arghablog

In my time of deepest hmph I turn to arghablog as a balm to the spleen. If you, dear reader, lived in my brain (next to Goose Gossage), you would be privy to the finest blog posts ever written. I conceive them daily, with you, loyal thimbleful of arghablog hopefuls, who check your blogometers every day in the hopes that the dormant, tripleted fop who used to run this place might show up and juggle, in mind. But anyway they’ve not been writ, or wrought, so they just rot. I come back every few months with hat in hand, standing before you essentially naked, asking for forgiveness and coffee (for chrissakes).

Yeah, so here I be. And if arghablog is where my inner brain soaks these days, you should know it’s a kink-infused soak. I think of nothing else. In my Vanimal, my vanity-plated suburbanite mouseketeer auto, I plug my iPhone in to the audio jack and blair Kinks so loud as to thoroughly convince god I’m in a textbook midlife crisis. If I could be on a fucking Harley the ride would be complete (though then I suppose I’d have to listen to the Stones, which I did back in ‘04). Anyway, I plug that bad boy in, but I have to hold the fancy cable because it’s shot and w/ 60s music I only get one channel if I don’t apply the pressure just so, and that channel is usually drastically incomplete. So I ride around and blast my incomplete collection of Kinks, which is unfair because once I owned them all on vinyl but where oh where is those bag o’ albums. I’ll never know.

I went to see Ray Davies in concert last Tuesday. He was really fine. Played with some really first rate musicians (though it didn’t stop me from missing Dave, whose biggest booster I’ve become of late. Him and Mick Avory. God, people spend so much time underestimating and taking for granted Ringo Starr that they leave hardly a moment to do the same to poor old Mick, who of late has wound up in the Kastoff Kinks, a collection of ex-Kink members who from time to time even include Ray Davies. What has this world come to?).

Gradually I’ve imagined this post where I say the following, but far more eloquently and edited and stuff – it’d have to be a book, I guess, were it to live up to my grand expectations and standards and whatnot. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society has become every thinking hipsters favorite album bar none, it’s the e-card passcode pin number into elite intellectual idea-traffic, don’t leave home without it. I read a book in the 33 and a third book series – that hipper than hip series about albums, each book dedicated to just one – about Village Green. All about how genius Ray was back then, and how the Kinks thoroughly and completely went to hell afterwards, like could you get more banal and stupid and sad as 70s Kinkdom? When I trod off to Kollege I was the only guy around w/ Village Green. But then it was discovered and I had to share my great love, and then in the intervening twenty or thirty or fifty years, when the hell are we, it’s become like Abraham Lincoln on the mountain, parting the red seas, greatest thing ever pooped by man, goes to eleven, don’t even look at that one. It makes me kind of mad (when I’m not busy loving it – because to my core I’m cool too. really).

It’s become overrated. I’m sorry to say it, I’m the wrong messenger. But Village Green is over rated. It’s overrated. I’m saying it. You can’t stop me. Look, no hands on the wheel, overrated. OVERRATED!!! hahahaha (evil snicker), I’m swerving off the road, I’m saying it and swerving off the road, you can’t see me, you can’t touch me, here I am driving at night on arghablog, swerving off the road, talking shit about the friggin Williamsburg Torah and you cannot even…oh shit…truck…TRUCK…..AUGHGUGHGUGHGUGHSGHGHGHGG…..

[I learned tonight that if you want to get a child to really listen to you, whisper.] The album you stupid Jaegermaester-drinking, Converse-hopping toads should be grinding into your breakfast mush came two later. Oh my poor friends – they hear this muchly. It’s Lola vs. Powerman and Moneygoround. I forgive you if push skip on Lola, I sometimes do it too. But go listen to that album again and again, as I do, again, and tell me we have anything to talk about anymore. We have nothing to talk about. You look like a clown in that shirt.

One day, when arghablog regains its decorum, its sobriety, I’ll tell you why. About how it’s one group’s coming into its own in the shadow of the 1970s, about how its Dave Davies capturing spirit, if not the letter, of Keith Richards, of how Get Back in the Line, and This Time Tomorrow, and even Dave’s Strangers, and certainly Ray’s Gotta Be Free are songs that should have made a Paul McCartney of the man, w/ interviews on Colbert and Superbowl appearances. If fate had been kinder. And to both of us. For as crappy as his luck has sometimes been, I shoulda been him.

Like a dormant, potent volcano, arghablog rumbles. Dammit. I’m listening to the Kinks over and over again, like I’m sixteen again. When I was in high school I thought they sang just to me, so astute was Ray Davies’ insight into my engine. Now I’m graying and fatting, I’m saddled with responsibilities and wrinkled dreams, I’m becoming a character in one of his songs. If that’s what it takes, then okay. I believe – and this bold – that I have a greater capacity than other people to love the Kinks. Quality love, the kind you really have to pay for. I’ve got it, it’s right here.

Anyway I listen to Arthur and then Village Green, but more Arthur, lots and lots now. It started when I tried to get into Muswell Hillbillies, feeling like perhaps I had done it some sort of injustice over the years. But then I just got tired of it – it’s still boring all these years later – and threw on Victoria, which is one of the three or four best pop songs ever written. Then I let the iPod run on, playing through this glorious wreck of brilliance – Arthur – that I suddenly realized I have grossly, horrifically even, neglected. Odd that I would do that to an album sandwiched, chronologically, between two of my absolute favorites, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, and the obscenely underrated Lola vs. Powerman and Moneygoround. But I did it, and now in all my geriatric splendor I’m rediscovering a messy masterpiece that landed just a scant year before I did.

So I’m hatching this massive arghablog post, as if anyone still cares, about just this. It’ll be my magnum opus, masterpiece shingle, as Hume or Boretz might have once said, and wouldn’t it be ironic if it were just as ignored as Village Green – that poor album with the misfortune to be released on the same day as the White Album, which sold many millions more copies.

The nutshell is this – and I might as well offer it up seeing as I find it hard these days to follow through on all my monstrous goals. Arthur, (or the Decline  and Fall of the British Empire) is Davies’ quirky response to the abysmal commercial failure of Village Green. It’s a bizarre response. Village Green failed, the conventional wisdom goes, because it was thoroughly out of step with its time. While others were singing about the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Davies once quipped, the Kinks were commemorating witches and old photo albums, pining for the fading into memory of the Victorian English way. So Arthur is Davies following every impulse all at once: the impulse to atone for his creative breakthrough/commercial catastrophe by catching up with the times; the impulse to just continue being himself, the quintessential not-like-everybody-else celebrating the England of 80 or 100 years ago; and the impulse to absorb and synthesize every significant motion in latter-60s rock all at once.

After Village Green, an album that so thoroughly came from Pluto, Ray went on to issue a timepiece, a memento of his age. Arthur is remarkably derivative in spots, an exercise in role-playing. There are snatches of Rubber Soul, Pet Sounds, Pepper, Beggar’s Banquet, as well as scads of nameless 60s psychedelic protest-jam-cock rock. Ray’s brother Dave spins in circles channeling alternately – and rather convincingly – the guitar work of mid-sixties George Harrison and later sixties Keith Richards. It’s an album that, essentially, shouldn’t be any good. A footnote the likes of Their Satanic Magesty’s Request, a work darkened by the towering shadows of those whose paths it follows.

You see – I just wanted to give a taste and get to bed, but darn if this isn’t going to eat me. The only thing more to say is that the album, instead of being a colossal non-item, is a staggering work of messy, derivative genius. The fact is that Ray not being Ray – and he sometimes IS Ray (no-one else on the planet could ever have written Victoria), is STILL a seismic force, especially in the last year of the 60s.

“Some Mother’s Son,” the single example I have time for now, is a blatant war protest song, not generally the Kinks’ flavor. From the start it sounds uncomfortably like someone else’s cause, or dare I cynically say an instance of Ray hopping on a trend. Be that as it may, though, it emerges as devastating – a gentle English ditty in saccharine tones that builds and builds, gradually and vividly depicting a gruesome battlefield death and the empty, officious rituals which surround it ["back home they put his picture in a frame; but all dead soldiers look the same"]. Though Ray seems somehow uncomfortable in this mask, his song is nonetheless better than anyone else’s on the topic. By the end you simply must forgive him his trespasses and love him (as only I truly can).

I have to sleep. It’s a rough draft and a first thought, but I might as well think out loud, as I encourage my students to do. Think out loud, you might not get the chance to say something fully thunk.