Quote of the Day (Ray Davies, on Why ‘It’s Critical To Be in the Now')

“You’ll never be able to be what you were. You’ll never achieve what you achieved before. It’s critical to be in the now. This is what I am, this is how I speak, this is what I write – take it or leave it. Thankfully, people have continued to take it rather than leave it.” —English rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter Sir Ray Davies, on creating new material, interviewed by Andy Greene, in “The Last Word: Ray Davies,” Rolling Stone, Apr. 6, 2017

Happy birthday to Ray Davies, born 80 years ago today in London. Unlike many other British Invasion musicians, Davies—whether fronting The Kinks or soloing—never really became relegated to a novelty act.

Part of the reason why comes from the venturesome spirit indicated by the above quote, but the rest comes from a character that, to use one word, is “complicated”—and, to use more, might be “shy,” “insecure,” “troubled,” and “turbulent.”

All those terms apply equally to how he has been viewed by his romantic partners (including fellow singer-songwriter Chrissy Hynde) and younger brother and Kinks bandmate Dave Davies.

But an equally useful word for him might be “engaged”: engaged with “the now,” and with the past—including the working-class environment in which he grew up, and its discomfort with and alienation from a rapidly changing culture.

Davies fans have their own favorites among the tunes from the musician’s long career. Mine might belong to, for want of a better term, the middle phase of The Kinks’ career—“Celluloid Heroes,” “Misfits,” and “Better Things." 

They spring from a sensitivity and sense of hope that, despite a personality that he described, in a 2011 Guardian interview, as “easy to love…but impossible to live with,” remains rooted in an abiding interest in other characters.

(Unlike Colin Gawel’s August 2014 post on the “Pencil Storm” blog, I would not go so far as to say, “Ray Davies Is the Best Songwriter.” But I thank him for bringing to my attention the 1986 song “Working at the Factory,” in which Davies yokes his youthful angst with his later rage against “the corporations and big combines” who “turned musicians into factory workers on assembly lines.”)

Flashback, March 1965: EC Out, Beck in with the Yardbirds

The departure of Eric Clapton (pictured) from the Yardbirds in March 1965 became like a shifting tectonic plate in the landscape of British blues rock. When everyone had recovered their senses, not one but three guitar gods had materialized, each spawning his own set of groups or supergroups that would dominate rock ‘n’ roll for the next few decades.

Tracing the relationships that developed at this time is like drawing a crazy family tree of the British Invasion. It all results from what I think of as “musical mitosis.”

Not familiar with that last word? The best—and certainly funniest—explanation of this phenomenon was offered on an episode of The Big Bang Theory, in which Howard Wolowitz explains how his asexual friend Sheldon Cooper might reproduce: “I believe one day Sheldon will eat an enormous amount of Thai food and split into two Sheldons.”

The band realignment involving Clapton became perhaps the maddest mitosis to occur in mod London’s music scene in the mid-Sixties. In short order, three young men, destined to be acclaimed as masters of their instrument, had been thrust to the forefront: Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. 

It all began with what Clapton, at least at the time, regarded as a move toward artistic freedom but that others in the music industry saw as career suicide. He had joined the Yardbirds only two years before at age 18, as the replacement for Anthony “Top” Topham. But with the group finally on the cusp of achieving success, he didn’t like the direction it was taking.

“The truth is, I was taking myself far too seriously and becoming very critical and judgmental of anybody in music who wasn't playing just pure blues,” the guitarist recalled four decades later in Clapton:The Autobiography. Specifically, as an admirer of the American blues, he had grown contemptuous of pop music. And so, where his bandmates saw the yellow brick road with a tune brought to them, “For Your Love,” Clapton smelled a sellout and became “constantly argumentative and dogmatic about everything that came up.” His sole contribution to “For Your Love,” their breakthrough hit, was a short blues riff in the middle.

Eventually, with his dissatisfaction becoming plainer and plainer for all to see, Clapton was taken aside by the Yardbirds’ manager and producer, Giorgio Gomelsky, and told that the group would not stand in his way if he wanted to leave.

Though this was something like the outcome he desired, Clapton was still stunned that the group—really, anyone—would not want him around. Yet within a month, he was feeling far more pleased about his decision after he was asked to join John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, who shared more intensely his affinity for the blues.

Before leaving the Yardbirds, Clapton recommended a well-regarded studio musician as his replacement. But the heir apparent to “Slowhand,” Jimmy Page, declined the offer at first, recommending in turn his boyhood chum Jeff Beck. The latter was on board when the Yardbirds rode the wave of their “For Your Love” success with a hot streak that included "Heart Full of Soul", "I'm A Man" and "Shapes of Things."

The Yardbirds part of the story can be wrapped up relatively quickly. When the group’s bassist, Paul Samwell-Smith, departed a year later to become a record producer, his spot in the band was taken, surprisingly, by Page. Well, for awhile, anyway, until he began to share lead-guitar duties with Beck. 

The last Yardbirds single to feature Beck, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago,” came out in October 1966. A month later, he began to exhibit an even more conspicuous case of what might be called “Clapton Disease”—i.e., unmistakable dissatisfaction—and, after a tour of the U.S. in which he did not show up at times, was fired for what was termed “health” reasons.

At this point, it’s probably easiest if we take each of the three separately:

*Clapton, after his stint with Mayall, went, in succession, to Cream, Blind Faith, solo, back to a group setting in Derek and the Dominoes, and back on his own, with "Layla" becoming an FM standard, in both its fiery electric guitar and acoustic versions, two decades apart;

*Beck, no sooner out of the Yardbirds, formed The Jeff Beck Group, featuring lead singer Rod Stewart; another incarnation of the same group in the 1970s; a short-lived power trio Tim Bogert and Carmine Appice; and solo (I saw him in 1976, on a bill with Jan Hammer and headlined by Jefferson Starship, where I came away gasping at the sounds he coaxed from his guitar); and

*Page, with the Yardbirds breaking up, formed the New Yardbirds, then decided to rename it as Led Zeppelin (legend has it, on the advice of Keith Moon). Of all the groups in which the three men participated, the latter lasted the longest, only breaking up in 1980 in the wake of drummer John Bonham’s death.

In 2011, Rolling Stone Magazine updated its list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” Clapton, Page and Beck were all listed among the top five (#2, 3 and 5, respectively; Jimi Hendrix and Keith Richards took the #1 and 4 spots, respectively).

This Day in Rock History (Stones Score 1st US Hit With Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’)

February 21, 1964—In a particularly auspicious day for the post-Beatle phase of the British Invasion, three singles destined to be classics were released. The first was Billy J. Kramer’s “Little Children”; the second, the Hollies’ “Just One Look.” The last, a cover version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” did more than just provide the Rolling Stones with their first single to hit the U.S. pop charts; it also served as a seque into the songwriting that would make them pop forces in their own right in the next half century.

Like their contemporaries and competitors, the Beatles, the Stones began their careers by, in effect, reflecting back to American audiences rock ‘n’ roll songs seemingly familiar for the last dozen years, but now revivified. What the Beatles did for the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” for instance, the Stones did for the B side of Holly’s “Oh Boy!”—i.e., they made it fresh in their own interpretation.

Actually, they took it a step further: they unlocked potential that had been somewhat muted, substituting Mick Jagger’s growling, rougher vocals for Holly’s trademark hiccup (while stripping away the doo-wop harmonies), accentuating the Bo Diddley bomp, bomp-ba-bomp, bomp-bomp beat of the guitar, along with Brian Jones’ bluesy harmonica. The new take on the song was different enough from the original that manager Andrew Loog Oldman even termed it “the first song that Mick and Keith [Richards] wrote. The way they arranged it was the beginning of their shaping of them as songwriters.”

The idea that the longhaired British youths, with no real songwriting credits of their own, just signed to Decca Records, could have so reinvented a song by the brilliant, blazingly prolificTexas artist might have seemed laughable on the surface. It becomes even more astonishing when one recalls how green they were in the studio, and how unprepossessing that particular environment itself was. 

As Keith Richards recalled in his bestselling 2010 memoir, Life, Regent Sounds Studio in London was "just a little room full of egg boxes and it had a Grundig tape recorder, and to make it look like a studio, the recorder was hung on the wall instead of put on the table.” The space was cramped, allowing little definition between instruments, and so, by necessity, the sound approximated the band’s raw feel in concert at the time. The boys loved their primitive environment—especially the Stones’ guitarist, co-songwriter and ultimate pirate spirit, who learned the art of overdubbing there on a basic two-track tape recorder.

The Rolling Stones did for “Not Fade Away” what Frank Sinatra did for Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: refocus attention on a relatively neglected portion of a major song catalog to such a point that it became a standard. Clearly, Holly’s record company didn’t see it as a major commercial hit, but the British band took their version to #3 on the charts in their own country and #48 in the U.S. (Not quite “She Loves You” territory, perhaps, but the ground overseas was becoming prepared for bigger things soon.)

Over the years, other artists have followed the lead of the scruffy U.K. upstarts.  Florence and the Machine recorded a four-minute take on the song three years ago, and that only begins to scratch the surface of what others have done with it. The Grateful Dead jammed for an epic 10 minutes in their version. But, as longtime readers of this blog might guess, my favorite version was done by Bruce Springsteen, who made it the first half of a melody with his own, equally fiery “She’s the One” in a Madison Square Garden concert I attended back in August 1978. (Hear for yourself in these two YouTube clips—“Not Fade Away” and “She’s the One”—that are, admittedly, far better in sound than visual quality.)

Today, “Not Fade Away” is the second most-covered song by Holly, exceeded only by “Peggy Sue.” Rolling Stone has even listed it among its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” What accounts for the awesome power that the Rolling Stones sensed? Joe Ely, who’s been playing the song in concert for years, told an interviewer several years ago: “The easiest thing to do is get it started. The hardest thing to do is find a place to stop. It’s infectious. It’s like a freight train you can’t stop.”