiced enough restraint to not add a “boozie boozie bop” as a parenthetical.
21. “Some Mother’s Son” (1969)
We have discussed many types of Kinks songs so far. “Rockin’” Kinks songs. “Funny” Kinks songs. “Reactionary” Kinks songs. “Kinky” Kinks songs. “Embittered About The Music Business” Kinks songs. But from here on out, there will be a disproportionate number of songs that fall into two categories: “Sad” Kinks songs and the somewhat less devastating “Wistful” Kinks songs. (There are also hybrids like “Where Have All The Good Times Gone,” which is a “Rockin’” Kinks song crossed with a “Wistful” Kinks song, particularly when you leave off the exclamation mark.)
The sad ones hit the hardest. Like “Some Mother’s Son,” one of the very saddest of the “Sad” Kinks songs and overall among the more effective anti-war numbers in the rock canon. Ray acts as an omniscient observer, writing about a kid lying dead on a battlefield while the next generation of parents wait for their children to come home from school. But in the outro, when he sings about the mother putting the dead kid’s photo on the wall, Ray’s voice cracks and the listener’s heart (this listener’s heart, anyway) instantly breaks along with it.
20. “This Time Tomorrow” (1970)
Another “Embittered About The Music Business” Kinks song, with Ray stuck this time on a monotonous flight rather than grounded in a monotonous hotel room. What makes “This Time Tomorrow” resonate with us non-rock stars is the deft deployment of a very powerful weapon in the Kinks arsenal — the high harmony vocals of one Dave Davies, always a reliable delivery device for heavy doses of lonesome melancholy.
19. “Get Back In The Line” (1970)
For all of us Dave fans out there, Lola Versus Powerman is a treasure trove, and not only for those peerless background vocals. (More on that later.) Dave is back in the chorus of this song, an affecting ode about blue-collar desperation with a not-so-subtle anti-union message. “‘Cause that union man’s got such a hold over me / He’s the man who decides if I live or I die, if I starve, or I eat / Then he walks up to me and the sun begins to shine / Then he walks right past and I know that I’ve got to get back in the line.”
(It’s possible Ray and Dave were still smarting over that tour boycott business from five years earlier.)
18. “Tired Of Waiting For You” (1965)
The first hit Kinks ballad. (And one of the precious few “hit Kinks ballads” on the planet). Even more unique, it’s the rare “Wishing For Fame And Fortune” Kinks song, with the romantic lyrical conceit doubling for a lament about Ray’s impatience for The Kinks to finally hit as big as the British bands above them in the mid-’60s hierarchy at the time, The Beatles and The Stones.
17. “The Village Green Preservation Society” (1968)
Mick Avory did not play drums on “Tired Of Waiting For You,” nor did he perform on many of the early Kinks hits. He was not viewed as a suitable alternative to the studio cats that were available, and even after Mick was finally brought into the fold on Kinks records he was considered to be a somewhat lackluster timekeeper. I have never understood this. As a fan of the Kinks thwack, I consider Mick Avory’s rudimentary but nonetheless powerful drumming one of my very favorite things about them. It’s that primal element that steered The Kinks away from fully submitting to tiresome pretension. Even when Ray was determined to take The Kinks to that place, Mick brought a level of gut-level violence that made such a maneuver impossible. His entrance on this song, one of his finest moments, is Exhibit A for that argument.
16. “Living On A Thin Line” (1984)
Circling back to Dave Davies: He originally thought that Ray should sing this song, perhaps because Dave’s lyrics reflecting on the decline of English power — which double as take on The Kinks’ own faded glory in the middle of the ’80s — seem to be very much in Ray’s typical wheelhouse. But Ray declined, which is just as well, because “Living On A Thin Line” is not only one of Dave’s greatest songs but also the most epic number he ever created, with regal, literary imagery matched by a grand acoustic strum, slippery bass line, and martial drums. “All the stories have been told / Of kings and days of old / But there’s no England now (there’s no England now) / All the wars that were won and lost / Somehow don’t seem to matter very much anymore.”
That “Living On A Thin Line” wound up on a Kinks record that most people have never heard and assume isn’t very good — incorrect assumption, by the way, about my beloved Word Of Mouth — would have be a cruel fate had The Sopranos not rescued it from obscurity.
15. “Come Dancing” (1983)
Now that I have mentioned Word Of Mouth twice in this column, I must pay tribute to The Kinks’ last hit single in America and the first Kinks song I ever heard. To my young ears, “Come Dancing” sounded like the typical New Wave smash of the day. It could have been a Men At Work jawn, as far as my 1st-grade ears were concerned. In reality, Ray wrote about his late sister, Rene, who gave him his first guitar. After that, she went out dancing and died, the victim of a heart attack at the age of 31, after doctors’ warnings that her health issues made dancing a dangerous endeavor. Rene’s death — and the timing of her gifted guitar — imbued Ray with a sense of destiny about his own music career and (perhaps) a fatalistic view of life’s arbitrary twists and turns.
14. “Big Sky” (1968)
As we have seen, that point of view can be discerned throughout Ray’s songs, from “Life Goes On” to “Come Dancing.” But “Big Sky” is the most straightforward articulation of this philosophy: “Big Sky looked down on all the people looking up at the Big Sky / Everybody’s pushing one another around / Big Sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry / But the Big Sky’s too big to let it get him down.”
13. “David Watts” (1967)
Ray delivers those lines in a talk-sing voice akin to a hectoring preacher, only what Ray is selling is the indifference of heaven, not eternal glory in the afterlife. It’s a worldview that parallels the rigidity of the British class system, which also somehow translates to the celebrity culture that was already starting to dominate American life in the ’60s. In “David Watts,” Ray sings about “a dull and simple lad” who dreams about being the most popular kid in school. It’s a posture that only Ray could pull off — peers like McCartney and Jagger were just more famous versions of David Watts, whereas Ray Davies could credibly align himself with that dull and simple lad even while fronting a badass rock band.
12. “Johnny Thunder” (1968)
“David Watts” begins with a pre-song aside from Ray, presumably directed at his band: “Nice and smooth.” Naturally, The Kinks proceed to play the opposite of nice and smooth, as was their custom. Ray didn’t bother with such instructions before “Johnny Thunder,” an ode to a Marlon Brando-esque rebel diametrically opposed to the goody-goody David Watts. But unlike “Big Sky,” “Johnny Thunder” makes a convincing case that God exists, only because a higher power must have been involved in creating those holy acoustic guitar and drum sounds.
11. “Two Sisters” (1968)
Then again, maybe God is Ray Davies, as this song is a better, funnier, and more heartbreaking story about sibling rivalry than Cain and Abel.
10. “A Well Respected Man” (1965)
David Chase originally wanted to use this as The Sopranos theme song. On one hand, it is infinitely superior to Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning,” which (let’s be real) sounds like Smash Mouth’s Achtung Baby period. But on the other hand, Tony Soprano hardly ever was home by 5:30. (Unless we mean 5:30 in the morning.)
9. “Shangri-La” (1969)
In that Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott, Davies tells a story about playing this song for a friend and realizing “halfway through it he was embarrassed by it because it was about him, and he realized it, and I can never sort of talk to him again. I wanted him to hear it, and then I realized: there he is.”
It’s possible to hear this anecdote — about Ray sharing a song about a normie striver with a real-life normie striver — and conclude that the storyteller is a sociopath. After all, “Shangri-La” is a long song. He had to sit with that guy for roughly three minutes knowing that they were already no longer friends. But Ray did it, I suspect, because he’s made a living reflecting the sad futility of his audience’s lives back to them, and we always come back for more. Why should Ray’s friend be any different?
8. “Young And Innocent Days” (1969)
If Ray didn’t want to offend his friend, he could have played this song. I can’t imagine anyone not loving it (or not weeping for 10 minutes after hearing it). Is this a “Sad” Kinks song or a “Wistful” Kinks song? It’s the most wistful “Sad” Kinks song and the saddest “Wistful” Kinks song, with a truly devastating Dave Davies high harmony vocal. “It’s too late, so late” — stop, please, I’m already dead.
7. “Days” (1968)
Ray didn’t put this on Village Green, because 1968 Ray Davies had more songs than Elon Musk has money (or illegitimate children). In recent years, he has said that he wants “Days” played at his own funeral. Forcing mourners to listen to a song you wrote qualifies as unconscionably egotistical behavior for everyone currently on the planet with the exception of Ray Davies. (Even Paul McCartney would be wrong to force a drum solo on funeral goers before getting to the money line from “The End.”)
6. “You Really Got Me”/”All Day And All Of The Night” (1965)
The first two Kinks hits, and pretty much the exact same song. Also: Pretty much the exact greatest rock song(s) ever made! They’re tied for the honor, anyway, with 500 other songs that don’t sound exactly like this song and therefore can’t possibly rock quite as hard.
5. “Death Of A Clown” (1967)
My second favorite Dave Davies song, which means I have two Dave songs in my Top Five. This was his first masterpiece, and the first tune Ray must have wished, deep down in a place he would never admit to, that he wrote himself. It’s about a clown who does while performing, and the fellow circus acts who gather for an impromptu wake. It qualifies as a “Sad” Kinks song, but it also has the dark humor that Ray displays in “Life Goes On” and countless other tunes, that impulse to laugh grimly at the unfairness of life rather than glumly revel in it. Let’s drink to that.
4. “Victoria” (1969)
If I were British, I suspect this would be my No. 1 Kinks song. But I am an American who is simultaneously patriotic and keenly aware of the silliness of patriotism — just like Ray in “Victoria” — so I must put it at No. 4.
I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I’m poor, I am free
When I grow, I shall fight
For this land, I shall die
Let her sun never set
Ditto for my view of the USA, Ray.
3. “Waterloo Sunset” (1967)
The Kinks song frequently cited as the band’s finest, and also as one of the most beautiful pop tunes ever written by anybody. It is Davies’ defining work — from a distance he observes two lovers in drab surroundings and feels a serenity that he does not experience in his own life, while his acoustic guitar gently chugs and Rasa Davies coos gorgeously. “Waterloo Sunset” creates a world more enveloping than any 80-minute rock opera, and it lingers for ages in your heart after you hear it. You almost can’t play this song all that often; the melancholy hits the heart like a 64-oz. porterhouse steak.
2. “Lola” (1970)
Alas, this is my list, so I’m putting two other Kinks songs that mean more to me personally slightly higher. The first is one of Ray’s most famous — and complicated — songs. “Lola” has had a fascinating journey over nearly 55 years. In contemporary times, it is celebrated as an early example of transgender representation in rock, a view of “Lola” that Ray has endorsed by openly discussing the occasionally blurred gender identities of his youth.
“We used to dress up and have parties at home,” he told The New York Times in 2020. “Men dressed as women. My dad, who is the most macho man you could imagine, used to put on a wig occasionally and dance around and make a fool of himself, which I encouraged. It’s part of the musical hall culture we have over here. It’s more accepted in London.”
But this enlightened perspective hasn’t always been predominant. I still have a clear memory of the first time I ever heard “Lola”: It was the school talent show. It was the early ’80s, and I was in the first or second grade. An older boy performed “Lola” in drag and acted out the lyrics with some other kids. The audience laughed at Lola squeezing the narrator tight and nearly breaking his spine, and the presentation overall conveyed that this was clearly a novelty tune not meant to be taken seriously. This was supported by the music, a hearty singalong that resembles an English drinking song or some bawdy tune that hooligans might sing at a football match.
I suspect there are many rock fans who still look at this song as a lark. At the time I first heard “Lola,” it was interpreted as a song about a man who wears a dress in public, rather than a trans woman. Ray himself still seemed to endorse that position as late as 2017, when discussing the song’s origins with The Guardian. “My manager was dancing with a drag queen. I was aware of what was going on and he wasn’t. I just egged him on — it’s not until you get into the daylight and you see the stubble that the realization dawns.”
But in the next paragraph, Ray also discusses his own date with Candy Darling, the Andy Warhol “superstar” and trans pioneer that he describes as “the most beautiful-looking woman in the world, who died tragically,” though he adds that nothing physical ever happened between them. (Ray also had a sweet and more public interaction with Candy in the pages of Warhol’s Interview magazine, where Ray asks for places in New York to see drag shows, in 1973, just one year before she passed.)
The fact is that “Lola” is jokey and bawdy, and it’s also profound and sensitive. The kid in the song is repulsed by who he encounters (“I pushed her away”) and then, just a few lines later, he’s bowled over in the throes of passion (“I fell to the floor”). It’s a song with no political agenda, and yet it’s also, probably, the most progressive thing Ray Davies ever wrote. Above all, it is thoroughly human in a way few songs are. And, yes, it also rocks like a bastard.
1. “Strangers” (1970)
Take a bow, Dave Davies. Not the most important Kinks song, or the most popular or influential, or the most representative of the catalog, or even the one I would put in a capsule to share with the aliens to teach them the ways of British Invasion rock. I put this one here simply because it’s the Kinks song that moves me the most. It puts the high lonesome Dave Davies voice at center stage, which helps. But “Strangers” also articulates, I believe, what’s in Ray’s heart with more clarity than Ray himself would ever dare. So many of his songs are about yearning for connection, but he’s typically writing about other people. But in “Strangers,” Dave aspires to bridge the real-life gap.
So I will follow you wherever you go
If your offered hand is still open to me
Strangers on this road we are on
We are not two, we are one
There is a whole lifetime of love and hatred and fistfights and strained but unbreakable bonds in those lines. I might not be British, but I do come from a dysfunctional family — as we all do — and that background is what unites Kinks fans everywhere. Life goes on, sure, but maybe life can also do more than just go on and on. With the help of Mick Avory’s steady thump and Nicky Hopkins’ eloquent piano flourishes, The Kinks — finally — just about achieve transcendence. Good job, lads.