waterloo sunset

my current fave song is "waterloo sunset" by the kinks. i've been listening to it a lot lately on an italian vinyl reissue of something else by the kinks that was seemingly packaged by the anal-retentive chef: thick plastic collector sleeve, deluxe gatefold cover, cardboard inner sleeve, plastic inner sleeve. dealing with the many layers is enough to make listening to it a serious proposition, what with all the toiletry one has to go through to take it out or put it away.

when i was young, i was too stoopid to appreciate the kinks after their early racka-racka stuff, but in later yrs i've come to dig the period from approximately face to face to lola versus powerman and the moneygoround real much. ray davies is proof positive, as were lennon/mccartney, that nick hornsby was correct when he observed that the major difference between anglo and american rockers of the '60s was that the brits liked their parents better. working off the same basic set of cultural referents as the beatles were (english music hall, the goon show, the carry on comedies, chuck berry), davies had a finer eye for detail (in a way that predicted elvis costello a few yrs later) and worked in a kind of splendid isolation owing to the fact that the kinks were barred from touring the states during the crucial yrs 1965-69. i saw the kinks twice, once during their overblown opera daze ca. '74 -- when some idiot hit ray in the head with a beer bottle while he was singing "alcohol," the head kink manfully soldiered on and finished the set -- and again in '80, when they'd dumbed their act down to a gtr-heavy arena-rock roar. it's real interesting to me know how certain '60s figures, particularly ray, brian wilson, and tim buckley, seem like the precursors to much of the sad bastard music my middle dtr likes to listen to today.

i actually learned how to play "waterloo sunset" so i could accompany her while she sang the words, which she learned off a live elliott smith version she found online. someday i'm gonna have to make good on a promise to her to record a tape of all the songs i usedta sing to her and her sisters when they were little (pert near the only playing and did between '83 and '91), if i'm only able to overcome a lifelong fear of making noises with my larynx near a tape machine. (my children, on the other hand, sing like angels. who knows where they get these things from?) the only time i ever really had fun doing that was singing beatlesongs w/my oldest dtr a coupla yrs ago. we haven't done that in awhile, tho.