In the Saddle Again

THE KINKS' LATEST RECORD, Give The People What They Want, represents the completion of a circle, of sorts, for the band. Not since the early '60s, when they hit the charts with hard-driving numbers like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," have the Kinks demonstrated this kind of heavy rock and roll. The music does not have the raw, unrestrained power of those early recordings, but the message of the album--boldly stated in the title--seems clear: The Kinks have returned to rock'n'roll and want to come back to the charts.

And who can blame them? In terms of popularity (though not, certainly, artistry), the years between "You Really Got Me" in 1964 and their live album, "One More for the Road," released last year, were lean ones for them. Of the three surviving British Invasion rock bands, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones and the Who, the Kinks are perhaps most surprising in their longevity. Any band must surmount numerous pressures to last as long as these three have, but only the Kinks have done so in the face of wavering and often scarce popularity. The Stones and the Who have remained in the limelight throughout their careers, but the Kinks, under the direction of lead-singer/songwriter Raymond Douglas Davies, remained during the late '60s and early '70s oddities in the eyes of the rock world.

In the late '60s, while most of the rest of the world followed the Beatles into the psychedelic era, Davies and the Kinks--their fame now all but forgotten--headed off in an entirely different direction. Davies never wrote a song about flower power or about drugs; he was much more likely (as in "Rosie Won't You Please Come Home" or "Arthur") to side with the parents in the Generation Gap. Davies and the band felt an abiding love for their home country and refused to Americanize their music. They wrote about small villages in England and about the problems of making ends meet in a working class environment. Musically, this was their finest era--particularly "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society" and "Something Else." But, save the critics and few diehard patrons, few paid attention.

The group responded to this apathy by treating their few remaining fans with scorn. In a way, they seemed actually to embrace the notion of their own unpopularity, and they would show up to concerts too drunk to play and Ray or his brother Dave would shout into the microphones "I can't remember the fucking words" to their own songs. Their audiences dwindled and finally, because of their on-stage conduct, they were banned briefly from appearing in the United States.

After rising briefly in 1970 with "Lola," probably the group's most famous song--all about a transvestite--the Kinks headed into their theatrical era, and their concerts became performances of Davies musicals. The albums of this era, most of which are now out of print, were less striking than their predecessors, but were nevertheless uniformly fine productions. Still, nobody paid attention.

SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY, Ray and the Kinks must have gotten a little tired of the neglect, and they began cleaning up their onstage performances, and producing music more geared to the public ear. After an unsuccessful such attempt in their Sleepwalker album, the Kinks finally got back on the charts with Misfits, which contained the group's first hit in a long, long time, "Rock and Roll Fantasy." Low Budget, their next effort, gave them a secure place in the popular market, and their wildly successful One More for the Road sparked a whole new generation of fans, many of whom were unaware that the group was more than a year or two old.

Give the People What They Want makes the circle of their life as a band complete. The songs are strictly geared toward the F.M. pop charts--songs that Davies, after 25-plus albums worth of music, could have written in his sleep. "Getting Better," the tune Davies obviously wrote to spearhead record sales, is a pleasing little ditty that probably took two minutes to write and three to arrange. "Destroyer," the most hard-hitting song in the album, rips off the riff from one of Davies' earliest hits, "All Day and All of the Night." The rest of the songs, for the most part, are nice but unmemorable--safe territory.

Ray will probably not do much more experimenting as a songwriter, nor will the Kinks drift far from their present course. Why should they? They are now more popular than ever. Ten years ago they would have had difficulty filling Jonathan Swift's; now they routinely pack Boston Garden. To say that they have sold out as artists would be ludicrous. "Artistic Integrity" is a term more often used by critics with steady incomes than by artists themselves, and if the Kinks haven't proven their artistic integrity, then nobody during the last two decades has earned the designation.