Joe says:
My family and I are quite strange in our music listening and we tend to have extended periods of interest in one particular band or group or songster at a given time. For a particularly long obsessive period of time. I feel like we are about to enter, or have already entered, an intense new musical period.
"How long do you think this one will last?" I ask Rebecca. And she says, "Not very, one hopes."
What will happen is this, and we must face the truth that it is usually a madness that afflicts the male members of the household: we listen to a record and we move the music from the car to the stereo to the portable to the iPod and we play it over and over on long trips. And short hops. Then we agree to dig like a badger deep into the recording artist's catalog and summon up the entire canon. This leads to wall to wall playing in the car, at mealtimes, while writing, while studying, while jogging, before sleep. The music becomes the soundtrack of the Kelly life.
We've been through Beatles. That took years (which followed on my own personal significant portions of decades). The Beatles obsession segued to Lennon and Harrison periods. We've done it with The Who. Elvis Costello got the treatment awhile back. The Band, too. Rebecca recalls the late '80s as synonymous with my Dylan period. Counting Crows and their relatively short catalog represents a short, distinct period for the boys. Springsteen recently had big-time airplay. There've been others.
But a new wave is coming. I've felt it coming. And it's not like we haven't had mini-periods of the group before. Rebecca thought we already had a period, but we reminded her that those were just particular hits collections and one album. Played over and over and over again.
What I'm talking about is a full-bore go out and get every song they ever made kind of obsession. And I felt it when we saw Darjeeling Limited for the second time. And you now know where I am going with this one, as we enter...
period.
Wes Anderson has lured us back to The Kinks' fantastic record Lola vs. Powerman with three cuts off that album in the movie: Strangers, This Time Tomorrow, and Powerman. I'm not certain how I missed this record all these years! The Kinks were never a big thing for me aside from their early, early hits and minor hits. Two of my all-time favorites from their early period have always been Where Have All the Good Times Gone and Like Everybody Else. There was that late '70s revival with Low Budget that was really popular in high school art class. But I never really experienced their late '60s to early '70s period until fairly recently. We got Village Green Preservation Society, and Arthur, and now Lola, and we are hooked on the hooks, the lyrics, the guitars, the inventive story-telling.
The thing I think I like most about The Kinks is the interplay of Ray Davies' and brother Dave Davies' voices, Dave taking that higher register that complements Ray's gruff voice so well. You know, like when they sing: "Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand why she walks like a woman and talks like a man." Dave wrote the great song Strangers with the beautiful phrase: "Strangers on this road we are on. But we are not two we are one," and it's hard not to think of the two brothers in that song. Ray is the more dominant one, for sure. But Dave was really, really important to the group, too.
There's talk of a reunion tour this year, don't know how true that is because the brothers apparently dislike each other with great passion, and there's bad blood all around the original band mates. Ray seems to be doing his own thing anyway. As a dad of two very close brothers who are separated by three years but share so much of their lives together I hope things will never go sour between them and they will always, always be close. Competition breaks many brothers apart. But I think they both know how truly we love and worship them both totally and equally and that's not a hard thing to do. They are both similar, yet great in their own ways.
Talking about brothers, particularly rock and roll brothers, have there been any two brothers (or sisters) in a band greater or more significant in rock history than the Davies brothers? (Two siblings, not three or more, like Gibbs, Isleys, Jacksons, or, um, Hansons. And actual brothers, not simply brothers of Doobie or brothers that are Righteous.)
Fogerty brothers maybe? Allman brothers. Gallagher brothers. Wilson sisters. Winwood brothers. Knopflers. Mothersbaughs. Crenshaws. I must be forgetting a bunch.
But were any better than the Davies?
