“There was The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Who and The Kinks,” says Arnold Engelman, the New York producer who has been pursuing the story of the last band on that list for some 20 years. “And they were all friends. That was the most incredible generation. Comedy. Fashion. Music. It was all together.”
Engelman, a veteran entertainment promoter and the head of WestBeth Entertainment, is sitting in the seats at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, pondering the most defiantly British of all the so-called British Invasion bands.
“They all looked at America,” he says, wistfully, “at all these kids having a wonderful time and thought, ‘Why can’t we do that?’”
They could, of course. And, as the decades passed, the first three of those bands achieved a level of global stardom without comparison. But The Kinks? Well, the clue was right there in their name. Lead singer and songwriter Ray Davies was a lot more complicated but was as big a talent as Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger or any of ’em.
Mark Harrison, a British vinyl record dealer and a specialist in the era, argues that without The Kinks, bands like Blur and The Jam could not have existed and that only “Sgt. Pepper’s”-era Beatles competes. “Is there a better British pop song than Davies’ “Waterloo Sunset?” Harrison asks.
On stage at Chicago Shakespeare’s Yard theater, the familiar iconography of the jukebox musical, a venerable Anglo-American genre, is being rehearsed.
“That sounds like a bloody nightmare,” shouts Danny Horn, the actor playing Davies, the lead singer of The Kinks. “Ray, it’s commercial,” says the sort of character destined to be the enemy of all true creative souls. “We’re just trying to smooth the rough edges.”
“It’s poncified,” insists the Davies character. “We all feel like ponces. You. Can’t. Hear. What. I. Can. Hear.”
Of course, as their fan base well knows, Davies and The Kinks were all about the rough edges. So much so that while their peers largely sold their music to American publishers, and then made myriad licensing details from Hollywood to Las Vegas and back again, Davies largely remained the same old working-class guy from Muswell Hill, London — socially aware, eccentric, elegiac, ever nostalgic for Britain’s disappearing rural charms, and yet with a Monty Python-like insouciance toward anything and everything he missed.
The struggles of The Kinks are all too familiar: sudden success with band members ill-prepared to handle it; bad behavior on stage; inter-band power struggles, especially between Ray and his younger brother Dave Davies; fights with anyone who tried to pigeonhole them or do any kind of “smoothing” so as to try and make The Kinks conform to an audience more likely to buy their records.
Sir Raymond Douglas Davies CBE was a remarkable iconoclast.
There was the repertoire of The Kinks itself, a hefty and staggeringly diverse catalog (most written by Davies) ranging freely from pop to blues to rock to jazz to avant-garde to heavy metal to a kind of proto-punk, featuring hits like “You Really Got Me,” “All Day and All of the Night,” “Lola,” “Set Me Free,” “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” and “Till the End of the Day,” and encompassing singles and concept albums alike.
Davies’ “unauthorized autobiography,” the 1996 memoir “X-Ray,” consciously employed an unreliable narrator. He scored movies. He appeared in movies. He penned short stories. He wrote stage musicals, several of them, including a 1988 version of Jules Verne’s “Around the World in Eighty Days” and a 2008 show called “Come Dancing,” based partly on his hit song of the same title but with a bunch of new songs.
“Ray wrote chronologically,” Engelman says. “When something happened in his life, he wrote a song about it.”
“Sunny Afternoon,” the current Stateside project involving Davies, now 80, actually features a book credited to Joe Penhall, a well-respected British playwright. But over the phone from London earlier this month, Davies (who has been struggling with his health) points out that he wrote “a few drafts” himself.
“Ray and Joe worked together,” says Hall in an interview after the rehearsal.
The reason why “Sunny Afternoon” is having its American premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, in cooperation with Engelman and the busy British producer Sonia Friedman, has everything to do with Edward Hall, the theater’s new artistic director and also the man who helmed the world premiere of said title at the Hampstead Theater in London in 2014. (Talk about a show long in gestation.)
“Once Ed got the job in Chicago,” Engelman says, “it finally all fell into place for America.”
“Sunny Afternoon,” named for one of The Kinks’ most familiar songs from 1966, tells the story of the band’s early years with, as is common in jukebox musicals, judiciously inserted songs at key moments. “To understand the early years,” Davies says, by way of explanation and with the economy that comes with age, “is to understand the later years.”
Some numbers, as is typical of the genre, are played in concert settings, including The Kinks’ appearance on “Top of the Pops,” the iconic BBC music show, and a notorious 1965 appearance in Cardiff where The Kinks had a blazing internal fight in the middle of their concert between the drummer and Ray’s brother.
“Mick Avory knocked Dave out with a cymbal,” Hall says, shaking his head. “All this happened while they were playing ‘Set Me Free.’”
Chris Dreja of the Yardbirds was watching that night from the edge of the stage and thought he had just witnessed a murder. “It was such a violent act,” he later told Johnny Rogan, who wrote a 2015 biography of Davies under the apt title, “Ray Davies: A Complicated Life.” Dave Davies recovered though and, improbably, The Kinks went on with their tour, even playing Chicago’s Arie Crown Theatre later that same year, their first visit to a city that quickly understood what The Kinks was all about. (The band also performed at the Auditorium Theatre in 1972 and the Uptown Theatre in 1980, among numerous other Chicago appearances over the years.)
“We wanted to try and find a way of telling the story about a bedroom band and a family that became this incredibly influential movement that changed the whole world of rock ‘n’ roll and had an effect on so many other musicians,” says Hall. “Very early on, it became clear to us that it had to be all about the music, about the process of making, writing and playing the music.”
In 2014, “Jersey Boys,” the musical story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, was packing them in on both sides of the Atlantic. That show opened up the idea that artists whose careers were mostly behind them could extend their reach by creating (or approving) their own narratives, wherein their younger selves were played by more youthful performers, warbling their hits with their original arrangements for a now-aging fan base. “Sunny Afternoon” was seen in London to be very much in that vogue, albeit more appreciative than most such shows of Davies’ particular charisma and improvisational skills. And with an ability to send Kinks fans into a state of euphoria.
Like “Jersey Boys,” “Sunny Afternoon” has paid close attention to the precise replication of The Kinks’ sound, no easy feat given that the band’s distinctive “fuzzy” sound famously was created when Dave Davies, annoyed that he was stuck with a faulty Epic amplifier, aggressively slashed the speaker cone with a razor blade, accidentally (maybe) changing the sound of his guitar and creating the kind of distortion that gave the band a musical calling card, especially once Davies hooked up the jerry-rigged amp to another amp to make the sound a whole lot louder and, well, change the face of rock music forever. Especially once guitarists like Pete Townshend of The Who heard what Davies had done.
Amps are the entire backdrop of the set on the stage at Chicago Shakespeare. “I saw ‘Side Man’ years ago,” says Hall, “and I remember being frustrated that although this was a great play, nobody played. So we knew we had to find the people who could play, the right guitars with the right pick-ups, the whole sound.”
Davies, famously, has a way of disassociating himself from his own biography and his own work, endlessly cynical about the so-called Swinging Sixties. Hall says that during the London development process, Davies would sit there and “talk about the Ray character.”
“He never wanted a sugar-coated version of his own self,” Hall says. “But I think you do understand in this show the enormous amount of pressure The Kinks were under from an industry that wanted them to be another hit band doing three-chord songs and wearing fashionable clothes, here today and gone tomorrow. They weren’t that. They were a round peg being squashed into a square hole. You have this groove of misfits. When they played, everything was beautiful. But when they stopped playing, stopped making music, everything would fall apart for one reason or another. If you know anything about The Kinks, you know they never did anything the same way as everyone else. They always left chaos behind.”
The plan for “Sunny Afternoon,” Engelman says, is to create a tour from this Chicago Shakespeare premiere, which features actors from the original London production and Chicago-based performers and musicians. In some ways, what happened with “The Who’s Tommy,” a rock-oriented show that premiered at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre before an enthusiastic audience only to struggle on Broadway, where fans of The Who were far less evident, especially among critics, is a cautionary tale. “Broadway’s a crapshoot,” Engelman says. “The finances alone could drown you. But The Kinks have an audience all across America.”
“Lots of great memories,” Davies says when asked about The Kinks playing in Chicago.
Now comes a treat for old Kinks fans, surely?
“New audiences,” he says, twice for emphasis. “New audiences.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
“Sunny Afternoon” opens in previews March 21 and runs through April 27 in The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare on Navy Pier; www.chicagoshakes.com
