Ray Davies (born 21 June 1944) is an English musician. He was the lead singer and songwriter for the Kinks, which he led with his younger brother, Dave. He has also acted, directed and produced shows for theatre and television. Since the dissolution of the Kinks in 1996, Ray Davies has embarked on a solo career as a singer-songwriter. (More from Wikipedia)
Link Wray’s influence is front and center on a good 50% of the records that I play, because he is credited with introducing the “power chord” on electric guitar to rock and roll, a technique whose effect is often enhanced by distortion.
Writing for Allmusic, Cub Koda calls the power chord “the major modus operandi of modern rock guitarists”. I will spare you the technical details – not least because I don’t really understand them myself – but Ray Davies of the Kinks (in their classic “You Really Got Me”) and Pete Townshend of the Who (in “My Generation”) helped popularize the power chord in the early years of the British Invasion. When Townshend is performing his famous windmill guitar technique, he is typically playing power chords.
(February 2013)
* * *
Many of the songs in the English Freakbeat Series were by musicians that became famous in later bands or in other contexts. The real attraction for the English Freakbeat, Volume 3 CD reissue though are three songs by a band called the Ravens; their bandleader Dave Davies and his younger brother Ray Davies were later in the Kinks, with Ray being the frontman and main songwriter for that stellar British Invasion group. Ray Davies was supposedly not involved in the Ravens at all according to the band’s official history; however, the CD liner notes as well as the review by Allmusic notes that some of these songs bear Ray Davies’ stamp and might have been sung (if not written) by him.
(March 2014/2)
* * *
The Crawdaddy Club was founded in early 1963 in the back room of the Station Hotel in Richmond, Surrey (a suburb of London). The owner was Giorgio Gomelsky, who had previously owned the Piccadilly Club in central London. The house band in the beginning was the Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band, whom Gomelsky had known from the earlier club. Charlie Watts had sometimes played drums for this band, and one of their guitarists was Ray Davies, later the founder and bandleader of the Kinks.
(January 2015/2)
* * *
As with Fur, there is one cover on the Racehorse album, a Ray Davies song that I was not previously familiar with called “Art Lover”, taken from the 1981 album by the Kinks, Give the People What They Want. The lines in this song if sung by a man would be more than a little unsettling, but the way Holly Ramos performs them (with no gender changes), they are merely quizzical: “Jogging in the park is my excuse / To look at all the little girls / I’m not a flasher in a rain coat / I’m not a dirty old man / I’m not gonna snatch you from your mother / I’m an art lover / Come to daddy.”
