max abelson's super groovy music video spectacular

#562: the turtles - elenore (howie, mark, johny, jim & al) (1968)

there are lots of late-1960s pop songs about late-1960s pop songs, but elenore, is the best one. the three most important things about it are a chorus that mocks choruses (“you’re my pride and joy, etcetera”), a chorus that is very quietly very dirty (“and you really do me well”), and a chorus that made the turtles’ glorious mark volman do some very serious jumping around with his tambourine toward the end of this clip.

update: a previous version of this post said that elenore is from the only non-kinks album that ray davies ever produced. this is incorrect. elenore is on the turtles present the battle of the bands, and not the davies-produced turtle soup. the super groovy music video spectacular regrets the error.

#555: the lilys - nanny in manhattan (1998)

the former observer photo editor kat irannejad, whom dedicated followers of this website will remember as one of the world’s finest and most generous mix-makers, began her most recent tape for me with a band i can’t believe i’d never heard of, the lilys. they sound like a kinky (kinks-like) beach party invaded by zombies (the odessey and oracle band, not the undead monster).

the lilys’ leader is a gentleman named kurt heasley, who must be a fun guy to work with because the list of former lilys members reads like a phonebook: there’s an archie, an art, a bryant, two dons, a gerhardt, people nicknamed bear, fuzzy, pel, and pablo, two michaels, four mikes, a mickey, two stevens, a thom, a tommy, a torben, and a trish. fun times!

#512: chrissie hynde (with nick cave) - i’ll stand by you (bbc, 1999)

it’s wrong that the 80s gets all the power ballad attention. with no disrespect to every rose has its thorn, it was in the 90s that stephanie seymour walked down axl rose’s aisle for ten and a half minutes while aerosmith outdid all the gems on get a grip with an interstellar slow jam. and then there’s the pretenders’ monumentally under-appreciated i’ll stand by you: this performance includes the velvet underground’s john cale looking on and nick cave slightly messing up key changes, plus there’s a joke about oasis. and god bless chrissie hynde, who came close to starting a band with the clash’s mick jones and marrying the kinks’ ray davies, but could beat both in arm wrestling.

#427: the kinks - autumn almanac (1967)

nostalgia for elderly english agrarian ideals doesn’t sound like it would make for good late-60s pop music, but this is the world’s least boring song about rheumatism, roast beef, dew, breezes and toast—just like village green preservation society is history’s best album about saving “little shops, china cups, and virginity.” one reason ray davies got away with so many victorian ditties about the weather and his tea (or sunsets) is that they were always at least half-ironic—the other reason is that his songs were smarter than everyone else’s, except lennon/mcartney’s.

#337: kinks - holiday (1972)

wobbliness is the world’s great secret weapon. one of the enormous pleasures of listening to billie holiday or gram parsons or ry cooder or neil young or wayne coyne or tom waits or shane macgowan is having to pray quietly that they don’t stagger and stumble and fall overboard. but a good wobble always maintains itself! except then there’s early-70s kinks (and late-60s kinks, too), who didn’t just sound like a klezmer band lost on new orleans highways, they sounded like their schoolbus had fallen into a pit of rusted clarinets and hooch.

their wobbliness made it impossible to even do proper band introductions (“john gosling on the organ! mr. john gosling!! gosling!!”), but it’s also a kind of wobbliness that sounded awfully good when there was a 3-man brass section playing along.

#268: the kinks - death of a clown (1967)

the great tragedy of brotherly rock bands is that the lesser-known sibling always ends up going slightly insane—especially poor dave davies.

despite his famously fizzy, whirring guitar playing for the kinks, the third-best band in british history, he’s never gotten the ga-ga adoration bestowed on main kink ray davies, his older brother. and isn’t that a tad unfair? after all, dave davies co-wrote and sang death of a clown, which, even when compared to ringo starr’s octopus’ garden, is a pretty peppy late-60s whirligig. boozy but morbid psychedelia should make a comeback.

#243: the kinks - muswell hillbillies (1972)

the hillbillies and the novelists and the veterans and the rabbis and the welders and the professors and the flight attendents and the divorcees and the bellboys and the dentists and the roadies and the real estate brokers and the guitarists are all voting for change. down with the 20th century’s acute schizophrenia paranoia blues! up with hope!

#80: elliott smith - waterloo sunset (1997, arizona)

at any point in time, from arizona to alaska, there is a sad and acne-scarred man in a teeshirt playing kinks songs on an acoustic guitar. and none of them will ever sound this humongously good and seem so massively upsetting.

#79: kinks - waterloo sunset (1967)

if i had ten songs to take to a desert island, this would be one of them. the lyrics are hermitic, claustrophobic, cold and slightly creepy (“i stay at home at night”), but the music is feathery, sweet, and angelically harmonized (especially the sha la las). and that quiet clash makes for the loneliest song about love ever written.

but it’s not really a love song—unless it’s possible to be in love with the couples walking through the dusk outside while you’re alone at your window.