headlessparrot's Full Review: Are The Village Green Preservation Society by The ...
Kinks leader Ray Davies has said of the group’s 1968 album The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society that it might be the “most successful flop of all time.” Such a claim is bold but not unreasonable, predicated on the fact that while Village Green Preservation Society sold poorly in its own time, it has blossomed into a much-beloved cult classic: once out of print, it is now, Wikipedia suggests, “the best-selling non-compilation album in the Kinks catalogue.” Davies’ claim might be somewhat shortsighted (or a bit narcissistic), however, given that the story of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds reads almost identically. Minus the important “cult” distinction, of course, which means that while Village Green has become a favourite of the hipster set, Pet Sounds trades in complete cultural ubiquity. Pet Sounds is also, at the risk of ostracism, the far superior album, which makes its ubiquity entirely defensible.
But given that Pet Sounds is inarguably one of the greatest records of all-time, saying so is less of an insult to Village Green than it is a statement of the obvious – a comparison of Japanese Kobe beef to the American variety, if you will (awful metaphor, I know). Which is to say that the hipsters (or Hewlett-Packard, who, in positively Nick Drake-ian fashion, co-opted the sweetly disarming “Picture Book” for a series of ads), bless their snarky hearts, have done a remarkable job in dusting off a long-forgotten gem that’s actually a gem, just not quite as radiant as a few of the others that have been unearthed.
A story to re-affirms my tenuous credibility: I distinctly recall sitting in the bedroom of a high school friend and being played his father’s early CD copy (pre-remaster) of The Village Green Preservation Society. I wasn’t paying much attention at the time, but the opening groove of the title track – a sparkling interlacing of jangling Rickenbacker, earthy organ, and skipping bass – remained firmly lodged in my mind for the five years that passed before I finally gave the Kinks their chance. The moral of the story is that I was a fool, but an almost-prescient one.
Along with growing affection for The Village Green Preservation Society, there have been a number of concurrent attempts to retroactively include the Kinks on lists of the biggest British bands of the 1960s, alongside such luminaries as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who. Where this movement has come from, I’m not entirely sure (it has certainly gathered steam these days, via the audiences that were smitten by Juno and, to a lesser extent, The Darjeeling Limited).
But it ignores a couple of things: a) the “Big Three” distinction often used to describe the Beatles, Stones, and Who was less about critical reception than it was about mainstream popularity. While the Kinks never hurt for popularity in the Commonwealth, a U.S. performance ban during the peak of the British Invasion ensured that they would always linger on a second tier in the eyes of the screaming masses. Moreover, b) even using critical reception as a metric, the Kinks’ inclusion is arguable. Any good greatest hits collection (this author suggests two-disc The Ultimate Kinks) will reveal that the Kinks were often an inconsistent band. Even the carefully sequenced cuts of such a compilation can’t disguise the presence of a few clunkers – interspersed, admittedly, between some of the greatest songs of the 1960s, or ever. Their albums, for the most part, follow the same trajectory: mostly great, occasionally brilliant, and sometimes mediocre. The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is one of three notable exceptions to that rule (Something Else By The Kinks and Arthur (Or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire) are usually recognized as the others). And I suppose in any case that it also doesn’t help that the Kinks, like the Rolling Stones, continued on long after their time was up, diminishing a reputation that was otherwise fairly blemish-free. See, for example, the 㣴s embarrassment “Come Dancing,” the band’s last top-ten single, described thusly by the A.V. Club’s Jason Heller: “As a Kinks song, it ain’t so hot.”
On the other hand, there’s also no reason to reduce the Kinks – like so many have – to their greatest hits, because their catalogue reveals so much more: more warts, indeed, but more golden nuggets as well. I do think, I’ll concede, that a convincing argument could be made that the Kinks’ artistic trajectory mirrored that of the other Big Three: occasional gems on inconsistent pre-Golden Age releases (see Meet The Beatles), followed by a period of critical and artistic prosperity (see Beggars Banquet-Exile On Main Street) and a precipitous decline (see The Who’s It’s Hard). However, I’ll decline from making such an argument for now, because it’s one that I’m only half convinced by myself. Nevertheless, it’s tempting to reduce the Kinks to “Lola” or “You Really Got Me,” but patently unfair (though both number amongst the era’s most important songs, for wildly different reasons). Just like Some Girls can never take away from the brilliance of Sticky Fingers, spells of mediocrity shouldn’t change the fact that the Kinks, for better or for worse (usually better), remain one of the underappreciated icons in the history of rock. If anything good has come from the appearance of “A Well Respected Man” in Juno, or of “Picture Book” in those HP advertisements, it’s the revelation of a Kinks that is much closer to historical truth: a peppy, polished, and jangly rock band whose dulcet hook-readiness is matched by its devastatingly incisive wit.
This is the Kinks that I know and love. This is the Kinks that defines The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, a wonderfully wry and quasi-nostalgic glimpse of rural British existence – the cozy ‘good old days’ that may not have even ever existed (and, if they did, may not have been so good). It’s a theme exquisitely summed up in a single line from the title track, “God save the little shops, china cups, and virginity.” In other words, if Village Green isn’t one the greatest British albums ever, it’s certainly one of the greatest British albums ever, a cozy glimpse of so-called hamlet-life that might be the Britannia (Britannica?) to the Band’s Americana.
With an overarching narrative like that, it’s not surprising that Village Green was an unmitigated flop upon release. This is the band, after all, who was banned for three years from the United States, – presumably (though not officially) for their rowdy rock and roll behaviour – whose early hits (“You Really Got Me,” “All Day And All Of The Night”) were as abrasive as anything the British Invasion ever offered, and whose proletarian concerns with class-consciousness (“David Watts”) seem focus-grouped for the disaffected. But it’s difficult to imagine modish youths slamming their bedroom doors and blaring The Village Green Preservation Society on vinyl, singing along to pleas of a return to a more idyllic England, whilst their parents pound on the door and order the fruit of their loins to “turn down that racket!” We are, after all, talking about 1968, the year of Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland, and The White Album. Next to which, Village Green seems rather unassuming. Because it is. The truth is that The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is, in many ways, the little album that could.
The truth is that The Village Green Preservation Society, though it doesn’t immediately sound it, is perfectly in step with the conceptual arch of these contemporary records, albeit in a skewed, seditious way: Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland and the like are inarguable products of the hippie revolution in its denouement, and it shows: they are tense records, filled with sludgy R&B/blues rhythms and overdriven guitar licks that reflect a palpable sense of dread. Village Green indeed reflects the same sensibility, but does so by turning expectations on its head: by recording a set of songs that is upbeat, jangly, and positively pastoral – using careful narratives and overarching themes rather than sludgy riffs to convey the nuanced anxiety of post-modernity. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that it was always brother Dave Davies who was the all-out rocker in the family, and that Village Green marks the point in Kinks history where Ray firmly began to muscle him out of the band’s songwriting process. Over the course of the band’s prior albums, Ray had shown himself to be the more focused writer: dynamic, clever, and character-and-scene-driven, with a flair nostalgia – and Village Green takes these tendencies to their fantastical limit, illustrating (incidentally) why some have pegged it as a Ray Davies solo album first and a Kinks record second.
The record opens with the title track (arguably the finest song in the Kinks catalogue), a sub-three minute paean to pastoral England, from teatime to strawberry jam and Professor Moriarty. The song serves as a brilliant prologue to the album, tying together the thematic strings of Village Green’s nostalgic minutiae, but is noteworthy more for the radiance of its arrangement: Ray’s reedy organ complemented by Dave’s acoustic guitar, an urgently throbbing bass phrase, and charmingly sloppy harmonies. “Picture Book” is played with a perfectly respectable measure of bucolic abandon – sloppy rhythm echoes the melody, and a chaotic mix throws the instruments into a muddled mess – that’s offset by the sweetness of its quirky lyrics, a wry reflection on aging, memory, and how we view ourselves, via glimpses of family in a photo album.
“Last of the Steam-Powered Trains” illustrates the Kinks’ blues-roots – constructed around a riff from bluesman Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” (Zeppelin weren’t the only shameful thieves) – and chugs along like the titular vehicle, propelled by a series of vibrant harmonica licks, and the anthropomorphic narrator who is (very literally) the last steam-powered train. His story, of course, perfectly embodies a point that has little to do with steam engines: the willingness of modernity to dispose of the past.
The oft-repeated hook of “Johnny Thunder,” meanwhile, sounds more like the Who than the Who, but it’s “Starstruck” that steals Village Green’s second half: equal parts teen-pop and Las Vegas croon (“Baby, you don’t know what your saying / Because you’re a victim of bright city lights”). “Wicked Annabelle,” elsewhere, is Dave Davies’ lone contribution, a sinister psychedelic stomp that evokes the darkness of those other 1968 albums (and which sounds remarkably tame until placed in the context of Village Green’s otherwise jovial tone). And “Animal Farm” is brilliant for its evocation of the country backwoods, its laidback twelve-string guitar and dulcet strings oozing pastoral vibrancy while Davies mourns “This world is big and wild and half insane / Take me where the animals are playing.” The irony, I suppose, being that the four-legged world to which our narrator seeks to escape is likely just as “wild and half insane,” even if it’s not as big. It merely seems to us – like the past that Davies reservedly exhorts – that the unknown is appealing. Until it becomes the known, when its wrinkles are revealed.
The irony of Village Green is that there’s as much distaste (or at least suspicion) in Davies’ teashop narratives as there is adulation. The album revels in its beautiful vision of a harmonious society, but is ultimately distrustful of the misguided social conservatism that anchors it, and aware of the fact that it is something to which we can never really return[1]. Subsequently, Village Green is surprisingly subversive – or at least surprisingly ambivalent – for a record that sounds suspiciously like my grandparents’ lament for simpler times. But the truth is that nostalgia – not even when paired with Village Green’s anguished internal tension – doesn’t play as well for those rebellious teenagers as does a straight sneer and overdriven guitars. But in the age of irony, where ambivalence is the rule rather than the exception, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society has rightly flourished as the masterpiece that it is: a collection of beautifully understated and wildly infectious pop songs, conceptually grounded by a universal ambivalence toward the past and the present.
Village Green has become somewhat of an industry unto itself. Like Pet Sounds, successive remasters and deluxe (3-disc!) editions of The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society have tacked on mono mixes, non-album singles, and studio outtakes from the album’s extensive recording sessions (Davies had always fancied Village Green as a double album, but was rebuked by his label). But these Easter eggs are merely icing on the cake for what is already an unsung, underrated, and wholly wonderful album – one whose influence is felt through the history of witty, intelligent, and culturally conscious – without being preachy – rock and roll. And one whose thesis – to quote All Music Guide, "that ‘new’ does not necessarily equal ‘better,’ and it's entirely possible to remain fond of the institutions and icons of one's youth without being a reactionary conservative" – reverberates as strongly as its songs.
______________________ [1] - This is the brilliance, incidentally, of The Village Green Preservation Society’s appearance in the 2007 action-spoof film Hot Fuzz. It demonstrates the small town’s sunny demeanour to viewers while – for astute listeners – simultaneously signifying its “not-quite-right” internal tension. In fact, Hot Fuzz (which is remarkably smart for such a wilfully dumb film) is very much a cinematic dramatization of Village Green, taken to its absurdist culmination.
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