I just watched a very ragged but inspiring two hour dvd-r of clips by the band from their beginnings up to the onset of Arthur (ending with absolutely glorious song Days, a performance filmed off a TV set!)
What struck me anew was that this band thrived on utter failure, they were at their most alive, and most happily a band, when the chips were down, and the hits stopped coming.
This loosest of compilations, wretchedly made, stray historical comments from Ray and friends glued in haphazardly, wonderfully complete as to footage available, instantly filled in all the stuff I'd only read in books. There's Ray's total ego-disintegration and opt-out/'set-me-free' attitude at the height of the band's success (though it had been lurking in the background all along) from the moment they give up playing You've Really Got Me variations the thousandth time and come up with the one-two punch of proto-Glam heavy metal and 'Turn off your Mind' buddhist passive resistance "Where Have All the Good Times Gone", and "See My Friends" (the last a song they were obviously very proud of, played again and again here to largely incomprehending audiences who hadn't heard Eight Miles High or Revolver as they'd not come out yet), both displaying a swaggering campy style that goes beyond where the Stones were to date.
There's enough historical patchwork to let us know that several critical things were going on: the band had been banned from America in perpetuity (for reasons undisclosed to date); former manager Larry Page was suing them for everything they were worth; and Ray was in deep personal identity confusion while obsessing over the taking 'of all my dough' by forementioned Larry, and his first marriage was drifting into irreconcilable differences. There's a great contemporary TV monologue from 1966 with Ray merry and articulate but utterly at wit's end making clear that all his continuing hits through the year like Respected Man, Follower of Fashion and Sunny Afternoon are-were direct comments on his own state of mind and his empathetic projection into the souls of the forces of evil trying to tramp him and his down. He comments that Page is an actor playing the role of respectable guy, that he himself Ray is an actor too, hiding behind a persona and ever-new fashionable Carnaby Street disguises, we're all actors, I'm not like you see me right now, but I can't tell you who I really am because I'm so into the part that I haven't a clue!: "They seek him here, they seek him there" he quotes. That's Ray staying a step ahead of his creditors and critics and followers trying to keep core identity together he explains in another excerpt.
He's essentially singing Bowie's Changes in this chapter of his story. The last change rung in the 'hit era' is the evergreen Sunny Afternoon whose total meaning becomes crystal clear in this context as he and band are living their life of luxury in the limelight, and dead broke at the same time, afternoon foreshadowing the Waterloo Sunset and flight from the crowd across the river definitively, to face a life of cold and frosty mornings on Dead End Street. This last mentioned great number, one of the underknown hits that never were which flowed freely throughout the subsequent three years in the wilderness, is done up here in one of the best (Happy Jack Who-quality) sixties music videos, band as pall bearers carrying their own coffin, and as Monty Pythonesque transgendered flatmates peeking out at also Kinks-played rent collectors sneaking in as documentary shots of the true disenfranchised living on and in the chilly chilly never-never are interposed.
From here on in, the tunes and performing style just get more and more eccentrically charismatic, and dare I say, flamingly 'theatrically gay' in a manner between Noel Coward, Slade, and Ziggy Stardust. Check out Dave Davies doing his solo single Death of a Clown (great Dylanesque rip with some help from the band in the studio, obviously) accompanying himself with a video-effect transvestite mime clown version of Dave (strumming and doing the Peter Quaife high bits on the vocal). Way before the time for such things, I'd think
Ray and pals become a gang of mad hatters out of Lewis Caroll in their clips, dressed in ever more outrageous finery, and their Leader inspires them all to a very, very loose goofy grin and high kick style of cabaret arena rock which is quite endearing. Their Autumn Almanac (rhyming as they sing it with the Armagnac they were evidently drinking) is the ultimate in butch guys with lady hairdresser coifs and apparel!
Most endearing though is the visionary guru-like gleam in the crackpot's eye as he sings his latest flops as if just delivered to him from the mountain. The best, least known song here, an eternal favorite of mine, is Wonder Boy. In the liner notes to Kinks Kronicles, John Mendelsohn commented that Lennon took notice -on record- the moment he saw the performance included here. Seeing it myself, it's obvious why. Ray had reached the Instant Karma and Imagine and Across the Universe state of consciousness before him and delivered "Artless Truth" in unbeatable 2 minute catchy pop form like nobody else of that vintage. The lyrics alone suggest the beatific rock and pop clarity we all desire:
Wonder boy, some mother’s son,
Life is full of work and plunder.
Easy go, life is not real,
Life is only what you conjure.
Wonder boy,
And the world is joy, every single day.
It’s the real Mccoy,
Wonder boy.
Everybody is looking for the sun.
People strain their eyes to see,
But I see you and you see me,
And ain’t that wonder?
Sorry to get worked up about this, but I gotta stress there's a ton of marvellous material by this band (and they were a total band at the time, not just Ray and sidemen) from this era that makes them the equal of anyone, and I just got the proof in one nice, messy package.
That said, it was way too messy. Is there any decent video compilation of some of this same revelatory stuff?