In conversation with Ray Davies of the Kinks

   Ray Davies

 

In conversation with Ray Davies of the Kinks

Rock fans hoping at long last for a reunion by brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies of The Kinks, the greatest English rock band to emerge in the 1960s not named The Beatles, Who or Rolling Stones, are out of luck. The famously combative and frequently estranged brothers seem no closer to mending their differences, although Dave has rebounded from his debilitating 2004 stroke

“He’s doing very well, living in the West Country (of England) and devising all these plots against me. Sibling rivalry never goes away,” said Ray Davies, who performs in San Diego Sunday, July 22, at downtown’s House of Blues, where he’ll be accompanied by Bill Shanley and The 88.

But if no reunion is in store for The Kinks, which last performed as a band in 1996, Ray is far more optimistic about a potential rebirth for“80 Days,” the ambitious musical he wrote 24 years ago for the La Jolla Playhouse. It had its world premiere here in 1988 and paved the way for Playhouse Artistic Director Des McAnuff’s subsequent collaboration at the theater with Pete Townshend on the hugely successful musical adaptation “The Who’s ‘Tommy’.”

“It might be revived,” Davies said Friday, speaking by phone Friday as he rode between concert stops in San Francisco and Los Angeles. "Des is busy working with Andrew Lloyd Webber right now. But I spoke with Des a few years ago and he felt it was one of the best scores he’s ever worked on, so I’m going to resurrect it.”

Davies, now 68, is now at work on two new musicals and his first opera. In 1990, he was inducted by Townshend into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with The Kinks. The Who leader saluted him as “almost indisputably rock’s most literate, witty and insightful songwriter. He invented a new kind of poetry, a new kind of language for pop writing that influenced me from the very, very beginning.”

Davies and The Kinks’ influence extends to Van Halen and The Smiths to The Kooks and countless other bands on both sides of the Atlantic. The list also includes Metallica, the Bay Area heavy-metal champions that perform with Davies on a song his latest album, “See My Friends,” which finds him revisiting some of his best songs with help from such longtime musical admirers as Bruce Springsteen, Mumford & Sons, Lucinda Williams, Jon Bon Jovi, Paloma Faith and the late Alex Chilton.

Davies last performed in San Diego six years ago at the Spreckels Theatre. His concert mixed recent and vintage solo songs with such Kinks’ gems as “Till the End of the Day,” “Celluloid Heroes” and “All the Day and All The Night.” The once and forever head Kink promised that his Sunday House of Blues show here will be even more eclectic.

QUESTION: The great Duke Ellington, who was a remarkably prolific composer, was once asked what inspired him to write. He smiled, and said: “Give me a deadline.” How important are deadlines for you, whether self-imposed or imposed by someone else?

DAVIES: Deadlines are always interesting to have. I think most writers are lazy – your company accepted, of course! The other day I was going through a song I started to write 10 years ago. Some of them are worth finishing. Deadlines are important to have, not being the be-all and end-all.

Q: Did you do anything with that 10-year-old song?

DAVIES: Yeah, that’s the challenge. Finding the time to write is a problem. Last year I had two weeks off to write. I’m doing a book and an album this year.

Q: What kind of book?

DAVIES: Kind of a memoir. It has a couple of weird characters I put in weird situations. I put them in a tree, to see how they get down.

Q: Are these characters autobiographical in nature?

DAVIES: One is. I write a lot of (song) characters that way – ‘A Well Respected Man,’ ‘Sunny Afternoon,’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ – fictiyious characters that I put real characters into and then it morphs into reality.

Q: How far along are you on the book? When will it be done?

DAVIES: I was commissioned to write it in 2008, but I’ve had two albums out and the collaborations album with Bruce, Mumford, Metallica, Lucinda and the others took a while. I’ve rented a place to stay at and work in at the end of the year.

Q: Have you been surprised by anything in your life you may have forgotten about that you’ve rediscovered as you work on the book?

DAVIES: Yeah, sometimes when I’m writing a line in a song I think: ‘Why am I writing this?’ Then I look back on it and it seems to work out. Last night in San Francisco I was singing ‘Working Man’s Café,’ and I thought: ‘Why am I doing this?’ And I looked in the audience and realized it connected with someone. Obviously, with my catalog of songs, people know the 15-20 big songs and they engage people into the bigger body of my work, which is important to me. The show I’ll be doing in San Diego is a good collection of Ray Davies songs and the songs of The Kinks, with a fine back-up band, The 88s.

Q: How similar or different is your impetus for writing songs now than it was 10 years ago or 40 years ago? Is the process easier, harder or very much the same, and why do you think that is?

DAVIES: It’s not more difficult, it’s just that I ask myself a question: ‘What’s different about this to make me want to write it?’ That’s the eternal question for a storyteller. In some ways, it’s easier now because there’s more technology available. When I started, people would say: ‘We need a new single to come out in a month,’ and I’d write something like ‘Sunny Afternoon.’ There was a streak in me, like a Madison Avenue mentality. I’m a very natural writer and a more poetic writer. I build up a reservoir of ideas for song so I can go: ‘What about this idea?’ The secret is not to become a hack.

Q: Did you ever feel like you were?

DAVIES: No, never. Writing, to me, is still a joy. I forget all my problems and get immersed in what I’m doing. Music is my hobby, as well as my job. If it hadn’t been a hobby, I wouldn’t still be doing it. After this (U.S.) tour is over, I go to Japan to play a festival there, then to the U.K. where I teach a writing course. I find it really stimulating to interact with young writers.

Q: The great American writer Grace Paley was once asked if she taught here students to write about what they know. She had a great response: ‘No, I teach them to write what they don’t know about what they know.’ How about you?

DAVIES: I remember once I freaked out, early on in my career, and they sent (legendary songwriter) Mort Schuman to talk to me. He said: ‘I’m not interested in what you wrote about and what you know. I’m interested in what you’re going to write about.’

Q: Did you and Mort ever collaborate?

DAVIES: No. We thought about that, but Morty died a short while after. He was a great writer; he wrote ‘Save the Last Dance For Me’ (with Doc Pomus). I would have liked to have collaborated with people more. Maybe with this next record, I’d like to collaborate with a few writers. It’s always good to see what other people have in mind.

Q: Any people in particular you’d like to collaborate with?

DAVIES: Sometimes you go to famous people. People think I’d connect with Pete Townshend.

Q: When you were a young man, was success or failure a greater source of artistic inspiration? How about now?

DAVIES: Well the classic story of The Kinks is they succeeded above all adversity. Because we couldn’t tour America for 3 years and then we came back in the late 1970s and put record after record out. And I wrote about miscasts, about society’s miscasts, like (on the albums) ‘Misfits’ and ‘Sleepwalkers.’ We regenerated our work by being outsiders. So one of my premises is that the muse comes from within and success isn’t always the best motivation. If you’re writing for success, you’ll inevitably be disappointed.

Q: In a 1992 interview, Andy Partridge of XTC told me...

DAVIES: Good band!

Q: Yes, they are. He told me: ‘I realize I’m not going to be a pop star, because I’m not cut out for it. But there are things I want to be -- for example, one of the world’s best songwriters. I have to climb over Burt Bacharach, be better than Ray Davies, put my foot in the wall to get over Lennon and McCartney. I have to feel I’ve written songs as good as some of the songs they did.’ When you were young, which artists made you feel the way Andy Partridge felt about you – that is, whose qualitative example did you aspire to match?

DAVIES: Um, I have to say everyone. I love great tunes and great songs and great writing. I hold nobody over anybody else. Because, you know, the secret is when you’ve written a song, you like to think it’s the best ever written.

Q: But were there any songwriters, like, say Hoagy Carmichael, that you held up as an example to emulate, in terms of the standard of their work?

DAVIES: Hoagy Carmichael was a target because my dad liked him. My dad liked jazz and dance music, and he liked vaudeville. Hoagy was in my spectrum, and also Big Bill Broonzy, who my dad also had albums by.

Q: Sounds like your dad had very good musical taste.

DAVIES: I like to think of him as a cool old guy.

Q: Art Blakey, the great jazz drummer and band leader, once said: ‘Music washes away the dust of everyday life.’ Do you agree?

DAVIES: Yeah, I do. I write about the ordinary, but that’s what I know. And I know that extraordinary things happen to ordinary people