“They kinda chized,” said my son, cryptically.
“Hmmm?” I offered, looking up from my navel and stalling for time.
“They said, ‘I feel all right, from morning til the end of the day.’ Shoulda been night.”
I could make neither head nor tail of this baffling utterance, until it occurred to me he must be referring to the Kinks. Had a third party been present, perhaps crushed into the back seat where I store my used coffee stirrers and tax records, that individual would likely have cracked the case earlier than I did, as my car’s speakers were in fact blasting the quaint vintage rock and roll at that very moment. The obvious conclusion was briefly obscured to me, as I’d forgotten my son still possessed the ability to interact with culture from the long-ago days when waitresses smoked while they handed you a plate of gluten-packed waffles, and rowhomes and townhomes were called “rowhouses and townhouses.” Nowadays, waitresses know better, and I believe whorehouses prefer to be called “whorehomes.”
Normally, if I’m listening to music in the car, he’s sequestered himself through the miracle of earbuds in the marvelous world of YouTube, which has become overrun (while the adults were sleeping) with videos of tousle-headed young vulgarians yelling at the camera in the bleating patois found in the hill country of Brovenia.
While I did feel my son had allowed his hidebound attachment to rhyme scheme to distract him from the many charms on display in this and other recordings by Ray Davies and his band of unkempt yobs, I was just happy he was engaging even to this paltry degree.
I yield to no man in my disdain for teenagers and their alternate universe of subliteracy, but as a prejudiced father I find myself warming to my son’s slang-slinging. I tell myself in a shaky voice that James Joyce, or at least Anthony Burgess, would have appreciated the infinite declensions of the neologism “jank,” while the word “chized” seems like something Shakespeare might have coined. I can see Rosenkrantz saying it to Guildenstern, his hair standing on end in the manner of quills upon the fretful porpentine.
It occurs to me that our British rockers of an earlier era, their heads turned by their grand English literature tradition, felt the need to augment their aping of black American idioms with a crumpety smattering of schoolboy bookishness.
Thus, Paul McCartney, when not filling the corridors of Abbey Road with his plastic soul experiments and bass lines as regal and Druidic as Stonehenge, was trotting out the nincompoopery of an old auntie telling a bedtime story; Pete Townshend took breaks more and more often from conjuring up the depths of hell with his Vox amplifier in order to spin out epically dreary hugger-mugger, and even Mick Jagger would get into the act, supplementing the vocabulary of the London bluesman with words like “messianic.”
It’s easy to tolerate an unholy amount of such flotsam, of course, if your ears are functioning. I won’t get into it, but let’s just say that with working-class bozos like Ringo, Charlie Watts, and Keith Moon drunkenly perched behind the drumkit, and the rest of the guitar-romancing crew hard at work kicking up a clatter for the ages, these bands made recordings that are as hard to ignore as a golem.
One of their brethren needs no such rationalizing, however.
While the other Carnaby Street-infesting dilettantes were busy dropping acid and keeping the world’s currency in motion, Ray Davies was quietly pottering away behind his pint, while tradesmen threw darts in a provincial pub. It’s difficult to say exactly what it is that makes Davies great, but it’s easy to see what’s different about him. It’s everything.
It’s hard to even think of him as a rock star at all. Most of what I know about him is guesswork, because unlike his more radio-friendly contemporaries, he wasn’t documented on film endlessly rehearsing, performing, clowning around, and preening his way into history. I assume that he spent his downtime fortifying himself with biscuits, staring out the window, chatting with termagants and costermongers, and in general behaving like a writer.
Ray Davies is a guy I rate as among the very best of rock and roll songwriters, and yet I can barely summon to mind a single Davies lyric. The words of his songs often seem incidental, because they’re plain speech, unencumbered by cleverness or profundity, and besides all that I’m perennially distracted by his characters. The people Davies writes about are alive in the world, and I feel protective of them, even the ones he’s wryly mocking. I think his genius is less about some sort of mastery of language or plotting, and more about his gift for observing people. Like a scientist who spends endless hours lying under a hedge and waiting for some bird or beast to show up and do something worth writing down in the notebook, Davies patiently goes through the drudgery of investigation, and comes back to us with stories both comic and sad, about characters that aren’t necessarily fascinating or even colorful, but they’re so real I’m afraid I’m going to get too close, and step on their laundry.
He carries himself with the astigmatic confidence of a poet, but not for him the ivy-covered world of fustian allusion and enjambment. Ray Davies is more a poet and storyteller in the tradition of Dylan Thomas, declaiming his beery odes to this and that for the benefit of an aging barmaid who pretends she’s listening, and not just thinking about rheumatism.
And if Ray Davies is the guy who’s been scribbling all afternoon while the condensation from his glass leaves a ring on the oaken bartop, his brother Dave is the local nut in a woolen sweater who rushes into the pub babbling wildly of alarums and excursions. Dave Davies wasn’t prolific, but he had a level of manic English energy that could make a Chuck Berry or Elvis song into something perverse, and when he sang a ballad it sounded like he had hay in his hair. His classic song “Death of a Clown” manages to operate at once like Lennon AND McCartney; it’s somehow cynical and adorable at once, equal parts unblinking social criticism and boozy last-call singalong.
On top of his trunk of peerless observational lyrics, Ray is aided in his labors by a curiously uncelebrated gift for melody. Though the Kinks could thrash out raunchy guitar chords that make Keith Richards sound overly complex, Davies often used his eccentric voice, like that of his brother inexplicably both acidic and amiable, to warble through melodies so heartbreaking I’m embarrassed to tell you how much they affect me. Whenever I’m growing concerned about my approaching descent into pedantry and pontification, it only takes a few seconds of “Waterloo Sunset” to remind me that rock and roll (if that’s what it is) can still make me feel something. His story of a geezer bewitched by the passing parade of youth makes me choke up, and in those moments I feel like the Sixties can keep Sgt. Pepper and Purple Haze and Woodstock and all the rest of it, as long as I can spend a few minutes with Terry and Julie at Waterloo Station once in a while. Jesus, I’m crying right now listening to it.
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