The movie on TV was a Lloyd Nolan-riverboat gambler opus, and the hotel was the Navarro on Central Park South. A walnut-paneled elevator, little old ladies in mink, a morning as gray and sloshy as New York can get. The Kinks' road manager and a woman friend were staring at the television in the suite's reception room. The bottles were empty, the ashtrays were full, and everyone was sniffling.

Ray Davies, impeccably dressed as usual, entered snorting at a Benzedrex inhaler. "This is an amazing place," he said as he dropped into an easy chair. "Amazing. You can walk out to the delicatessen fifty yards down the road and buy a banana, and while you're out somebody could have jumped out the window on the top floor and they could have hosed them away by the time it takes you to walk down the road and come back . . ."

Davies got up and walked to the window. The trees in Central Park were bare in the clinging mist, and the horizon was a washed out non-color. Lloyd Nolan glanced sideways and dealt from his lap. Ray Davies practiced golf swings with his umbrella. He looked uncannily like the Ray Davies I first met in 1969. His Edwardian crushed velvet jacket looked like the one he wore back in 1965 when some people thought the Kinks were the latest word in British fop decadence.

"We really liked Jesse Fuller at the time," Davies recalled. "And Chuck Berry, Howlin' Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson. When we first started to make records they tried to get people to just manufacture popular records, but we wanted songs that we could use in our stage act which would be us. 'All Day and All of the Night' was the sum total of our stage act, together in one thing. We kept playing it until we got it down to the simplest possible form. Directness was its thing."

Davies says he hasn't detected many changes in the world since that time, other than in his personal life and in the way people dress (" . . . they're wearing some clothes that I wore then, and it looks all right"). The music business, he's convinced, will never change.

"Why are we still around? That's a question I never thought about. Well, I have thought about it, but I haven't stayed on it very long. We've gone through a lot. We're going through a lot of things now. We've worked hard; we do work hard. I fly back to England tomorrow, and we do a gig the same day. We keep working and I try to worry about how good we can play rather than how well somebody else is playing. We've always just concerned ourselves with our group. It can be a bad thing, but in the long run it works. Sometimes the band plays something, and if we thought about everybody else we'd say, 'We can't play that because it's not cool to play that, it's not done.' But we go on oblivious to all these things. It's a nice way to be."

Lloyd Nolan cashed in his chips. A Popeye cartoon came on and Ray turned up the sound.

"There's a lot of good music with Popeye cartoons," he said, "some of the arrangements must have been quite difficult to play. I've been listening to some old Bix Beiderbecke records, too . . . they were my inspiration for the horn arrangement on 'Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues.' One of my favorites is 'Old Man River.' And there's the one that goes . . ."

Ray hummed the introduction to Beiderbecke's "At the Jazz Band Ball."

"'Old Man River' is a great song. Most people who like it don't know the intro." He hummed the intro. "I actually like Frank Sinatra singing that. I saw a film clip and he did it really great; he really got emotion in the thing. I didn't think he could do that . . . probably can't do it now. Hey, I'll tell you what -- I saw this film Jazz on a Summer Day, and Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden were backing Chuck Berry at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1959. Really! There was Chuck Berry jumping around in his gold suit singing 'Sweet Little Sixteen,' and these boys in the back playing the shuffle and Louis Armstrong and Jack Teagarden playing . . ."

Ray started humming again. Could this, I wondered aloud, be a conceptual basis for the Kinks' current composite of hard-driving rock and blustering, blowsy Dixieland?

"Yeah, that's a nice comparison," said Davies.

And what about those vaudeville revues that figure in so many Davies songs?

"I'm quite fond of them, though I've never actually seen one. We used to rehearse in a theater in East London that was the last vaudeville theater. It was open until quite recently -- a couple of years ago -- and they used to have vaudeville nights. In Leeds, in Yorkshire, they have a vaudeville night still. They dress up in their old-time clothes and such . . . I like to think that whether it's Jack Bruce playing at Radio City Music Hall or Sri Mahavishnu playing in Central Park or us, it's a carry on. It's the same world, and no matter how much you dislike the things that have gone before, they have gone before. I happen to like some of the things that have gone before, though I know plenty of people who really want nothing to do with it.

"I thought of our Village Green album as a musical, a revue, and that's the way I've approached most of the albums since. Especially Everybody's in Showbiz. On that last LP I said things in two or three verses that could have been said in one line. I was exaggerating because I'm working on a film built around the album, and I was looking ahead, trying to plan visually. When something is said in one line you can lose it because you're concentrating on too many things. You might think 'Oh, that's not like Ray normally does.' Usually it's said once and hidden."

The Kinks stage show has become as exaggerated as Ray's new songs. After a semi-incoherent period, capped by the famous Carnegie Hall concert when Davies slashed about the stage and climaxed "Ape Man" by knocking over a bank of amplifiers, he has built up a charismatic stage presence. One RCA executive described it as "a ninety-degree turnaround from his stiffness on the 69' tour."

The lyrics to the new songs are superficially similar to those from Lola, when the music business was the target for Ray's barbs, and I wondered if he was really so militantly furious at that time.

"Absolutely. 'Powerman,' for example, was from a direct confrontation I had with somebody. I was working very hard, acting in a play for BBC television, and this guy took me out to dinner. I said 'Look, I haven't got much time because I've got to be up for rehearsals in the morning; what do you want?' And he looked at me, and he said, 'Ultimate power.' I said, 'Oh, how are you going to do that?' He said, 'Oh, by delegation.' So I left. He later said that he just wanted me to feel uncomfortable."

Now the subject is show business.

"Have you heard us do 'Mr. Wonderful?' The person who wrote that must have really been clever . . . just terrific. So innocent. I think people are scared to be innocent now."

It was mid-afternoon by this time. The park was still draped in mist. Ray walked over to the window and picked up his umbrella, then tossed it onto the couch and sat down again.

"They are innocent, really," he said, "but they feel they've got to have some dark side to them to make them mysterious. I try that and it doesn't work. I try it with my friends, but they don't go for it. Friends always seem to want you as you are."

[From Issue 125 — January 4, 1973]