The Kinks' Artistic Breakthrough

The Kinks' sixth studio album, The Village Green Preservation Society, which originally came out in 1968, is the product of an already great band leaping into truly outstanding heights. It was an intimate, less self-conscious, more poetic statement of what became more impassioned, grand and bald in their immediately succeeding albums. Though the Kinks were outsold by fellow British bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who, neither of those sexier bands could have made an album of such thematic and lyrical sophistication, emotional sensitivity and conceptual variety, and the aesthetic dynamics of the musical compositions themselves are a true wonder for the mind to digest. Something truly exquisite must have happened to Ray Davies and his bandmates, a eureka moment of some sort, for while such albums as the Kinks Kontroversy, Face to Face and Something Else certainly bear a proliferation of gems that point toward a steadily rising artistic development, Village Green sounds like a liberation album, every song utterly inspired and possessed of a non-commercial pop sound with a delightfully carefree spirit. Its songs run from wry folk rock to delicately rendered calypso, each deftly commingling such feelings as vintage sadness, gentle humor, the awe of the weird, and the unabashed joy in the humble creations given to everyday life.

The Village Green Preservation Society is an engaging concept album without being overtly so, and each song is an exploration of a special room in a mansion filled with a cornucopia of moods, reflections, rhythms and imagery, both lyrical and musical. It is also an autumnal album, about the baby that was getting thrown out with the bathwater in the rapidly changing times of the High Sixties, but in this album it is the glory and joy of a metaphorical Fall at its nostalgic best: the oeuvre of brightly colored leaves, the gallant celebration of precious things people carelessly throw away or "responsibly" forget as a spiritual winter looms, the faith in mysterious forces more lasting than the vapid trends that fixate people, the exuberant sense of homage to a natural simpler existence, the gently observant humor that enables a psyche to survive a subtly fading world, the illusory mesmerism of summer's golden fame compared to the natural fulfillment of family and friendship in a humbler season, the fascinating strangeness of dying summer's weird evocations, and the power of present-mindedness over inevitable fatalism to inspire a festive mood for the dance honoring the year's final harvest.

Yet this record was not their swansong, but ironically the beginning of new creative muscularity in the group that would last for four consecutive albums. That the Kinks had the misfortune to live in the long shadow of the Beatles is regrettable. And then, just as the Beatles bid adieu, swaggering Led Zeppelin stormed the barn, inadvertently keeping the Kinks from entering the fore as they deserved. Society then as now had tendencies toward monolithic tastes and fixations, but this album fortunately has continued to get pressed in new editions in the decades that have followed its mostly ignored debut, and succeeding generations have discovered that it is a lasting work of art. Moreover, it is an album that especially speaks to our own times, where the changes in society are entering another watershed, with great doubt as to what will survive of our collective culture. Now that the frenetic rattle of the Stones has finally quietened and the colorful fog of the Beatles has finally cleared, true music lovers may finally see and discover in retrospect the fantastic work of those bands who were their equally talented peers and contemporaries -- and most especially, The Kinks.

Mutual Muse

When discovering music retroactively, it is the product of research and recommendation -- not listening to top-forty radio. So the music-lovers of vintage rock, for instance, tend to follow veins of musical relationships. A good example (which leads even to the present) would be: Muddy Waters -- The Bluesbreakers -- The Yardbirds -- Cream -- Derek and the Dominoes -- Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble -- The Black Keys. I have recently made a discovery that if I had been an adult or adolescent at the time the music came out, I might not have noticed in the haze of bands competing for my ear and radio play. I have long been an ardent fan of Buffalo Springfield, an American band full of great musical ideas and talent from the latter half of the sixties, who came to an untimely end because of battling egos. Their finest work was their middle album from 1968, entitled, Buffalo Springfield Again. It is a record that encompasses its own little universe of musical and lyrical ideas, stating its creative intentions better than most any group of its time -- and certainly full of unique surprises. Now recently I have been discovering the seventies incarnation of a British band called, Traffic. I decide to give a listen to their sixties incarnation and select their 1968 self-titled effort, Traffic (and coincidentally the middle album also for that version of the group). I take an immediate liking to it, and find it to be a different animal than the later incarnation of the group. What is more, it makes me think of an American band, who, in their own way, they resemble more than any other of the time: Buffalo Springfield. It is not a mere question of them being contemporaries of each other. Here I am detecting a similar vision, approach, quality and style of musicianship. It feels like I'm home again, listening to a lost album. Sadly, both groups, as they were formed for those respective albums, soon collapsed from infighting. Their final albums were odds and sods left over after coming apart; for Traffic it was Last Exit; for Buffalo Springfield it was Last Time Around. Traffic was later reborn with a new direction (though with a definite musical continuity with its sixties version, and in way so was Buffalo Springfield, in the form of Crosby Stills & Nash (aka, "CSN"), then later, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (aka, "CSNY"). With the British group it was a rivalry and clash of musical directions between lead guitarist, songwriter and co-lead vocalist, Dave Mason, and keyboardist, songwriter and guitarist, Steve Winwood. With the American group it was a similar conflict between co-lead guitarist, songwriter and co-lead vocalist, Stephen Stills and co-lead guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Neil Young. Too much talent in one place to be happily contained? Interestingly, in both cases there was so much mutual respect that the rivals took each other back (in both cases temporarily) when, on the one hand Stephen Stills and company made the album, Deja Vu by having a creative reconciliation with Neil Young, and on the other hand when Steve Winwood and company made the album, Welcome to the Canteen by having a creative reconciliation with Dave Mason. In both cases the reunions didn't get past a single musical tour, but the similarities do not end there. Finding myself delighted by the particular contributions Dave Mason had made to the sixties-version of Traffic, I listened to his debut solo album, Alone Together. This is a wonderful album, through and through, but once more, I felt like I had gone back to home sweet home: it bears an astonishing resemblance in style and quality to Stephen Stills first two solo albums, which I acquired after loving his special contributions to both Buffalo Springfield, CSN, and CSNY. Rarely have I found such a pleasing (and accidental) affinity between contemporaneous British and American groups and artists. It is far more the case (at least to the trained ear of the rock fan) to find differences between the popular music of those two Anglophone realms in the late sixties and early seventies period; even when comparing groups in similar subcategories between the two nations, you can't get much more different than The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, or James Taylor and Cat Stevens, or Grand Funk Railroad and Black Sabbath. Yet in the case of the Dave Mason (et al.) / Stephen Stills (et al.) paradigm, I think we have a delightfully miraculous situation of a mutual muse! How cool would it have been if any assemblage of these musicians featuring those two key players had met at a rock festival and jammed together? It would have been musical nirvana!

When a Band or Artist Changes and Gets Better

We are probably all familiar with the negative side of change when it happens to a group or solo artist we like. There can be any number of reasons why musicians and singers lose that muse that made us originally love them. For some, they become wealthy and take the opportunity to be so self-indulgent that they no longer have anything interesting to say musically. For others its because they start taking higher doses of certain drugs, or change to different drugs, which effectively changes the whole character of their music. For others, it seems like life just starts to intimidate them, they begin to lose their youthful passion, and then start to "play it safe" with their music, resulting in a musical output less stimulating for the listener. Then there is the theory that an artist needs to be "hungry" to be good, and that once they are financially secure so goes the spark informing the quality of their music -- this theory seems disproved by Bruce Springsteen, who has kept "the hungry" in his music despite all his mounting success down through the years. Indeed, change does not always have to be negative. There are cases when it is quite a good thing. There are artists (at least up to a point) where a person likes them more as they evolve. That is the key word: evolve. When change is negative, it is not because the artist is evolving but rather they are either retreating from their original passion or rehashing earlier tropes with diminishing inspiration. The trick is for the rock or pop artist not to lose sight of the fact that what they are doing is a form of art and not merely a formulaic business of noise-making where you hope to push the profitable buttons in the music-making doframus. There are great examples of evolution where groups or individuals kept renewing themselves in fresh and beautiful ways while remaining true to their identity: Jethro Tull from the late sixties and through the seventies into the early eighties, blending and developing various permutations of blues rock, folk rock, prog rock and operatic rock; Elton John from the late sixties into the late seventies, going from singer/songwriter to glam rocker to passionate rock and roller. However, my favorite case is The Kinks, and here I am only interested in mapping their mid sixties to early seventies output. They went from unhinged blues rockers and ecstatic mod punks, to astutely satirical and trenchantly poetic observers of urban life, to epic tragedians and fond odesters of the transformations of working class identity and its retention of a Gothic imagination. What a journey -- and I'm not just talking about the lyrics!