Ray Davies
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The show we saw was more than three hours long, but there was so much material for Davies to choose from that nobody with a wish list for the set could possibly hear everything he wanted. Mr. Lungs in the back bellowed for “Big Sky” and Mr. Fixated to one side kept shouting for “Sleepwalker” and everybody knew damn well that no matter how many times Davies disappeared into the wings waving, the night was simply not going to end without “Lola.” Down in front, for reasons I never found out, someone had a huge stack of paper plates, and fans Frisbeed dozens of them at the poor man–with a song request written on each one.
I’m sure Davies skipped a few tunes that somebody was dying for, but he made up for it with pleasant surprises–material we’d forgotten to anticipate, including a smattering of cuts from Muswell Hillbillies and Village Green Preservation Society. (“One of the least successful rock records ever made,” Davies called it. “But stick around long enough and eventually you’ll become a cult.”) Back in 1968, many music writers figured that Village Green failed because it was so amazingly incompatible with the zeitgeist–wistful nostalgia for the pastoral garden parties of the Edwardian gentry was hardly the coin of the realm in those days. But plenty of Davies’s current fans have no memory of the late 60s–these days those tumultuous times can seem as distant as “little shops, china cups, and virginity” were to the proverbial street fighting man. It’s starting to look like Davies’s stubbornly out-of-step aesthetic, despite its superficial brittleness and vulnerability, was well equipped to weather the ravages of time. Maybe a longing for things worth handing down from generation to generation was the point all along.
There was intimacy at these shows too–and it was more than just a performance of intimacy, where you can pretend to know somebody because you’ve shared his collection of footnoted anecdotes with him. Despite the way Davies changed personas like shirts–sleazy promoter, rock star, tourist, idle nobleman–he never lost touch with what his fans cherish most. His true wizardry is in his tenderest songs, like “Oklahoma USA,” fragile and lovely like the escapist dreams at its heart, and “Days,” which is both a benediction and a preemptive farewell to someone who could be a lover, a relative, or a friend. The best stories he tells are the ones you can inhabit as thoroughly as if they were your own memories–and when you think of it that way, it makes perfect sense that people would never get tired of hearing them.
