The Kinks

Dad pulled this one out and put it on the turntable one night. The opening cut was "You Really Got Me", and this loud, rowdy guitar riff came hurtling out of the speakers. Whoa! I asked him what this was, he said "The Kinks", and for some reason I thought he said "The Cakes"! I heard most of that record that evening, and I was very impressed by it.

Around the same time, I heard "Sunny Afternoon" on the Best Of Britain album, and really liked what I was hearing. It wasn't the usual riff-rocker from them, but very melodic, with a memorable opening bass line.

There were some videos by them a couple-few years later that we used to see on MTV. "Predictable" cracked us up, especially with Ray Davies as a long-haired hippie, exactly the kind of guy we knew quite well!

By 1989, I hadn't heard them for a long time, so I pulled out the Greatest Hits album that I knew so well, played it loudly, and it sounded as great as ever. But I really got back into them when The Pace were doing a few sons from the You Really Got Me album; oddly enough, we never touched that song! But we did do some semi-obscure cuts that we picked from a few albums and tapes of theirs that I began buying, and a few of them stayed in out repertoire. "Come On Now" was a lot of fun to rock out on, "I Need You" was undoubtedly a great song to play, and "Beautiful Delilah" was always a great stomper.