Kinks – "Dead End Street" (1966)

What are we living for?

Two-room apartment on the second floor

No chance to emigrate

I’m deep in debt and now it’s much too late

In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine assembled a panel of 55 musicians, critics, and industry executives and asked them to name the 100 most influential artists of the rock ’n’ roll era.  (The list was updated in 2011.)

Most of the recording artists that I will identify as “overrated” in this years “29 Posts in 29 Days” are on that list – some of them are near the top of that list.

Not surprisingly, most of the artists that I will identify as “underrated” aren’t on that list.  If the consensus is that you belong in the all-time top 100, it’s hard to make a strong case that you’re underrated.

Hard – but not impossible . . .

*     *     *     *     *

I don’t think there’s much doubt that if there were a Mount Rushmore of “British Invasion” bands, the four groups that most deserve to be on it are the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Kinks.

Rolling Stone ranks the Beatles as #1 on its “most influential list,” with the Rolling Stones at #4, the Who at #29, and Kinks at #65.

The Who should rank higher, and the Kinks should rank much higher.  They had their share of hit singles – “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” “Tired of Waiting for You,” and “Lola” all made the top ten in the U.S. – but few Americans paid much attention to their albums.

[NOTE: Can you believe that the Who had only one top ten single in the U.S. – “I Can See for Miles”?]

Virtually every album that the Beatles or Rolling Stones released in the second half of the sixties made it to#1 or #2 on the album charts, while the Kinks were lucky when one of their albums cracked the top 50.

In fact, most of their very best albums – albums like Something Else and Arthur – never even made it into the top 100.

Go figure.

*     *     *     *     *

Rolling Stone chose Peter Buck of R.E.M. to write a brief essay on the Kinks for its top 100 article.  I’m not a big fan of R.E.M., but Buck’s appreciation of the Kinks is excellent:

I’ve got pretty much every note the Kinks recorded on my iPod — certainly everything through 1980.  And it all sounds good.

The Kinks are the only major band from the sixties I can think of that didn’t go psychedelic, didn’t do any of that crap that all of the other big bands did at the time.  When everyone was writing song cycles about Eastern mysticism, Ray Davies was writing about a two-up/two-down flat in some English suburb.

Ray wrote songs about the things that were important to him.  He invented his world and gave it life.  And in that world, people weren't wearing Nehru jackets, smoking pot and jamming for 24 hours a day. . . .

The Kinks slipped into rock history through the back door. All of those great albums that we talk about now, like Face to Face, Something Else by the Kinks and Village Green Preservation Society — nobody bought those records in the sixties.  But those of us who love those records — and a lot of us are musicians — have loved them for decades.

*     *     *     *     *

The Kinks recorded a lot of songs about real people – adults, not teenagers – dealing with real problems.

Click here to listen to “Dead End Street,” which is one of those songs.  

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.