The Live Kinks

Release info: Produced by: Shel Talmy Release date: Aug 1967 Record label & catalog #: Reprise R 6260 Country: USA Format: 12" vinyl LP (album), 33 1/3 RPM Release type: Regular release Description/Notes: mono mix

Tracks:

Side 1
1. Till The End Of The Day		live, mono mix (3:33), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
2. A Well Respected Man		live, mono mix (3:12), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
3. You're Looking Fine		live, mono mix (3:37), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
4. Sunny Afternoon		live, mono mix (5:03), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
5. Dandy		live, mono mix (2:00), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
Side 2
1. I'm On An Island		live, mono mix (2:52), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
2. Come On Now		live, mono mix (3:02), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
3. You Really Got Me		live, mono mix (2:10), recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
4. Medley: (8:46)
Milk Cow Blues		live, mono mix, part of medley, recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
Batman Theme		live, mono mix, part of medley, recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland
Tired Of Waiting For You		live, mono mix, part of medley, recorded 1 Apr, 1967 at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, Scotland

Liner Notes:

An Orgy For Ears -- The Kinks In Live Koncert

They came to us in 1964 wearing pink shirts and long frock coats with a song called "You Really Got Me," which was their third attempt and their first hit. They came to us from Muswell Hill, a shabby and sometimes violent suburb of North London, the pride of which was a street gang called the Mussies. They came to us from Art School. They came to us with a pompous publicity man and two genteel, bowler-hatted, pin-striped managers who had been securing work for them at debutantes' balls in Chelsea. They came to us in a blaze of tasteless publicity (cultivated impiety, irreligious image-building), and they survived because they are good, and for no other reason.

They came to us when London was older.

The Stones were wearing uniforms in those days--black leather vests and neatly-pressed chequered pants. Georgie Fame was playing blues in a subterranean Soho cellar called The Flamingo and down the street at a small club called The Scene was a young group called The High Numbers, idols of the mod cult and later to become The Who. Richmond, a bustling, wooded village on the Thames 20 miles out of London was producing its own brand of music in the form of Clapton, Baldry, Mayall's Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds, and the Beatles were still in Liverpool. Purple Hearts were popping, and Dylan was little more than a rumor. Mini-skirts were two inches above the knee, Carnaby Street was in full bloom, Wilson had won the General Election, and England was ready for change.

Into all this came the Kinks. Their first record was "Long Tall Sally" and it wasn't a hit because we'd taken that trip with the Beatles, but it was rough, raw, rowdy, and honest, and some indication of what was to come later.

"You Really Got Me" was the first hit, "All Day And All Of the Night" came next and the Kinks were here.

They were regulars on "Ready, Steady, Go." They were often seen in the Ad Lib Club, London's first In-Pop-Rendezvous, where John and Paul and Mick and Keith and sometimes P.J. Proby would sip Scotch and Coke and mull over new ideas. They gave whimsical interviews to the National Press, turbulent concerts up and down the country, played a lot of football for show-biz teams, drank a lot of beer in show-biz pubs and sharpened their wits and their minds as they developed and matured.

London began to change. Skirts were getting shorter, beards longer, minds freer, cigarettes thinner, people younger. Harold Wilson went to Liverpool and re-opened the Cavern. Jagger had coffee with Princess Margaret. Lennon wrote a book.

For the first time pop people realized the power they had, and for the first time they begun to use it constructively. Pop became more than a commodity for Friday night thrill-seakers in provincial discotheques. Every culture has its art, and pop replaced football as the art of the new culture. Confronted with the inheritance of an absurd reality, the new movement created its own reality, a reality which was witnessed at the Monterey Pop Festival, a reality which deals in life, love, and laughter, all of which you will hear on this album, recorded in concert up in Scotland.

This is the first live album from the Kinks, and it is probably their most significant recorded work. It is living theatre. It is also fairly representative of where they have been and where they are now. It contains some of the finest poetry from Ray Davies (a social diarist whose laconic wit, incisive perception, and flair for detail has placed him, along with Lennon, McCartney, Townshend, Jagger, Richard, Airplane Grace, Simon, and even Dylan, in the vanguard of a New Society).

The recent Festival at Monterey made an important social statement, and it therefore becomes trivial to discuss the merits of the acts which performed there, or the validity in the appearance and non-appearance of certain acts. The Kinks were not present, neither were they missed. For they were surely there in Spirit.

Andy Wickham

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