Over the years, many compilation albums of the music of The Kinks have been released. Reprise Records, the group’s first American record label, famously released the double-album set The Kinks Kronicles in 1972. The impetus behind the release was the group leaving the label and signing with RCA.
Reprise actually created an excellent and still sought after release. The two-LP set included one previously unreleased track and 13 non-album B-sides. Music journalist John Mendelson selected the tracks and contributed liner notes. Reprise had previously released a greatest hits album in 1966. There have been nearly 40 compilation releases of the group’s music from various US and UK labels over the years, representing the good, the bad, the ugly, and unfortunately totally unnecessary.
If The Beatles were the big bang of pop music in the 1960s, The Kinks might represent the next big bang. Just barely before the Rolling Stones and The Who, the group scored hits with an explosive new sound, boasted one of the best ever English pop songwriters (Ray Davies), and quickly grew as witty chroniclers of English life.
This 2-LP, vinyl set includes 30 tracks and there are 36 on the CD set. The vinyl was mastered by Kevin Gray and sounds excellent, especially the many mono tracks. There are liner notes by three of the four original members of the group, Ray Davies, Dave Davies, and Mick Avory, included in the eight-page booklet. The time period is 1964 through 1971, from their self-titled debut album through the soundtrack to Percy.
The four sides are divided up into themes and the tracks are not in chronological order, which, for the most part, works surprisingly well. “Songs about becoming a man, the search for adventure, finding an identity and a girl,” the first side, starts off with two songs (“You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night”) established the Kinks’ place in ’60s pop, but the rest of side one proves their staying power.
Songs like “Dandy” and “Stop Your Sobbing,” which would become hits for others, are mixed in with better-known songs like “Tired of Waiting For You.” Dave Davies’ “Wait Till The Summer Comes Along” is quite good but gets somewhat lost in the plethora of high-quality Ray Davies compositions. The closing track “So Long” has an English folk rock feel.
Side two “Songs of ambition achieved, bitter taste of success, loss of friends, the past comes back and bites you in the back-side,” takes the theme in a direction that shifts the songs out of chronological order. While it may seem jarring at first to hop from the mid-’60s mod pop of side one, to later in the ’60s and then to the mid-’70s, it does work. “Supersonic” shows Ray in a new phase as a songwriter, interjecting exotic music that sounds a little like the better-known “Apeman.”
“Days and nights of a lost soul, songs of regret and reflection of happier times” oddly sounds like a follow-up to side one. The side starts off in somewhat of a mellow and sophisticated, folky mood. Amidst the lyrical bewildered frustration, Ray’s songs are surprisingly sunny and upbeat, even as he looks back wistfully at better times, perfectly captured on “Days” and “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”—the latter the theme song of golden-age thinking.
Side four “A new start, a new love, but have you really changed? Still haunted by the quest and the girl,” sounds very much like side three, and given the theme, “Waterloo Sunset” and “Celluloid Heroes” simply had to be included here on this side. It’s nice to see Ray end on a positive note with “This Is Where I Belong.” The thematic construct of the set allows for Davies’ songs to be heard in a context that elevates them to their rightful place, as some of the best pop songs ever written in the rock era.
One would think after so many compilation albums of The Kinks, yet another one would not be needed, but this one works on many levels. Part 2 will be released later this year and begins where Part 1 ends, in 1971, the period that began with their first album for RCA, Muswell Hillbillies.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A+
