Kinks – Muswell Hillbillies

Some remember Ray and Dave Davies for those wry English singles of the late ’60s: “Waterloo Sunset”, “Sunny Afternoon”, “Autumn Almanac” and the like, songs as steeped in music-hall tradition as they are in rock ‘n’ roll. Some associate them with the driving garage rock that first made their band, the Kinks, famous — early hits such as “You Really Got Me” and “Tired Of Waiting For You”. Some think of their early-’70s rock operas, which were really more vaudeville than Verdi; others of their brief, hard-rocking return to arenas in the late ’70s and early ’80s.

But few would consider these extremely English brothers the lost fathers of country-rock, figures on par with Gram Parsons and Willie Nelson. Yet artists ranging from Wilco to Dwight Yoakam have cited them as an influence. This shouldn’t be surprising: From the beginning, the Kinks were as comfortable in a country idiom as they were playing rock or blues. Long before the band had formed, Ray and Dave would listen to Chet Atkins records and sing Hank Williams songs together. Country-western influences appear in several of their ’60s songs — “Got My Feet On The Ground”, “Act Nice And Gentle”, “There Is No Life Without Love”, “Willesden Green” — and even their more R&B-centered work sometimes betrays a subtle twang.

The Nashville influence exploded in 1971 on the band’s best album, Muswell Hillbillies, a record that occasionally remembered to rock but was more often content to wrap itself in genres far more ancient. The music was steeped in tradition: the bluesy slide guitar of “20th Century Man” and “Here Come The People In Grey”; the soft accordion of “Oklahoma U.S.A.”; the music-hall cabaret of “Alcohol” and “Holiday”; the Beale Street jazz of “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues”; the solid C&W of “Complicated Life”, “Have A Cuppa Tea”, “Uncle Son”, and “Muswell Hillbilly” — a song Merle Haggard would’ve written if he’d grown up in North London instead of Bakersfield.

Lyrically, the album is built around three angry populist anthems. First, “20th Century Man” rips into the bureaucratic age we live in, a time “Controlled by civil servants/And people dressed in grey.” Then “Here Come The People In Grey” tells the tale of a man facing that same bureaucracy; stripped of his home, the narrator is reduced to a militia fantasy, ultimately to no avail: “Here come the people in grey, to take me away.”

On the record’s final cut, the 20th century man has resigned to his relocation, but not to the fate the grey-suited folk have planned for him: “They’re gonna try to make me change my way of living/But they’ll never make me something that I’m not.” And so the singer dreams of the community he’s lost, projecting it onto garbled media images of America: “I’m a Muswell Hillbilly boy/But my heart lies in old West Virginia/Never seen New Orleans, Oklahoma, Tennessee…Take me back to those Black Hills that I ain’t never seen.”

Between these three tunes are stories of the people who lived in the neighborhood the redevelopers destroyed, plus the modern man’s complaints of paranoia, oppression and a life far too complicated. The result is that rare concept album which lives up to its ambitions.

The twang remained on the band’s next album, Everybody’s In Showbiz (1972), but the Kinks’ music was beginning to move in new directions. Maryann Price, later of Asleep at the Wheel, joined them on Preservation Act 2 (1974), adding her cowgirl vocals to “Scrapheap City”; a couple songs on State Of Confusion (1983) showed a country influence; and Davies’ recent solo CD, The Storyteller (1998), includes several fine countryish tunes. But Muswell Hillbillies remains the high point in the band’s affair with Nashville. (Velvel’s reissue includes two previously unreleased bonus tracks, “Mountain Woman” and “Kentucky Moon.”)