Ray Davies turns 60

Master Raymond Douglas Davies was born 60 years ago today, on June 21, 1944. Happy #60, Ray!

For starters, by any rights Ray Davies should be rated one of the top 10 greatest songwriters in the rock music tradition. He's just that good.

Of course, the Kinks made their name with some of the most brilliant simple two and three chord rock and roll singles ever recorded, notably "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" in 1964.

Ray and the boys rapidly expanded the palette with contemplative ballads such as "So Tired of Waiting for You." Ray has been famous for the daydream stuff, "Sunny Afternoon" and "Lazy Old Sun."

He's got his own little genre of pop social satires, totally rockin' good stuff like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "Harry Rag" and "Apeman."

They could always return to their teenage rock roots to touch base and revitalize, such as "Victoria" and "Low Budget."

To those who share the religion, "Rock and Roll Fantasy" may sound like the greatest and saddest song about losing faith in the music. Then again, he wrote the equally brilliant "You Can't Stop the Music." That kind of thing shows why they would be called Kinks.

True to their name, they had a lot of kinks, most notably homosexuality versus social conservatism. On the one hand, Ray Davies wrote some really gay stuff, starting with "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion." No one else has made as big a pop hit as gay as "Lola" -- give or take maybe "Karma Chameleon." Then, of course, there's "David Watts" -- possibly their best song, with the perfect pop hooks and the furious gallop detailing class envy and pure confused teenaged homosexual desire.

Yet on the other hand, Ray Davies has been the most hardcore conservative in a social preservation type sense, most famously with the whole album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Even as the 60s youth social rebellion was peaking, Ray was writing "Rosie Won't You Please Come Home." In the brilliant "Two Sisters," Ray took the side of the housewife and mother over the "wayward lass" of a sister.

Perhaps Ray's best expression of conservative thought running against the "sex and drugs and rock & roll" grain would be the brilliant diamond hard smackdown of "The Hard Way," in which a teacher breaks it right down for some smartass punk. "I'm wasting my vocation teaching you to write neat, when you're only fit to sweep the streets."

"Conservative" here means more a broad sense of favoring old, quiet and traditional over new and flashy, rather than any particular political affiliation. Indeed, Davies has often exhibited a kind of class consciousness associated with liberalism, or even Marxism. There's a sense that he WANTS to believe in Marxist stuff, but just knows better.

The perfect encapsulation of this comes from the Preservation, Act 1 album, with the masterly "Money and Corruption/I'm Your Man." The setup of this construct has the working folk railing against the evil capitalists and their political hacks. Then a man arises from the people with a seductive ballad promising a five year plan to fix things. Pretty soon he's explaining how all the big shots that run these companies will be personally answering to HIM.

If all you know of the Kinks is the half dozen songs that the radio usually plays, you're SO sadly deprived. Some of those aren't really even their best songs. "Come Dancing" is a perfectly nice song (and classic conservative type nostalgia), but not the very pick of the litter.

Besides a good best-of collection, all cool people should definitely have the albums Face to Face and Something Else for starters.

They had some high concept albums that they used as the basis for little stage plays with costumes and such in the early 70s that have been particularly criminally underappreciated. All connisseurs of modern pop music really need to hear Schoolboys in Disgrace, Soap Opera, and Preservation, Act 1. These all have interesting overarching ideas, stories and themes. More importantly, they have some catchy, tuneful and totally unique sounding SONGS. You definitely benefit from the context of the album with these, but they work beautifully as individual songs.

There are still many hidden gems in these albums. Few noticed "Stop Your Sobbing" until the Pretenders recorded it on their first album. Also, for Ray being such a poof, he managed to impregnate Chrissie Hynde -- THE rock and roll girl of my teenaged dreams.

As recently as 1999, the Rushmore movie soundtrack dug up a buried Kinks treasure that few people had ever noticed before, "Nothin' In This World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl." Jebus, are there more songs that good buried in the Kinks catalogue that even I haven't noticed?

For a particularly personal pick, the weird undertow of dreamy dread in "Rainy Day in June" has haunted my summers for many years. Man, but that's a freaky one.

There's just NO way to pick out 10 best Ray Davies or Kinks songs, so here's about the smallest list I can stand to leave:

"Rainy Day in June"
"David Watts"
"Lola"
"I'm Not Like Everybody Else"
"Rush Hour Blues"
"You Make It All Worthwhile"
"Have Another Drink"
"You Can't Stop the Music"
"Jack, the Idiot Dunce"
"Headmaster"
"The Hard Way"
"Demolition"
"Money and Corruption/I'm Your Man"
"Two Sisters"
"Rosie Won't You Please Come Home"
"Rock and Roll Fantasy"
"Nothin' In This World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl"
"Afternoon Tea"
"Harry Rag"
"Tin Soldier Man"
"Schooldays"
"Dandy"
"Low Budget"
"Dedicated Follower of Fashion"
"Tired of Waiting for You"
"Victoria"
"Father Christmas"
"All Day and All of the Night"
"You Really Got Me"
"Waterloo Sunset"
"Superman"
"Come Dancing"
"Celluloid Heroes"
"Deadend Street"
"Party Line"
"A Well Respected Man"
"Sunny Afternoon"
"The Last Assembly"

Thank you, Ray.