[The odd thing about the Kinks] is that despite their frequent inability to remain vertical on stage, and despite the fact that they've been known to give performances in which they sounded like, in John Mendelsohn's phrase, "the first rehearsal of an inept teenage garage band," they've managed to create a body of recorded work that is quite clearly in the Beatles/Stones/Dylan class. Yet they've never really achieved the commensurate superstardom….

Discussions of the Kinks have invariably centered around Ray Davies…. But in the beginning it was the Kinks as a band that knocked people out. And, strangely enough, they made their initial reputation as avant-gardists. But there really is no rock avant-garde anymore, John Lennon's protestations to the contrary, and the style of amphetamine raving pioneered on their early singles is by now—eight brief years later—totally absorbed into the mainstream. But avant-gardists they were, a totally electric rock-and-roll band that produced a cataclysmic wall of sound unlike anything that had ever been heard in rock before. (p. 96)

Somewhere along the line Ray began to write. At first his lyrics were the conventional boy-girl stuff of the period (though laced with a rather unambiguous sexuality that was perfectly mated to the sonic blitz the band was laying down), but he soon began to get itchy for something more serious. What he eventually came up with, A Well Respected Man, was Archie Rice with a backbeat. A clever merger of his r-&-b roots with his other major passion, the music-hall style, it was to serve as a model for an entire school of British rock. Lyrically, it was vaguely Dylanesque, but purely Davies' own were the song's wit and its particular kind of contempt for middle-class values.

From there Ray took off, turning out an uninterrupted series of brilliant singles and albums on subjects as diverse as steam-powered trains, session men, lower-class drug addiction, and the setting of the sun on the British Empire. He became a sort of rock-and-roll Damon Runyon, filling his songs with telling little character studies—as in David Watts, in which he neatly skewers both the eternal golden schoolboy and his own jealousy of him. And he couched it all in a verbal style of almost Gilbertian cleverness: "We are the Custard Pie Appreciation Consortium," he declares in one number….

[This] lyric genius should by rights have served to put the Kinks up there with the major mythic figures of the past decade. No such luck, however. In fact, sometime around the middle of 1966, just as they were beginning to perfect the new approach, their work died an absolutely unheralded death in this country, and it stayed buried until late 1969. Granted, the American audience often has its head in the sand, but at least some of the fault is Ray's; he has obstinately refused to be fashionable—he claims, for instance, that he didn't even listen to [The Beatles's] "Sgt. Pepper" until two years after it came out, and I believe him.

This almost masochistic streak has run through much of his recent work, which has become increasingly autobiographical: the post-"Arthur" Kinks songs are more often than not as concerned with Ray's personal psychological problems as they are with the plight of the workingman. Ironically, as the Davies persona has emerged, the group has begun to sell records again. Perhaps time has simply caught up with them; these days, the sexual confusion of some of the songs (Lola, you recall, "walked like a woman and talked like a man") and Ray's on-stage antics are, thanks to Alice Cooper, not quite so problematical. Or perhaps, more disturbingly, it's the old Judy Garland fan syndrome: the perverse appeal of watching someone of immense talent and sensitivity fall apart before your eyes. After all, Ray has gone so far as to set his own suicide note to music, and the counter-culture has amply demonstrated a taste for such ghoulishness. Or, most likely, it's just that the music the band has made since Ray allowed himself the luxury of public self-analysis is in some ways more brilliant than ever. I find myself playing "Muswell Hillbillies" quite as often as "Face to Face" or "Something Else," which leads me to think that Ray as an individual is every bit as interesting as Wicked Annabella, or Dandy, or Pretty Polly, or any other creation of the Davies fancy. (p. 97)