The Stand Up Comic:
Ray Davies at the Variety Playhouse

March 19, 2006

I didn't know what to expect when it came to seeing Ray Davies in concert. I have a pretty decent collection of Kinks albums, and can tell you favorite songs.. but I had no idea what Ray Davies' stage persona might be like. It turns out he is something of a goof. I mean that in a good way. He is engaging of the audience and willing to be silly—like putting-a-beer-bottle-on-his-head type silly.

Thinking about Kinks albums, I could never have expected a dour old guy to walk onto the stage. Ray Davies seems to occupy a zone of pop music that is not well populated here in America. We have our serious song-writers and bands.. the Bob Dylans and U2s. Then there are bands that celebrate drinking and partying and having a good time.. I am having a harder time naming examples because that is not my musical bag. But Ray Davies writes songs that are serious, but at the same time self-mocking and fun. Dylan or Neil Young can be up-tempo.. they can even have a light touch.. but they rarely make it to "fun." The stage presence of Ray Davies matched his offbeat musical personality.

One of the songs he performed last night was "Stand Up Comic", from his new album Other People's Lives. The song alternates between the voice of a stand up comic goofing off and commentary on that role. It was the beginning of the second half of the concert, and Davies was wearing his glasses and gray suit, goofing as if he were working the crowd like a stand up comic.

William Shakespeare is the schmooze of the week
and anyone who says different is a fucking antique
and Noel Coward has become very hard
and the comic says bollocks and everyone laughs

Those lines.. or at least those sentiments.. will feel familiar to a fan of the Kinks. A characteristic mode for Ray Davies is looking back to the past—not the past as a golden unity, but the past as more diverse and plain odd. The past was that time when you didn't have to be like everybody else.

Davies had played "20th Century Man" from Muswell Hillbillies earlier in the concert, which includes the following lines:

You keep all your smart modern writers
Give me William Shakespeare
You keep all your smart modern painters
I'll take Rembrandt Titian Da Vinci and Gainsborough

The lines, which are delivered with as much force as Davies can muster, are unambiguous in their relish for the past.. at the expense of the present.

So who is this stand up comic character, dismissing Noel Coward as too hard? The first answer is that it is ironic. Davies detests the entertainment pitch to the lowest common denominator and is making fun of it. Having listened to the song several times on the new CD, this was my interpretation.. it was a classic Kinks sentiment.

In concert the song comes across differently because Ray Davies so embodies the stand up comic—and does so without apparent irony.. in fact it was his normal stage persona pushed a little further. A similarly complicated view of this character is present in Ray Davies' liner notes for the new CD:

Sometimes when I am trying to introduce new material, I feel like a stand up comedian in a bar full of lager louts. Like I said, I tried to break away from my past but I had a back catalogue that would follow me wherever I went. When I would try to be a different person; a more caring and poetic individual, this STAND UP COMIC would turn up to sabotage my attempts to place myself on a new platform. This little demon will simply not go away... I'll call him Max in honour of the comedian Max Miller the great old London vaudevillian... I have tried to forget about this song and I even tried taking it off the album but the "Stand Up Comic" will not go away.

This sounds almost as if the singer/song-writer is being held back by this stand up comic persona. And in a way he is right. That need to goof off and talk about getting a drink at a pub keeps his songs from having gravitas, or whatever we want to call that sense of self-importance that keeps people quiet and impressed.

This stand up comic has been there throughout Ray Davies career. The connection of this stand up comic to the vaudevillian Max Miller is a clue that it is a positive character in the Ray Davies conceptual system. In "The Village Green Preservation Society" Davies sang "God save Donald Duck, vaudeville and variety." And on the cover of Muswell Hillbillies the band is standing in an old-fashioned pub. Vaudeville and pubs were always part of the Kinks. And if Shakespeare is an influence with Davies, it is the Shakespeare of Falstaff and the comedies who stands as the source of that influence. Which, it need hardly be said, is nothing to be shaken-off..