As much as I’ve been a long, longtime fan of The Kinks, I never went too far back in their discography. (Note that this record, on the covers at least, labels them without a definite article – just “Kinks.”) My first Kinks record was probably “Low Budget,” which came out in my freshman year of college. I bought their next several releases on vinyl and then CD, snagged a copy of Misfits at some point. But from my old record-collecting days, the older stuff that I got was compilations – “The Kinks Greatest Hits!,” “The Live Kinks,” and a Portuguese collection called “Golden Hour of the Kinks.” Their original albums from the ’60s I mostly ignored until relatively recently. And this, their 1964 debut album, I don’t even remember having seen until this reissue, though their follow-up “Kinda Kinks” was all over the bins back in the day.
Not surprisingly, it’s very much a ’60s British R’n’B group’s album, with obligatory Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley covers, and some originals that didn’t give much of a hint of what was to come from one of rock’s most inventive, quirky songwriters – except for “Stop Your Sobbing.” Damn, that bit of legend was on their very first album! And the proto-punk masterpiece that is “You Really Got Me” is here, too, showing that other interesting direction they would go. Beyond that, it’s quite enjoyable, but if I’d experienced it in real time, it may not have made me a Kinks fan for life – it might have been hard to differentiate from all the other 1964 British Invasion albums that sounded pretty much just like it.
Picked this up at Forever Changes here in Phoenixville, where Shawn is on top of the latest trends but also knows what I like, and what I like is mostly reissues of stuff I missed the first time around.
