Rating My CD's: Fancy

32. The Kinks -- Face to Face


I hate listening to the radio. At best, Tesla's Marconi's century-old invention exudes tedious middlebrow talkiness; at worst, the complete absence of thought. And that's only the actual content: radio commercials are a whole other way to get under my skin. If I ever meet the bastards behind the Cars for Kids ad, I will not be held responsible for my actions.

But back in 2000 I didn't have much of a choice. I was driving a 1988 Lincoln Mark VII whose reliability taught me to curse auto mechanics in the saltiest of terms. I had lost my first job and was alternating between temping and collecting unemployment. Disposable income was not part of my life experience, so new car stereos and new CD fodder for mix tapes weren't either.

So after wearying of almost all the commercial stations in the Delaware Valley, my housemate hipped me to the local University of Pennsylvania station. Although the pledge/membership ads were fully as dull as any other desperate attempt to part me from my cash, at least they played songs not pile-drived into my head ad infinitum. And one afternoon in the late spring to early summer, I heard the first Kinks song that made me give a damn about them:

The taxman's taken all my dough,
He's left me in my stately home,
Lazin' on a Sunny Afternoon.

Up until this point, all I knew about the Kinks was "You Really Got Me" (and I'm not sure if I'd ever heard the original version) and the notion that their name had barred them from the kind of Stateside success that the Beatles and Stones got. But this particular juxtaposition of fuzz-saw guitar and nihilism was a revelation. I began to look, whenever I was in Tower Records (moment of silence) or the like, for the album "Sunny Afternoon" belonged to. But all I found was Arthur and Village Green and all the stuff from their Little-England indie-pop genesis period. But it sat in the back of my mind, a new avenue to be explored.

Amazon.com shows no record of me buying Face to Face there, so I must have either stumbled across it in a hole-in-the-wall shop or ordered it online from somewhere else. In any case, I'm still considering how to take it.

"Sunny Afternoon" is still awesome, one of my Top Ten all-time songs. It's got such a fine feel to it, a wondrous croaky lament of wealth and fame and self-awareness. But the rest cannot command of me anything better than mellow applause. "Rainy Day in June" is a decent mining of the same territory as "Sunny Afternoon," but too apocalyptic to be listened to except in melancholy. "Session Man" reeks of envy, and a clumsy shot at the guys, such as Jimmy Page, who rescued their first album from Dave Davies' fecklessness on guitar. And a lot of the other songs lack staying power: I like them when I'm listening, but I shrug them off when I'm not.

Amazon calls it an Essential Recording, and it's recently been re-released with new tracks. But while it's important for the the development of English rock as distinct from early 60's America-Reflecting British Invasion, I can't begin to put it in the same category as Revolver or even Aftermath, the respective Beatles and Stones discs from the same year. Sometimes being in transition is just uncomfortable. "Sunny Afternoon" will prevent me from getting rid of this, but I'll be skipping "Little Miss Queen of Darkness" and "You're Looking Fine" to get there.

Grade: OK