You seldom get to meet your heroes. If you do, it would just be a quick handshake, a smile for the camera, a few blubbered words which they’ve probably heard a million times before. They already have the joke to come back with for you to tell your friends later.
That seems awkward to me, so I always pass up the opportunity. I watched Donovan sign autographs after a show once, stood about ten feet away and just watched him. When the line would thin out he’d catch me, smile and go on to the next person. When he was done he looked over at me, smiled and waved and was off. That was fucking Donovan. He knew what I was doing and was cool with it. I got more from that encounter than if I’d stood in the line and got the autograph.
I was late coming to the Kinks. But when I did, I was all in. They were the first to go psychedelic. The first band to burst out of the speakers with a truly heavy guitar. The first to delve into alternative sexualities, years before they figured out how to live up to their name with Lola.
The British bands were different. They wrote songs. Americans jammed. Songs take craftsmanship. It’s hard to write lyrics that capture a bit of the universal psyche, is catchy and makes you wanna shake your butt.
They were the first to go psychedelic. The first band to burst out of the speakers with a truly heavy guitar. The first to delve into alternative sexualities, years before they figured out how to live up to their name with Lola.
Banned from America, Ray Davies wrote himself into a breakdown, as barred from the biggest market in the world, to survive you had to have hits. So they became exquisitely British. Waterloo Sunset, from 1967 has even frequently been tossed around as the most beautiful lyrics in the English language.
It was in a video from that era, the very early seventies … he was wearing a velvet jacket in a performance, and I thought that was about the coolest thing ever. Years later, I saw a velvet jacket in a JPeterman catalog. Black. I coveted it, but I couldn’t afford it. Then after Christmas came the half price sale.
It’s my lucky jacket. There’s something about it. I had a guy come up to me in a restaurant once and asked if he knew me. I didn’t. He asked where I was from, I told him, he thought I was being cagey, but was polite and fucked off. A few minutes later he was back. “By know you, I mean, are you famous or something?”
It was the jacket. I’ve had other variations on that theme. A velvet jacket draws peculiar glances.
A few years later I’m walking through the square in front of the Abbey in Bath, England. I look ahead, there’s a couple strolling towards me. The guy is wearing a fur cap. He’s looking at me, at the jacket and smiling. He might have been remembering having one like that once upon a time. It’s Ray Davies.
We keep walking towards each other, and I’m tempted to say something, but his eyes go from the jacket to mine, and he smiles, the gap toothed smile. I smile back and we walk on.
Genius is a word that’s overused when people write about him. But he found a way to rhyme consortium in a song. And he wrote and recorded this song, then held onto it for fifty years, before finally releasing it. When he, and his audience was old enough to get it.
That’s patience, and that’s genius.