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Something Kinky Going On
02/22/1999 1:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Mac Randall
Dave Davies's place among the legends of rock has been secure for nearly 35 years now. The historical position of the Kinks' lead guitarist was assured the day he slit the speaker cone of his amplifier with a razorblade, thus creating the distorted proto-metal sound that would be immortalized on 1964's "You Really Got Me" and go on to influence generations of musicians. Davies's work over the next three-plus decades, both with the Kinks and solo, hasn't been too shabby either. All this is common knowledge, no doubt, but what many people might not know, thanks to the long shadow cast over the group by the superlative composing skill of Dave's older brother Ray, is that the Kinks were originally Dave's band (Ray was the last to join). In their early days, the younger Davies sang a large chunk of the material; he was also the group's most flamboyant live showman, normally outfitted in outrageous foxhunting gear and an eye-popping array of frilly shirts.
This oft-forgotten aspect of the early Kinks has recently come to the fore with the release of Unfinished Business (Velvel), a two-disc collection of Dave's Kinks and solo work including several previously unheard tracks. Disc one opens with one of those tracks, the first known Kinks recording, which was actually cut when the band was still called the Ravens: a scratchy October 1963 acetate of the song "I Believed You," written by none other than David Russell Gordon Davies. A few years down the road, Dave's writing talents would blossom on classic songs like "Death Of A Clown," "Love Me Till The Sun Shines," and "Susannah's Still Alive," but even at the band's inception, he was already plugging away.
Caught over a cup of coffee at his hotel near New York's Central Park just a few hours before he's due to take the stage for the first of four solo shows downtown at the Bottom Line, Davies has nothing but fond things to say about the Kinks' early years--despite the band's long and notorious record of bitter quarreling, especially between the two brothers. "Working with the Kinks, there always seemed to be some kind of automatic process at work. Ray and I had this telepathy happening for a long time, where one of us always knew what the other could do with something. Things only started to f--k up when we started thinking about it too much."
With the Kinks went on indefinite hiatus, Dave decided in 1997 that the time was right to go out on the road with his own band. His first-ever solo tour surprised a lot of people for three main reasons: 1) He played an inordinate amount of old Kinks numbers; 2) He had no qualms about playing songs written by Ray; 3) He was really good. The warm reception inspired Dave to put together Unfinished Business and follow it up with another tour. "I deliberately wanted to mix things up," he says of his recent concertizing. "There's such a vast amount of Kinks music that hasn't been heard that it would have been impossible for me to do a show without covering some of it. The stuff's too good not to do."
Due to contractual difficulties, Dave found himself unable to include many of the original '60s recordings of his own songs on Unfinished Business. A frustrating development indeed, but one that he circumvented by re-recording tracks like "Susannah's Still Alive," "Death Of A Clown," and "Hold My Hand" last year. "I'm not a great lover of re-recording," Dave says, "but I thought it would've been a shame not to have, say, 'Death Of A Clown.' Especially because of the love-hate thing I've got with that song--there was a time when I loathed the thought of doing it, but it's grown to be a really important part of the live set. I figured if I could re-record it in a modest way, it might be alright, and when it was done, I was really pleased with it." What's amazing is how well the new versions recreate the sound of the 30-year-old originals. "Someone emailed me the other day and said, 'Did you sample the backing vocals from the old version of "Death Of A Clown"?' The answer is no, that's new, and it's a real person"--Dave's lady friend Kate.
Other tracks, like "Lincoln County" and the previously unreleased 1969 composition "Climb Your Wall," make clear just how strong the influence of Bob Dylan, the Byrds, and much of the more country-inflected rock of the late '60s was on Davies's writing. "I loved John Wesley Harding," Dave confesses, "and I loved that [Byrds] song Roger McGuinn cut with [guitarist] Clarence White, 'Chestnut Mare.' Beautiful stuff. There were other influences on those songs as well, but that's definitely one of the places where my head was at the time."
Unfinished Business also includes several tracks from Dave's solo albums, most of which feature Dave playing all the instruments. His first, AFL1-3603, wasn't released until 1980, although the imminent appearance of a full-fledged Dave Davies album had been rumored as far back as 1967, when a short string of solo singles came out in Britain. What took him so long? "I did about half an album in the late '60s and another half an album in the early '70s," he recalls, "and some of those tracks I nearly included [on Unfinished Business]. Those recordings were okay, but they just didn't feel right to me, so I didn't want them out. But having said that, I didn't want to put out 'Climb Your Wall' either, and it's gotten a tremendous response."
The most recent song on Unfinished Business is the title track, a piece of unabashed '60s pop nostalgia that Dave recorded with his son Simon on drums. "Simon's got his own band in England called U.K. Mash," Dave says. "It was fun working with him, but we had a lot of little crises because he didn't always agree with the way I was approaching it. At one point I said, 'Imagine you're Ringo Starr.' He said, 'I don't want to do that.' But I always thought Ringo was a cool drummer." Ah, the kids these days....
Among Dave's other projects at the moment, besides new studio and live albums, are collaborations with two other Davies progeny. He's recently cowritten a song with his guitar-playing son Daniel, which he describes as "'All Day And All Of The Night' crossed with Rage Against The Machine." And along with his classically trained, computer-savvy son Russell, he's written the soundtrack to a projected animated film called Purusha And The Spiritual Planet; if you want to check that music out, visit the Dave Davies website (www.davedavies.com). "It's a blast," Dave says of working with his sons. "I had no idea it could be this enjoyable. There's a lot of things that go unsaid, but at the same time they know what they want." Sounds a lot like their dad.
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