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Author Topic: Kinks on DVD/Video?  (Read 4196 times)
cabinessence
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« on: January 11, 2006, 10:32:07 PM »

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:

Quote
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?
« Last Edit: January 11, 2006, 11:49:46 PM by cabinessence » Logged
Matinee Idyll
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« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2006, 03:41:55 AM »

'ello cab,

Criminally little out there I'm afraid...

Certainly pick up the Return to Waterloo/Come Dancing with the Kinks double presentation DVD, I LOVE "Don't Forget to Dance", lovely song. 

I also borrowed a "Warner Music Video Biography VHS" that was a "no interviews, just video clips" type deal...  Lots of the things you mentioned (though not all in full, often just short minute and a half snippets)...

There's also "The Kinks on Shindig!" VHS, lots of miming, and some great live performances... Great video that.

And finally, "The Kinks Special Edition EP" which is a DVD of them on, I think German television, Performing 4 songs "Waterloo Sunset", "Mister Pleasant", and two others... I don't have that, but they're good little DVDs (if you can find it cheap)
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Jeff Mason
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« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2006, 05:17:33 AM »

Uh, don't forget One For the Road as well, even if it isn't the Kinks As We Love Them.

What is the status of the footage filmed on tour in 1971/2?  Remember that Everybody's In Showbiz was supposed to be a concert film with lots of behind the scenes views.  It never got finished but surely the raw footage still exists.  A great film is waiting to be made I would think.

Plus it would be interesting if they could find a way to release the films/slides that they used live in concert for Preservation/Soap Opera/Schoolboys.  Considering that this material is supposedly so much better live one would think that this would have been tried by now.
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Mitchell
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« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2006, 06:07:42 AM »

This stuff sounds really interesting. I'd love to see it someday.
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« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2006, 04:49:16 PM »

There's a BBC concert performance from 1972, about 10 songs, that can be downloaded at Dimeadozen. 

I downloaded a Top of the Pops clip the other day from Limewire of the band doing "Lola."  It's a blend of pre-recorded and live audio performance, and even weirder, it's karaoke.  The words seem to have been translated by someone who doesn't understand English too well, because the captioned lyrics are hilariously off at times.
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cabinessence
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« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2006, 12:11:17 AM »

Matinee and the rest of you have sourced about 3/4 of the material I saw, including a little bit from One for the Road. Where Have All the Good Times Gone was borrowed in live performance from that one, and  more or less spuriously superimposed on sixties live clips for some of the sequence which MIGHT show them -with different lineup- playing the same song. The touring seventies band, truth be told, was a more polished unit than the one that would have originally attempted the tune, so there's no reason to complain and I'm eager to catch up with this incarnatiion as far as greatest hits are concerned. Continued great material is a different issue, of course.

What I liked with my mix was the chronological one-after-another time line with the development of the original band clearly described, something the selected clips so far mentioned can not capture. I even appreciated the irritating repetition of the same three early hits played or mimed to six times or more because it drove home the impulse to set oneself free from the rock and roll machinery that resulted in the truly rare one-off masterpieces also captured here; songs not financially worth flogging to death but funded anyway because there was enough commercial  momentum left the band to do what they might,  represented by  'who-gives-a?!' mad presentations which actually paved the way to the One for the Road cult that eventually followed. 
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