PowerPop… An Eclectic Collection of Pop Culture

Dave grew up in Canada, now resides in Texas, and has been passionate about music for as long as he can remember. Unfortunately, a brief foray into buying keyboards during his high school years didn’t equate to making music people were passionate about doing anything with but avoiding!  He writes a daily music blog, A Sound Day, looking at memorable music events from album releases to artist birthdays to important concerts and more. You can find Dave at https://soundday.wordpress.com.

Thanks Max, for inviting me to be a part of this “forum.” I look forward to seeing what other music fans come up with, what their reactions are to The Kinks and which songs from the band’s 25-or-so year run they choose to highlight.

It would be easier and more obvious to do the Beatles or Rolling Stones instead, but The Kinks are perhaps a more interesting choice since they’ve always been sort of on the periphery of major headline stardom and to many are an afterthought when discussing the ’60s and the British Invasion. I don’t put them on an even footing with the other two bands but the Kinks certainly deserve a bit more respect. A good chunk of their catalog is unknown to most, myself included.

My first thought when asked to write about a song of theirs was “Come Dancing”, their superb 1983 comeback hit, but that title had already been claimed. Which was actually good because it made me think a bit more and re-examine some more of their songs. Still, I knew I wanted to do something off State of Confusion, the album that put them back on hit radio after a fairly long absence, in North America at least. It was indeed the first album of theirs I bought and to date, still the only studio album – not a greatest hits sort of compilation – that I’ve had.

Though the Kinks showed up on the scene at approximately the same time as the Beatles and the Stones, they never quite matched their success and weren’t adopted nearly as much by “oldies” or “Classic Rock” radio stations. So as a kid growing up in the ’70s, I was aware of and quite liked some of their big hits – the quirky, scandalous for the times “Lola”, the rock staples like “All Day and All of The Night” and the nicely pop-py “Victoria”  but they were never at the forefront of my musical thoughts.

I noticed and liked their hard-rocking “Destroyer” in 1981; think I even bought the 45. But I really only began to appreciate their real talent with State of Confusion. I heard enough of it on radio to go out and buy it, and when I did, I found myself liking almost all the tracks and playing it end to end quite often. I really became aware of what a great lyricist Ray Davies was – how he could paint such aural pictures, and match opposing feelings like joy and sorrow, optimism and realism so well in a song. Thus, how he captured the nuances of life!

Also clear to me was that the band, like most good ones, was varied. They put together both great fist-pumping rockers and beautifully melodic pop tunes. This, ironically, annoyed their label boss Clive Davis. For some reason he thought this would cause, well a “State of Confusion” among fans and limit their appeal. Instead, I think the opposite was true. However, he wanted to market them exclusively as a hard rock act and didn’t like songs like “Come Dancing” or “Don’t Forget to Dance” since they were hardly companion pieces to Ozzy Osbourne or AC/DC for radio.

Many of their best tunes are rock; many are “pop”. But “Heart of Gold” falls somewhere in between, rather best described as “power pop” – so where better than the Power Pop Blog for it to show up!

The song tells of a young woman who is embittered and seems to have a tough demeanor, but he realizes has a “heart of gold” underneath that “tough exterior”.  In the song she was “the apple of your father’s eye” until a younger sister came along and she found “all the affection suddenly gone.”  Random, fictitious thoughts from Ray… or about someone he knew? Many think the latter.

Ray had been in a serious relationship with Chrissie Hynde for a couple of years or more at the time the song appeared. In fact, they’d just had a baby together, Natalie Hynde. Rather mirrored in the lyrics. However, all wasn’t rosy for the pair; soon after they split up and she married Jim Kerr from Simple Minds, making the song all the more poignant and an admirable expression if it was indeed about his soon-to-be ex, who certainly showed a  tough exterior in public.

Musically, I love the upbeat song and especially the jangly playing of Ray’s brother Dave, the band’s lead guitarist. Despite being contentious as anything, the two brothers were always the core and heart of The Kinks. On this one they manage to pull off a very retro-’60s sound yet keep it modern with solid production (which Ray did himself). While mirroring their ’60s heyday, it also showed a keen ear-to-the-ground awareness of the new alternative rock sounds just beginning to show up – R.E.M., The Smiths and yes, The Pretenders. It was lost on me back then, but re-listening to “Heart of Gold”, the first thing that jumped out at me is how much it sounds like a Pretenders song. It is easy in fact to imagine Chrissie singing it instead of Ray. So similar are the stylings I went to the liner notes to see if any of The Pretenders were on the song. They aren’t, but I’m betting they were in Ray’s mind when he was putting the song down on paper. Indeed, Rolling Stone noted the same, saying it “has the jangly, quasi-folk rock sound of the present hit ‘Back on the Chain Gang’” by the Pretenders.

The song wasn’t released as a single, so like many other worthy Kinks songs, it was never widely known. A shame. I’ll give the last word over to Rolling Stone again, who at the time stated “nobody but The Kinks could have made such a record in 1983 and no band deserves more to be at the top.”

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