Podcast appearances and mentions of mick avory

Pat welcomes podcaster and friend Mario del Barrio to the "Rock Room" to check out the NEW 2024 Remasters of The Kinks' albums "Sleepwalker" & "Misfits"See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Friend of the Jagbags Bruce Hollett joins us to discuss the music and career of the British power pop/punk pioneer the Kinks. Where do they rank in the all-time Rock Pantheon? What is their beat album? Their best song? Are they underrated or properly rated? Why were they destined to live in the shadow of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones? We go through our 45-minute all-time Kinks Playlist (an impossible task), and try to remember the exact word-for-word titles of the Kinks' most successful LPs.

Nos zambullimos en el recopilatorio “The Journey part 1” (BMG). El doble álbum recoge una colección de canciones de los Kinks seleccionadas por Ray Davis, Dave Davies y Mick Avory. Los tres miembros supervivientes de la legendaria banda británica no solo han seleccionado el contenido sino que además lo han hecho agrupando las canciones según las temáticas que tratan sus letras y han añadido comentarios y recuerdos para cada una de ellas. Playlist; THE KINKS “You really got me” THE KINKS “She’s got everything” THE KINKS “Stop your sobbing” THE KINKS “Wait till the summer comes along” THE KINKS “Wonderboy” THE KINKS “Mindless child of motherhood” THE KINKS “I’m in disgrace” THE KINKS “Do you remember Walter?” THE KINKS “Too much on my mind” THE KINKS “Where have all the good times gone” THE KINKS “Strangers” THE KINKS “Days” THE KINKS “Shangri-La” THE KINKS “Death of a clown” THE KINKS “Waterloo Sunset” Escuchar audio

En Música de Contrabando, revista diaria de música en Onda Regional de Murcia (orm.es; 23,00h a 01,00h) Los Kinks celebran su 60 aniversario con el doble vinilo antológico The journey – Part 1. Las canciones que contiene han sido seleccionadas por Ray y Dave Davies, y el batería Mick Avory. Todas las grabaciones han sido remasterizadas desde las cintas originales. Una versión del "Forever Young" de Alphaville forma parte de la campaña "40 Años de Eterna Juventud" para celebrar el cuarenta aniversario del centro Informajoven Murcia. Vestida de encaje (Son buenos 2023), la provocativa canción de Maria de Juan, que habla de sexo y conquista, es el segundo adelanto de DRAMÁTICA, cuyo lanzamiento está previsto para marzo. BEN FOLDS publicará nuevo disco el 2 de junio y hoy presenta su primer single: 'Winslow Gardens'. ‘Conmigo' es la canción más pop que han hecho Cala Vento hasta ahora. Sin guitarra ni batería. La idea nació porque cuando terminan cada concierto ponen una canción de otro artista para salir a saludar y pensaron: ¿por qué no hacer una propia? Y han creado ‘Conmigo.THE LONG RYDERS son pura energía country rock en SEPTEMBER NOVEMBER SOMETIME, nuevo adelanto que da título a su inminente nuevo disco. Presentamos hoy el segundo tema de adelanto del nuevo álbum de José Ignacio Lapido. Se titula “Creo que me he perdido algo”, y es otra brillante muestra de lo que nos espera cuando el 24 de marzo se edite “A primera sangre”. La multipremiada y enormemente influyente Feist regresa con Multitudes. PIPIOLAS representan ese pop lleno de aristas, de fantasía, en el que es imposible aburrirse. En el que hay grandes melodías, grandes arreglos, pero, sobre todo, una imaginación y una creatividad desbordantes. Su propuesta muestra una personalidad arrolladora, carisma y mucha magia. Con "Romancero Propio" nos avanzan un LP de debut lleno de sorpresas y expectativas. Laufey y su aterciopelado jazz han reinterpretado temas propios ya publicados junto a la orquesta sinfónica de islandia, como "valentine", que acaba de estrenar. “Hacia el bosque” es el título del tercer disco de Amago. Un disco conceptual, disco-libro temático, sobre el autismo que pretende concienciar a la sociedad.Y nos lo presenta al tiempo que nos habla, como experto, de salud mental. En la agenda de conciertos nos ocupamos de Los Secretos, Biznaga, Ave Alcaparra, Verona, The Golden Lips, Le Mur, La Conjura de JAC, Whisky Caravan, Valira, Bum Motion Club, El Perrete, Los Chikos del Mañiz, Bassgame Fiesta, Love Hard Techno...Se han hecho rogar, pero aquí están de nuevo Dead Beens y mantienen intacta la esencia de sus respectivos grupos , Rock'n'Roll, pop vitaminado, punk , new wave repleto de melodías pegadizas y subidones arrebatadores y una extraña capacidad para conseguir alegrarte el día. O la noche. Échale una oída a su nuevo album, "Been no beans", que les ha producido el genio Ross.

Episode one hundred and fifty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Waterloo Sunset” by the Kinks, and the self-inflicted damage the group did to their career between 1965 and 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a nineteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Excerpt From a Teenage Opera" by Keith West. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many Kinks songs. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. And this is the interview with Rasa I discuss in the episode. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start, this episode has some mentions of racism and homophobia, several discussions of physical violence, one mention of domestic violence, and some discussion of mental illness. I've tried to discuss these things with a reasonable amount of sensitivity, but there's a tabloid element to some of my sources which inevitably percolates through, so be warned if you find those things upsetting. One of the promises I made right at the start of this project was that I would not be doing the thing that almost all podcasts do of making huge chunks of the episodes be about myself -- if I've had to update people about something in my life that affects the podcast, I've done it in separate admin episodes, so the episodes themselves will not be taken up with stuff about me. The podcast is not about me. I am making a very slight exception in this episode, for reasons that will become clear -- there's no way for me to tell this particular story the way I need to without bringing myself into it at least a little. So I wanted to state upfront that this is a one-off thing. The podcast is not suddenly going to change. But one question that I get asked a lot -- far more than I'd expect -- is "do the people you talk about in the podcast ever get in touch with you about what you've said?" Now that has actually happened twice, both times involving people leaving comments on relatively early episodes. The first time is probably the single thing I'm proudest of achieving with this series, and it was a comment left on the episode on "Goodnight My Love" a couple of years back: [Excerpt: Jesse Belvin, "Goodnight My Love"] That comment was from Debra Frazier and read “Jesse Belvin is my Beloved Uncle, my mother's brother. I've been waiting all my life for him to be recognized in this manner. I must say the content in this podcast is 100% correct!Joann and Jesse practically raised me. Can't express how grateful I am. Just so glad someone got it right. I still miss them dearly to this day. My world was forever changed Feb. 6th 1960. I can remember him writing most of those songs right there in my grandmother's living room. I think I'm his last living closest relative, that knows everything in this podcast is true." That comment by itself would have justified me doing this whole podcast. The other such comment actually came a couple of weeks ago, and was on the episode on "Only You": [Excerpt: The Platters, "Only You"] That was a longer comment, from Gayle Schrieber, an associate of Buck Ram, and started "Well, you got some of it right. Your smart-assed sarcasm and know-it-all attitude is irritating since I Do know it all from the business side but what the heck. You did better than most people – with the exception of Marv Goldberg." Given that Marv Goldberg is the single biggest expert on 1950s vocal groups in the world, I'll take that as at least a backhanded compliment. So those are the only two people who I've talked about in the podcast who've commented, but before the podcast I had a blog, and at various times people whose work I wrote about would comment -- John Cowsill of the Cowsills still remembers a blog post where I said nice things about him fourteen years ago, for example. And there was one comment on a blog post I made four or five years ago which confirmed something I'd suspected for a while… When we left the Kinks, at the end of 1964, they had just recorded their first album. That album was not very good, but did go to number three in the UK album charts, which is a much better result than it sounds. Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon got to number one in 1960, but otherwise the only rock acts to make number one on the album charts from the start of the sixties through the end of 1967 were Elvis, Cliff Richard, the Shadows, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Monkees. In the first few years of the sixties they were interspersed with the 101 Strings, trad jazz, the soundtrack to West Side Story, and a blackface minstrel group, The George Mitchell Singers. From mid-1963 through to the end of 1967, though, literally the only things to get to number one on the album charts were the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Monkees, and the soundtrack to The Sound of Music. That tiny cabal was eventually broken at the end of 1967 by Val Doonican Rocks… But Gently, and from 1968 on the top of the album charts becomes something like what we would expect today, with a whole variety of different acts, I make this point to point out two things The first is that number three on the album charts is an extremely good position for the Kinks to be in -- when they reached that point the Rolling Stones' second album had just entered at number one, and Beatles For Sale had dropped to number two after eight weeks at the top -- and the second is that for most rock artists and record labels, the album market was simply not big enough or competitive enough until 1968 for it to really matter. What did matter was the singles chart. And "You Really Got Me" had been a genuinely revolutionary hit record. According to Ray Davies it had caused particular consternation to both the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds, both of whom had thought they would be the first to get to number one with a dirty, distorted, R&B-influenced guitar-riff song. And so three weeks after the release of the album came the group's second single. Originally, the plan had been to release a track Ray had been working on called "Tired of Waiting", but that was a slower track, and it was decided that the best thing to do would be to try to replicate the sound of their first hit. So instead, they released "All Day And All Of The Night": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "All Day And All Of The Night"] That track was recorded by the same team as had recorded "You Really Got Me", except with Perry Ford replacing Arthur Greenslade on piano. Once again, Bobby Graham was on drums rather than Mick Avory, and when Ray Davies suggested that he might want to play a different drum pattern, Graham just asked him witheringly "Who do you think you are?" "All Day and All of the Night" went to number two -- a very impressive result for a soundalike follow-up -- and was kept off the number one spot first by "Baby Love" by the Supremes and then by "Little Red Rooster" by the Rolling Stones. The group quickly followed it up with an EP, Kinksize Session, consisting of three mediocre originals plus the group's version of "Louie Louie". By February 1965 that had hit number one on the EP charts, knocking the Rolling Stones off. Things were going as well as possible for the group. Ray and his girlfriend Rasa got married towards the end of 1964 -- they had to, as Rasa was pregnant and from a very religious Catholic family. By contrast, Dave was leading the kind of life that can only really be led by a seventeen-year-old pop star -- he moved out of the family home and in with Mick Avory after his mother caught him in bed with five women, and once out of her watchful gaze he also started having affairs with men, which was still illegal in 1964. (And which indeed would still be illegal for seventeen-year-olds until 2001). In January, they released their third hit single, "Tired of Waiting for You". The track was a ballad rather than a rocker, but still essentially another variant on the theme of "You Really Got Me" -- a song based around a few repeated phrases of lyric, and with a chorus with two major chords a tone apart. "You Really Got Me"'s chorus has the change going up: [Plays "You Really Got Me" chorus chords] While "Tired Of Waiting For You"'s chorus has the change going down: [Plays "Tired of Waiting For You" chorus chords] But it's trivially easy to switch between the two if you play them in the same key: [Demonstrates] Ray has talked about how "Tired of Waiting for You" was partly inspired by how he felt tired of waiting for the fame that the Kinks deserved, and the music was written even before "You Really Got Me". But when they went into the studio to record it, the only lyrics he had were the chorus. Once they'd recorded the backing track, he worked on the lyrics at home, before coming back into the studio to record his vocals, with Rasa adding backing vocals on the softer middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Tired of Waiting For You"] After that track was recorded, the group went on a tour of Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. The flight out to Australia was thirty-four hours, and also required a number of stops. One stop to refuel in Moscow saw the group forced back onto the plane at gunpoint after Pete Quaife unwisely made a joke about the recently-deposed Russian Premier Nikita Khruschev. They also had a stop of a couple of days in Mumbai, where Ray was woken up by the sounds of fishermen chanting at the riverside, and enchanted by both the sound and the image. In Adelaide, Ray and Dave met up for the first time in years with their sister Rose and her husband Arthur. Ray was impressed by their comparative wealth, but disliked the slick modernity of their new suburban home. Dave became so emotional about seeing his big sister again that he talked about not leaving her house, not going to the show that night, and just staying in Australia so they could all be a family again. Rose sadly told him that he knew he couldn't do that, and he eventually agreed. But the tour wasn't all touching family reunions. They also got into a friendly rivalry with Manfred Mann, who were also on the tour and were competing with the Kinks to be the third-biggest group in the UK behind the Beatles and the Stones, and at one point both bands ended up on the same floor of the same hotel as the Stones, who were on their own Australian tour. The hotel manager came up in the night after a complaint about the noise, saw the damage that the combined partying of the three groups had caused, and barricaded them into that floor, locking the doors and the lift shafts, so that the damage could be contained to one floor. "Tired of Waiting" hit number one in the UK while the group were on tour, and it also became their biggest hit in the US, reaching number six, so on the way home they stopped off in the US for a quick promotional appearance on Hullabaloo. According to Ray's accounts, they were asked to do a dance like Freddie and the Dreamers, he and Mick decided to waltz together instead, and the cameras cut away horrified at the implied homosexuality. In fact, examining the footage shows the cameras staying on the group as Mick approaches Ray, arms extended, apparently offering to waltz, while Ray backs off nervous and confused, unsure what's going on. Meanwhile Dave and Pete on the other side of the stage are being gloriously camp with their arms around each other's shoulders. When they finally got back to the UK, they were shocked to hear this on the radio: [Excerpt: The Who, "I Can't Explain"] Ray was horrified that someone had apparently stolen the group's sound, especially when he found out it was the Who, who as the High Numbers had had a bit of a rivalry with the group. He said later "Dave thought it was us! It was produced by Shel Talmy, like we were. They used the same session singers as us, and Perry Ford played piano, like he did on ‘All Day And All Of The Night'. I felt a bit appalled by that. I think that was worse than stealing a song – they were actually stealing our whole style!” Pete Townshend later admitted as much, saying that he had deliberately demoed "I Can't Explain" to sound as much like the Kinks as possible so that Talmy would see its potential. But the Kinks were still, for the moment, doing far better than the Who. In March, shortly after returning from their foreign tour, they released their second album, Kinda Kinks. Like their first album, it was a very patchy effort, but it made number two on the charts, behind the Rolling Stones. But Ray Davies was starting to get unhappy. He was dissatisfied with everything about his life. He would talk later about looking at his wife lying in bed sleeping and thinking "What's she doing here?", and he was increasingly wondering if the celebrity pop star life was right for him, simultaneously resenting and craving the limelight, and doing things like phoning the music papers to deny rumours that he was leaving the Kinks -- rumours which didn't exist until he made those phone calls. As he thought the Who had stolen the Kinks' style, Ray decided to go in a different direction for the next Kinks single, and recorded "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", which was apparently intended to sound like Motown, though to my ears it bears no resemblance: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy"] That only went to number nineteen -- still a hit, but a worry for a band who had had three massive hits in a row. Several of the band started to worry seriously that they were going to end up with no career at all. It didn't help that on the tour after recording that, Ray came down with pneumonia. Then Dave came down with bronchitis. Then Pete Quaife hit his head and had to be hospitalised with severe bleeding and concussion. According to Quaife, he fainted in a public toilet and hit his head on the bowl on the way down, but other band members have suggested that Quaife -- who had a reputation for telling tall stories, even in a band whose members are all known for rewriting history -- was ashamed after getting into a fight. In April they played the NME Poll-Winners' Party, on the same bill as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Moody Blues, the Searchers, Freddie And The Dreamers, Herman's Hermits, Wayne Fontana & The Mindbenders, the Rockin' Berries, the Seekers, the Ivy League, Them, the Bachelors, Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, Cilla Black, Dusty Springfield, Twinkle, Tom Jones, Donovan, and Sounds Incorporated. Because they got there late they ended up headlining, going on after the Beatles, even though they hadn't won an award, only come second in best new group, coming far behind the Stones but just ahead of Manfred Mann and the Animals. The next single, "Set Me Free", was a conscious attempt to correct course after "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy" had been less successful: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Set Me Free"] The song is once again repetitive, and once again based on a riff, structured similarly to "Tired of Waiting" but faster and more upbeat, and with a Beatles-style falsetto in the chorus. It worked -- it returned the group to the top ten -- but Ray wasn't happy at writing to order. He said in August of that year “I'm ashamed of that song. I can stand to hear and even sing most of the songs I've written, but not that one. It's built around pure idiot harmonies that have been used in a thousand songs.” More recently he's talked about how the lyric was an expression of him wanting to be set free from the constraint of having to write a hit song in the style he felt he was outgrowing. By the time the single was released, though, it looked like the group might not even be together any longer. There had always been tensions in the band. Ray and Dave had a relationship that made the Everly Brothers look like the model of family amity, and while Pete Quaife stayed out of the arguments for the most part, Mick Avory couldn't. The core of the group had always been the Davies brothers, and Quaife had known them for years, but Avory was a relative newcomer and hadn't grown up with them, and they also regarded him as a bit less intelligent than the rest of the group. He became the butt of jokes on a fairly constant basis. That would have been OK, except that Avory was also an essentially passive person, who didn't want to take sides in conflicts, while Dave Davies thought that as he and Avory were flatmates they should be on the same side, and resented when Avory didn't take his side in arguments with Ray. As Dave remembered it, the trigger came when he wanted to change the setlist and Mick didn't support him against Ray. In others' recollection, it came when the rest of the band tried to get Dave away from a party and he got violent with them. Both may be true. Either way, Dave got drunk and threw a suitcase at the back of a departing Mick, who was normally a fairly placid person but had had enough, and so he turned round, furious, grabbed Dave, got him in a headlock and just started punching, blackening both his eyes. According to some reports, Avory was so infuriated with Dave that he knocked him out, and Dave was so drunk and angry that when he came to he went for Avory again, and got knocked out again. The next day, the group were driven to their show in separate cars -- the Davies brothers in one, the rhythm section in the other -- they had separate dressing rooms, and made their entrance from separate directions. They got through the first song OK, and then Dave Davies insulted Avory's drumming, spat at him, and kicked his drums so they scattered all over the stage. At this point, a lot of the audience were still thinking this was part of the act, but Avory saw red again and picked up his hi-hat cymbal and smashed it down edge-first onto Dave's head. Everyone involved says that if his aim had been very slightly different he would have actually killed Dave. As it is, Dave collapsed, unconscious, bleeding everywhere. Ray screamed "My brother! He's killed my little brother!" and Mick, convinced he was a murderer, ran out of the theatre, still wearing his stage outfit of a hunting jacket and frilly shirt. He was running away for his life -- and that was literal, as Britain still technically had the death penalty at this point; while the last executions in Britain took place in 1964, capital punishment for murder wasn't abolished until late 1965 -- but at the same time a gang of screaming girls outside who didn't know what was going on were chasing him because he was a pop star. He managed to get back to London, where he found that the police had been looking for him but that Dave was alive and didn't want to press charges. However, he obviously couldn't go back to their shared home, and they had to cancel gigs because Dave had been hospitalised. It looked like the group were finished for good. Four days after that, Ray and Rasa's daughter Louisa was born, and shortly after that Ray was in the studio again, recording demos: [Excerpt: Ray Davies, "I Go to Sleep (demo)"] That song was part of a project that Larry Page, the group's co-manager, and Eddie Kassner, their publisher, had of making Ray's songwriting a bigger income source, and getting his songs recorded by other artists. Ray had been asked to write it for Peggy Lee, who soon recorded her own version: [Excerpt: Peggy Lee, "I Go to Sleep"] Several of the other tracks on that demo session featured Mitch Mitchell on drums. At the time, Mitchell was playing with another band that Page managed, and there seems to have been some thought of him possibly replacing Avory in the group. But instead, Larry Page cut the Gordian knot. He invited each band member to a meeting, just the two of them -- and didn't tell them that he'd scheduled all these meetings at the same time. When they got there, they found that they'd been tricked into having a full band meeting, at which point Page just talked to them about arrangements for their forthcoming American tour, and didn't let them get a word in until he'd finished. At the end he asked if they had any questions, and Mick Avory said he'd need some new cymbals because he'd broken his old ones on Dave's head. Before going on tour, the group recorded a song that Ray had written inspired by that droning chanting he'd heard in Mumbai. The song was variously titled "See My Friend" and "See My Friends" -- it has been released under both titles, and Ray seems to sing both words at different times -- and Ray told Maureen Cleave "The song is about homosexuality… It's like a football team and the way they're always kissing each other.” (We will be talking about Ray Davies' attitudes towards sexuality and gender in a future episode, but suffice to say that like much of Davies' worldview, he has a weird mixture of very progressive and very reactionary views, and he is also prone to observe behaviours in other people's private lives and make them part of his own public persona). The guitar part was recorded on a bad twelve-string guitar that fed back in the studio, creating a drone sound, which Shel Talmy picked up on and heavily compressed, creating a sound that bore more than a little resemblance to a sitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friend"] If that had been released at the time, it would have made the Kinks into trend-setters. Instead it was left in the can for nearly three months, and in the meantime the Yardbirds released the similar-sounding "Heart Full of Soul", making the Kinks look like bandwagon-jumpers when their own record came out, and reinforcing a paranoid belief that Ray had started to develop that his competitors were stealing his ideas. The track taking so long to come out was down to repercussions from the group's American tour, which changed the course of their whole career in ways they could not possibly have predicted. This was still the era when the musicians' unions of the US and UK had a restrictive one-in, one-out policy for musicians, and you couldn't get a visa to play in the US without the musicians' union's agreement -- and the AFM were not very keen on the British invasion, which they saw as taking jobs away from their members. There are countless stories from this period of bands like the Moody Blues getting to the US only to find that the arrangements have fallen through and they can't perform. Around this time, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders were told they weren't notable enough to get permission to play more than one gig, even though they were at number one on the charts in the US at the time. So it took a great deal of effort to get the Kinks' first US tour arranged, and they had to make a good impression. Unfortunately, while the Beatles and Stones knew how to play the game and give irreverent, cheeky answers that still left the interviewers amused and satisfied, the Kinks were just flat-out confusing and rude: [Excerpt: The Kinks Interview with Clay Cole] The whole tour went badly. They were booked into unsuitable venues, and there were a series of events like the group being booked on the same bill as the Dave Clark Five, and both groups having in their contract that they would be the headliner. Promoters started to complain about them to their management and the unions, and Ray was behaving worse and worse. By the time the tour hit LA, Ray was being truly obnoxious. According to Larry Page he refused to play one TV show because there was a Black drummer on the same show. Page said that it was not about personal prejudice -- though it's hard to see how it could not be, at least in part -- but just picking something arbitrary to complain about to show he had the power to mess things up. While shooting a spot for the show Where The Action Is, Ray got into a physical fight with one of the other cast members over nothing. What Ray didn't realise was that the person in question was a representative for AFTRA, the screen performers' union, and was already unhappy because Dave had earlier refused to join the union. Their behaviour got reported up the chain. The day after the fight was supposed to be the highlight of the tour, but Ray was missing his wife. In the mid-sixties, the Beach Boys would put on a big Summer Spectacular at the Hollywood Bowl every year, and the Kinks were due to play it, on a bill which as well as the Beach Boys also featured the Byrds, the Righteous Brothers, Dino, Desi & Billy, and Sonny and Cher. But Ray said he wasn't going on unless Rasa was there. And he didn't tell Larry Page, who was there, that. Instead, he told a journalist at the Daily Mirror in London, and the first Page heard about it was when the journalist phoned him to confirm that Ray wouldn't be playing. Now, they had already been working to try to get Rasa there for the show, because Ray had been complaining for a while. But Rasa didn't have a passport. Not only that, but she was an immigrant and her family were from Lithuania, and the US State Department weren't exactly keen on people from the Eastern Bloc flying to the US. And it was a long flight. I don't know exactly how long a flight from London to LA took then, but it takes eleven and a half hours now, and it will have been around that length. Somehow, working a miracle, Larry Page co-ordinated with his co-managers Robert Wace and Grenville Collins back in London -- difficult in itself as Wace and Collins and Page and his business partner Eddie Kassner were by now in two different factions, because Ray had been manipulating them and playing them off against each other for months. But the three of them worked together and somehow got Rasa to LA in time for Ray to go on stage. Page waited around long enough to see that Ray had got on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, then flew back to London. He had had enough of Ray's nonsense, and didn't really see any need to be there anyway, because they had a road manager, their publisher, their agent, and plenty of support staff. He felt that he was only there to be someone for Ray Davies to annoy and take his frustrations out on. And indeed, once Page flew back to the UK, Ray calmed down, though how much of that was the presence of Rasa it's hard to say. Their road manager at the time though said "If Larry wasn't there, Ray couldn't make problems because there was nobody there to make them to. He couldn't make problems for me because I just ignored them. For example, in Hawaii, the shirts got stolen. Ray said, ‘No way am I going onstage without my shirt.' So I turned around and said to him, ‘Great, don't go on!' Of course, they went on.” They did miss the gig the next night in San Francisco, with more or less the same lineup as the Hollywood Bowl show -- they'd had problems with the promoter of that show at an earlier gig in Reno, and so Ray said they weren't going to play unless they got paid in cash upfront. When the promoter refused, the group just walked on stage, waved, and walked off. But other than that, the rest of the tour went OK. What they didn't realise until later was that they had made so many enemies on that tour that it would be impossible for them to return to the US for another four years. They weren't blacklisted, as such, they just didn't get the special treatment that was necessary to make it possible for them to visit there. From that point on they would still have a few hits in the US, but nothing like the sustained massive success they had in the UK in the same period. Ray felt abandoned by Page, and started to side more and more with Wace and Collins. Page though was still trying to promote Ray's songwriting. Some of this, like the album "Kinky Music" by the Larry Page Orchestra, released during the tour, was possibly not the kind of promotion that anyone wanted, though some of it has a certain kitsch charm: [Excerpt: The Larry Page Orchestra, "All Day And All Of The Night"] Incidentally, the guitarist on that album was Jimmy Page, who had previously played rhythm guitar on a few Kinks album tracks. But other stuff that Larry Page was doing would be genuinely helpful. For example, on the tour he had become friendly with Stone and Greene, the managers who we heard about in the Buffalo Springfield episode. At this point they were managing Sonny and Cher, and when they came over to the UK, Page took the opportunity to get Cher into the studio to cut a version of Ray's "I Go to Sleep": [Excerpt: Cher, "I Go to Sleep"] Most songwriters, when told that the biggest new star of the year was cutting a cover version of one of their tracks for her next album, would be delighted. Ray Davies, on the other hand, went to the session and confronted Page, screaming about how Page was stealing his ideas. And it was Page being marginalised that caused "See My Friend" to be delayed, because while they were in the US, Page had produced the group in Gold Star Studios, recording a version of Ray's song "Ring the Bells", and Page wanted that as the next single, but the group had a contract with Shel Talmy which said he would be their producer. They couldn't release anything Talmy hadn't produced, but Page, who had control over the group's publishing with his business partner Kassner, wouldn't let them release "See My Friend". Eventually, Talmy won out, and "See My Friend" became the group's next single. It made the top ten on the Record Retailer chart, the one that's now the official UK chart cited in most sources, but only number fifteen on the NME chart which more people paid attention to at the time, and only spent a few weeks on the charts. Ray spent the summer complaining in the music papers about how the track -- "the only one I've really liked", as he said at the time -- wasn't selling as much as it deserved, and also insulting Larry Page and boasting about his own abilities, saying he was a better singer than Andy Williams and Tony Bennett. The group sacked Larry Page as their co-manager, and legal battles between Page and Kassner on one side and Collins and Wace on the other would continue for years, tying up much of the group's money. Page went on to produce a new band he was managing, making records that sounded very like the Kinks' early hits: [Excerpt: The Troggs, "Wild Thing"] The Kinks, meanwhile, decided to go in a different direction for their new EP, Kwyet Kinks, an EP of mostly softer, folk- and country-inspired songs. The most interesting thing on Kwyet Kinks was "Well-Respected Man", which saw Ray's songwriting go in a completely different direction as he started to write gentle social satires with more complex lyrics, rather than the repetitive riff-based songs he'd been doing before. That track was released as a single in the US, which didn't have much of an EP market, and made the top twenty there, despite its use of a word that in England at the time had a double meaning -- either a cigarette or a younger boy at a public school who has to be the servant of an older boy -- but in America was only used as a slur for gay people: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Well Respected Man"] The group's next album, The Kink Kontroversy, was mostly written in a single week, and is another quickie knockoff album. It had the hit single "Til the End of the Day", another attempt at getting back to their old style of riffy rockers, and one which made the top ten. It also had a rerecorded version of "Ring the Bells", the song Larry Page had wanted to release as a single: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Ring the Bells"] I'm sure that when Ray Davies heard "Ruby Tuesday" a little over a year later he didn't feel any better about the possibility that people were stealing his ideas. The Kink Kontroversy was a transitional album for the group in many ways. It was the first album to prominently feature Nicky Hopkins, who would be an integral part of the band's sound for the next three years, and the last one to feature a session drummer (Clem Cattini, rather than Avory, played on most of the tracks). From this point on there would essentially be a six-person group of studio Kinks who would make the records -- the four Kinks themselves, Rasa Davies on backing vocals, and Nicky Hopkins on piano. At the end of 1965 the group were flailing, mired in lawsuits, and had gone from being the third biggest group in the country at the start of the year to maybe the tenth or twentieth by the end of it. Something had to change. And it did with the group's next single, which in both its sound and its satirical subject matter was very much a return to the style of "Well Respected Man". "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was inspired by anger. Ray was never a particularly sociable person, and he was not the kind to do the rounds of all the fashionable clubs like the other pop stars, including his brother, would. But he did feel a need to make some kind of effort and would occasionally host parties at his home for members of the fashionable set. But Davies didn't keep up with fashion the way they did, and some of them would mock him for the way he dressed. At one such party he got into a fistfight with someone who was making fun of his slightly flared trousers, kicked all the guests out, and then went to a typewriter and banged out a lyric mocking the guest and everyone like him: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dedicated Follower of Fashion"] The song wasn't popular with Ray's bandmates -- Dave thought it was too soft and wimpy, while Quaife got annoyed at the time Ray spent in the studio trying to make the opening guitar part sound a bit like a ukulele. But they couldn't argue with the results -- it went to number five on the charts, their biggest success since "Tired of Waiting for You" more than a year earlier, and more importantly in some ways it became part of the culture in a way their more recent singles hadn't. "Til The End of the Day" had made the top ten, but it wasn't a record that stuck in people's minds. But "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" was so popular that Ray soon got sick of people coming up to him in the street and singing "Oh yes he is!" at him. But then, Ray was getting sick of everything. In early 1966 he had a full-scale breakdown, brought on by the flu but really just down to pure exhaustion. Friends from this time say that Ray was an introverted control freak, always neurotic and trying to get control and success, but sabotaging it as soon as he attained it so that he didn't have to deal with the public. Just before a tour of Belgium, Rasa gave him an ultimatum -- either he sought medical help or she would leave him. He picked up their phone and slammed it into her face, blacking her eye -- the only time he was ever physically violent to her, she would later emphasise -- at which point it became imperative to get medical help for his mental condition. Ray stayed at home while the rest of the band went to Belgium -- they got in a substitute rhythm player, and Dave took the lead vocals -- though the tour didn't make them any new friends. Their co-manager Grenville Collins went along and with the tact and diplomacy for which the British upper classes are renowned the world over, would say things like “I understand every bloody word you're saying but I won't speak your filthy language. De Gaulle won't speak English, why should I speak French?” At home, Ray was doing worse and worse. When some pre-recorded footage of the Kinks singing "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" came on the TV, he unplugged it and stuck it in the oven. He said later "I was completely out of my mind. I went to sleep and I woke up a week later with a beard. I don't know what happened to me. I'd run into the West End with my money stuffed in my socks, I'd tried to punch my press agent, I was chased down Denmark Street by the police, hustled into a taxi by a psychiatrist and driven off somewhere. And I didn't know. I woke up and I said, ‘What's happening? When do we leave for Belgium?' And they said, ‘Ray it's all right. You had a collapse. Don't worry. You'll get better.'” He did get better, though for a long time he found himself unable to listen to any contemporary rock music other than Bob Dylan -- electric guitars made him think of the pop world that had made him ill -- and so he spent his time listening to classical and jazz records. He didn't want to be a pop star any more, and convinced himself he could quit the band if he went out on top by writing a number one single. And so he did: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Or at least, I say it's a single he wrote, but it's here that I finally get to a point I've been dancing round since the beginning of the episode. The chorus line, "In the summertime", was Rasa's suggestion, and in one of the only two interviews I've ever come across with her, for Johnny Rogan's biography of Ray, she calls the song "the only one where I wrote some words". But there's evidence, including another interview with her I'll talk about in a bit, that suggests that's not quite the case. For years, I thought it was an interesting coincidence that Ray Davies' songwriting ability follows a curve that almost precisely matches that of his relationship with Rasa. At the start, he's clearly talented -- "You Really Got Me" is a great track -- but he's an unformed writer and most of his work is pretty poor stuff. Then he marries Rasa, and his writing starts to become more interesting. Rasa starts to regularly contribute in the studio, and he becomes one of the great songwriters of his generation. For a five-year period in the mid-to-late-sixties, the period when their marriage is at its strongest, Ray writes a string of classic songs that are the equal of any catalogue in popular music. Then around 1970 Rasa stops coming to the studio, and their marriage is under strain. The records become patchier -- still plenty of classic tracks, but a lot more misses. And then in 1973, she left him, and his songwriting fell off a cliff. If you look at a typical Ray Davies concert setlist from 2017, the last time he toured, he did twenty songs, of which two were from his new album, one was the Kinks' one-off hit "Come Dancing" from 1983, and every other song was from the period when he and Rasa were married. Now, for a long time I just thought that was interesting, but likely a coincidence. After all, most rock songwriters do their most important work in their twenties, divorces have a way of messing people's mental health up, musical fashions change… there are a myriad reasons why these things could be like that. But… the circumstantial evidence just kept piling up. Ray's paranoia about people stealing his ideas meant that he became a lot more paranoid and secretive in his songwriting process, and would often not tell his bandmates the titles of the songs, the lyrics, or the vocal melody, until after they'd recorded the backing tracks -- they would record the tracks knowing the chord changes and tempo, but not what the actual song was. Increasingly he would be dictating parts to Quaife and Nicky Hopkins in the studio from the piano, telling them exactly what to play. But while Pete Quaife thought that Ray was being dictatorial in the studio and resented it, he resented something else more. As late as 1999 he was complaining about, in his words, "the silly little bint from Bradford virtually running the damn studio", telling him what to do, and feeling unable to argue back even though he regarded her as "a jumped-up groupie". Dave, on the other hand, valued Rasa's musical intuition and felt that Ray was the same. And she was apparently actually more up-to-date with the music in the charts than any of the band -- while they were out on the road, she would stay at home and listen to the radio and make note of what was charting and why. All this started to seem like a lot of circumstantial evidence that Rasa was possibly far more involved in the creation of the music than she gets credit for -- and given that she was never credited for her vocal parts on any Kinks records, was it too unbelievable that she might have contributed to the songwriting without credit? But then I found the other interview with Rasa I'm aware of, a short sidebar piece I'll link in the liner notes, and I'm going to quote that here: "Rasa, however, would sometimes take a very active role during the writing of the songs, many of which were written in the family home, even on occasion adding to the lyrics. She suggested the words “In the summertime” to ‘Sunny Afternoon', it is claimed. She now says, “I would make suggestions for a backing melody, sing along while Ray was playing the song(s) on the piano; at times I would add a lyric line or word(s). It was rewarding for me and was a major part of our life.” That was enough for me to become convinced that Rasa was a proper collaborator with Ray. I laid all this out in a blog post, being very careful how I phrased what I thought -- that while Ray Davies was probably the principal author of the songs credited to him (and to be clear, that is definitely what I think -- there's a stylistic continuity throughout his work that makes it very clear that the same man did the bulk of the work on all of it), the songs were the work of a writing partnership. As I said in that post "But even if Rasa only contributed ten percent, that seems likely to me to have been the ten percent that pulled those songs up to greatness. Even if all she did was pull Ray back from his more excessive instincts, perhaps cause him to show a little more compassion in his more satirical works (and the thing that's most notable about his post-Rasa songwriting is how much less compassionate it is), suggest a melodic line should go up instead of down at the end of a verse, that kind of thing… the cumulative effect of those sorts of suggestions can be enormous." I was just laying out my opinion, not stating anything as a certainty, though I was morally sure that Rasa deserved at least that much credit. And then Rasa commented on the post, saying "Dear Andrew. Your article was so informative and certainly not mischaracterised. Thank you for the 'history' of my input working with Ray. As I said previously, that time was magical and joyous." I think that's as close a statement as we're likely to get that the Kinks' biggest hits were actually the result of the songwriting team of Davies and Davies, and not of Ray alone, since nobody seems interested at all in a woman who sang on -- and likely co-wrote -- some of the biggest hit records of the sixties. Rasa gets mentioned in two sentences in the band's Wikipedia page, and as far as I can tell has only been interviewed twice -- an extensive interview by Johnny Rogan for his biography of Ray, in which he sadly doesn't seem to have pressed her on her songwriting contributions, and the sidebar above. I will probably continue to refer to Ray writing songs in this and the next episode on the Kinks, because I don't know for sure who wrote what, and he is the one who is legally credited as the sole writer. But… just bear that in mind. And bear it in mind whenever I or anyone else talk about the wives and girlfriends of other rock stars, because I'm sure she's not the only one. "Sunny Afternoon" knocked "Paperback Writer" off the number one spot, but by the time it did, Pete Quaife was out of the band. He'd fallen out with the Davies brothers so badly that he'd insisted on travelling separately from them, and he'd been in a car crash that had hospitalised him for six weeks. They'd quickly hired a temporary replacement, John Dalton, who had previously played with The Mark Four, the group that had evolved into The Creation. They needed him to mime for a TV appearance pretty much straight away, so they asked him "can you play a descending D minor scale?" and when he said yes he was hired -- because the opening of "Sunny Afternoon" used a trick Ray was very fond of, of holding a chord in the guitars while the bass descends in a scale, only changing chord when the notes would clash too badly, and then changing to the closest possible chord: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Sunny Afternoon"] Around this time, the group also successfully renegotiated their contract with Pye Records, with the help of a new lawyer they had been advised to get in touch with -- Allen Klein. As well as helping renegotiate their contracts, Klein also passed on a demo of one of Ray's new songs to Herman's Hermits. “Dandy” was going to be on the Kinks' next album, but the Hermits released it as a single in the US and took it into the top ten: [Excerpt: Herman's Hermits, “Dandy”] In September, Pete Quaife formally quit the band -- he hadn't played with them in months after his accident -- and the next month the album Face To Face, recorded while Quaife was still in the group, was released. Face to Face was the group's first really solid album, and much of the album was in the same vein as "Sunny Afternoon" -- satirical songs that turned on the songwriter as much as on the people they were ostensibly about. It didn't do as well as the previous albums, but did still make the top twenty on the album chart. The group continued work, recording a new single, "Dead End Street", a song which is musically very similar to "Sunny Afternoon", but is lyrically astonishingly bleak, dealing with poverty and depression rather than more normal topics for a pop song. The group produced a promotional film for it, but the film was banned by the BBC as being in bad taste, as it showed the group as undertakers. But the single happened to be released two days after the broadcast of "Cathy Come Home", the seminal drama about homelessness, which suddenly brought homelessness onto the political agenda. While "Dead End Street" wasn't technically about homelessness, it was close enough that when the TV programme Panorama did a piece on the subject, they used "Dead End Street" to soundtrack it. The song made the top five, an astonishing achievement for something so dark: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Dead End Street"] But the track also showed the next possible breach in the Kinks' hitmaking team -- when it was originally recorded, Shel Talmy had produced it, and had a French horn playing, but after he left the session, the band brought in a trombone player to replace the French horn, and rerecorded it without him. They would continue working with him for a little while, recording some of the tracks for their next album, but by the time the next single came out, Talmy would be out of the picture for good. But Pete Quaife, on the other hand, was nowhere near as out of the group as he had seemed. While he'd quit the band in September, Ray persuaded him to rejoin the band four days before "Dead End Street" came out, and John Dalton was back to working in his day job as a builder, though we'll be hearing more from him. The group put out a single in Europe, "Mr. Pleasant", a return to the style of "Well Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion": [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Mr. Pleasant”] That was a big hit in the Netherlands, but it wasn't released in the UK. They were working on something rather different. Ray had had the idea of writing a song called "Liverpool Sunset", about Liverpool, and about the decline of the Merseybeat bands who had been at the top of the profession when the Kinks had been starting out. But then the Beatles had released "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", and Ray hadn't wanted to release anything about Liverpool's geography and look like he had stolen from them, given his attitudes to plagiarism. He said later "I sensed that the Beatles weren't going to be around long. When they moved to London, and ended up in Knightsbridge or wherever, I was still in Muswell Hill. I was loyal to my origins. Maybe I felt when they left it was all over for Merseybeat.” So instead, he -- or he and Rasa -- came up with a song about London, and about loneliness, and about a couple, Terry and Julie -- Terry was named after his nephew Terry who lived in Australia, while Julie's name came from Julie Christie, as she was then starring in a film with a Terry, Terrence Stamp: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] It's interesting to look at the musical inspirations for the song. Many people at the time pointed out the song's similarity to "Winchester Cathedral" by the New Vaudeville Band, which had come out six months earlier with a similar melody and was also named after a place: [Excerpt: The New Vaudeville Band, "Winchester Cathedral"] And indeed Spike Milligan had parodied that song and replaced the lyrics with something more London-centric: [Excerpt: Spike Milligan, "Tower Bridge"] But it seems likely that Ray had taken inspiration from an older piece of music. We've talked before about Ferd Grofe in several episodes -- he was the one who orchestrated the original version of "Rhapsody in Blue", who wrote the piece of music that inspired Don Everly to write "Cathy's Clown", and who wrote the first music for the Novachord, the prototype synthesiser from the 1930s. As we saw earlier, Ray was listening to a lot of classical and jazz music rather than rock at this point, and one has to wonder if, at some point during his illness the previous year, he had come across Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy, which Grofe had written for Paul Whiteman's band in 1928, very much in the style of "Rhapsody in Blue", and this section, eight and a half minutes in, in particular: [Excerpt: Paul Whiteman, "Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy" ] "Waterloo Sunset" took three weeks to record. They started out, as usual, with a backing track recorded without the rest of the group knowing anything about the song they were recording -- though the group members did contribute some ideas to the arrangement, which was unusual by this point. Pete Quaife contributed to the bass part, while Dave Davies suggested the slapback echo on the guitar: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset, Instrumental Take 2"] Only weeks later did they add the vocals. Ray had an ear infection, so rather than use headphones he sang to a playback through a speaker, which meant he had to sing more gently, giving the vocal a different tone from his normal singing style: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And in one of the few contributions Rasa made that has been generally acknowledged, she came up with the "Sha la la" vocals in the middle eight: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] And the idea of having the track fade out on cascading, round-like vocals: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Waterloo Sunset"] Once again the Kinks were at a turning point. A few weeks after "Waterloo Sunset" came out, the Monterey Pop Festival finally broke the Who in America -- a festival the Kinks were invited to play, but had to turn down because of their visa problems. It felt like the group were being passed by -- Ray has talked about how "Waterloo Sunset" would have been another good point for him to quit the group as he kept threatening to, or at least to stay home and just make the records, like Brian Wilson, while letting the band tour with Dave on lead vocals. He decided against it, though, as he would for decades to come. That attitude, of simultaneously wanting to be part of something and be a distanced, dispassionate observer of it, is what made "Waterloo Sunset" so special. As Ray has said, in words that seem almost to invoke the story of Moses: "it's a culmination of all my desires and hopes – it's a song about people going to a better world, but somehow I stayed where I was and became the observer in the song rather than the person who is proactive . . . I did not cross the river. They did and had a good life apparently." Ray stayed with the group, and we'll be picking up on what he and they did next in about a year's time. "Waterloo Sunset" went to number two on the charts, and has since become the most beloved song in the Kinks' whole catalogue. It's been called "the most beautiful song in the English language", and "the most beautiful song of the rock 'n' roll era", though Ray Davies, ever self-critical when he's not being self-aggrandising, thinks it could be improved upon. But most of the rest of us disagree. As the song itself says, "Waterloo Sunset's fine".

Their eighteenth studio album found The Kinks moving in a different direction than many previous albums.  Low Budget would address many contemporary issues in song, rather than the subtle pieces and nostalgia found on earlier albums.  The Kinks also recorded much of the album in New York rather than London.  The result charted well in the United States, reaching number 11 on the Billboard 200.  It did not do well in their native Britain.The band members of The Kinks for this album were Ray Davies on guitar, keyboards, and vocals, Dave Davies on guitar and background vocals, Jim Rodford on bass and background vocals, and Mick Avory on drums.  They are joined in the studio by Nick Newall on saxophone and Gordon Edwards (briefly a member of the group) playing piano on the title track.  Ray Davies wrote all the tracks on this album.The album was more heavily produced than other albums and took a harder edge, which was appropriate for their arena rock phase for the group.  There were a lot of diverse songs as well, led by the disco-infused lead single, "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman."   Catch Me Now I'm FallingThe second track from the album uses Captain America as a surrogate for the United States, and criticizes the U.S. as a country fallen on hard times, and its allies as not coming the the need of America despite earlier times when the allies were help by America during and after World War II.  The song was released as a single, but only in the U.S.PressureA high speed deeper cut, this song looks at pressure as a contagious disease, one that can be spread from one person to another, but which also can take over when you're alone.  This song has a decidedly punk flavor.  The call and response sound in the vocals gives it a more manic feel as well.(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman The lead and biggest single from the album reached number 41 on U.S. charts.  Ray Davies was inspired to write the lyrics by the release of "Superman:  The Movie" in the previous year.  The disco feel was difficult for the band to achieve.  The song itself tells of a desire to take on modern problems like Superman, though the protagonist is nothing like the invincible super hero.Low BudgetThe title track leads off the second side of the album.  It describes a man learning to live much more frugally due to hard economic times.  The song was in line with the recessionary malaise of the times, though people could identify with it when living through any recession. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:The Main Theme to the motion picture The Amityville HorrorThis popular horror show convinced us all to stay away from houses that say, "Get Out!" STAFF PICKS:You Can't Change That by RaydioBruce leads off the staff picks with an American R&B and Funk band. Raydio is Arnell Carmichael and Darren Carmichael on vocals, Charles Fearing on guitars, Larry Tolbert on percussion, and Ray Parker, Jr. on vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards, and primary songwriter.  This song went to number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and features Arnell Carmichael on high vocals and Ray Parker, Jr. on low vocals.Goodbye (Astrid, Goodbye)  by Cold ChiselRob's staff pick may not be well known in the U.S., but is a hit from Australia.  In fact, Cold Chisel has been listed as the number 3 favorite Australian band as rated by Australian musicians, behind AC/DC and INXS, but ahead of Midnight Oil and Crowded House.  This rocking song with a boogie beat is about a guy who is hitting the road, and was designed as a set finisher.I Don't Like Mondays by the Boomtown RatsWayne brings us a cult hit that was inspired by a school shooting in California.  The piano-driven piece didn't chart in the U.S. but has had staying power over time.  Front man Bob Geldof heard the original story of the shooting while doing an interview at WRAS radio out of Georgia State.  Geldof regretted doing the song because it made the shooter famous.Heart of the Night by PocoBrian  wraps up the staff picks on a mellow note.  This is from the album "The Legend."   Writer Paul Cotton said this song was inspired by his "love and lust for New Orleans,"  and that the song practically wrote itself.  Phil Kinsey, who performed on saxophone on Al Stewart's "Year of the Cat" is featured on alto sax on this song.   INSTRUMENTAL TRACK:Morning Dance by Spyro GyraThis jazz fusion piece was on the charts in the summer of 1979 and closes out of podcast this week.  

In Episode 46 of Retrosonic Podcast, Steve from Retro Man Blog welcomes The Chords & The Fallen Leaves drummer Buddy Ascott for an update on his recent musical adventures. We cover The 79'ers tour with The Vapors, recent shows with The Fallen Leaves and his production work with Proper. There's also news on his charity bass drum skin which he is getting signed by as many famous drummers as possible to auction for the Roll Out The Barrel water-aid trust. So far there's the signatures of Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, Clem Burke of Blondie, Rick Buckler of The Jam, John Maher of Buzzcocks, Mick Avory of The Kinks and many more. We actually interrupt the podcast to capture the very last autograph, that of Terry Chambers of XTC. There's music from The Vapors, The Chords and XTC and then we play and discuss some new superb new releases from Ruts DC, The Price, Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Eels, The Len Price 3, The Wedding Present with Louise Wener, Lester Square, Telefis with Jah Wobble, The Jukeez, Goodbye Victory Road and Tiny Flaws. For the full tracklist and links for more information on each band and how you can buy their music please check out the feature at Retro Man Blog below: https://retroman65.blogspot.com/2022/02/retrosonic-podcast-episode-46-stupidly.html Retrosonic Podcast has a valid PRS licence.

This episode reflects back on The Kinks legacy of brilliant British Pop music featuring the talented songwriting genius of Ray Davies. His legacy of songs has touched rock audiences for almost 60 years now. He is a true music Legend in the same sense that John Lennon, Paul McCartney Pete Townshend and Mick Jagger are. This episode skims the surface of his musical inventiveness. Also:Listen to previous shows at the main webpage at:https://www.buzzsprout.com/1329053Pamela Des Barres Home page for books, autographs, clothing and online writing classes.Pamela Des Barres | The Official Website of the Legendary Groupie and Author (pameladesbarresofficial.com)Listen to more music by Laurie Larson at:Home | Shashké Music and Art (laurielarson.net)View the most amazing paintings by Marijke Koger-Dunham (Formally of the 1960's artists collective, "The Fool").Psychedelic, Visionary and Fantasy Art by Marijke Koger (marijkekogerart.com)For unique Candles have a look at Stardust Lady's Etsy shopWhere art and armor become one where gods are by TwistedByStardust (etsy.com)For your astrological chart reading, contact Astrologer Tisch Aitken at:https://www.facebook.com/AstrologerTisch/View and purchase wonderful art by Patricia Rodriguez at:patriciarodriguez (tigerbeearts.com)Tarot card readings by Kalinda available atThe Mythical Muse | FacebookI'm listed in Feedspot's "Top 10 Psychedelic Podcasts You Must Follow". https://blog.feedspot.com/psychedelic_podcasts/

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "G.T.O." by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I've used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks' Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don't want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a record that has often been called "the first heavy metal record", one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We're going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We're going to look at the Kinks, and at "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older -- their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray's thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she'd had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it's possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing "Apache", Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins' version of "Malaguena": [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, "Malaguena"] Ray's newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them -- and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things.  And it wasn't just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy's tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Did You Leave Heaven?"] Like Broonzy's earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians -- you'll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton -- but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation's taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy's performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him -- even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet -- though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing "No Trespassing" by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, "No Trespassing"] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin' Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start's mother thought the young lad's raspy voice was so awful she wouldn't let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn't like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children's parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn't see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave's songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling -- he was kicked out for "Teddy Boy behaviour", but his main problem was that he didn't feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people.  Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society's showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones' early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band's repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece "Honky Tonk Train Blues", which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby's Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, "Honky Tonk Train Blues"] But while the group were extremely good musicians -- their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies -- Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Ramrod"] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special", which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as "Big Bill Broonzy with drums": [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, "Country Line Special"] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make.  But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods -- who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils -- John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn't like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and "manager" Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett's friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils.  Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal -- he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn't exactly a success -- Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn't want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn't singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d'Abo's band A Band of Angels -- d'Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren't. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren't already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal -- Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group's earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song "I'm A Hog For You Baby": [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, "I'm A Hog For You Baby"] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, "I Believed You": [Excerpt: The Ravens, "I Believed You"] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names -- at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn't to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group's self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name "Larry Page, the Teenage Rage" -- a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer's insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, "That'll be the Day"] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He'd teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for "Rock Around the Clock" for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York.  Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page's management income, Kassner would give Page's acts songs, and any song Page's acts wrote would be published by Kassner.  Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements -- independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he'd produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of "Surfin' Safari" by the Beach Boys, and one of "Music in the Air" by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe's office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like "Charmaine" by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, "Charmaine"] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and "kinky" had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as "kinky boots". Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, "Kinky Boots", in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, "Kinky Boots"] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group "the Kinks", as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks' bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles' gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles' reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school -- though he still didn't think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal,  and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally", and that they hadn't yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Long Tall Sally"] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him "Congratulations, you just made a flop", and they were correct -- the Kinks' version had none of the power of Little Richard's original or of the Beatles' version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as "Bits and Pieces": [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, "Bits and Pieces"] It's also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies' rhythm parts for him on most of the group's early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What's definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn't available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn't want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in.  Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available.  Avory wouldn't play on the next few records -- Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity -- but he was available for the group's first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks' stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn't get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were "OK as they are". Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave's "One Fine Day", a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, "One Fine Day"] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray's "I've Got That Feeling": [Excerpt: The Orchids, "I've Got That Feeling"] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting -- at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write -- he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words "I", "Me", and "You" in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible.  This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group's next single, "You Still Want Me", a Merseybeat pastiche that didn't even do as well as the group's first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Still Want Me"] The group were now in trouble. They'd had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for "You Really Got Me" many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan's performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer's Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, "As Catch Can"] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like "Parchman Farm": [Excerpt: Mose Allison, "Parchman Farm"] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained  the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song's final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the "you" and "me" based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn't a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he'd pointed Ray to "Louie Louie" by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, "Louie Louie"] Ray was instantly inspired by "Louie Louie", which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line "Yeah, you really got me going," Page suggested that instead he sing "Girl, you really got me going", partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group's sexuality was already coming in for some question -- Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word "girl" might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We've heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course -- on "Rocket '88", and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n' Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich's demo of "Do-Wah-Diddy", but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies' reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox -- but it's very rarely been done as well as it was on "You Really Got Me": [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of "You Really Got Me" has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that's not the case -- that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song.  Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn't want it released. Pye were insistent -- they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group's management had faith in their singer's vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn't come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled "Oh no!" with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he'd distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "You Really Got Me"] "You Really Got Me" was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option -- so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, "Stop Your Sobbing", showed a giant leap forward in Ray's songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "Stop Your Sobbing"] There may be a reason for that. "Stop Your Sobbing" features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks' circle, Ray's new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group's records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we'll see some of the influence she had on the group.

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As usual, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. I’ve used several resources for this and future episodes on the Kinks, most notably Ray Davies: A Complicated Life by Johnny Rogan and You Really Got Me by Nick Hasted. X-Ray by Ray Davies is a remarkable autobiography with a framing story set in a dystopian science-fiction future, while Kink by Dave Davies is more revealing but less well-written. The Anthology 1964-1971 is a great box set that covers the Kinks’ Pye years, which overlap almost exactly with their period of greatest creativity. For those who don’t want a full box set, this two-CD set covers all the big hits. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a record that has often been called “the first heavy metal record”, one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted, guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts. We’re going to look at the first singles by a group who would become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the sixties, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development. We’re going to look at the Kinks, and at “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davies, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older — their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray. The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities. Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature. Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother but never really got to know him. Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever. Rene, the second-oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray’s thirteenth birthday. Ray had been unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday, Rene gave him one as his birthday present. She then went out to a dance hall. She did this even though she’d had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition. The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone. She died that night, aged only thirty-one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar. For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he ended up actually seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it’s possible to imagine. But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar. He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins. Pete Quaife would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quaife could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing “Apache”, Davies could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins’ version of “Malaguena”: [Excerpt: Chet Atkins, “Malaguena”] Ray’s newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness. Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion, so if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them — and then Ray could play them, and spend his own money on other things. And it wasn’t just pop music that the two of them were getting into, either. A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a sixteen-minute documentary about Big Bill Broonzy’s tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Did You Leave Heaven?”] Like Broonzy’s earlier appearances on Six-Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians — you’ll see clips from it both in the Beatles Anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton — but it particularly affected Ray Davies for two reasons. The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation’s taste in music, and his father approved of Broonzy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers. The other reason was that Broonzy’s performance sounded authentic to him. He said later that he thought that Broonzy sounded like him — even though Broonzy was Black and American, he sounded *working class* (and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davies did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were). Soon Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quaife and John Start, as a trio. Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davies Quartet — though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaife Quartet or the Dave Davies Quartet. The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing “No Trespassing” by the Ventures: [Excerpt: The Ventures, “No Trespassing”] Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower, rockabilly, songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lightnin’ Hopkins material, but at first they thought they needed a lead singer. They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to who sang with them at a couple of gigs, but John Start’s mother thought the young lad’s raspy voice was so awful she wouldn’t let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn’t like having another big ego in the group, so Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekkers and left them with no lead singer. But that was far from the worst problem the Davies brothers had. When Dave was fifteen, he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant. The two were very much in love, and wanted to get married, but both children’s parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again. Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn’t see his daughter for thirty years. The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave’s songwriting in the sixties. Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colour-blind. Quaife also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling — he was kicked out for “Teddy Boy behaviour”, but his main problem was that he didn’t feel comfortable as a working-class lad mixing with Bohemian middle-class people. Ray, on the other hand, was in his element. While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working-class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the college film society’s showings of films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa and Truffaut, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry. Davies also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the film society, and also started branching out into playing with other people. After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Korner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davies went up to Korner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world. Korner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gomelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones’ early gigs, and Gomelsky got Davies an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band. Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGuinness thought that the Dave Hunt band were too close to trad for his tastes. Davies, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing trad along with the blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davies Quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group. Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt band’s repertoire included things like the old Meade Lux Lewis boogie piece “Honky Tonk Train Blues”, which they would play in the style of Bob Crosby’s Bobcats: [Excerpt: Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, “Honky Tonk Train Blues”] But while the group were extremely good musicians — their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain and was a big part of the Canterbury Scene in the seventies — Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother. While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them. The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Duane Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had see live: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, “Ramrod”] Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London R&B scene. Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”, which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as “Big Bill Broonzy with drums”: [Excerpt: Cyril Davies, “Country Line Special”] That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nicky Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave, and Pete would make. But not John. Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods — who soon changed their name again to the Boll Weevils — John Start decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums, and become a quantity surveyor. There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn’t like Ray Davies, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled, person. Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group. Willett was an experienced musician, who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and “manager” Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett’s friends in the music business pointed them in the direction of the Boll Weevils. Robert Wace offered the Boll Weevils a deal — he could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show. Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Boll Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn’t exactly a success — Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless. Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn’t want the group, and nothing further came of it. This is particularly odd because at the time Ray wasn’t singing any solo leads. Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else. The group were soon favourites on the circuit of society balls, where their only real competition was Mike d’Abo’s band A Band of Angels — d’Abo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper class society in a way that the Boll Weevils weren’t. However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren’t already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage. It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils. They came to a deal — Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get fifty percent of the group’s earnings. Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo. They recorded two songs, the old Coasters song “I’m A Hog For You Baby”: [Excerpt: The Boll Weevils, “I’m A Hog For You Baby”] and a Merseybeat pastiche written by Dave Davies, “I Believed You”: [Excerpt: The Ravens, “I Believed You”] It shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names — at some point around the time of the recording session, the Boll Weevils changed their name yet again, to The Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allen Poe poem. This lineup of the Ravens wasn’t to last too long, though. Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group’s self-appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management. Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement. Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group. The person they turned to was Larry Page. This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google, rather he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name “Larry Page, the Teenage Rage” — a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer’s insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK: [Excerpt: Larry Page, “That’ll be the Day”] After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Page had briefly tried working in other fields, before going into management. He’d teamed up with Eddie Kassner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing. Kassner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for “Rock Around the Clock” for two hundred and fifty dollars, and had become incredibly rich, with offices in both London and New York. Page and Kassner had entered into a complicated business arrangement by which Kassner got a percentage of Page’s management income, Kassner would give Page’s acts songs, and any song Page’s acts wrote would be published by Kassner. Kassner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements — independent producer Shel Talmy. Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles, and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there he might as well see if he could get some work. Talmy was a good friend of Nik Venet, and Venet gave him a stack of acetates of recent Capitol records that he’d produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work. Talmy took an acetate of “Surfin’ Safari” by the Beach Boys, and one of “Music in the Air” by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe’s office and told Rowe he had produced them. Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques, but either way Rowe hired him to produce records for Decca as an independent contractor, and Talmy started producing hits like “Charmaine” by the Bachelors: [Excerpt: The Bachelors, “Charmaine”] Page, Kassner, Talmy, and Rowe all worked hand in glove with each other, with Page managing artists, Kassner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them and Rowe signing them to his record label. And so by contacting Page, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal. They cut Page in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Kassner, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group. The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgement he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca. They had already been turned down by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pye records, the same label as the Searchers. Around the time they signed to Pye, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers. In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a Cabinet minister had attended orgies as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgement of the concept of BDSM, and “kinky” had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather-clad Honor Blackman in the TV show The Avengers being publicised as “kinky boots”. Blackman and her co-star Patrick MacNee even put out a novelty single, “Kinky Boots”, in February 1964: [Excerpt: Patrick MacNee and Honor Blackman, “Kinky Boots”] Page decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davies and Pete Quaife it would make sense to call the group “the Kinks”, as a name that would generate plenty of outrage but was still just about broadcastable. None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now The Kinks. The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more when a promoter and booking agent got involved. Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly-named Kinks’ bookings primarily because he booked all the Beatles’ gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles’ reflected glory as they could get. Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school — though he still didn’t think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star. He did, though, think that if he was lucky he could make enough money from six months of being a full time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia. Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single. Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”, and that they hadn’t yet recorded the song. He phoned Page from Paris, at enormous expense, and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone. The group worked up a version with Ray on lead, and recorded it three days later: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Long Tall Sally”] Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him “Congratulations, you just made a flop”, and they were correct — the Kinks’ version had none of the power of Little Richard’s original or of the Beatles’ version, and only scraped its way to number forty-two on the charts. As they had no permanent drummer, for that record, and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Cattini. Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark Five such as “Bits and Pieces”: [Excerpt: The Dave Clark Five, “Bits and Pieces”] It’s also been reported by various people, notably Shel Talmy, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davies’ rhythm parts for him on most of the group’s early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself who insists that he played the parts. What’s definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davies played all the lead guitar. However, the group needed a full-time drummer. Dave Davies wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of the Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn’t available they turned instead to Mick Avory, who they found through an ad in the Melody Maker. Avory had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn’t want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in. Avory was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davies took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avory, but accepted that he was the best drummer available. Avory wouldn’t play on the next few records — Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avory was a bit of an unknown quantity — but he was available for the group’s first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark Five and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance, on Ready Steady Go. That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of R&B standards that all the London R&B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people. Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks’ stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn’t get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were “OK as they are”. Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page/Kassner/Talmy stable of artists. With Talmy producing, Shel Naylor recorded Dave’s “One Fine Day”, a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway but is actually quite catchy: [Excerpt: Shel Naylor, “One Fine Day”] And Talmy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing Ray’s “I’ve Got That Feeling”: [Excerpt: The Orchids, “I’ve Got That Feeling”] Page also co-wrote a couple of instrumentals with Ray, who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting — at this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore. Page saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write — he had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience. He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words “I”, “Me”, and “You” in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible. This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group’s next single, “You Still Want Me”, a Merseybeat pastiche that didn’t even do as well as the group’s first record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Still Want Me”] The group were now in trouble. They’d had two flop singles in a row, on a three-single contract. It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single. Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner. Ray had come up with the basic melody for “You Really Got Me” many years earlier. The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece inspired by Gerry Mulligan’s performance in the classic documentary Jazz On A Summer’s Day: [Excerpt: Gerry Mulligan, “As Catch Can”] From there it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins style guitar instrumental and then into a piece in the style of Mose Allison, the jazz and R&B singer who was a huge influence on the more Mod end of the British R&B scene with records like “Parchman Farm”: [Excerpt: Mose Allison, “Parchman Farm”] Through all of this, the basic melody had remained the same, as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing. But the song’s final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page. As well as the “you” and “me” based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn’t a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was to concentrate on riffs. In particular, he’d pointed Ray to “Louie Louie” by the Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pye, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that: [Excerpt: The Kingsmen, “Louie Louie”] Ray was instantly inspired by “Louie Louie”, which the Kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it. It seems also to have been Page who made one minor change to the lyric of the song. Where Ray had started the song with the line “Yeah, you really got me going,” Page suggested that instead he sing “Girl, you really got me going”, partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group’s sexuality was already coming in for some question — Dave Davies is bisexual, and Ray has always been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality. Starting with the word “girl” might help reassure people about that somewhat. But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave, rather than Ray. Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife. He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new, larger, amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy, sound which was almost unknown in Britain at the time. We’ve heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course — on “Rocket ’88”, and on some of the Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Greenwich’s demo of “Do-Wah-Diddy”, but those had been odd one-offs. Dave Davies’ reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox — but it’s very rarely been done as well as it was on “You Really Got Me”: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] But that introduction, and the classic record that followed, nearly never happened. The original recording of “You Really Got Me” has been lost, but it was apparently very different. Ray and Dave Davies have said that Shel Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spector soundalike, and drenched the whole thing with echo. Talmy, for his part, says that that’s not the case — that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different but equally valid take on the song. Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn’t want it released. Pye were insistent — they had a contract, and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said. But luckily the group’s management had faith in their singer’s vision. Larry Page insisted that as he and Kassner owned the publishing, the record couldn’t come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket. The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmy, went back into the studio. The first take of the new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talmy would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take. And that second take was extraordinary. Going into the solo, Ray yelled “Oh no!” with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he’d distracted Dave at the crucial moment. Instead, he delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “You Really Got Me”] “You Really Got Me” was released on the fourth of August 1964, and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September. It was also released in the US, and made the top ten over there. The Kinks were suddenly huge, and Pye Records quickly exercised their option — so quickly, that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August. The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor R&B covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album in particular, “Stop Your Sobbing”, showed a giant leap forward in Ray’s songwriting: [Excerpt: The Kinks, “Stop Your Sobbing”] There may be a reason for that. “Stop Your Sobbing” features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks’ circle, Ray’s new girlfriend Rasa Didzpetris, who would become a regular feature on the group’s records for the next decade. And when we next look at the Kinks, we’ll see some of the influence she had on the group.

Episode one hundred and nineteen of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks, and the song that first took distorted guitar to number one. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Ed Masley, a music critic for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com, joins You, Me and An Album to introduce me to The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. In addition to explaining what makes this his favorite album, Ed discusses his love for the Kinks more generally and how he became a music critic. He also mentions that he co-wrote a song with someone who has previously appeared on this podcast.You can find Ed on Twitter at @EdMasley, and you can find the music from his band, The Breakup Society, on Bandcamp at https://thebreakupsociety.bandcamp.com/.Ed mentioned that the song, Picture Book was featured on a Hewlett Packard ad. You can view the ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOnif6BC0kc. 1:19 Ed joins the show1:37 How Ed became a music critic4:07 Does it help to be a musician when being a music critic?5:24 What has Ed been covering during the pandemic?8:54 Which three underrated albums does Ed recommend?14:57 What is it about the Kinks that appeals to Ed so much?21:30 Why Al was lukewarm about Village Green23:15 Al doesn't like 60s rock?!?26:47 Is Tim Booth of James influenced by Ray Davies?29:19 Village Green was a grower, even for Ed Breaking down the tracks (not in order)32:28 We Are The Village Green Preservation Society37:44 Do You Remember Walter?40:30 Picture Book46:14 Big Sky 48:12 The Kinks were not afraid to experiment with different styles50:31 The common theme between Village Green and Waterloo Sunset 54:33 Phenomenal Cat57:23 Wicked Annabella 58:40 Ed asked Ringo Starr about Mick Avory 1:04:06 Animal Farm1:06:31 Village Green1:08:42 People Take Pictures of Each Other1:11:53 Starstruck1:14:34 All My Friends Were There The outro music is Strength Was Always Your Weakness by The Breakup Society. 

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “The Monkey Time” by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “The Monkey Time” by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on “The Monkey Time” by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Information on Chris Barber comes from Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber by Barber and Alyn Shopton. Information on Alexis Korner comes from Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. Two resources that I’ve used for this and all future Stones episodes — The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. I’ve also used Andrew Loog Oldham’s autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards’ Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. This compilation contains Alexis Korner’s pre-1963 electric blues material, while this contains the earlier skiffle and country blues music. The live performances by Chris Barber and various blues legends I’ve used here come from volumes one and two of a three-CD series of these recordings. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones’ singles up to 1971.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we’re going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the sixties, sum up what “rock music” means to most people. This is all the more surprising as when they started out they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as “rock and roll”. We’re going to look at the London blues scene of the early sixties, and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music, going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made. We’re going to look at the Rolling Stones, and at “I Wanna Be Your Man”: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] The Rolling Stones’ story doesn’t actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won’t be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British blues scene that they formed in. One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn’t cover people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in the early episodes — after all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists. It didn’t, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown. But those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber. We’ve seen Barber before, in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything. On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made. He is a trombone player from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine — his parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work (he turned it down but accepted a CBE), but Clement Atlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network, and became hooked on jazz. By the time the war ended, when he was fifteen, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and more — records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s. And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes: [Excerpt: Sleepy John Estes, “Milk Cow Blues”] In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain’s pre-eminent traditional jazz trombonist — a position he held until he retired last year, aged eighty-nine — but he wasn’t just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he’d ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze when his guitarist recorded an old Lead Belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on “Rock Island Line”. If that had been Barber’s only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important — after all, without “Rock Island Line”, it’s likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the fifties and sixties on a single hand. But he did far more than that. In the mid to late fifties, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music. He didn’t have a breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released “Petit Fleur”, engineered by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chris Barber, “Petit Fleur”] And Barber didn’t even play on that – it was a clarinet solo by his clarinettist Monty Sunshine. But long before this big chart success he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio, and he was hugely appreciated among music lovers. A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead — a band who aren’t releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fanbase and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits. And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever. Because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure Black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him. And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians. Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R&B. Those who liked modern jazz — a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano — unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone-based R&B. Their R&B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R&B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R&B movement of the sixties came from this scene — people like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Manfred Mann all come from this modernist scene. But the trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive-sounding jazz. Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax — who came to the UK for a crucial period in the fifties to escape McCarthyism — and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax’s friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the Delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano. This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player Alexis Korner. These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Johnson’s early recordings before his later pop success. They liked solo male performers who played guitar. These two scenes were geographically close — the Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquee, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R&B in the UK. And there wasn’t a perfect hard-and-fast split, as we’ll see — but it’s generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British “blues scene” was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes, based in a pre-existing split in the jazz world. Barber was, of course, part of the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent. But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Colyer, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes. Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate — and more importantly play — music in a variety of styles. So Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Broonzy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he’d found out Robert Johnson was dead. It was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy got to record with Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, “When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?”] And it was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy appeared on Six-Five Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is. If you watch the Beatles Anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Broonzy is the only blues musician specifically named. That’s because of Chris Barber. Broonzy toured with Barber several times in the fifties, before his death in 1958, but he wasn’t the only one. Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we’ve looked at previously. Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers. The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan and the Chris Barber band, “Tain’t Nobody’s Business”] And we’re lucky enough that many of the Barber band’s shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we’ll talk about in later episodes) were recorded and have since been released. With those recordings we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Chris Barber band, “Peace in the Valley”] Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and the Chris Barber band, “This Little Light of Mine”] And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson. But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music. Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges. You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians’ unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US and vice versa, and the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up. Through the NJF Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters. Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how you’d reach Muddy Waters — did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something? Lewis laughed, and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent. The reason for Barber’s confusion was fairly straightfoward — Barber was thinking of Waters’ early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax. Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941. He’d travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress — apparently he didn’t know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier. When he couldn’t find Johnson, he’d found another musician, who had a similar style, and recorded him instead. Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to — Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever — but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson’s biggest influence. Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “I Be’s Troubled”] Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes — Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy’s record-lending library and then stolen it because he liked it so much.  But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star), harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.  Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he’d been performing acoustically: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “I Can’t Be Satisfied”] But soon he’d partnered with Chess’ great bass player, songwriter, and producer Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess’ other big star Howlin’ Wolf. Throughout the early fifties, Waters had a series of hits on the R&B charts with his electric blues records, like the great “Hoochie Coochie Man”, which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] But by the late fifties, the hits had started to dry up. Waters was still making great records, but Chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized R&B ones. So Waters and his pianist Otis Spann were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them. Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters’ current repertoire. Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of modern jazz players who didn’t really fit his style before joining the Barber tour, and so he and Spann were a little worried on their first night with the group when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets. But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of “Hoochie Coochie Man” to introduce their guests, Waters and Spann’s faces lit up — they knew these were musicians they could play with, and they fit in with Barber’s band perfectly: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and the Chris Barber band, “Hoochie Coochie Man”] Not everyone watching the tour was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though — the audiences were often bemused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues. Waters, like many of his contemporaries, was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected. The time after that he came over, though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues. Because Muddy Waters’ first UK tour had developed a fanbase for him, and that fanbase had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber. Alexis Korner had started out in the Ken Colyer band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donegan when Donegan was conscripted. After Donegan had rejoined the band, they’d played together for a while, and the first ever British skiffle group lineup had been Ken and Bill Colyer, Korner, Donegan, and Barber. When the Colyers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Korner had gone with the Colyers, mostly because he didn’t like the fact that Donegan was introducing country and folk elements into skiffle, while Korner liked the blues. As a result, Korner had sung and played on the very first ever British skiffle record, the Ken Colyer group’s version of “Midnight Special”: [Excerpt: The Ken Colyer Skiffle Group, “Midnight Special”] After that, Korner had also backed Beryl Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Cyril Davies: [Excerpt: Beryl Bryden Skiffle Group, “This Train”] But Korner and Davies had soon got sick of skiffle as it developed — they liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Korner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan’s singing — he’d even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber band while both he and Donegan were still in the band — and what Donegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English music-hall songs, Korner saw as watering down the music. Korner and Donegan had a war of words in the pages of Melody Maker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain. Korner started with an article headlined “Skiffle is Piffle”, in which he said in part: “It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement…British skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success. But musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment”. Donegan replied pointing out that Korner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Korner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn’t skiffle, it was the blues. You can judge for yourself whether the “Blues From the Roundhouse” EP, by Alexis Korner’s Breakdown Group, which featured Korner, Davies on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner’s Breakdown Group, “Skip to My Lou”] But soon Korner and Davies had changed their group’s name to Blues Incorporated, and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davies in particular liked. [Excerpt: Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated feat. Cyril Davies, “Death Letter”] But after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Korner got more involved with the folk scene. At a party hosted by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, he met the folk guitarist Davey Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele’s lyricist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its factional differences. Korner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, “3/4 AD”] But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his shows. Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was secretary of the National Jazz Federation. They co-owned a club, the Marquee, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second-biggest rock festival in Britain. Barber had a residency at the Marquee, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there. He had a singer — his wife, Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith mould — and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows. He asked Korner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Korner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots, and so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Cyril Davies rejoining Korner. The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Korner on electric guitar, Davies on harmonica, and Chris Barber plus Barber’s trumpet player Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members. The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous — the idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same lineup from one show to the next. For example, their classic album R&B From The Marquee, which wasn’t actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Good, features Korner, Davies, sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Heatley on bass, Graham Burbridge on drums, and Long John Baldry on vocals: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, “How Long How Long Blues”] But Burbridge wasn’t their regular drummer — that was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts. And they had a lot of singers. Baldry was one of their regulars, as was Art Wood (who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn’t yet involved with these players). When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker. When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Heckstall-Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce. Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn’t bring his guitar, he’d just sing with them. So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis. A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two. And one time Eric Burdon hitch-hiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group. He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Korner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man. Korner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number. At the end of the song Korner introduced them — “Eric Burdon from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger”. Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities. He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show. Soon after, Davies left the group — he wanted to play strictly Chicago style blues, but Korner wanted to play other types of R&B. The final straw for Davies came when Korner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ — it was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far. Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar-playing friend for a song or two — they’d play a Chuck Berry song, to Davies’ disapproval. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years. Then one day they’d bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger’s arm — one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he’d ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago because they weren’t out in the UK yet. They’d bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and R&B music: [Excerpt: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, “Beautiful Delilah”] Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called The Rollin’ Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his. He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine. Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones — Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues. Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band R&B like Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential. They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avory. And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential. Jagger agreed to join, but only if his mates Dick and Keith could join the band. Jones was a little hesitant — Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that. He probably even listened to Elvis. Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity. But eventually Jones agreed — though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart’s piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically “and you must be the Chuck Berry artist”. Their first gig was at the Marquee, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn’t make their regular gig. Taylor and Avory soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal: [Excerpt: The Rollin’ Stones, “You Can’t Judge a Book By its Cover”] By this point, Jones, Richards, and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalour. Jones was managing the group (and pocketing some of the money for himself) and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded. Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player — they didn’t like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it — he had a really good amplifier that they wanted — but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.  They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Korner’s wife Bobbie, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early 1963. Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style — Watts would play jazz-inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast, throbbing, quavers. The Rollin’ Stones were now a six-person group, and they were good. They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R&B. Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with. Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Colyer’s club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around. Gomelsky thought of himself as the group’s manager, though he didn’t have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelsky this. Jones booked the group in at the IBC studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs: [Excerpt: The Rollin’ Stones, “Diddley Daddy”] Gomelsky started getting the group noticed. He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off — even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn’t have any money to heat the flat. The group’s live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group. And the magazine’s editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he’d already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work. He’d worked for Mary Quant, the designer who’d popularised the miniskirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars. Most recently, he’d taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles’ London press agent. But he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he’d found them. Oldham knew nothing about R&B, didn’t like it, and didn’t care — he liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain’s answer to Phil Spector. But he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it. He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager. However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings — at the time in Britain you needed an agent’s license to get bookings, and you needed to be twenty-one to get the license. He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them — even though he’d not even talked to the group about it. Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and his other Liverpool groups. At that point Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner. He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music-hall organ player before moving over to the management side and whose big clients were Bert Weedon and Mrs. Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a base. Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV, but Easton agreed that the group had promise — though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of. The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group’s leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton. Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups. Jones, as the group’s leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal. One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Phil Spector and which he’d taken to heart was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label, and that’s what Oldham and Easton did. They formed a company called Impact, and went into the studio with the Stones and recorded the song they performed which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called “Come On” — though they changed Berry’s line about a “stupid jerk” to being about a “stupid guy”, in order to make sure the radio would play it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Come On”] During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to mic up the piano. His plans didn’t include Ian Stewart. Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record — the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn’t poppy enough. But they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them. The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it’s usually told — that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stones biographies, or that they were appearing together on Juke Box Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say — are false, and so it’s likely that the story is made up. Decca wanted the Stones to rerecord the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released. The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group. Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group. He became their road manager, and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next twenty-two years, until his death — he just wasn’t allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.  That wasn’t the only change Oldham made — he insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones, with a g, not Rollin’. He also changed Keith Richards’ surname, dropping the s to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again. “Come On” made number twenty-one in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single. Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success. Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs — nothing seemed right. Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song. Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham. They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be OK for the group. The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them. The result became the Stones’ second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number twelve. The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing — as Lennon said of the song, “We weren’t going to give them anything great, were we?”: [Excerpt: The Beatles, “I Wanna Be Your Man”] For a B-side, the group did a song called “Stoned”, which was clearly “inspired” by “Green Onions”: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, “Stoned”] That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanker Phelge — Nanker after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Phelge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Phelge. As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it. When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton’s time with the group. But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realisation — if you’re going to make records you need songs, and you can’t just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single. No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Loog Oldham was going to make them into writers. We’ll see how that went in a few weeks’ time, when we pick up on their career.  

Episode 108 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Rolling Stones and how the British blues scene of the early sixties was started by a trombone player. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have an eight-minute bonus episode available, on "The Monkey Time" by Major Lance. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. i used a lot of resources for this episode. Information on Chris Barber comes from Jazz Me Blues: The Autobiography of Chris Barber by Barber and Alyn Shopton. Information on Alexis Korner comes from Alexis Korner: The Biography by Harry Shapiro. Two resources that I've used for this and all future Stones episodes -- The Rolling Stones: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesden is an invaluable reference book, while Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis is the least inaccurate biography. I've also used Andrew Loog Oldham's autobiography Stoned, and Keith Richards' Life, though be warned that both casually use slurs. This compilation contains Alexis Korner's pre-1963 electric blues material, while this contains the earlier skiffle and country blues music. The live performances by Chris Barber and various blues legends I've used here come from volumes one and two of a three-CD series of these recordings. And this three-CD set contains the A and B sides of all the Stones' singles up to 1971.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today we're going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the sixties, sum up what "rock music" means to most people. This is all the more surprising as when they started out they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as "rock and roll". We're going to look at the London blues scene of the early sixties, and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music, going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made. We're going to look at the Rolling Stones, and at "I Wanna Be Your Man": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] The Rolling Stones' story doesn't actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won't be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British blues scene that they formed in. One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn't cover people like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf in the early episodes -- after all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists. It didn't, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown. But those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber. We've seen Barber before, in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything. On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made. He is a trombone player from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine -- his parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work (he turned it down but accepted a CBE), but Clement Atlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network, and became hooked on jazz. By the time the war ended, when he was fifteen, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton and more -- records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s. And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes: [Excerpt: Sleepy John Estes, "Milk Cow Blues"] In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain's pre-eminent traditional jazz trombonist -- a position he held until he retired last year, aged eighty-nine -- but he wasn't just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he'd ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze when his guitarist recorded an old Lead Belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on "Rock Island Line". If that had been Barber's only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important -- after all, without "Rock Island Line", it's likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the fifties and sixties on a single hand. But he did far more than that. In the mid to late fifties, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music. He didn't have a breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released "Petit Fleur", engineered by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chris Barber, "Petit Fleur"] And Barber didn't even play on that – it was a clarinet solo by his clarinettist Monty Sunshine. But long before this big chart success he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio, and he was hugely appreciated among music lovers. A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead -- a band who aren't releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fanbase and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits. And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever. Because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure Black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him. And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians. Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R&B. Those who liked modern jazz -- a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano -- unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone-based R&B. Their R&B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R&B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R&B movement of the sixties came from this scene -- people like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Manfred Mann all come from this modernist scene. But the trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive-sounding jazz. Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax -- who came to the UK for a crucial period in the fifties to escape McCarthyism -- and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax's friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the Delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano. This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player Alexis Korner. These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Lonnie Johnson's early recordings before his later pop success. They liked solo male performers who played guitar. These two scenes were geographically close -- the Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquee, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R&B in the UK. And there wasn't a perfect hard-and-fast split, as we'll see -- but it's generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British "blues scene" was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes, based in a pre-existing split in the jazz world. Barber was, of course, part of the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent. But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Colyer, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes. Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate -- and more importantly play -- music in a variety of styles. So Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Broonzy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he'd found out Robert Johnson was dead. It was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy got to record with Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Big Bill Broonzy, "When Do I Get to Be Called a Man?"] And it was because of Barber bringing Broonzy over that Broonzy appeared on Six-Five Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is. If you watch the Beatles Anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Broonzy is the only blues musician specifically named. That's because of Chris Barber. Broonzy toured with Barber several times in the fifties, before his death in 1958, but he wasn't the only one. Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we've looked at previously. Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers. The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan: [Excerpt: Louis Jordan and the Chris Barber band, "Tain't Nobody's Business"] And we're lucky enough that many of the Barber band's shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall (a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we'll talk about in later episodes) were recorded and have since been released. With those recordings we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharpe: [Excerpt: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Chris Barber band, "Peace in the Valley"] Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee: [Excerpt: Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and the Chris Barber band, "This Little Light of Mine"] And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson. But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music. Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges. You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians' unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US and vice versa, and the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up. Through the NJF Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the Modern Jazz Quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters. Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how you'd reach Muddy Waters -- did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something? Lewis laughed, and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent. The reason for Barber's confusion was fairly straightfoward -- Barber was thinking of Waters' early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax. Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941. He'd travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress -- apparently he didn't know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier. When he couldn't find Johnson, he'd found another musician, who had a similar style, and recorded him instead. Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to -- Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever -- but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson's biggest influence. Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Be's Troubled"] Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes -- Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy's record-lending library and then stolen it because he liked it so much.  But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmie Rodgers (not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star), harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.  Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he'd been performing acoustically: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "I Can't Be Satisfied"] But soon he'd partnered with Chess' great bass player, songwriter, and producer Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess' other big star Howlin' Wolf. Throughout the early fifties, Waters had a series of hits on the R&B charts with his electric blues records, like the great "Hoochie Coochie Man", which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] But by the late fifties, the hits had started to dry up. Waters was still making great records, but Chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized R&B ones. So Waters and his pianist Otis Spann were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them. Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters' current repertoire. Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of modern jazz players who didn't really fit his style before joining the Barber tour, and so he and Spann were a little worried on their first night with the group when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets. But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of "Hoochie Coochie Man" to introduce their guests, Waters and Spann's faces lit up -- they knew these were musicians they could play with, and they fit in with Barber's band perfectly: [Excerpt: Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, and the Chris Barber band, "Hoochie Coochie Man"] Not everyone watching the tour was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though -- the audiences were often bemused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues. Waters, like many of his contemporaries, was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected. The time after that he came over, though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues. Because Muddy Waters' first UK tour had developed a fanbase for him, and that fanbase had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber. Alexis Korner had started out in the Ken Colyer band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donegan when Donegan was conscripted. After Donegan had rejoined the band, they'd played together for a while, and the first ever British skiffle group lineup had been Ken and Bill Colyer, Korner, Donegan, and Barber. When the Colyers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Korner had gone with the Colyers, mostly because he didn't like the fact that Donegan was introducing country and folk elements into skiffle, while Korner liked the blues. As a result, Korner had sung and played on the very first ever British skiffle record, the Ken Colyer group's version of "Midnight Special": [Excerpt: The Ken Colyer Skiffle Group, "Midnight Special"] After that, Korner had also backed Beryl Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Cyril Davies: [Excerpt: Beryl Bryden Skiffle Group, "This Train"] But Korner and Davies had soon got sick of skiffle as it developed -- they liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Korner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan's singing -- he'd even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber band while both he and Donegan were still in the band -- and what Donegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English music-hall songs, Korner saw as watering down the music. Korner and Donegan had a war of words in the pages of Melody Maker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain. Korner started with an article headlined "Skiffle is Piffle", in which he said in part: "It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement...British skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success. But musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment". Donegan replied pointing out that Korner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Korner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn't skiffle, it was the blues. You can judge for yourself whether the “Blues From the Roundhouse” EP, by Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group, which featured Korner, Davies on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner's Breakdown Group, "Skip to My Lou"] But soon Korner and Davies had changed their group's name to Blues Incorporated, and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davies in particular liked. [Excerpt: Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated feat. Cyril Davies, "Death Letter"] But after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Korner got more involved with the folk scene. At a party hosted by Ramblin' Jack Elliot, he met the folk guitarist Davey Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele's lyricist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its factional differences. Korner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while: [Excerpt: Alexis Korner and Davey Graham, "3/4 AD"] But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his shows. Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was secretary of the National Jazz Federation. They co-owned a club, the Marquee, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second-biggest rock festival in Britain. Barber had a residency at the Marquee, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there. He had a singer -- his wife, Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith mould -- and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows. He asked Korner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Korner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots, and so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Cyril Davies rejoining Korner. The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Korner on electric guitar, Davies on harmonica, and Chris Barber plus Barber's trumpet player Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members. The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous -- the idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same lineup from one show to the next. For example, their classic album R&B From The Marquee, which wasn't actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Good, features Korner, Davies, sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Heatley on bass, Graham Burbridge on drums, and Long John Baldry on vocals: [Excerpt: Blues Incorporated, "How Long How Long Blues"] But Burbridge wasn't their regular drummer -- that was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts. And they had a lot of singers. Baldry was one of their regulars, as was Art Wood (who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn't yet involved with these players). When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker. When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Heckstall-Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce. Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn't bring his guitar, he'd just sing with them. So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis. A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two. And one time Eric Burdon hitch-hiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group. He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Korner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man. Korner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number. At the end of the song Korner introduced them -- "Eric Burdon from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger". Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities. He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show. Soon after, Davies left the group -- he wanted to play strictly Chicago style blues, but Korner wanted to play other types of R&B. The final straw for Davies came when Korner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ -- it was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far. Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar-playing friend for a song or two -- they'd play a Chuck Berry song, to Davies' disapproval. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years. Then one day they'd bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger's arm -- one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he'd ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago because they weren't out in the UK yet. They'd bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and R&B music: [Excerpt: Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, "Beautiful Delilah"] Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called The Rollin' Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his. He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine. Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones -- Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues. Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band R&B like Wynonie Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential. They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avory. And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential. Jagger agreed to join, but only if his mates Dick and Keith could join the band. Jones was a little hesitant -- Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that. He probably even listened to Elvis. Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity. But eventually Jones agreed -- though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart's piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically "and you must be the Chuck Berry artist". Their first gig was at the Marquee, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn't make their regular gig. Taylor and Avory soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal: [Excerpt: The Rollin' Stones, "You Can't Judge a Book By its Cover"] By this point, Jones, Richards, and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalour. Jones was managing the group (and pocketing some of the money for himself) and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded. Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player -- they didn't like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it -- he had a really good amplifier that they wanted -- but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.  They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Korner's wife Bobbie, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early 1963. Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style -- Watts would play jazz-inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast, throbbing, quavers. The Rollin' Stones were now a six-person group, and they were good. They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelsky, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R&B. Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with. Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Colyer's club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around. Gomelsky thought of himself as the group's manager, though he didn't have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelsky this. Jones booked the group in at the IBC studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed songs: [Excerpt: The Rollin' Stones, "Diddley Daddy"] Gomelsky started getting the group noticed. He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off -- even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn't have any money to heat the flat. The group's live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group. And the magazine's editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Loog Oldham. Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he'd already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work. He'd worked for Mary Quant, the designer who'd popularised the miniskirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars. Most recently, he'd taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles' London press agent. But he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he'd found them. Oldham knew nothing about R&B, didn't like it, and didn't care -- he liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain's answer to Phil Spector. But he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it. He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager. However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings -- at the time in Britain you needed an agent's license to get bookings, and you needed to be twenty-one to get the license. He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them -- even though he'd not even talked to the group about it. Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and his other Liverpool groups. At that point Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner. He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music-hall organ player before moving over to the management side and whose big clients were Bert Weedon and Mrs. Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a base. Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday Night at the London Palladium on the TV, but Easton agreed that the group had promise -- though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of. The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group's leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton. Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups. Jones, as the group's leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal. One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Phil Spector and which he'd taken to heart was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label, and that's what Oldham and Easton did. They formed a company called Impact, and went into the studio with the Stones and recorded the song they performed which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called "Come On" -- though they changed Berry's line about a "stupid jerk" to being about a "stupid guy", in order to make sure the radio would play it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Come On"] During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to mic up the piano. His plans didn't include Ian Stewart. Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record -- the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn't poppy enough. But they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them. The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it's usually told -- that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stones biographies, or that they were appearing together on Juke Box Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say -- are false, and so it's likely that the story is made up. Decca wanted the Stones to rerecord the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released. The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group. Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group. He became their road manager, and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next twenty-two years, until his death -- he just wasn't allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.  That wasn't the only change Oldham made -- he insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones, with a g, not Rollin'. He also changed Keith Richards' surname, dropping the s to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again. "Come On" made number twenty-one in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single. Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success. Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs -- nothing seemed right. Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney. They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song. Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham. They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be OK for the group. The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them. The result became the Stones' second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number twelve. The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it: [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing -- as Lennon said of the song, "We weren't going to give them anything great, were we?": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Wanna Be Your Man"] For a B-side, the group did a song called "Stoned", which was clearly "inspired" by "Green Onions": [Excerpt: The Rolling Stones, "Stoned"] That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanker Phelge -- Nanker after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Phelge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Phelge. As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it. When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton's time with the group. But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realisation -- if you're going to make records you need songs, and you can't just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single. No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Loog Oldham was going to make them into writers. We'll see how that went in a few weeks' time, when we pick up on their career.  

One of the final tracks to feature Mick Avory on drums and, without Dave, a fine example for Ray's ability as a guitar player.

This song came from the first sessions after Mick Avory left the band and it shows.

Pat and Guest Co-Host Mario Del Barrio go track by track through the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Kinks classic album "Arthur."

This unique film review draws on archive concert film of the Kinks in performance and documentary footage from television and radio archives around the world, along with extensive interviews with former band members to produce the true story of the Kinks in their own words. The film features frank interviews with former Kinks band members, including drummer Mick Avory, Kinks bassist John Dalton and keys player John ‘The Baptist’ Gosling, along with archive interviews of Dave Davies.

This unique film review draws on archive concert film of the Kinks in performance and documentary footage from television and radio archives around the world, along with extensive interviews with former band members to produce the true story of the Kinks in their own words. The film features frank interviews with former Kinks band members, including drummer Mick Avory, Kinks bassist John Dalton and keys player John ‘The Baptist’ Gosling, along with archive interviews of Dave Davies.Here at Music Legends Magazine we break the mould of traditional music magazines by offering a fantastic suite of free video podcasts. This content is designed to complement and expand upon the key articles in the magazine using exclusive footage and interviews that we hope you will love. Please feel free to browse the available podcasts here on PodBean, or simply scan the QR code at the bottom of articles to take you straight to the relevant page.  Thanks for watching! – The Music Legends Team.  

This unique film review draws on archive concert film of the Kinks in performance and documentary footage from television and radio archives around the world, along with extensive interviews with former band members to produce the true story of the Kinks in their own words. The film features frank interviews with former Kinks band members, including drummer Mick Avory, Kinks bassist John Dalton and keys player John ‘The Baptist’ Gosling, along with archive interviews of Dave Davies.Here at Music Legends Magazine we break the mould of traditional music magazines by offering a fantastic suite of free video podcasts. This content is designed to complement and expand upon the key articles in the magazine using exclusive footage and interviews that we hope you will love. Please feel free to browse the available podcasts here on PodBean, or simply scan the QR code at the bottom of articles to take you straight to the relevant page.  Thanks for watching! – The Music Legends Team. 

This unique film review draws on archive concert film of the Kinks in performance and documentary footage from television and radio archives around the world, along with extensive interviews with former band members to produce the true story of the Kinks in their own words. The film features frank interviews with former Kinks band members, including drummer Mick Avory, Kinks bassist John Dalton and keys player John ‘The Baptist’ Gosling, along with archive interviews of Dave Davies.Here at Music Legends Magazine we break the mould of traditional music magazines by offering a fantastic suite of free video podcasts. This content is designed to complement and expand upon the key articles in the magazine using exclusive footage and interviews that we hope you will love. Please feel free to browse the available podcasts here on PodBean, or simply scan the QR code at the bottom of articles to take you straight to the relevant page.  Thanks for watching! – The Music Legends Team. 

This unique film review draws on archive concert film of the Kinks in performance and documentary footage from television and radio archives around the world, along with extensive interviews with former band members to produce the true story of the Kinks in their own words. The film features frank interviews with former Kinks band members, including drummer Mick Avory, Kinks bassist John Dalton and keys player John ‘The Baptist’ Gosling, along with archive interviews of Dave Davies.Here at Music Legends Magazine we break the mould of traditional music magazines by offering a fantastic suite of free video podcasts. This content is designed to complement and expand upon the key articles in the magazine using exclusive footage and interviews that we hope you will love. Please feel free to browse the available podcasts here on PodBean, or simply scan the QR code at the bottom of articles to take you straight to the relevant page.  Thanks for watching! – The Music Legends Team. 

The Kinks – der ud over Ray Davies bestod af lillebror Dave på guitar, Pete Quaife på bas (afløst i 1969 af John Dalton) og Mick Avory på trommer – udsendte i perioden 1964 til 1971 en røvfuld stildannende singler på pladeselskabet Pye, heriblandt klassikere som ”You Really Got Me”, ”Sunny Afternoon”, ”Waterloo Sunset” og ”Lola”. Det blev også til ni lp’er i perioden, ikke mindst mesterværkerne Face to Faceog The Village Green Preservation Society. I processen skabte gruppen den lyd og attitude, der i 1990erne kaldtes Britpop.At denne Raymond Douglas Davies er en af 60’er-rockens vigtigste og mest velformulerede sangskrivere, er hævet over enhver tvivl. Her hyldes han og The Kinks med en stribe kanoniserede klassikere suppleret med nogle af værternes personlige favoritter. Playliste:You Really Got Me (1964) Tired of Waiting for You (1965)See My Friends (1965)Where Have All the Good Times Gone (1965)  A Dedicated Follower of Fashion (1966)I’m Not Like Everybody Else (1966) Lead vocal: Dave DaviesSunny Afternoon (1966)Too Much on My Mind (1966)Dead End Street (1966)Waterloo Sunset (1967)Death of a Clown (1967) Lead vocal: Dave DaviesDavid Watts (1967)No Return (1967)Autumn Almanac (1967)Days (1968)Big Sky (1968)Phenomenal Cat (1968)Shangri-La (1969)Victoria (1969)Lola (“Cherry Cola Version”, 1970)God’s Children (1971)Foto af The KinksCredit: Sanctuary Records

Gestur þáttarins að þessu sinni er Jens Ólafsson, Jenni söngvari hljómsveitarinnar Brainpolice. Brainpolice er að spila á Gauknum í kvöld í kringum miðnættið. Jenni er í stuttu stoppi á landinu en hann hefur búið í Danmörku í næstum áratug. Plata þáttarins er Þriðja plata bresku hljómsveitarinnar The Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy sem kom út 26. nóvember 1965, skömmu eftir að Kinks spilaði í Austurbæjarbíói í Reykjavík. Á þessari plötu sýnir Ray Davies nýja takta sem áttu eftir að einkenna hann og hans lagasmíðar árn á eftir, en á plötunni eru líka blús-rokkarar eins og sveitin hafði helst verið þekkt fyrir til þess tíma þegar platan kom út, lög eins og Milk Cow Blues. Kinks þótti gríðarega svalt band á þessum tíma og góður maður sagði einu sinni: Stelpurnar hlustuðu á Bítlana og strákarnir á Stones. En töffararnir hlustuðu á Kinks. Þeir þóttu óstýrilátir og stundum brutust úr slagsmál á sviðinu mili manna. Það og fleira varð til þess að þeir voru ekki velkomnir til Bandaríkjanna þegar breska innrásin til Bandaríkjanna stóð hvað hæst. Phobia heitir 23ja plata Kinks og jafnframt sú sem síðast kom út. Hún kom út 1993. Það hefur næstum stöðugt síðan verið talað um endurkomu Kinks en svo er alltaf eitthvað sem stoppar það, ósamkomulag, veikindi eða eitthvað annað. En núna lítur állt út fyrir að eitthvað sé að gerast hjá þeim Ray og Dave Davies og upphaflega trommaranum Mick Avory. Það var sagt frá því síðasta sumar að þeir þrír væru að byrja að vinna við plötu, taka upp lög sem Ray Davies er búinn að sanka að sér fyrir Kinks á undanförnum árum. Bassaleikarinn Pete Quaife lést 2010 og er þess vegna ekki með. Óskalagasíminn verður opnaður (5687-123) um kl. 20 og A+B er svo að þessu sinni með Mötley Crue. Hér er lagalisti þáttarins: Brainpolice - Jacuzzi Suzy Dimma - Ég brenn Clutch - Electric worry Hellacopters - Carry me home Hole - Celibrity skin Lucy in blue - In flight SÍMATÍMI The Kinks - Gotta get the first plane home (plata þáttarins) Blind Dog - Iron cage (óskalag) Aerosmith - Dude looks like a lady (óskalag) The Palth - Please babt please Rock paper Sisters - Howling fool Queen - Dead on time (óskalag) Jet Black Joe - Fuzz (óskalag) Love/Hate - Don´t fuck with me (óskalag) Black Sabbath - Sweat Leaf The Kinks - Where have all the good times gone (plata þáttarins) Utangarðsmenn - Þór GESTUR FUZZ - Jenni úr Brainpolice Brainpolice - Jacuzzy Suzy JENNI II Soundgarden - Rusty cage JENNI III Soundgarden - Mind riot Rammstein - Deutchland A+B Mötley Crue - Girls girls girls (A) Mötley Crue - Sumthin' for nuthin'

Gestur þáttarins að þessu sinni er Jens Ólafsson, Jenni söngvari hljómsveitarinnar Brainpolice. Brainpolice er að spila á Gauknum í kvöld í kringum miðnættið. Jenni er í stuttu stoppi á landinu en hann hefur búið í Danmörku í næstum áratug. Plata þáttarins er Þriðja plata bresku hljómsveitarinnar The Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy sem kom út 26. nóvember 1965, skömmu eftir að Kinks spilaði í Austurbæjarbíói í Reykjavík. Á þessari plötu sýnir Ray Davies nýja takta sem áttu eftir að einkenna hann og hans lagasmíðar árn á eftir, en á plötunni eru líka blús-rokkarar eins og sveitin hafði helst verið þekkt fyrir til þess tíma þegar platan kom út, lög eins og Milk Cow Blues. Kinks þótti gríðarega svalt band á þessum tíma og góður maður sagði einu sinni: Stelpurnar hlustuðu á Bítlana og strákarnir á Stones. En töffararnir hlustuðu á Kinks. Þeir þóttu óstýrilátir og stundum brutust úr slagsmál á sviðinu mili manna. Það og fleira varð til þess að þeir voru ekki velkomnir til Bandaríkjanna þegar breska innrásin til Bandaríkjanna stóð hvað hæst. Phobia heitir 23ja plata Kinks og jafnframt sú sem síðast kom út. Hún kom út 1993. Það hefur næstum stöðugt síðan verið talað um endurkomu Kinks en svo er alltaf eitthvað sem stoppar það, ósamkomulag, veikindi eða eitthvað annað. En núna lítur állt út fyrir að eitthvað sé að gerast hjá þeim Ray og Dave Davies og upphaflega trommaranum Mick Avory. Það var sagt frá því síðasta sumar að þeir þrír væru að byrja að vinna við plötu, taka upp lög sem Ray Davies er búinn að sanka að sér fyrir Kinks á undanförnum árum. Bassaleikarinn Pete Quaife lést 2010 og er þess vegna ekki með. Óskalagasíminn verður opnaður (5687-123) um kl. 20 og A+B er svo að þessu sinni með Mötley Crue. Hér er lagalisti þáttarins: Brainpolice - Jacuzzi Suzy Dimma - Ég brenn Clutch - Electric worry Hellacopters - Carry me home Hole - Celibrity skin Lucy in blue - In flight SÍMATÍMI The Kinks - Gotta get the first plane home (plata þáttarins) Blind Dog - Iron cage (óskalag) Aerosmith - Dude looks like a lady (óskalag) The Palth - Please babt please Rock paper Sisters - Howling fool Queen - Dead on time (óskalag) Jet Black Joe - Fuzz (óskalag) Love/Hate - Don´t fuck with me (óskalag) Black Sabbath - Sweat Leaf The Kinks - Where have all the good times gone (plata þáttarins) Utangarðsmenn - Þór GESTUR FUZZ - Jenni úr Brainpolice Brainpolice - Jacuzzy Suzy JENNI II Soundgarden - Rusty cage JENNI III Soundgarden - Mind riot Rammstein - Deutchland A+B Mötley Crue - Girls girls girls (A) Mötley Crue - Sumthin' for nuthin'

Gestur þáttarins að þessu sinni er Jens Ólafsson, Jenni söngvari hljómsveitarinnar Brainpolice. Brainpolice er að spila á Gauknum í kvöld í kringum miðnættið. Jenni er í stuttu stoppi á landinu en hann hefur búið í Danmörku í næstum áratug. Plata þáttarins er Þriðja plata bresku hljómsveitarinnar The Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy sem kom út 26. nóvember 1965, skömmu eftir að Kinks spilaði í Austurbæjarbíói í Reykjavík. Á þessari plötu sýnir Ray Davies nýja takta sem áttu eftir að einkenna hann og hans lagasmíðar árn á eftir, en á plötunni eru líka blús-rokkarar eins og sveitin hafði helst verið þekkt fyrir til þess tíma þegar platan kom út, lög eins og Milk Cow Blues. Kinks þótti gríðarega svalt band á þessum tíma og góður maður sagði einu sinni: Stelpurnar hlustuðu á Bítlana og strákarnir á Stones. En töffararnir hlustuðu á Kinks. Þeir þóttu óstýrilátir og stundum brutust úr slagsmál á sviðinu mili manna. Það og fleira varð til þess að þeir voru ekki velkomnir til Bandaríkjanna þegar breska innrásin til Bandaríkjanna stóð hvað hæst. Phobia heitir 23ja plata Kinks og jafnframt sú sem síðast kom út. Hún kom út 1993. Það hefur næstum stöðugt síðan verið talað um endurkomu Kinks en svo er alltaf eitthvað sem stoppar það, ósamkomulag, veikindi eða eitthvað annað. En núna lítur állt út fyrir að eitthvað sé að gerast hjá þeim Ray og Dave Davies og upphaflega trommaranum Mick Avory. Það var sagt frá því síðasta sumar að þeir þrír væru að byrja að vinna við plötu, taka upp lög sem Ray Davies er búinn að sanka að sér fyrir Kinks á undanförnum árum. Bassaleikarinn Pete Quaife lést 2010 og er þess vegna ekki með. Óskalagasíminn verður opnaður (5687-123) um kl. 20 og A+B er svo að þessu sinni með Mötley Crue. Hér er lagalisti þáttarins: Brainpolice - Jacuzzi Suzy Dimma - Ég brenn Clutch - Electric worry Hellacopters - Carry me home Hole - Celibrity skin Lucy in blue - In flight SÍMATÍMI The Kinks - Gotta get the first plane home (plata þáttarins) Blind Dog - Iron cage (óskalag) Aerosmith - Dude looks like a lady (óskalag) The Palth - Please babt please Rock paper Sisters - Howling fool Queen - Dead on time (óskalag) Jet Black Joe - Fuzz (óskalag) Love/Hate - Don´t fuck with me (óskalag) Black Sabbath - Sweat Leaf The Kinks - Where have all the good times gone (plata þáttarins) Utangarðsmenn - Þór GESTUR FUZZ - Jenni úr Brainpolice Brainpolice - Jacuzzy Suzy JENNI II Soundgarden - Rusty cage JENNI III Soundgarden - Mind riot Rammstein - Deutchland A+B Mötley Crue - Girls girls girls (A) Mötley Crue - Sumthin' for nuthin'

In this episode, we chat to Ray Davies, Dave Davie, and Mick Avory on their 1968 classic, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation. We'll look at the album's enduring legacy, and how it would prove a turning point for the group itself. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Pat is once again joined by friend and "Kinks Super Fan" Mario del Barrio to discuss the band's 1970 - 1979 discography. Kyle produces and cracks wise!

Podcast Episode

Mix de alguno de los mas conocidos temas de The Rolling Stones & Mick Jagger, todo remezclas The Rolling Stones es una banda británica de rock originaria de Londres. Desde su gira por los Estados Unidos en 1969 se autodenominaron «la banda de rock and roll más grande del mundo».La banda se fundó en abril de 19623 por Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ian Stewart y Dick Taylor. El guitarrista Geoff Bradford y el baterista Mick Avory los apoyaron en sus primeros ensayos, mientras que los bateristas Tony Chapman y Carlo Little4 tocaron en sus primeras actuaciones. Tras la salida de Taylor en diciembre de 1962, ingresaron en su lugar el bajista Bill Wyman y en enero de 1963 al baterista Charlie Watts. A petición de su mánager, Stewart fue retirado de la alineación en 1963, aunque siguió colaborando en las sesiones de grabación y como road mánager. Brian Jones fue despedido en 1969, falleciendo al poco tiempo, siendo reemplazado por el guitarrista Mick Taylor, que dejaría el grupo en 1975 y sería a su vez reemplazado por Ron Wood. Con el retiro de Bill Wyman en 1993 se incluyó al bajista Darryl Jones que, aunque toca con la banda desde la grabación del álbum Voodoo Lounge en 1994, no es un miembro oficial. Son considerados una de las más grandes e influyentes agrupaciones de la historia del rock, siendo la agrupación que sentó las bases del rock contemporáneo. Contando desde sus inicios con el favor de la crítica, algunos de sus materiales están considerados entre los mejores de todos los tiempos; entre ellos destacan Beggars Banquet (1968), Let It Bleed (1969), Sticky Fingers (1971) y quizá su mejor obra, Exile on Main St. (1972). En 1989 fueron incluidos en el Salón de la Fama del Rock and Roll, y en 2004 la revista estadounidense Rolling Stone los colocó en el puesto No. 4 en su lista de Los 100 Mejores Artistas de todos los Tiempos.13 Ningún grupo de rock hasta la fecha ha sostenido tan duradera y todavía mundialmente reconocida trayectoria como The Rolling Stones; con Jagger, Richards y Watts como miembros fundadores en activo, continúan siendo la banda más longeva de la historia del rock. Sus primeras producciones incluían versiones y temas de blues, rock and roll y R&B norteamericano. No obstante, en el transcurso de su trayectoria añadieron toques estilísticos de otros géneros para adaptarse a cada época, recibiendo influencias desde la música psicodélica, el country, el punk, la música disco, el reggae o la música electrónica. Pese a encabezar junto a The Beatles (con los que siempre rivalizaron en popularidad) la «invasión británica» en los primeros años de la década de 1960, no fue sino hasta el lanzamiento de «(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction» en 1965 cuando alcanzaron el estrellato internacional y se establecieron como una de las bandas más populares en la escena musical. A la fecha, la banda ha editado veinticinco álbumes de estudio y colocado treinta y dos sencillos dentro de los diez más populares de Reino Unido y los Estados Unidos. Las ventas totales de The Rolling Stones se estiman entre 20019 y 250 millones de discos, convirtiéndolos en uno de los artistas más exitosos de todos los tiempos.

New Spencer Daniels, Azar Lawrence, Bob Stroger & The Headcutters, #DirtyKnobs, Joss Jaffe, #EddieVedder + Dave Brubeck, Lauryn Hill, Brigitte Purdy, Wynton Marsalis, Veirs, Case & Lang, Miram Makeba, #BillyStrings, Weather Report, #RobertRandolph,#snoopdogg, #drdre, #eminem... Birthdays for John Helliwell, Ali Campbell, Mick Avory