Dave Davies “Chosen People”
Having one of the greatest songwriters of your time as your older brother can’t have been easy when you’re trying to create your own work.
As a member of The Kinks, Dave was the id of the band in behavior and in sound. In 1964 the Kinks guitarist Dave Davies took his little green amp and shredded it with razor blades to make the distorted rattle of their first hit “You Really Got Me”. It shook the world with its might. Sometimes, Dave’s brother Ray claims this breakthrough for himself as if to reenact the fraternal combat at the center of their sound. Either way, it was a breakthrough in loud. After a one-off hit single in 1967’s “Death of a Clown” Dave was briefly involved with Pye records in coming up with a solo album, but when the subsequent single failed to chart, the album was cancelled. Dave went back to the Kinks.
Dave Davies has an unusual voice. When it screeches over loud guitar you think this must be some lost 80s metal artist. It’s a voice like Ozzy Ozbourne’s that from first listen lays down its membership in the canon of music for misfits and burn-outs. This voice will never do an album of standards. His voice is thin and strains, but it does contain feeling. In those high notes lies a younger brother yearning, as if he’s yelling “wait up Ray, what about me?” At least that’s what this younger brother hears.
There’s a story about young Dave that always gets me. When Dave was 15 he got caught on school grounds having sex with his girlfriend Sue Sheehan and was expelled. When Sue’s revealed she was pregnant, the two sets of parents conspired to separate them. They told each that the other had fallen out of love and they sent Sue away to have her baby, forbidding them to communicate. Dave didn’t see Sue or his child until 1993. The pain of this separation produced multiple songs from Dave including 1967’s “Susannah’s Still Alive” intended for his first solo album. The tune bristles with feeling and hope for a love lost. If you hear this song, you hear the sound of a very viable solo artist.
But it didn’t happen. Dave resolved to submit one or two tracks to every other Kinks album and took his role as a supporting member of the band, turning up the guitar in the mix and pushing against his brother’s theatrical instinct, while brother Ray all but turned The Kinks into a Broadway backing band for concept album after concept album. The levee broke when their new record deal explicitly forbade the delivery of another concept album. This helped Ray focus on songs instead of lofty theater ideas and brought the Kinks back to popularity. They were on the radio and became relevant again. From this confident perch, Dave decided to ride the momentum into another stab at a solo career, remaining in the Kinks, but producing three albums in the four years from 1980-1983.
The first two Dave Davies solo albums are very tough, almost metal responses to brother Ray’s more melodic instinct. His voice is mostly screaming—you’re the Id to the Superego—we get it! The nakedness of Dave’s 60’s work is buried under a LOT of guitar. His third attempt, 1983’s “Chosen People” is a much more varied and measured affair. There’s a lot more studio work done to capture this reedy voice and make sure the emotion still comes through. They succeed. A song like “Love Gets You” is so sweet it could be a teeny bopper hit.
I haven’t mentioned that in 1982 Dave had an “epiphany” prepping for a concert. He reports that he received telepathic communications from extra-terrestrial sources, informing him they had been guiding him for years and projected into his mind an image of their spaceship. These ETs also downloaded a ton of information into his brain, that according to a 2003 interview, he was still pulling out of his subconscious. With the amount of drugs he had put himself through in the past, you’d think by now he might question this new reality, but instead he suggested that it would be a “cool idea” if rock stars joined forces to get together to communicate with the E.T.’s.
This tale is retold in the song “True Story” who’s very title draws suspicion:
[This is space-sector calling] Are you talking to me?
[We have a message for you] I could not help but listen.
[Children of earth must all become] One family.
[Your leaders will not listen] But what can I do?
[People will listen to you] I'm just a poor fool,
[Reach out and help us and] Make them understand.
And so he did, bringing the aliens up in interviews with his publicist who, I am sure, was freaking out in the corner. You’d think this kind of delusion would make an unlistenable slog, but it doesn’t. Dave folds his E.T. intervention experience into a pretty easy to endorse wish for world peace. All this is to say, where Ray’s work was grounded in stories of working class English characters, Dave was more “out there”.
Some of this “open-minded” dimension to Dave can be seen on the cover to “Chosen People” which shows a panorama of ethnicities on a psychedelic background: the Geisha girl, the rice patty worker, and the pigeon-toed nude African boy. If it made sense, you could unpack it as a problem. Above it all is a white face-painted man in a bow-tie with a top hat. He has a knowing look on his face. Who is this overlord? Good question. Here are some lyrics from the title track:
We are the four grandfathers, a destiny for man.
It is written in our prophecy,
[It is written in our prophecy]
That we shall find the true white brother,
[We shall find the true white brother]
Who will help us, joined together, to build humanity.
There is a place for everyone.
Uh-oh. It sounds like Mein Kampf on peyote, but on listening closer and staring at that record cover, it’s more likely this “true white brother” is the bow-tie man on the cover, rather than a grand aryan wizard. I hope it’s not my innate optimism, but a supremicist interpretation doesn’t really fit with the “We are the World” theme or the gentle spirit of the lyrics. “Charity”, a successful anthem for thinking outside yourself also reinforces this “love each other” angle:
Will our hearts ever change? Does it sound so strange?
When people touch children cry, can you not wonder why?
In your own little world, can you not say a word?
Dave’s philosophies are essentially flower-child in nature. Brother Ray wrote about a gang of kids sticking up “Father Christmas”, and made a sly holiday alternative classic. Dave writes about children crying. Where Ray is wry and clever, Dave is open-hearted and honest.
That open heartedness is on full display on “Take One More Chance”, a genuinely effective summoning of that old vein of lost love. The verses are sung so supple and soft. He so rarely lets his voice hover in this range. For the chorus he returns to his usual position at the top of his register, but the contrast gives the song a resonance he doesn’t usually have. You hear the man at ease and then the man straining. You appreciate the effort. Hearing this soft and beautiful song, one wonders if Dave’s problem was living up to the legend of having invented the first heavy metal sound, rather than the legend of his own brother.
To the extent you can call this record a success, it’s because Dave is showing more sides of himself, instead of just asserting himself as the guitar balls of the Kinks. There are a couple of universal pleas for understanding, and a shout out to the E.T. ‘s, but the most frequent subject tapped is a broken heart. “Cold Winter” is one of these, a song about losing love, stretched through a seasonal metaphor into a processing of universal loss. An orchestra lifts the song up to an epic level, an early hard-rock draft of the “November Rain” era Guns n’ Roses. If “Cold Winter” could have been found in the record store, it would be a more natural fit for Axl and company than a Wings cover. I suppose Axl is still alive. Maybe it’s not too late.
When people fall into conspiracy theories, it’s said to be the result of feeling a loss of control over their lives, wanting a reason for why they can’t pull it all together. 1982 wasn’t the first year voices spoke to Dave. In 1971, deep under the effects of cocaine, voices told Dave to jump out of a hotel window. Fortunately, he argued inside himself against it. My actual unqualified Jungian interpretation of the theatrically bow-tied figure looming over Dave Davies’ world? It’s his brother Ray. 1983’s “Chosen People” is as good as the popular, but way past prime albums that Ray, Dave and the Kinks were making at the time, so in that sense, Dave scored a victory over the “great white brother” that had the most control over him. Sales figures disagreed and the album was a flop. The last song “Cold Winter” both works and makes me sad. I’m not sure how much of that feeling is from the craft of the song or from the strain of being good but not great. That’s the challenge of “Chosen People”, it captures the underdog heart of a yearning younger brother. Is the album’s full expression of “almost”, enough?