Ray Davies “Americana”
For the last thirteen years, over the course of twenty-six seasons (and counting), The BBC has blessed us with “Antiques Road Trip.” “Antiques Road Trip” might sound like “Antiques Road Show,” but the two programs actually share very little in common. Whereas the more renowned “Road Show” focuses on the objects, their stories and their value, the latter is a buddy road trip, featuring a pair of antiques experts driving around the U.K., buying and then auctioning off antiques for charity. Whereas the “Road Show” appraisers are erudite and somniferous, the “Road Trip” experts are whimsical and competitive. The former is a staid drama, the latter is “Easy Rider,” with antiques instead of drugs and motorcycles.
“Road Trip’s” G.O.A.T. is (arguably) James Lewis, who appeared in only a handful of seasons, but who racked up massive profits before returning to a life on the auction rostrum. Lewis displayed an uncanny knack for negotiation and a sixth sense for the market. However, whereas Mr. Lewis could seemingly buy anything for much less than it was worth and sell it for more, other participants are more particular in their interests. For example, Charlie Ross and James Braxton have a penchant for brown furniture. Anita Manning, Roo Irvine and Christina Trevanion know their precious metals and gems. Charles Hanson is a ceramics guy — bowls, vases and tea sets. And Tim Medhurts is a numistatist — an expert in coins and currency.
By and large, those were all categories of antiquing that I was at least nominally familiar with. But, the more “Road Trip” I consumed, the more I realized that it was the other — more obscure — obsessions that interested me. Some contestants, for example, excelled in gardenalia (antiques related to gardens). Others had a thing for railwayana (antiques related to trains), nauticalia (maritime antiques) and horology (clocks and timepieces). But the road tripper whose prowess most captivated me was Paul Laidlaw, the charming Scottish auctioneer whose knowledge of “militaria” (everything from uniforms to weapons to medals to maps to you name it) seemed bottomless.
Raymond Douglas Davies has no interest in militaria or gardenalia or railwayana (that I know of). And though his keen eye and ear for English society is widely lauded, I’m not so sure that “Britannia” (the idea, not the symbol) is his great obsession, either. No — decades after he, his brother Dave, drummer Mick Avory and bassist Pete Quaife became the most internationally beloved band without a platinum-selling album, Ray Davies revealed his truest passion: Americana.
Davies’ “Americana” is not Wilco’s “Americana.” As a genre, Americana suggests music in between “Roots Rock” and “Alternative Country.” Stylistically, it's a fertile but ultimately narrow lane. Davies’ Americana, on the other hand, is as expansive as it is deep. It considers both the United States of America and the land mass that predated the country — the massive mountain ranges and the canyons and rivers and the natives and the cowboys. The freedom and independence and capitalism and Jazz and Blues and Soul. The New York and Los Angeles and high hopes and dashed dreams. All of it. It has very little to do with Nashville and much more to do with “The Lone Ranger” and Duke Ellington and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Ray Davies is obsessed with Americana in the same way that Paul Laidlaw is obsessed with militaria.
For casual Kinks’ fans, this might sound incongruous. But, it’s true. The man who wrote “A Well Respected Man,” “Waterloo Sunset” and “Village Green Preservation Society” — the singer-songwriter who satirized and romanticized English life was positively enraptured with America. England might have consumed his mind, but America owned his heart.
The irony of this claim is not simply that The Kinks’ were perhaps the most British of the British Invasion acts. It’s not simply that The Kinks were banned from touring the U.S. from 1965 until 1970, during their first commercial peak. Nor is it that, in 2004, he was robbed and shot in America by an American. The irony is that, in spite of his greatness and his Englishness, his Pop stardom faded rather quickly in the U.K. And inversely that, in spite of the touring ban and the near murder, the love affair between Ray Davies and America is both requited and enduring.
It’s true that Ray’s “Americana kink” has a whiff of sado-masochism. That we kicked him out! That one of our own shot him! That we made him start back at the bottom and work his way back up to the arenas. Our own anglophilia is not so different — our preoccupation with the monarchy and the customs and pageantry that our founding fathers and mothers wanted to escape. But mostly, the relationship is born from a deep, reciprocal appreciation. Our knowledge that we appreciated The Kinks — their loudness, their weirdness, their specificity — in ways that England simply would not. And Ray’s knowledge that America was more than just McDonalds and The Eagles.
Ray’s infatuation is elemental. His Americana is akin to the version from Randy Newman’s “Sail Away” — full of big dreams and broken dreams and small time grifters and long cons and movie stars and big cities and lonely plains and cowboys and Indians. Its history is relatively short, but its sweep is positively epic.
Throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, when The Kinks’ ascent in America boldly contrasted with the sighs they received back home, the inversion was as obvious as it was illogical. It was a question in interviews. It was the inspiration for Davies’ move to New Orleans in the early Aughts. It was the news headline after he was robbed, shot and left New Orleans. And then, in 2015, twenty-two years after the last Kinks’ album, eight years after his last solo album and seven years after he staged “Come Dancing,” it was the thesis of Davies’ memoir, “Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story.”
Two years after the release of his book, Davies pressed the matter — releasing a companion album, simply entitled “Americana.” “Americana” (the album) is an unusual object — existing somewhere between concept album, musical memoir and one man show. As a piece of product, it lacks precedent or comparables. But, as a record, it’s cogent in the way that biographies can be but concept albums rarely are. “Americana” is ostensibly a series of Ray’s reflections on America, from his days as a boy watching American entertainment to his life as a touring musician to his time as a resident of New Orleans to his near death experience. At fifteen songs, it stretches out a bit, but ultimately in a way that befits the theme. The same can be said of Ray’s delivery, which is less sharp and more reflective — dreamy, even. It’s breadth and pace match the subject.
But “Americana” is not strictly a solo effort — it’s not a one man show. There’s, of course, the matter of his band. After “Word of Mouth” (1984), The Kinks released three final albums without the services of founding drummer, Mick Avory, who also happened to be Ray’s dearest friend as well as Dave Davies’ greatest nemesis. The loss of Avory, the enmity between the brothers, and the arrival of MTV sent The Kinks in all sorts of directions — very few of them good. While “Think Visual,” “Phobia” and, especially, “UK Jive” boasted their share of excellent songs, they also all sounded somehow wrong. Off. Too tight. Too slick. Too tentative. Too distant. The Kinks lost their “feel.” And so, twenty plus years after “Phobia,” Ray Davies desperately needed a band with feel. And specifically, a band with feel for “Americana.”
In The Jayhawks, he found just that. The beloved Minneapolis band, born from the scene that produced Uncle Tupelo, not the mention The Replacements, excelled in an insouciant brand of Rock that was on the Rootsy side of Alternative Country. They bore no traces of Cowpunk and, in contrast to John Hiatt and Steve Earle, their guitars and vocals blended more than they led. For Davies, The Jayhawks represented the perfect marriage of form (Americana) and function (“Americana”).
It was a marriage that bore fruit. For whatever “Americana” lacks in hooks and concision, it makes up for with “feel.” That uncanny quality is a product both of the band’s sensitivity for the material and the way in which Ray pairs sound and words. How the jangle of the title track really stretches out to evoke the land where the buffalo roam. How the hopalong of “A Long Drive Home to Tarzana” sounds like the view from a bus or train window and how the slow keyboard hum “Message From the Road” feels like a vintage answering machine recording. No small part of this skill belongs to Davies, who’d written and staged musicals before and whose concept albums artfully connected song and story. But whereas the record could have easily veered into theatricality, The Jayhawks nudged it closer to biopic or memoir.
If Kinks’ albums are full of characters that Davies would either humanize or satirize (or both), on “Americana,” there are no third parties. There are no strangers. In fact, there are no major characters, other than the lead — Ray himself. Dave Davies makes a brief appearance. Ray’s exes show up for a couple of duets. His daughter is mentioned but not named. And Alex Chilton, Ray’s neighbor in New Orleans, is resurrected for one very brief interlude. But otherwise, “Americana” is a “two hander” between Ray Davies and the U.S. of A.
“Americana” thrives less when it sounds like The Jayhawks and more when it sounds like the “Ray-Hawks.” The material frequently calls out for genteel turns, but the band’s casual ease and the subject’s wide expanse can get listlessness at times. It’s a delicate, and probably necessary, needle to thread — sounding older and wizened without sound old and tired. “Message from the Road,” for instance, is pretty, but also pretty boring. And “The Invaders,” a song about longhairs arriving in The States for the first time, is the rare track in which the message and medium conflict. It’s begging for loud Mod guitars and a pert snare beat, but is played as semi-baroque, semi-twee Indie Pop instead. It sounds nothing like a culture clash or a counterculture. It sounds like a sweet nostalgic giggle. It’s not a miss. But it’s a missed opportunity.
Conversely, the best moments on “Americana” are not the theatrical curtain raisers but the unabashed rockers — those most typical of Davies’ style. “The Great Highway” is using those same power chords that The Kinks turned inside out, except with more cowbell and without Dave’s slightly off harmonies. When the Jayhawks shout “hey hey hey” in the chorus, it’s direct emphasis — celebration rather than observation. It’s a subtle difference, but one that explains why The Modern Lovers “Roadrunner” sounds “American” while The Kinks “Do It Again” does not.
Likewise, when Ray urges the band towards Power Pop or Rhythm and Blues, the push-pull works. “The Mystery Room” is a bluesy stomper about the time and space between the moment Davies was shot and when he knew he’d make it. In so many ways, it’s existential heaviness evokes Warren Zevon. In fact, “Americana” has more than a little in common with Zevon’s “Sentimental Hygiene,” a late career reclamation where (like Davies in 2017) the singer-songwriter was backed by a jangly, critically lauded, sub-popular band (R.E.M.).
Just weeks before the release of “Americana,” Davies — the big brother and frontman from one of Rock’s most enduring and obsessed over bands, the man who was expelled from America once and then was chased out again a second time, the writer who was both completely preoccupied with and wholly disinterested in the English class system — was knighted by the Queen. The irony of the title, issued while Davies was gazing westward towards mountains and buffalo and cowboys and Indians and blonde girls with beautiful teeth, was lost on no one.
Davies love affair with America was not quelled by his new status nor was it exorcised by the release of “Americana.” One year later, he issued a second, even more sprawling sequel entitled “Our Country: Americana Act II” (nodding to “Preservation Act II” while also emphasizing the “Our” in “Our Country”). Both “Americana” albums were modest sellers, warmly embraced by critics, “No Depression” readers, NPR listeners and, most of all, Kinks’ fans tired of those “will they won’t they” reunion rumors. As of 2023, with Ray approaching eighty, those rumors — of Ray, Dave and Mick recording together again — still persist. As does the idea of America (sort of). As does the monarchy (just barely).