Hazy Thoughts in the Summer Malaise

Too much on my mind

Summer, true summer is here now. Those days when it's so hot that I don't want to be outside despite the sunshine and when I feel constantly uncomfortable in the outdoor heat or in the unnatural air conditioned interior. The un-cooled interiors, which become unbearably stuffy, manage to bring in the worst of both worlds. Afternoons on days like this are to be endured, rather than enjoyed.

Today I had the depressing realization that I am already fantasizing about next summer, since this one is going to be a wash and the coming school year promises to be the most dangerous and difficult one yet. So much of my mental space this summer is taken up by the fall, both in terms of work I am doing for the school and in the constant churn of anxiety that dominates just about every waking hour of my day.

Even in the best of times summer brings a case of the blues. After the trench warfare of the school year, which demands every ounce of energy I can give, the indolence of summer is hard to handle. I end up with too much time on my hands and too much time spent at home. It allows my mind to wander to things I was too busy to think about during the school year. Memories of old fuckups and failures come dancing right into my consciousness, replaying humiliations and mistakes from decades ago.

This quarantine summer means being at home even more and even fewer outlets. I've tried to channel my energy into cooking, cleaning, and gardening, which has helped a little. The challenge of putting my mind at ease is harder this time around due to my constant worry about the state of the country. If I sit around long enough I just keep thinking about how the pandemic is getting worse after a hundred thousand people have died. I think about how a mass movement for racial equality has ended up with yet another culture war about statues. The economic situation is bad and I know plenty of people who have lost their jobs. At times like this I almost long to be one of those millions of vapid people so disengaged from the world to be troubled by it.

And yeah, I know it could be worse. I had a family member back home with the virus but they're fine now. As tough as my job will be next year, at least I still have one. It's been good to have all this time with my wife and kids. I was able to go out to Pennsylvania last week and see two old and very dear friends and kayak on a lake, play cards, grill meat, and drink whiskey. Music has been an important consolation, as always. It's amazing how much great new music is out there right now. Be that as it may, no song is really speaking to me as much right now as a golden chestnut by The Kinks, "Too Much On My Mind."

All I want right now is something to look forward to. I have no clue when that will ever be the case again.

The Kinks, "Celluloid Heroes"

I've noticed that the Kinks are disproportionately represented in my tracks of the week. Reflecting on that fact, I think the reason why is that Ray Davies lyrics and themes leave a lot more room for discussion than the music of most others. I am also a sucker for culture as social observation, and the Kinks did that better than anyone in rock history.

They started off as exuberant British invaders with songs like "You Really Got Me" that bashed and burned harder than anything that'd ever hit the charts. Then, in their 1966 to 1971 golden age, they got more wistful, less rocking, and more concerned with documenting life in postwar Britain than making music for a rave up.  After Muswell Hillbillies, however, they took a strange slide into a run of ill-conceived and poorly received concept albums. (They eventually righted the ship in the late 1970s with a string of hard rock albums returning to their early roots but with the commentary intact.) I am not a fan of these albums (few are), but the first one, 1972's Everybody's In Show Biz, has some standout songs.

Tops has got to be "Celluloid Heroes," which has the line that gives the album its name. In a rarity for The Kinks, the location is Los Angeles, not England, in particular Hollywood Boulevard. It talks about the Walk of Fame, but with a kind of Davies-ian melancholy as he discusses stars of yore. There's Greta Garbo, who later shunned the spotlight, and Rudolph Valentino, who died young, and those "some that you've hardly ever heard of." Their fame is framed as a struggle, one that took something away from them that they never got back. The goddess of fame is fickle, too: "Success walks hand in hand with failure/ On Hollywood Boulevard."

And it's at that point that the song turns. After reminding the listener of the price of fame, Davies pines longingly to be a "celluloid hero" himself, because "they never feel any pain" and "never die."The music lifts up to become even more anthemic, the longing palpable. By "celluloid heroes" he does not mean Errol Flynn or Marilyn Monroe, but "Errol Flynn" and "Marilyn Monroe," the screen personas that enamor us so. Deep down we know that fame does not bring eternal life and deliverance from personal hardship, but we also want to dream that it can, our modern, secular version of sainthood. I can't think of another song that says it so well.

Breaking Down The Kinks' Run of Greatness: 1966-1971

Spotify has a lot of great music, but if you rely solely on their volumnious database you will still miss out on one of the greatest runs by a band in rock history, and I'm not talking about the Beatles.  It's generally acknowledged that groups like the Fab Four, The Rolling Stones, The Who, and The Doors put together great runs of albums in the period roughly between 1966 and 1972.  The group with the longest winning streak in that era, however, was The Kinks, and many of their crucial albums are missing from the streaming database.

In America they're known mostly for their early, proto-metal rockers "All Day And All Of The Night," and you really got me, along with their early 80s nostalgia exercise "Come Dancing."  During their 1966 to 1971 winning streak, the Kinks stopped touring America due to a dispute with the musicians' union, and made music so indelibly English that it did not play well to Yankee tastes.  It also happened to be odd enough that the band did not retain their popularity in their home country, either.  Apart from weirdos and afficianados like myself, this music has mostly been forgotten, a real crime.  In the interests of spreading the Gospel of the Kinks and my own obsessive tendencies, here's a breakdown of the albumsof the era, all of which deserve your attention.

Face to Face 1966

This 1966 album begins the run, full of songs commenting on life and the class system in Britain.  "Sunny Afternoon," taking the point of view of a drunk aristocrat's ennui was the hit, and the last one the Kinks would have for awhile.  On this album Ray Davies' jaundiced eye towards modern life comes forth, satirizing tourism in "Holiday in Waikiki" and poking fun at the Carnaby Street fashions of "swinging London" on "Dandy."  "Session Man" is a great sleeper track that mocks the pretensions of session musicians, and was likely inspired by experiences the band had when the label put session men on their records.  It's derision of musical virtuosity is punk as punk can be, a whole decade early.

Something Else 1967

On Something Else the Kinks perfected the formula they started on their previous record.  There are many snapshots of daily life, the mundane world that most rock bands just completely ignore.  Daily rituals like "Afternoon Tea" get a song, and the album ends with "Waterloo Sunset," the most beautiful ballad about a train station, or perhaps anything else, ever recorded.  In between there are tales of schoolboy envy ("David Watts") family conflict ("Two Sisters"), and the "Lazy Old Sun."  Dave Davies also offers two of his best songs on this album, the darkly humorous "Death of a Clown" and the gutbucket rock of "Love My 'Til The Sun Shines."

The Village Green Preservation Society 1968

This concept album may have been the band's best yet, but it sank faster than a cinder block.  Perhaps this was because its evocation of small town life and its nostalgia for the old days was wildly out of touch with the spirit of revolt and progress in 1968 when it came out.  The harpsichords and psychedelic touches of the last two albums dropped out in favor of a folk-pop sound that bands like Belle and Sebastian have been very heavily influenced by.  It's hard to choose individual songs to highlight, since the album holds together really well as a cohesive whole.  The best moments deal with memory, and how we are constantly trying to preserve what the passage of time is continually wrenching from us.  "Picture Book," "Do You Remember Walter" and "People Take Pictures of Each Other" all hit this theme really well.

Arthur 1969

Arthur might very well be the best of The Kinks' albums, strange since it was written for a TV special that never actually materialized.  It is a concept album unlike any other, telling the story of the decline of the British Empire through the experience of one ordinary person.  The rollicking "Victoria" is a fun little send-up of naive patriotism, but things get pretty serious pretty quickly on "Yes Sir" and "Some Mother's Son," unsparing looks at trench warfare during World War I.  In the first song a bewildered private is constantly being ordered around by callous bourgeois officers who laugh about sending the cannon fodder off to die.  The second is one that always brings a tear to my eye, telling the tale of an anonymous soldier dying in a trench, and the hole that will be left in his family's life.  The album tells the tale of Arthur's achievement of a middle class life in Australia, but on "Shangri-La" Ray Davies wrote perhaps the best critique of postwar suburbanization to find its way onto a rock album.

Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround 1970

The Kinks had their first hit in awhile stateside with "Lola," a rollicking song about gender-bending romance.  Ironically, the song came on an album revolving around the vagaries of the music business.  Ray Davies details the ways bands are parted from their hard earned money on the humorously bitter "Moneygoround" once they are lucky enough to hit the "Top of the Pops."  The album also contains the affecting "Back In The Line," a wrenching song about having your livelihood in the hands of careless jerks whose butts you have to kiss to survive.  This acid take on the music business ended up being the Kinks' comeback, and helped launch them to a new label.

Muswell Hillbillies 1971

For a large part of the 70s the Kinks wandered in a wilderness of half-baked concept albums and rock operas that could not equal what they had accomplished on Arthur, before playing things safe and settling into hard rock in the later part of the decade.  Before that strange journey, they put out a truly stellar record with a heavy folk and country influence.  It begins with "20th Century Man," the best summation of Ray Davies' critique of modern society's inhumanity.  Other highlights include the country-ish "Muswell Hillbillies" and musical hall-inflected "Alcohol."

The Kink Kronikles 1972

The Kinks' old label neatly summed up the band's golden era on this double LP compilation, one of the few able to combine well-known songs like "Lola" and rarities like "Willesden Green" in a seamless fashion.  Even if you own all the other albums, it's a must have for the presence of great stand-alone singles like the wistful "Days," the jaunty "Autumn Almanac" and bouncy "Wonderboy."  My favorite has got to be "Big Black Smoke," a dark tale of a young country girl corrupted by London's bright lights.  It's the kind of social realism that we get so little from pop music, and something the Kinks provided in admirable abundance.

Track of the Week: The Kinks, "Some Mother's Son"

World War I was the event that first sparked my interest in history.  It was the combination of checking out an illustrated history of it from the library in the third grade with Snoopy battling the Red Baron in It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown that gave me the bug.  When I started my graduate studies, I was certain that I would be doing a dissertation topic related to the war's political and cultural fall-out.  Somehow along the way I realized that the nineteenth century had more interesting facets that had not yet been picked over by better and more renowned scholars than I.

Despite that, my abiding interest in World War I has never left me.  Something about its murderous absurdity and inherently elegaic quality won't let go of me.  Even though plenty of my friends and family are veterans, I cannot think of November 11th as anything other than Armistice Day.  As a teenager I wrote stories from the perspective of trench soldiers (yeah, I didn't get a date until I was 18), and relished constructing one scene where a German soldier arose from the muddy trench on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, looked at his English counterparts on the other side of No Man's Land, and wondered why they had been trying so hard to kill each other.

All wars are tragic because young people must die to advance the political aims of old men.  "Some Mother's Son" by The Kinks gets to the heart of this tragedy perhaps better than any other.  Coming on their historical concept album Arthur, it tells the simple tale of a nameless soldier of the Great War losing his life, and his mother losing a son.  It's all summed up in a heart-breakingly simple line, "some mother's son ain't coming home today."  At the end of the day, that's the raw reality of war, and no number of parades, jet plane flyovers, or American flag pins on the lapels of television personalities can change that.  I certainly appreciate the sacrifices made by our veterans; my own grandfather lost a kidney during World War II which likely shortened his life.  That said, I can't stand war being bathed in pieties and showered with glory on this Veteran's Day when too many mothers' sons from our recent conflicts won't be coming home today.