Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
A songwriter who got lucky
Kinks legend Ray Davies was stuck in the creative process, reworking recordings he couldn’t finish. Then he got shot in New Orleans and found a new sense of urgencyby ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Globe and Mail, March 6, 2008We all glimpse our fates in other people’s lives at some point. But when Ray Davies saw a man take a bullet to the shoulder on a street in New Orleans, where he was then living, he didn’t realize he was getting a preview of what would happen to him a few months later as he chased a thief down a similar road in the same city.
The slug hit him in the upper right thigh, breaking his femur. He was taken to the Charity Hospital, a Dickensian detail that he finds amusing. Just a few days earlier, he had been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. No need to ask which of that week’s distinctions changed his life more.
“The time to get shot is when you’re 20,” he told me during an interview in Toronto last week, four years after the shooting. “I have to work really hard to keep my mobility. But I’ve always been quite fit, so I’m lucky.”
At 63, he looked worn but natty in his earth-toned suit. On his lapel he wore a pin of the Arsenal Football Club, the North London team he has supported ever since his working-class dad began dragging him to games. The white trainers on his feet, though, seemed more a concession to his trick leg than a fashion choice.
The immediate effects of the bullet wound were transitory, unlike Davies’s lifelong addiction to songwriting. The Kinks alumnus, aptly described in a recent book-length study of his work as “one of the greatest songwriters of the rock era,” was still in the emergency ward when he felt the familiar craving.
“I was still plugged up to all these machines,” he said. “I was quite afraid of what was going to happen. They were worried about my heartbeat, because it was really slow, and I had shock. I asked a nurse for a notepad, with Louisiana State University Hospital on the top of it, and I wrote these observations down.”
These observations became Morphine Song, one of 13 numbers on Davies’s latest solo album, Working Man’s Café. From his hospital bed, he notes the easygoing professionalism of his nurses, the agony of a nearby junkie who resented her neighbour getting morphine with no hassle, and the sounds of a brass band that Davies was sure he could hear marching right through the ward.
The shooting seems to have done something for his productivity, at least in terms of getting records out. As soon he had recovered from his injuries, he quickly finished an album he had been fussing over for six years (Other People’s Lives), and released Working Man’s Café a year after that.
The new record is a strange mixture of confidence and befuddlement. Davies the songwriter is very secure in his craft, but he is less so as an interpreter of the world around him. The effects of globalization, the gentrification of his old London neighbourhood, the chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina (which greatly damaged the Charity Hospital) – it all marches through his songs like a strange fate we don’t deserve. He offers no solutions, and even wrote a song (You’re Asking Me) to say so.
“I’ve got a theory: 80 per cent of the people in the world need emotional support and the other 20 per cent are crazy,” he said. “But I don’t know what the answer is. That’s why I write and make records, and am not a politician.”
What he can do is document a feeling. It’s often a nostalgic feeling about the London that he knew as a boy, that lionized him when he became a star in the sixties and that is slowly fading as manufacturing jobs move offshore. But even his memories are elusive. His career, he says, was an accident that happened while he was trying to have an ordinary life.
“Somebody said, ‘Hey, Ray, what was it like when you toured with the Beatles, when you did all those great Carnaby Street things?’ I can’t remember. I was living through it, just doing my job. As soon as we had a No. 1 hit, I got married. I was trying to get out of it even then, and settle down … Nobody told me how to write songs. The first real song that I put out [the influential You Really Got Me] was a No. 1. They said, ‘Do you want to follow up?’ and I said, ‘Okay, but I don’t do this for a living, I lucked out first time.’ Then I had another hit, and another.”
He is famously demanding of those he works with: He and his brother, Dave, battled for years in the Kinks. When he played his current band a demo-tape version of Vietnam Cowboys, the song that begins Working Man’s Café, they didn’t grasp it to his satisfaction. “So I abandoned production in England and went to Nashville, got a few players together who liked the tunes, we played the songs, and they got it,” he said, adding: “It’s not that the first band was playing it badly. It just didn’t knit. It’s that indefinable thing.”
Another song, Hymn for a New Age, gropes toward another indefinable thing. We need something to believe in, he said, but it can’t be Santa Claus on a heavenly throne.
“I went to a Church of England school, and it stuck with me,” he said. “I had that church religion when I was little, and I resisted like all kids do. But it instilled in me a certain belief. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s there. I’m not a preachy sort of person, but I do believe in something. And I’ve got to believe in myself.”
He still plays his old songs, a decade after the Kinks packed it in for good. “I cover my records because they’re part of my evolution as a person, and because they’re damn fun to play,” he said. “And if I were going to see me play, I’d want to hear some of those songs.”
Other People’s Lives could be heard in Britain by anybody who bought a Sunday Times when the paper was sold with a free copy of the disc inside. Davies didn’t really like the way that marketing brainstorm turned out. “I thought they were going to put a combination of the last album and some teaser tracks from this album,” he said. “They probably got paid a lot of money by the newspaper, which I didn’t see. Two weeks later, the record company [V2] was sold and went out of business.”
Davies will tour with the same band that couldn’t get Vietnam Cowboy the first time round. He seemed confident that there will be no difficulty now that the song exists as a record. Still, there’s one player from his past who left a hole he has never fully been able to fill: his brother, who is still recovering from a stroke he suffered soon after Ray was shot.
“Since I’ve been doing solo work, I’ve worked with a dozen guitar players, including some really good ones,” Davies said. “And nobody hits the strings like he did.”
Don’t get shot again, Ray
Happy to attest that “Under the Blacklight” is superb. It’s got some fun retro things going on. And, Jenny’s voice never disappoints me. 🙂
From Lucinda William “Essence”
Lost Highway Records 2001
Warner – Tamerlane Publishing/Lucy Jones MusicTony Garnier bass
Bo Ramsey guitar
Charlie Sexton guitar
David Mansfield violin/viola
Jim Keltner drums
Reese Wyans organ
Lucinda acoustic guitarGood sh*t on the ‘tube, Nordy (Ronny). Thanks for the heads-up.
Bridwell’s got the Doug Martsch (Built to Spill) beard-thing going on, doesn’t he? 🙂Band of Horses – “Cease to Begin”
No sophomore slump for Ben Bridwell & co. here…
Nicely haunting at times.This Day In Music History … (from Associated Press)
In 1963, 17-year-old Neil Young performed his first professional date at a Winnipeg country club.
And…
In 1949, RCA Victor introduced the 45 rpm record. It was designed as a rival to Columbia’s 33-and-one-third rpm long-playing disc, introduced the previous year. The two systems directly competed with each other to replace 78 rpm records, bewildering consumers and causing a drop in record sales. By the end of 1949, all the major companies, except RCA, had committed themselves to the LP record, seemingly putting an end to the 45. Even RCA itself announced it would issue its classical library on 33-and-one third rpm discs.
