Deep Album Cuts Vol. 381: The Kinks
Last fall I ranked every Kinks album for Spin, and as I was doing my deep dive on the band's catalog, I started picking out songs for this playlist.
2. Stop Your Stobbing
3. Nothin' In The World Can Stop Me Worryin' About That Girl
4. Where Have All The Good Times Gone
5. Baby Won't You Please Come Home
6. David Watts
7. Funny Face
8. Do You Remember Walter?
9. Brainwashed
10. Strangers
11. Moments
12. Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues
13. You Don't Know My Name
14. Daylight
15. Introduction to Solution
16. Have Another Drink
17. The Hard Way
18. Stormy Sky
19. Misfits
20. Attitude
21. Add It Up
22. Heart of Gold
23. Missing Persons
24. Think Visual
25. Now and Then
26. Close to the Wire
Tracks 1 and 2 from Kinks (1964)
Track 3 from Kinda Kinks (1965)
Track 4 from The Kink Kontroversy (1965)
Track 5 from Face To Face (1966)
Tracks 6 and 7 from Something Else By The Kinks (1967)
Track 8 from The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968)
Track 9 from Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire) (1969)
Track 10 from Lola Versus Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part One (1970)
Track 11 from Percy (1971)
Track 12 from Muswell Hillbillies (1971)
Track 13 from Everybody's In Show-Biz (1972)
Track 14 from Preservation Act 1 (1973)
Track 15 from Preservation Act 2 (1974)
Track 16 from The Kinks Present A Soap Opera (1975)
Track 17 from The Kinks Present Schoolboys In Disgrace (1975)
Track 18 from Sleepwalker (1977)
Track 19 from Misfits (1978)
Track 20 from Low Budget (1979)
Track 21 from Give The People What They Want (1981)
Track 22 from State Of Confusion (1983)
Track 23 from Word Of Mouth (1984)
Track 24 from Think Visual (1986)
Track 25 from UK Jive (1989)
Track 26 from Phobia (1993)
The Kinks were never as big in America as they were in the UK, so even though I totally grew up on the Stones and The Who, my experience with the Kinks for a long time was limited to a handful of ubiquitous songs from the '60s and early '70s. I didn't even hear their biggest '80s song, "Come Dancing," until I saw the video on MTV2 one day in the late '90s and was kind of baffled that it didn't sound much at all like the other stuff I knew by the band.
One thing I find myself doing in this column is lamenting when I got into a band via a compilation, because back in the CD era, if you had all the hits in one place, it kind of slowed you down from buying the proper albums. In college I got the 2002 compilation The Ultimate Collection, I can't even remember if it was a used bin acquisition or something a friend gave me. Still, that's a pretty comprehensive 2-disc best-of with all the hits plus a few famous album tracks, so it was at least a good crash course, but I wish I had picked up a couple of proper albums instead. In any case, now that I know the albums, it was fun to try to condense that history into this, I love when I can cram a little of something from every album from a 30-year career into an 80-minute mix and you can kind of hear their sound evolve from song to song.
The Pretenders covered "Stop Your Sobbing," Van Halen covered "Where Have All The Good Times Gone," The Jam covered "David Watts," and ELO very clearly nicked the intro from "Do You Remember Walter?" on "Mr. Blue Sky." Wes Anderson used "Nothin' In The World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl" memorably in Rushmore, and "Strangers" in The Darjeeling Limited. "Strangers" and "Funny Face" and "You Don't Know My Name" and "Close to the Wire." were written and sung by Dave Davies, who had a nice little run of songs on Kinks records alongside his brother Ray writing most of their material. "Close to the Wire" felt like a good closing song as a rare example of Ray and Dave trading off on lead vocals.
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