It was a song about confused sexual identity – previously more Entwistle’s forte – that first showed Davies a way back to the charts. ‘Lola’, the single that re-established The Kinks on Top of the Pops, was innuendo upon innuendo about a man attracted to a very butch ‘girl’ he met in a Soho bar. At one point the singer drops to his knees as Lola says, ‘That’s the way that I want you to stay’, almost daring the BBC to ban such a blatantly transsexual song. (In the end they almost did, though not because of its transvestite theme, but rather because it name-checked the brand name Coca-Cola.)
The Kinks’ return to the charts, though, only inspired further bitterness, amply expressed in the sarcastic ‘Top of the Pops’, and this time Ray was unambiguous about the perks of success: ‘I’ve been invited out to dinner with a prominent queen.’ With the finishing line of his relationship with Pye, The Kinks’ managers and the Sixties pop establishment in sight, he let loose with both barrels. The album he built around his latest hit single, Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One – which spawned another peculiar Kinks hit, ‘Apeman’ – promised to point a searing searchlight at the record industry itself. As he told Disc’s Lon Goddard during the sessions: ‘I live in a strange world to some, but I think the straight world is a lot stranger . . . My whole intention [now is] to build a complete record. The LP we’re doing has a storyline and ‘Lola’ is part of that.’
But for all the talk of another underlying concept, the album and its title track had almost nothing in common, as Davies for the first time seemed to be more concerned with the message than the music. As it happens, the album’s main message was expressed in just four words, the title of the closing track, ‘Got to Be Free’. Lola Versus . . . was Davies’ not-so-fond farewell to Pye (and Reprise) – save for a half-assed soundtrack to the nudge-nudge wink-wink film, Percy. Starting in the spring of 1971, he set about charming a new suitor, RCA Records, the label responsible for the birth of country.
RCA had been resting on its laurels for a long, long while, until sometime in 1971 they realized the rock revolution was passing them by. Appointing a new head of A&R, Dennis Katz, they decided to splash the cash. In which case, Davies was their man. As he told authorized biographer Jon Savage: ‘RCA wanted us so bad, I just said . . . “Ask for another hundred thousand pounds.” And they offered it.’
In fact, someone in A&R had been doing their homework. The three signings RCA completed in September 1971, to much fanfare, included two A-list Sixties songwriters, both entirely free of other label obligations, and an underappreciated English singer-songwriter who was set fair to deliver his second classic album of the Seventies to his latest suitor. All three were invited to New York to share in the hype. Ray Davies, as an early fan of ‘Space Oddity’, knew of David Bowie, but one imagines Lou Reed’s work with The Velvet Underground had largely passed him by. If Reed and Bowie both had impressive sets of songs stockpiled – with Reed demoing twenty-two songs for his first solo LP the following month, while Bowie delivered Hunky Dory on signing with another album’s worth of songs ready to record – Davies had taken twenty demos with him into the studio in August. He was soon putting the finishing touches to The Kinks’ follow-up to the lacklustre Lola Versus . . . The result: a real return to form.
Muswell Hillbillies, issued the last week of November 1971, was an album that straddled three of Davies’ perennial preoccupations (family, a fantasy inner life and the lost past), and as such represented a welcome return to the rich territory of Village Green . . . and Arthur. This time, though, he set it to those most English of themes – social dislocation and depression. The musical backdrop was a pastiche of styles largely American in origin, ones pioneered by RCA. Not that his new record label was any more understanding of his music than Pye. As Davies told pop historian Peter Doggett, ‘I don’t think RCA knew what they wanted or what they were actually going to get. I think they wanted the brand-name.’ To RCA, Muswell Hillbillies was a dozen songs by The Kinks, and they seemed to think that would be enough. Davies, though, did not, and began to tell anyone who would listen that the album was not all it could have been:
Ray Davies: I wanted [Muswell Hillbillies] to be a double album. To start [with], it’s about making people something they’re not. I wanted it to be like Arthur, but I didn’t have the time to finish it because I had a lot of things to do this year. I wanted to make little statements about England and what’s happened to some of the people . . . What amazes me is there are new towns like Harlow in England, and in these towns . . . there are all these people who’ve been taken out of the East End of London and put into these places . . . They’re trying to keep things the same as when they lived together in London, but they have to break down eventually . . . It’s very disturbing to see this happen. They’re knocking down all the places in Holloway and Islington and moving all the people off to housing projects in new towns . . . My Gran used to live in Islington in this really nice old house, and they moved her to a block of flats, and she hasn’t got a bath now. She’s got a shower . . . And she’s ninety years old, she can’t even get out of the chair, let alone stand in the shower . . . They took her around and showed her where she was gonna live, and [told her] she didn’t have any choice . . . The government people think they’re taking them into a wonderful new world, but it’s just destroying people . . . People can’t meet each other anymore . . . [It’s just] people looking through all those little spy holes at each other. The album is a condensed version of all these ideas. The first side is trying to live in this world, the other side is concerned with the old world. I’d like to make a little film out of it. [1972]
Like Townshend, Davies had too many ideas for just one album – if not quite enough for two. One strand that never made the released artefact was a picture-postcard version of rustic backwoods America. Represented by two outtakes, ‘Mountain Woman’ and ‘Kentucky Moon’, it would be hinted at by just one song on the album, the dreamy ‘Oklahoma USA’. At this early stage, according to Davies, the album was intended to be an Anglicized version of the hit American TV show, Beverly Hillbillies: ‘In the beginning it was written as . . . a script for a film . . . about the rehousing that was going on at the time. Mum and Dad lived in Islington and they were happy there. I don’t know what happened, but they had to move out of the city. Anyway, my image of it was getting on a truck like the Beverly Hillbillies and putting all the stuff on the back. That was the start of the film.’
If this premise didn’t last long, it did establish a framework for the project, and he was soon up and running. Although American-centric songs fell by the wayside, the idea of basing the whole album’s sound around its music did not. Davies had been spending a lot of time at the Archway Tavern in Holloway north London – the interior of which is featured on the cover of Muswell Hillbillies – acquiring a taste for bitter and listening to ‘bad country and western music’ with the vestiges of his immediate family (‘I used to go down there with a couple of my sisters and my Dad on a Thursday night – [they were] the last real family outings that we had, actually’). He even perversely boasted: ‘At that time the [Archway Tavern] had the worst country and western band in the world. They were Irish, trying to play country music. I wanted us to mimic that. Obviously it was more rock & roll because we were doing it, but my vocals were [deliberately] slurred.’ Over the years Davies has been less effusive about his abiding love of country music. Only in the 1990s did he really explicate its formative effect on his own early musical leanings:
Ray Davies: Before [the age of fifteen] the bounds of my musical world had been marked out by watching Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals; listening to country-and-western music on the radio; hearing my sister’s be-bop records and early rock & roll; and family gatherings around the piano . . . [while] Hank Williams became my favourite combination of singing and playing. His songs had a crying quality to them that seemed to sum up some of my own darker doubts about the world. [1994]
All of these styles would n
ow be thoroughly referenced on Muswell Hillbillies – though in a way that was self-consciously Anglicized. Hence, his use of Mike Cotton’s band to proximate a trad-jazz sound, which served a quite distinct purpose, one duly noted by NME’s Phil McNeill in his worthy 1977 three-part Ray Davies profile in NME: ‘Ray takes the brass from The Mike Cotton Sound . . . and inflicts the lugubrious cadences of The Salvation Army and Twenties Music Hall upon them . . . The deliberately unglamorous sound is itself conceptual: the band assumes an overall aural image to suit the requirements of the album, a sound in sympathy with an older, greyer, even more bewildered generation. Depression music that captures the sad facelessness of the cover shot.’ Indeed, throughout the album The Kinks demonstrated a degree of musical ambition that had not always been evident in the ‘Quaife era’, flirting with everything from New Orleans jazz to ‘Sally Army’ brass. As brother David pointed out, ‘It’s so rooted in our London backgrounds, yet it has all the emotional elements, and a lot of the instrumentation, of American blues.’
An integral element in the conceptual mix was that sense the album has of ‘family gatherings around the piano’. It is particularly there on ‘Oklahoma USA’, a song imbued with the memory of his sister Rene’s death on his thirteenth birthday. She had bought Ray a guitar, ‘played the family piano for the last time and gone to the Lyceum Ballroom, where she collapsed and died while the orchestra played a song from Oklahoma!’ Not surprisingly, as Davies told readers of X-Ray, ‘Muswell Hillbillies was a homage to the family that used to be. All the songs, like “Uncle Son”, “Holloway Jail”, “Oklahoma USA”, were songs about people who actually existed in the lives of my parents.’ The title track was one such tale of young promise that went unfulfilled:
Ray Davies: [Rosie was] my mother’s best friend when they were about sixteen. They used to walk up the Holloway Road, and all the boys whistled at her because she was very big and well-endowed . . . She had a very sad life, and she never felt fulfilled as a person. On the original demo for the album there was a whole song called ‘Rosie Rooke’. Leaving Rosie Rooke behind is like leaving everything behind. She symbolized all that for me. [1972]
That track was part of the side ‘concerned with the old world’. But the album also addressed the conundrum of ‘trying to live in this world’. Indeed, it was with the songs of dislocation that the scarier side of Davies’ own psyche became manifest, beginning with album-opener ‘20th Century Man’. On the face of it, this song is a distant cousin of ‘Apeman’ (the narrator, given half a chance, says he would be ‘taking off [his] clothes and living in the jungle’). But there is a more sinister side to him. The lyrics, printed on the inner sleeve of a Kinks album for only the second time, tell us the singer, one more ‘paranoid schizoid product of the twentieth century’, is struggling to ‘keep a hold of my sanity’. What isn’t clear from the song alone is that Davies had in mind someone who was a cross between a suicide bomber and that galactic hitchhiker, Arthur Dent:
Ray Davies: I remember writing a [film] scenario for . . . ‘20th Century Man’. It was just a madcap idea . . . This guy was almost like a suicide bomber at the end of a building that was going to be knocked down, and he said, ‘If you’re going to knock the place down, I’ll just blow myself up.’ . . . The ‘20th Century Man’ is the last man on the block. [2000]
If the ‘20th Century Man’ was a ‘paranoid schizoid product of the twentieth century’, the next song concerned another. Set to a funereal Big Easy arrangement, ‘Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues’ was a ‘genuine story, again about my Dad.’ – “Even my Dad lost the best friend he ever had / Apparently his was a case of acute schizophrenia.” – as indeed was ‘Alcohol’, the most overtly ironic song on Muswell Hillbillies, but one that would soon return to bite him. In his delivery, Davies even attempted to emulate his father on those family occasions when ‘he would stagger over to the piano and belt out a song. He was often so drunk that he would not so much sing the words as assume the attitude of the lyrics.’ Davies’ extended family also served as the inspiration for the opening two tracks on the second side, ‘Have a Cuppa Tea’ and ‘Here Come the People in Grey’, both written with his grandmother in mind; the former being primarily ‘concerned with the old world’, the latter being about ‘trying to live in this world’:
Ray Davies: ‘Have a Cuppa Tea’ is my gran. We used to go round to her with a problem. She was like a fairy godmother . . . She used to go to the pub, The Copenhagen, walk all the way herself, order a gin and Guinness, drink it and go home, every night until the day she died. You could sit with her . . . and she knew everything . . . I just wish she and her knowledge could be around now. [1984]
‘Here Come the People in Grey’, with its subtext that these might as well be men in white come to take her away, returns the album to its central theme: ‘People being moved out of the city and moved into this new environment that they can’t comprehend.’ ‘Complicated Life’, the final song from the side that is ‘trying to live in this world’, summed up Davies’ predicament (drawing on an old joke: guy goes to doctor, says he wants to live to be a hundred; doctor says cut out sex, gambling, booze, cigarettes; guy says, ‘Will I live to be a hundred?’; Doctor says, ‘No, but it’ll seem like it.’) As Davies explained on the album’s appearance, the song wasn’t ‘about big business deals or having lunch with Rothschilds bankers; it’s worrying about the electricity bill and petty things that are always there.’
Muswell Hillbillies is, in fact, just as angry an album as Arthur. On ‘Here Come the People in Grey’, Ray expresses anger on behalf of his grandmother, whereas on ‘Complicated Life’ – which had a single-word working-title, ‘Suicide’ – he is projecting the anger of someone more like his brother-in-law, a character he described the previous year as being ‘worried about the unions, things like that . . . [So] when he’s had a few pints, yeah, a few Guinnesses, then maybe he’ll break down a little bit, start shouting, you know, get it out. You get a bit twisted inside, your guts get twisted up. [Whereas] I do it the other way, I go to bed all right and I wake up twisted.’ Twisted was just how he felt throughout making and promoting Muswell Hillbillies.
Here was an album that was more than a mere ‘homage to the family that used to be’; it was an attempt to reclaim something he had inadvertently lost. As Davies recently informed Uncut, ‘I was still living in north London, and Dave was. But the empathy with our surroundings had gone. My relationships were not the same with my family. I felt that I’d lost contact with them . . . Muswell Hillbillies was an attempt to get back to where we were from.’ And a valiant attempt, too; one that Davies was rightly proud of, though he fully admits ‘it was the classic thing of not delivering what people think you’re going to deliver.’
Unfortunately, ‘it kind of set everything back a few years.’ Back to 1968, in fact. And it didn’t help that Davies seemed initially reluctant to promote an album he later classed as one of his favourites. When The Kinks landed in America in November 1971, all primed to push the brand-name on a three-week US tour, their leader was not quite ready to unveil the Muswell Hillbillies in person. The set-list at their Carnegie Hall show two days before the album’s release included a single song from the LP, ‘Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues.’ When they returned to the same hall four months later with the album long gone from the chainstore racks they were performing two-thirds of it.
Go figure. It was one thing to deliberately give the record label no obvious single (leaving them with ‘20th Century Man’, an apposite but uncommercial follow-up to ‘Apeman’). It was quite another to leave the album to fend for itself when every other English touring band based their sets on their current project. As a result, Muswell Hillbillies never had a fighting chance of replicating the chart position of Lola Versus Powerman, which peaked sixty-five places higher.
Meanwhile, it seemed that this cathartic reimmersion in the family and its communal past had not so much freed Davies’ inner demons as fed them. If his new label-mates, B
owie and Reed, thought they were the new Weird and Gilly, they were absolute beginners compared with the premier Kink. When a US interviewer asked him what he thought of the RCA party that announced their joint signing, Davies told her, ‘I sent my robot, an imitation robot dressed up as me. I stayed at the hotel. He taped the thing on video for me and played it for me the next morning.’
By the time the band returned to the States the following spring, Davies was talking freely about his own death: ‘I hope it’s a very grand day when I go – although I did write in my diary the other day, “I hope it will be soon . . . and alone.” [But then,] I was very upset . . . People think that I’m strong and I’m not.’ If this kind quote wasn’t alarming enough, he was openly discussing whether he was going a bit bonkers: ‘My world . . . is not a little world anymore. It started off as a little world but there are infiltrators in my little world . . . It makes me think that I’m mentally not all there. It would be great for me to be actually mad, [but] I’ve got a terrible feeling that I’m not.’
His brother, who knew the signs well enough, was not so convinced. Dispirited by yet another commercial failure for the band, Dave was seriously considering whether ‘to give it up and go and live in an ashram in Tibet, but I could see that Ray was deteriorating emotionally’. As he began performing the bulk of the Muswell Hillbillies songs night after night, brother Ray seemed to be turning into the acute schizoid paranoid he’d previously depicted on vinyl.
All the Madmen Page 17