"Eyes can lie," warns Dave Davies in his song "Visionary Dreamer." "And sometimes words are oh so useless . . ."

The man who's so wary of self-categorization that he's named his debut solo album after its catalog number -- AFLI-3603 -- is more than a little squirmy as he tries to talk about himself while sitting under a hissing vent in his record company's headquarters. In fact, whenever I press him too closely, he seems to suffer instant memory loss.

Reticence is a trait that guitarist Dave, 33, shares with his big brother, Ray Davies, 36. But as the founders of the Kinks, both men have a fairly well-documented history -- whether they like it or not. Dave, who was born into a London family that included Ray and six sisters, quit school at age fifteen ("distracted by girls") and worked in a music shop while devoting nights to a band called the Ravens. Along with early Kinks bassist Pete Quaife and art-school dropout Ray, they played the debutante circuit and finally won a record deal.

Just about the time the band was due to go into the studio, an incident occurred that resulted in the epoch-making fuzz-tone sound of "You Really Got Me." "I used to sit in my room with a little green amplifier I hated the sound of," Dave recalls. So I cut the speakers up with a razor blade and fed it through what was then a big amp -- thirty watts -- and I thought, ''ell, that's the best thing I ever heard.'"

That sound propelled the Kinks onto the charts with a string of hit singles. Most American fans, however, are unaware that Dave had two hits of his own in England in 1967 -- "Death of a Clown" and "Suzannah's Still Alive." During that time Dave also did a session for a solo album -- a session he claims to barely remember, but one that avid bootleg collectors have been trading for years.

Around 1970, when Ray directed the Kinks into a series of theatrically oriented concept LPs, Dave felt alienated: "What we were doing didn't have any spark; I didn't think we'd yet reached our limits in rock & roll." Then, in the summer of 1973, Ray announced that he was quitting the Kinks. "As my mum always used to say, these things are sent to try us," Dave says of that period. But things changed when he sat down with Ray and they played some Chuck Berry songs on acoustic guitars. Suddenly rock was fun again, and Ray was writing.

"Ray's a very sensitive writer," says Dave. "He projects himself into people he cares about, then writes as if he's them -- trying to figure out what is really him through his emotional entanglements with the person. I suppose I'm like that, too."

That sort of creative process resulted in Ray's "A Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy," a number from the 1978 Misfits album that sounds like an exhortation from Ray to brother Dave: "For all you know we may still have a way to go." The Kinks' renewed success encouraged Dave to get a solo album off his chest, and he worked in spurts from mid-1979 through last April, producing, arranging, singing and playing almost all of the instruments.

The result is an LP whose heavy-metal guitar antics sound a bit dated but undeniably powerful. Dave's choice for a single was the gentle "Imaginations Real," but the core of the album is his howling, anarchic couplets that rail against big government, "science and money" and other instruments of oppression. "I suppose it's an inborn thing that I don't like to be made to do anything," muses Dave.

His solo record has sold respectably, and the bands live LP, One for the Road, is a hit. And as the Kinks roam America's arenas, Dave's already planning another solo outing. "It's funny," he says. "A numerologist friend did the numbers in the title up with the numbers in my name. He said the record was gonna take my name on an adventure. I thought that was rather romantic."

[From Issue 330 — November 13, 1980]