About a year ago, the Kinks released The Journey, Part 1, the first of three double-album retrospectives commemorating the band’s 60th anniversary. The Journey, Part 2 followed at the end of 2024, and with the upcoming release of The Journey, Part 3 on July 11, the series concludes with a selection of the band’s Arista Records recordings from 1977 to 1984, along with a 1993 live concert at Royal Albert Hall. This was a time of deservedly renewed popularity for the Kinks, who had shifted back to a more rock-oriented sound after a number of theatrical concept albums to become an arena act and garner many later-period hits.
To say that the Kinks are one of the most important bands in rock would a criminal understatement, and they have been criminally overlooked at times. After all, they were one of the groups to spearhead the 1960s British Invasion with their initial 1964 single, “You Really Got Me.” Bandleader Ray Davies went on to establish himself as one of the most important songwriters in rock. His insights into the human condition are heartfelt, and laced with humor, making the band beloved by hardcore Kinks fans and listeners worldwide. Brother and lead guitarist Dave Davies is one of the progenitors of heavy rock and distorted guitar riffing. The Kinks have sold more than 50 million records and are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame.
Any one of Ray Davies’ greatest songs, like “Waterloo Sunset” or “Lola” or “Better Things” would be career-making for a band. (In the liner notes, Dave Davies wrote about "Better Things": "I never knew my brother was so sensitive until I heard this; what an optimistic and powerful song.") Ray wrote dozens of timeless unforgettable classics. Brother Dave was no slouch as a songwriter either, as songs like “Death of a Clown” and “Living on a Thin Line” (Ray Davies: "the way we all felt at the time") will reveal.
The Journey, Part 3 is impeccably produced and presented. The album is remastered from the original ¼-inch production master tapes and will be available as a 2-LP set, 2-CD set, and in high-definition and standard digital. The live performances were taken from an off-the-board mix, normally a recipe for compromised sound, but not here (though don't expect sonic miracles), especially since the Kinks were a killer live band at the time, which I can attest to personally. The studio tracks were edited and mixed by Matt Jaggar at Konk Studios, and the live cuts were mixed by Richard Whittaker. The remastering and record cutting was done by Alex Gordon at Abbey Road Studios. The album offers track-by-track commentary by Ray Davies, Dave Davies and original Kinks drummer Mick Avory, and extensive liner notes by Phil Alexander. (For more information and track listings, click here.)
The Kinks, The Journey, Part 3, 2-LP set.
It's a testament to the Kinks’ greatness that even if they’d begun their career with their Arista albums, they’d still be legendary. (And we’re talking about ignoring earlier songs as monumental as “Days,” “Where Have All the Good Times Gone,” Celluloid Heroes,” “This Time Tomorrow,” and “Big Sky,” all of which are included in the first two The Journey albums.) The Journey, Part 3 contains hits like “Catch Me Now I’m Falling,” “A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy,” Sleepwalker,” “Come Dancing,” “Misfits,” “Low Budget,” and many more. The band at this point consisted of Ray and Dave Davies, along with Mick Avory on drums (Bob Henrit replaced him on the Word of Mouth album except for three tracks), John Gosling or Ian Gibbons on keyboards, and mostly Jim Rodford on bass (John Dalton played bass on all but one track on Misfits).
The remastering is excellent, wideband with articulate, powerful bass, detailed midrange and highs, good dynamics, and clarity. Recording technology had vastly improved from the Kinks’ earlier recordings, and it shows, from the wallop of Mick Avory’s drums to the gritty roar of Dave Davies’ guitar, and the abundance of those gorgeous brotherly vocal harmonies. Details like the background piano in “Catch Me Now I’m Falling” are clearly heard. “Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman,” written by Ray “as a kind of a joke” in response to Arista head Clive Davis’s request for a more commercial record (Ray despised disco), positively wallops out of the speakers with its insistent drums and bass and Dave Davies’ thrashing guitar. So does “Destroyer,” the Kinks’ tip of the hat to “You Really Got Me.”
“A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy,” one of Ray’s most poignant songs (“and when he feels the world closing in/He turns his stereo way up high”…”Oh but you and me keep thinking/That the world’s just passing us by”), sounds warm and inviting, yet with a rock edge. As Dave Davies mentions in the liner notes, "A personal favorite, a wonderful melody. Ray's sensitive portrait of a superfan based on impressions of different people."
The Kinks adapted well to the improvements in recording technology that were available during the Arista recording years (the 1970s and early 1980s could arguably be considered the golden age of analog multitrack recording), and it shows in the concise arrangements and soaring vocals – listen to the “oohs” of “Living on a Thin Line” or the way the percussion and acoustic guitars sneak in at the beginning of “Come Dancing.”
Ray Davies could write achingly gorgeous songs like “Misfits” ("they are everywhere," according to the song and the liner notes), and it sounds magnificent here. The sonic details are numerous – the beautiful-sounding acoustic guitars, the slide of the bass at the end of the first verse, the incisive “click” of Mick Avory’s hits on the 2 and 4, the “quack” rhythm sound of Dave’s multitracked Fender Stratocasters, and the sublime guitar harmonics at the end of the bridge. You won’t have to be a Kinks fan to get chills from hearing it. Every dog has his day, indeed.
The Journey, Part 3 is not only an excellent conclusion to the Journey series, it’s a fine introduction to the Kinks’ Artista years and to how devastating the band could be live. Nicely done, as my Kinks fanatic friend would say. Of course, Kinks kompletists will have to have all three albums in the series. The Journey records are a compelling reminder of just how truly, incredibly great the Kinks were, and a fitting tribute to their legacy of 60 years – and counting.
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I had the pleasure of talking with the Kinks’ original drummer, Mick Avory, who was extremely gracious. Following are excerpts from our interview. I was having so much fun, we might have gone off on a few tangents…
Frank Doris: Let me start off by asking: what keeps you going as a musician?
Mick Avory: Well, you can sort of rest on your laurels, and if you don't play anymore you lose your touch, [and] you have to keep to a certain amount to keep interested. At my age, well, I haven't really got any big hobbies that I want to do all the time. I play a bit of golf, but I'm limited to what I can do. I'm about a 28 handicap now, and that seems to work out all right.
FD: I saw Les Paul and when he was in his seventies and he had arthritis in two fingers, but he still played beautifully. He couldn’t blaze like he used to but he still sounded wonderful. I agree, if you're a musician, you have to keep at it, otherwise, like you say, what are you going to do? You're going to sit in your house and do nothing.
MA: Do it while you can to a certain standard. I've played with the Sixties All Stars, and one of 'em [Alan Lovell] was in the Swinging Blue Jeans. He's the main singer and guitar player. We’ve got Robin Bibi, who's more of a blues guy, and Mike Steed, the bass player, plays with the Kast Off Kinks as well. So, it’s all hand in glove really. And we're playing all the same sort of Kinks music, or Sixties music, maybe Seventies, that we really had cut our teeth on. [The Sixties All Stars is a group of British 1960s group members. The Kast Off Kinks formed in 1994 featuring original members of the Kinks, to continue playing the music. – Ed.]
FD: The music you played during the Arista era felt like a revitalization. You guys went from not being allowed in the US to doing “Sleepwalker” and “Misfits” and “Superman,” and it gave you a tremendous resurgence in the US. What was that like?
MA: Well, it was a relief, because after being banned for four years and going back in 1969 with the Arthur album. [Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)] That was a good album.
FD: Oh god, yeah. (The album features Kinks classics like “Victoria” and “Shangri-La.”)
MA: The Kinks had bad timing doing things. We should have been on tour when we released “Lola.” We were sitting at home halfway through doing an album, and it would take six weeks for them to actually get the album out and on sale, and we'd still be at home or just about go to America.
The Kinks outside the Archway Tavern in the UK: Ray Davies, Mick Avory, John Dalton, John Gosling and Dave Davies. Courtesy of BMG.
FD: That album, Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, it's got a lot of bitterness. Ray Davies was skewering the music business and you can understand why, given the circumstances.
MA: After that we went into the more concept [type] things [in albums like Preservation Act 1 and The Kinks Present a Soap Opera – Ed.] when we did a live show, with other people on stage and helping out with singing chorus lines and all sorts of things, and we’d add a story to it, but no one understood what it was all about. Ray liked the theater, and he sort of steered us that way. I think he'd like to have done it on his own, but he couldn't spare the time, couldn't leave the group long enough to actually do it on his own. So, he involved the group. But there's some nice songs in there and some of 'em are quite good.
FD: When you went to Arista, I think [label president] Clive Davis had encouraged the band to write more radio-friendly or rock-oriented stuff.
MA: Harder songs, not all of them. [Ray] can write hard rock songs, but we're not that sort of band. I think we're more known for the melodies and things that are more interesting rather than just playing through rock songs. But Clive Davis got hold of us and said, “you guys, you should be in the big arenas and do all these stadiums, and you need some harder songs to get it across.” Obviously if you're too subtle, it doesn't get across to 15,000 people. You can do it here and there, but you can't do a whole concert like that. But we've always had “All Day and All of the Night” and “You Really Got Me,” and they're tougher riff songs.
FD: The Kinks kind of started that whole proto-punk thing with “You Really Got Me” and Dave Davies’ guitar sound. But the beautiful songs that Ray writes, like “Waterloo Sunset” – which for me is the greatest rock song ever written – you can be moved to tears listening to songs like that. He’s able to mix the humor and the sadness and the truth, the reality of what it's like to be living in this world.
MA: The words are so descriptive and you get that feeling from the words, and if it is put to a nice melody, there's nothing better.
FD: I wanted to ask you about “Misfits,” one of the best songs of the Arista era.
MA: It’s another one I always thought was a great song. It never got its true worth. The record company put out “Black Messiah” as the A side and “Misfits” as a B side. It should have been the other way around.
FD: Well, that wouldn't be the first record company mistake. Like the Decca people who didn't sign the Beatles.
MA: They turned down the Kinks as well!
FD: Who were some of your early influences?
MA: Well, I started off with a guy called Lonnie Donegan who was a skiffle guy. He was the king of skiffle. He used to sing American sort of folk songs or old blues songs and turn them into his style. [Also], the traditional jazz bands, not all of them, but some Chris Barber and Ken Collier and people like that, they'd have their jazz band and they'd have a skiffle band as well, just for novelty reasons. And they probably get a few gigs doing that. Anyway, [skiffle] sort of tied in with it. It was sort of jazz. It was more jazz swing rhythms and country rhythms.
It was all two/four [swing rhythm] back then. Not sort of straight rock and roll. It wasn't played back then. All the rock and roll records were derived from bebop drummers and all that gradually evolved into something else, depending on how the songs were written.
FD: Even Chuck Berry had that swing feel.
MA: That's right.
FD: The dotted eighth against the 4/4 feel. Yeah, it's true. You really didn't start getting that 4/4 bashing until much later.
MA: That's right. And then the sounds got louder, bigger, and it changed the way you've got to play it, and it's a bit more rigid.
FD: So your jazzier background might have made you the ideal drummer for Ray Davies’ songs.
MA: I had a bad time at the beginning because I couldn't play loud enough, because my job before joining the Kinks was working in the hotel with a trio and with George Shearing [type] stuff and all that very light [music] and the [drum] sticks had no weight to them at all. I don’t know how I played with 'em, but they didn't want noise, obviously.
I couldn't do anything raucous at all. So that was bad training for a rock band, really. But I joined The Kinks as a more of a rhythm and blues band, more something like Chuck Berry-type stuff.
FD: Look at how many early albums by the Stones and the Beatles and had covers of stuff like that.
MA: The Stones particularly followed him. I met them in 1962. I had a day job back then. A friend of mine I used to play with, his father was a drummer, and he got this call from Mick Jagger, who was unknown at the time, and [his father] said, oh, they're all young boys [and suggested I go and see them]. I spoke to Ian Stewart, who was the keyboard player, and it was really good boogie woogie-type piano. [Stewart] said, “yeah, well this rhythm and blues is going to be the music of the era.”
But I said, “well, I dunno whether I'd fit in anyway, but I'll do the gig if you want.” I went back a second time, but they wanted a regular drummer and I said, “well, I can't do that because I'm not prepared for it and I don't want to turn pro anyway. I don't think I'm good enough, to be honest, and I don't want to waste your time, but I'll do the gig if it's of any help.” I never did the gig, but it's documented that I did do it. Keith Richards’ and Bill Wyman’s books both got it wrong. It was probably so long ago [that] they forgot.
FD: When you started playing arenas and stadiums after the band got more popular in the States during the Arista years, did you have to adapt your playing style to the harder kind of rock you were playing?
MA: As Kinks got into the bigger venues I was more conscious of being under volume, although by now the drums were being put through the main PA. But it wasn’t just the volume, it was the type of sound I needed to cut through. Of course, leading up to this I was gradually working on [playing with] a matched grip...rather than the [traditional] orthodox grip I played with up to this point. I had to work on my technique with the new grip to feel comfortable getting through a gig.
I remember the first gig I played entirely with the matched grip was in 1977 at Anaheim Stadium in L.A. From then I’ve kept it going ever since, to the detriment of [using] the orthodox grip. [In drumming there are two grips or ways of holding the sticks, the traditional grip where both hands hold the sticks differently, and the matched grip, where both hands hold the sticks in the same manner. Click here for a detailed explanation – Ed.]
I used to see a lot of American drummers who could play both ways…which took me back to when I started out with a Buddy Rich book on rudiments. It told you that when you mastered the rudiments with the orthodox grip, to learn to play them all with the matched grip as well. But to me the two grips were not related, as one is played with the hand underneath and the other with the hand on top, which is the opposite, and an opposite wrist movement. But as most drummers know, the orthodox grip started with marching [bands]. Drummers having to play the drum on an incline…not because it's easy, because it isn't, but what I was playing at the time suited the orthodox grip as it was more subtle, which is opposite to what you need for rock music.
So, the answer [to your question] was the grip change...both grips have their advantages though.
FD: It must be very gratifying to know that you’ve become part of…
MA: History. We didn't just stop at the first one or two hits. It went on and it's carrying it on through different decades. It's not easy, but Ray always came up with new ideas and new themes and things that kept it going, and the band liked that because it was more interesting.
I mean, Dave's very good on that. When I first met him, I didn't really know he was an amazing guitarist. When he had the opportunity to use this invaluable sort of creative guitar playing, he was very good at it. He always got the right sounds; he just worked on it and thought, “well, that sounds right with the track.” He'd work out his parts and it all fitted in. He had empathy to Ray’s songs and together that was very strong.
FD: Did you guys work out arrangements in the studio, or was it kind of on the fly? Did Ray give you a skeleton of a song, or more of a finished idea?
MA: Well, it was done in different ways. He didn't spend a lot of time in the studio in the [early and mid-] Sixties, because [we had to] get a song out, and they'd run through it and it was very quickly done, usually. We didn't really rehearse anywhere at the time. It wasn't until around 1966 or 1967 when we'd go around to Ray's house. Then we started to get together and have a little run-through and record on a cassette machine, and then he'd take it away and work on it, and then he could sort of get the band to jam a certain feel.
And so he got the feeling of what the band was good at together, because you get good together if you keep playing together. So it evolved like that. But he was always reluctant to sing the song at the same time [we were doing a demo]. He'd give you an idea, [and maybe a] guide vocal, but I think [he was concerned] that if you made [a demo] too much like a [finished] song, someone might nick it in the studio.
FD: Later on, with eight, 16- and 24-track, you had the luxury of adding overdubs and recording in a different way.
MA: Well, the thing is, when you [have] more tracks [you can] muck about it [and waste time]. [Some bands] just want to get bass and drums down, [but] really, you can all [just play] together. Dave used to keep putting his hand up: “oh no, I made a mistake.” It didn't matter. Just keep playing because [we could] overdub it anyway. That sort of thing.
FD: It can be counterproductive in a way. Multitrack recording gives you option paralysis to spend forever deciding how to record and mix a track.
MA: Yeah, I mean, it can get complicated. You've got so many faders, you've got to [move them] up and down and you couldn't [keep] a mix and then [go back and] alter certain parts of it. You had to have all the faders in the right positions and if you wanted anything different, you'd have to keep playing it and [changing things manually]. Of course, now things are quicker and more automatic. You don't have to stay there all night [and think], “don't forget, you've got to push that fader up on that bar!” We had an engineer called Roger Wake, and that was a good name for him. He stayed awake all night.
FD: When we were kids, we thought a band would last a few years and that would be it, and the fickle public would move on to the next big thing. Did you ever think that there would be a Kinks 60th anniversary?
MA: Oh god, no. No one did. No one could foresee it lasting any more than about five years, I think. But it depends how popular you are and how the music business goes. You get a couple of hits, you can live on them forever if you want to do that.
