September 14 – The Kinks – The Kink Kronikles

Kronikles with two Ks – like in Kinks. Cute.

With apologies to my more than patient friend who lent me The Grateful Dead albums (I’m still enjoying American Beauty) and two Kinks albums, including this double record set compilation that features their songs from 1966 through 1970, I think I may prefer the earlier greatest hits album. I like some of the Kinks songs, but not a whole album, and especially not a double-record compilation in which I only recognize four or five songs, and am not wowed by anything else. Perhaps the other album will go over better.

The set starts with the song “Victoria,” and my friend Vicki liked the Kinks and Ray Davies, and thus of course liked that song tons. It may have been about 18 years ago when Ray Davies did his Storyteller tour that Vicki’s husband got her tickets to see him for her birthday. Two tickets in fact, but he didn’t want to go. So I got to. And it was fun. He is a good storyteller, though I recall a little on the bitter side, but my only complaint would be that he didn’t do “Apeman.” I even convinced Vicki that we should sit in our seats and wait for him to come out again because he had to do “Apeman.” This, even after two guys for whom it was obvious this was not the first show of the tour that they had seen, ran out of the theater as soon as Ray Davies left the stage without an encore. And even after most had already filed out of the theater. I felt bad that she believed me, and I had to disappoint. But I blame Ray.