Episode 119: “You Really Got Me” by the Kinks

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 119

You Really Got Me by The Kinks

Today we're going to look at a record that has often been called the first heavy metal record, one that introduced records dominated by heavy, distorted guitar riffs to the top of the UK charts.

We're going to look at the first singles by a group who have become second only to the Beatles among British groups in terms of the creativity of their recordings during the 60s, but who were always sabotaged by a record label more interested in short-term chart success than in artist development.

We're going to look at the kinks and at You Really Got Me.

The story of the Kinks starts with two brothers, Ray and Dave Davis, the seventh and eighth children of a family that had previously had six girls in a row, most of them much older.

Their oldest sister was twenty when Ray was born, and Dave was three years younger than Ray.

The two brothers always had a difficult relationship, partly because of their diametrically opposed personalities.

Ray was introverted, thoughtful, and notoriously selfish, while Dave was outgoing in the extreme, but also had an aggressive side to his nature.

Ray, as someone who had previously been the youngest child and only boy, resented his younger brother coming along and taking the attention he saw as his by right, while Dave always looked up to his older brother, but never really got to know him.

Ray was always a quiet child, but he became more so after the event that was to alter the lives of the whole family in multiple ways forever.

Reni, the second oldest of his sisters, had been in an unhappy marriage and living in Canada with her husband, but moved back to the UK shortly before Ray's thirteenth birthday.

Ray had been unsuccessfully unsuccessfully pestering his parents to buy him a guitar for nearly a year, since Elvis had started to become popular, and on the night before his birthday Reni gave him one as his birthday present.

She then went out to a dance hall.

She did this even though she'd had rheumatic fever as a child, which had given her a heart condition.

The doctors had advised her to avoid all forms of exercise, but she loved dancing too much to give it up for anyone.

She died that night, aged only thirty one, and the last time Ray ever saw his sister was when she was giving him his guitar.

For the next year, Ray was even more introverted than normal, to the point that he actually ended up seeing a child psychologist, which for a working-class child in the 1950s was something that was as far from the normal experience as it's possible to imagine.

But even more than that, he became convinced that he was intended by fate to play the guitar.

He started playing seriously, not just the pop songs of the time, though there were plenty of those, but also trying to emulate Chet Atkins.

Pete Quaif would later recall that when they first played guitar together at school, while Quafe could do a passable imitation of Hank Marvin playing Apache, Davis could do a note-perfect rendition of Atkins' version of Malaguena.

Ray's newfound obsession with music also drew him closer to his younger brother, though there was something of a cynical motive in this closeness.

Both boys got pocket money from their parents, but Dave looked up to his older brother and valued his opinion.

So, if Ray told him which were the good new records, Dave would go out and buy them, and then Ray could play them and spend his own money on other things.

And it wasn't just pop music that the two of them were getting into either.

A defining moment of inspiration for both brothers came when a 16-minute documentary about Big Bill Brunzi's tour of Belgium, Low Light and Blue Smoke, was shown on the TV.

heaven

just for these earthly things?

Why did you lose your little

hello?

Baby, why'd you drop your wings?

Like Brunsy's earlier appearances on Six Five Special, that film had a big impact on a lot of British musicians.

You'll see clips from it both in the Beatles anthology and in a 1980s South Bank Show documentary on Eric Clapton.

But it particularly affected Ray Davis for two reasons.

The first was that Ray, more than most people of his generation, respected the older generation's taste in music, and his father approved of Brunsy, saying he sounded like a real man, not like those high-voiced girly-sounding pop singers.

The other reason was that Brunsy's performance sounded authentic to him.

He said later that he thought that Brunsy sounded like him.

Even though Brunsy was black and American, he sounded working class, and unlike many of his contemporaries, Ray Davis did have a working-class background, rather than being comparatively privileged, like say John Lennon or Mick Jagger were.

Soon, Ray and Dave were playing together as a duo, while Ray was also performing with two other kids from school, Pete Quafe and John Start, as a trio.

Ray brought them all together, and they became the Ray Davis Quartet, though sometimes, if Pete or Dave rather than Ray got them the booking, they would be the Pete Quaif Quartet, or the Dave Davis Quartet.

The group mostly performed instrumentals, with Dave particularly enjoying playing No Trespassing by the Ventures.

Both Ray and Dave would sing sometimes, with Ray taking mellower rockabilly songs, while Dave would sing Little Richard and Lane and Hopkins material.

But at first, they thought they needed a lead singer.

They tried with a few different people, including another pupil from the school they all went to, who sang with them at a couple of gigs.

But Jon Start's mother thought the young lad's raspy voice was so awful she wouldn't let them use her house to rehearse, and Ray didn't like having another big ego in the group.

So Rod Stewart soon went back to the Moontrekers, and left them with no lead singer.

But that was far from the worst problem the Davis brothers had.

When Dave was fifteen, he got got his 16-year-old girlfriend Susan pregnant.

The two were very much in love and wanted to get married, but both children's parents were horrified at the idea, and so each set of parents told their child that the other had dumped them and never wanted to see them again.

Both believed what they were told, and Dave didn't see his daughter for 30 years.

The trauma of this separation permanently changed him, and you can find echoes of it throughout Dave's songwriting in the 60s.

Ray and Pete, after leaving school, went on to Hornsey Art School, where coincidentally Rod Stewart had also moved on to the year before, though Stewart had dropped out after a few weeks after discovering he was colourblind.

Quafe also dropped out of art school relatively soon after enrolling.

He was kicked out for teddy boy behaviour, but his main problem was that he didn't feel comfortable as a working class lad, mixing with bohemian middle-class people.

Ray, on the other hand, was in his element.

While Ray grew up on a council estate and was thoroughly working class, he had always had a tendency to want to climb the social ladder, and he was delighted to be surrounded by people who were interested in art and music, though his particular love at the time was the cinema, and he would regularly go to the College Film Society's showings at films by people like Bergman, Kurosawa, and Truffo, or silent films by Eisenstein or Griffith, though he would complain about having to pay a whole shilling for entry.

Davis also starred in some now-lost experimental films made by the person who ran the Film Society, and also started branching out into playing with other people.

After a gig at the art college, where Alexis Corner had been supported by the young Rolling Stones, Davis went up to Corner and asked him for advice about moving on in the music world.

Corner recommended he go and see Giorgio Gamelsky, the promoter and manager who had put on most of the Stones' early gigs.

and Gamelski got Davis an audition with a group called the Dave Hunt Rhythm and Blues Band.

Tom McGuinness had been offered a job with them before he went on to Manfred Mann, but McGinnis thought that the Dave Hunt Band were too close to Trad for his tastes.

Davis, on the other hand, was perfectly happy playing Trad along with the Blues, and for a while it looked like the Ray Davis quartet were over, as Ray was getting more prestigious gigs with the Dave Hunt group.

Ray would later recall that the Dave Hunt Band's repertoire included things like the old Mead Lux Lewis Boogie piece, Honky Tonk Train Blues, which they would play in the the style of Bob Crosby's Bobcats.

But while the group were extremely good musicians, their soprano saxophone player, Lol Coxhill, would later become one of the most respected sax players in Britain, and was a big part of the Canterbury scene in the 70s, Ray eventually decided to throw his lot in with his brother.

While Ray had been off learning from these jazz musicians, Dave, Pete, and John had continued rehearsing together, and occasionally performing whenever Ray was free to join them.

The group had by now renamed themselves the Ramrods, after a track by Dwayne Eddy, who was the first rock and roll musician Ray and Dave had seen live.

Dave had become a far more accomplished guitarist, now outshining his brother, and was also getting more into the London RB scene.

Ray later remembered that the thing that swung it for him was when Dave played him a record by Cybil Davis, Country Lion Special, which he thought of as a bridge between the kind of music he was playing with Dave Hunt and the kind of music he wanted to be playing, which he described as big Bill Brunsy with drums.

That was, coincidentally, the first recording to feature the piano player Nikki Hopkins, who would later play a big part in the music Ray, Dave and Pete would make.

But not John.

Shortly after Ray got serious about the Ramrods, who soon changed their name again to the Bull Weevils, Jon Stark decided it was time to grow up, get serious, give up the drums and become a quantity surveyor.

There were several factors in this decision, but a big one was that he simply didn't like Ray Davis, who he viewed as an unpleasant, troubled person.

Start was soon replaced by another drummer, Mickey Willett, and it was Willett who provided the connection that would change everything for the group.

Willett was an experienced musician who had contacts in the business, and so when a rich dilettante wannabe pop star named Robert Wace and his best friend and manager Grenville Collins were looking for a backing band for Wace, one of Willett's friends in the music business pointed them them in the direction of the Bull Weevils.

Robert Wace offered the Bull Weevils a deal.

He could get them lucrative gigs playing at society functions for his rich friends, if they would allow him to do a couple of songs with them in the middle of the show.

Wace even got Brian Epstein to come along and see a Bull Weevils rehearsal, but it wasn't exactly a success.

Mickey Willett had gone on holiday to Manchester that week, and the group were drummerless.

Epstein said he was vaguely interested in signing Ray as a solo artist, but didn't want the group, and nothing further came of it.

This is particularly odd, because at the time, Ray wasn't singing any solo leads.

Robert Wace would sing his solo spot, Dave would take the lead vocals on most of the upbeat rockers, and Ray and Dave would sing unison leads on everything else.

The group was soon favourites on the Circuit of Society Bowls, where their only real competition was Mike Dabbo's band, a band of angels.

Dabbo had been to Harrow, and so was part of the upper-class society, in a way that the Bull Weevils weren't.

However, the first time they tried to play a gig in front of an audience that weren't already friends of Wace, he was booed off stage.

It became clear that there was no future for Robert Wace as a pop star, but there was a future for the Boll Weevils.

They came to a deal.

Wace and Collins would manage the group, Collins would put in half his wages from his job as a stockbroker, and Wace and Collins would get 50% of the group's earnings.

Wace and Collins funded the group recording a demo.

They recorded two songs, the old coasters song, I'm a hug for you, baby.

Can't get enough of your love.

I'm a hug for you, baby.

Can't get enough of your love.

When I go to sleep at night, that's the only thing I'm thinking of.

One little piggy at a piece of

piggy eight the two pieces, yeah.

When these little piggies coming from your house, he's gonna grab a little bit of a piece of the piggy.

And a Mersey beat pastiche, written by Dave Davis, I believed you.

Now it's up to me.

I believed you, I believed you.

Now it's up to me.

I believe what you said.

The loving days were through,

but you were fooling around.

i found somebody who will never never take your place

will never give me your embrace

but now that you're shown your face you're broken

it shows how up in the air everything was that those tracks have since been released under two names at some point around the time of the recording session the boll weevils changed their name yet again to the Ravens, naming themselves after the recent film, starring Vincent Price, based on the Edgar Allan Poe poem.

This line up of the Ravens wasn't to last too long, though.

Mickey Willett started to get suspicious about what was happening to all of the money, and became essentially the group's self appointed shop steward, getting into constant rows with the management.

Willett soon found himself edged out of the group by Wace and Collins, and the Ravens continued with a temporary drummer until they could find a permanent replacement.

Wace and Collins started to realise that neither of them knew much about the music business, though, and so they turned elsewhere for help with managing the group.

The person they turned to was Larry Page.

This is not the Larry Page who would later co-found Google.

Rather, he was someone who had had a brief career as an attempt at producing a British teen idol under the name Larry Page the Teenage Rage, a career that was somewhat sabotaged by his inability to sing, and by his producer's insistence that it would be a good idea to record this, as the original was so bad it would never be a hit in the UK.

Cause that'll be the day

when I die.

Well, you give me all your loving and your dirt with loving, all your hugs and kisses and your money, too.

Well, you know, you love me, baby, until you tell me maybe that someday, well, I'll be through.

Well, that'll be the After his career in music had come to an ignominious end, Paige had briefly tried working in other fields before going into management.

He'd teamed up with Eddie Kastner, an Austrian songwriter who had written for Vera Lynn before going into publishing.

Kastner had had the unbelievable fortune to buy the publishing rights for Rock Around the Clock for $250 and had become incredibly rich.

with offices in both London and New York.

Paige and Kastner had entered into a complicated business arrangement arrangement by which Kastner got a percentage of Page's management income, Kastner would give Pager's Acts songs, and any song Pages Acts wrote would be published by Kastner.

Kastner and Page had a third partner in their complicated arrangements, independent producer Shell Talmy.

Talmy had started out as an engineer in Los Angeles and had come over to the UK for a few weeks in 1962 on holiday, and thought that while he was there, he might as well see if he could get some work.

Talmy was a a good friend of Nick Vennett, and Vennett gave him a stack of assetates of recent capital records that he'd produced, and told him that he could pretend to have produced them if it got him work.

Talmy took an acetate of Surf and Safari by The Beach Boys, and one of Music in the Air by Lou Rawls, into Dick Rowe's office, and told Rowe he had produced them.

Sources differ over whether Rowe actually believed him, or if he just wanted anyone who had any experience of American recording studio techniques.

But either way, Rowe hired him to produce records for Decker as an independent contractor, and Talmi started producing hits like Charmaine by The Bachelors.

Paige, Castna, Talmy and Row all worked hand in glove with each other, with Paige managing artists, Kastner publishing the songs they recorded, Talmy producing them, and Rowe signing them to his record label.

And so by contacting Paige, Wace and Collins were getting in touch with a team that could pretty much guarantee the Ravens a record deal.

They cut Paige in on the management, signed Ray and Dave as songwriters for Castna, and got Talmy to agree to produce the group.

The only fly in the ointment was that Rowe, showing the same judgment he had shown over the Beatles, turned down the opportunity to sign the Ravens to Decca.

They had already been turned out by EMI, and Phillips also turned them down, which meant that by default they ended up recording for Pi Records, the same label as the searchers.

Around the time they signed to Pi, they also changed their name yet again, this time to the name that they would keep for the rest of their careers.

In the wake of the Profumo sex scandal, and the rumours that went around as a result of it, including that a cabinet minister had attended all geese as a slave with a sign round his neck saying to whip him if he displeased the guests, there started to be a public acknowledgment of the concept of B D S M, and kinky had become the buzzword of the day, with the fashionable boots worn by the leather clad Hannah Blackman on the T V show The Avengers being publicised as kinky Boots.

Blackmun and her co-star Patrick McNee even put out a novelty single, Kinky Boots, in February 1964.

Everybody's going for those kinky boots, kinky boots.

Kinky Boots, it's a man the kind of fashion that you borrowed from the boots.

Borrowed from the boots.

Kinky Boots, fashion magazines say wear them.

And you rush to obey like the women in the harem.

Full length, half-length, fully fashioned, half-length.

Brown boots, black boots, painted leather jazz boots.

Paige decided that this was too good an opportunity to miss, and that especially given the camp demeanour of both Dave Davis and Pete Quaif, it would make sense to call the group the Kinks, as a name that would generate plenty of outrage, but was still just about broadcastable.

None of the group liked the name, but they all went along with it, and so Ray, Dave, and Pete were now the Kinks.

The ever-increasing team of people around them increased by one more, when a promoter and booking agent got involved.

Arthur Howes was chosen to be in charge of the newly named Kinks Bookings, primarily because he booked all the Beatles' gigs, and Wade and Collins wanted as much of the Beatles' reflected glory as they could get.

Howes started booking the group in for major performances, and Ray finally quit art school, though he still didn't think that he was going to have a huge amount of success as a pop star.

He did, though, think that if he was lucky, he could make enough money from six months of being a full-time pop musician that he could move to Spain and take guitar lessons from Segovia.

Pye had signed the Kinks to a three-single deal, and Arthur Howes was the one who suggested what became their first single.

Howes was in Paris with the Beatles in January 1964, and he noticed that one of the songs that was getting the biggest reaction was their cover version of Little Richard's Long Tall Sally, and that they hadn't yet recorded the song.

He phoned Paige from Paris at enormous expense and told him to get the Kinks into the studio and record the song straight away, because it was bound to be a hit for someone.

The group worked up a version with Ray on lead and recorded it three days later.

Ray later recollected that someone at the studio had said to him, Congratulations, you just made a flop.

And they were correct.

The Kinks version had none of the power of Little Richard's original or of the Beatles Beatles' version, and only scraped its way to number 42 on the charts.

As they had no permanent drummer, for that record and for the next few they made, the Kinks were augmented by Bobby Graham, who had played for Joe Meek as one of Mike Berry and the Outlaws, before becoming one of the two main on-call session drummers in the UK, along with fellow Meek alumnus Clem Katini.

Graham is now best known for having done all the drumming credited to Dave Clark on records by the Dave Clark 5, such as Bits and Pieces.

Since you left me, I just said goodbye.

I'm a piece of bits and pieces.

All I do is sit and cry.

I'm the pieces, bits, and pieces.

You went away and left me misery.

I'm the pieces, bits and pieces.

It's also been reported by various people, notably Shell Talmey, that the session guitarist Jimmy Page played Ray Davis' rhythm parts for him on most of the group's early recordings, although other sources dispute that, including Ray himself, who insists that he played the parts.

What's definitely not in doubt is that Dave Davis played all the lead guitar.

However, the group needed a full-time drummer.

Dave Davis wanted to get his friend Viv Prince, the drummer of The Pretty Things, into the group, but when Prince wasn't available, they turned instead to Mick Avery, who they found through an add-in melody maker.

Avery had actually been a member of the Rolling Stones for a very brief period, but had decided he didn't want to be a full-time drummer, and had quit before they got Charlie Watts in.

When the Stones became successful, he'd realised his mistake, and looked for another band.

Avery was chosen by Ray and the management team, and Dave Davis took an instant dislike to him, partly because Ray liked Avery, but Dave accepted that he was the best drummer available.

Avery wouldn't play on the next few records.

Talmy liked to use musicians he knew, and Avery was a bit of an unknown quantity, but he was available for the group's first big tour, playing on the bottom of the bill with the Dave Clark V and the Hollies further up, and their first TV appearance on Ready Steady Go.

That tour saw the group getting a little bit of notice, but mostly being dismissed as being a clone of the Rolling Stones, because like the Stones they were relying on the same set of RB standards that all the London RB B bands played, and the Stones were the most obvious point of reference for that kind of music for most people.

Arthur Howes eventually sent someone up to work on the Kinks' stage act with them, and to get them into a more showbiz shape, but the person in question didn't get very far before Graham Nash of the Hollies ordered him to leave the Kinks alone, saying they were okay as they are.

Meanwhile, Larry Page was working with both Ray and Dave as potential songwriters, and using their songs for other acts in the Page Castner Talmy stable of artists.

With Talme producing, Shell Naylor recorded Dave's One Fine Day, a song which its writer dismisses as a throwaway, but is actually quite catchy.

One fine day,

we'll be as happy as happy can be.

Well, I saw my baby coming up a host.

While the mind and the heart goes over,

I said a war, yeah, one crying baby.

I said, Oh,

yeah, one crying babe.

I said, Oh,

and Tommy also recorded a girl group called The Orchids, singing rays.

I've got that feeling.

And when he kisses me, I know.

I've got that feeling.

Listen,

oh yeah.

I've got that feeling.

Listen.

Oh, yeah.

Paige was working hard with Ray,

who was the brother who was more eager to learn the craft of songwriting.

At this point, Dave seemed to find it something of a chore.

Paige saw it as his job at this point to teach the brothers how to write.

He had a whole set of ideas about what made for a hit song, and chief among them was that it had to make a connection between the singer and the audience.

He told the brothers that they needed to write songs with the words I, me, and you in the title, and repeat those words as much as possible.

This was something that Ray did on the song that became the group's next single, You Still Want Me, a Merseybeat pastiche that didn't even do as well as the group's first record.

And you still want me,

and you still want me.

You wanted the sky,

but I

The group were now in trouble.

They'd had two flop singles in a row on a three-single contract.

It seemed entirely likely that the label would drop them after the next single.

Luckily for them, they had a song that they knew was a winner.

Ray had come up with the basic melody for You Really Got Me many years earlier.

The song had gone through many changes over the years, and had apparently started off as a jazz piano piece, inspired by Jerry Mulligan's performance in the classic documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day.

From there, it had apparently mutated first into a Chet Atkins-style guitar instrumental, and then into a piece in the style of Moz Allison, the jazz singer, who was a huge influence on the more mod end of the British RB scene, with records like Parchment Farm.

Well I'm sitting over here on Parchman Farm

Well I'm a sittin' over here on Parchman Farm and I ain't never done no man no harm

Through all of this the basic melody had remained the same as had the two chords that underpinned the whole thing But the song's final form was shaped to a large extent by the advice of Larry Page.

As well as the you and me-based lyrics, Page had also advised Ray that as he wasn't a great singer at this point, what the group needed to do was concentrate on myths.

In particular, he pointed Ray to Louie Louie by The Kingsmen, which had recently been released in the UK on Pi, the same label the Kinks were signed to, and told him to do something like that.

Ray was instantly inspired by Louie Louie, which the kinks quickly added to their own set, and he retooled his old melody in its image, coming up with a riff to go under it.

It seems also to have been Paige who made one minor change to the lyric of the song.

Where Ray had started the song with the line, Yeah, you really got me going, Paige suggested that instead he sing, Girl, you really got me going, partly to increase that sense of connection with the audience again, partly to add a tiny bit of variety to the repetitive lyrics, but also partly because the group's sexuality was already coming in for some question.

Dave Davis is bisexual, and Ray has always been been keen to play around with notions of gender and sexuality.

Starting with the word girl might help reassure people about that somewhat.

But the final touch that turned it into one of the great classics came from Dave rather than Ray.

Dave had been frustrated with the sound he was getting from his amplifier, and had slashed the cone with a knife.

He then fed the sound from that slashed amp through his new larger amp, to get a distorted, fuzzy sound, which was almost unknown in Britain at the time.

We've heard examples of fuzz guitar before in this series, of course, on Rocket 88 and on some of the Johnny Burnett Rock and Roll Trio records, and most recently last week on Ellie Branch's demo of Doo Diddy, but those have been odd one-offs.

Dave Davis's reinvention of the sound seems to be the point where it becomes a standard part of the rock guitar toolbox, but it's very rarely been done as well as it was on You Really Got Me.

Girl, you really got me going.

You got me so I don't know what I'm doing now

Yeah,

you really got me know You got me so I can't sleep at night

Yeah,

you really got me known You got me so I don't know what I'm doing

Oh yeah,

you really got me known You got me so I can't sleep at night

But that introduction and the classic record that followed nearly never happened.

The original recording of You Really Got Me has been lost, but it was apparently very different.

Ray and Dave Davis have said that Shell Talmy overproduced it, turning it into a Phil Spectre sound-alike, and drenched the whole thing with echo.

Talmy, for his part, says that that's not the case, that the main difference was that the song was taken much slower, and that it was a very different, but equally valid, take on the song.

Ray, in particular, was devastated by the result, and didn't want it released.

Pye were insistent.

They had a contract and they were going to put this record out whatever the performers said.

But luckily, the group's management had faith in their singer's vision.

Larry Page insisted that as he and Castner owned the publishing, the record couldn't come out in the state it was in, and Robert Wace paid for a new recording session out of his own pocket.

The group, plus Bobby Graham, piano player Arthur Greenslade, and Talmi, went back into the studio.

The first take of the new new session was a dud, and Ray worried that Talme would end the session then and there, but he allowed them to do a second take.

And that second take was extraordinary.

Going into the solo, Ray yelled, oh no, with excitement, looking over at Dave, and became convinced that he distracted Dave at the crucial moment.

Instead, Dave smirked and delivered one of the defining solos of the rock genre.

Seeds don't ever set me free.

I always wanna be by your side.

You Really Got Me was released on the 4th of August 1964 and became a smash hit, reaching number one in September.

It was also released in the US and made the top ten over there.

The kinks were suddenly huge, and Pi Records quickly exercised their option, so quickly that the group needed to get an album recorded by the end of August.

The resulting album is, as one might expect, a patchy affair, made up mostly of poor RB covers, but there were some interesting moments, and one song from the album, in particular, Stop Your Sobbing, showed a giant leap forward in Ray's songwriting.

There may be a reason for that.

Stop Your Sobbing features backing vocals by someone new to the Kinks circle.

Ray's new girlfriend, Rasa Ditz Petris, who would become a regular feature on the group's records for the next decade.

And when we next look at the Kinks, we'll see some of the influence she had on the group.

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