Listen to Psychedelic Rock! Exploring a Musical Genre by Christian Matijas-Mecca;

Author:Christian Matijas-Mecca; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2020-02-07T21:00:00+00:00

THE KINKS: THE KINKS ARE THE VILLAGE GREEN PRESERVATION SOCIETY (NOVEMBER 1968)

Released one year after Something Else by the Kinks, Ray Davies and company delivered one of the most underrated and overlooked albums not only of the psychedelic period but of the 1960s. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is perhaps the band’s finest work and is both a masterpiece and statement of Englishness in pop music. While their previous two albums were released in near identical form both in the United States and the United Kingdom, Village Green was carried on a far more fractured route. In 1968, the band was still barred from performing in the United States, which did nothing to make their records a key component of Reprise’s marketing prowess. With the goal of delivering a product tailored to each market, Ray Davies delivered a twelve-track album to Pye Records, the original Village Green, and for the U.S. market he delivered an eleven-track album to Reprise with the title Four More Respected Gentlemen. This collection featured a pair of tracks that were not on Village Green, thereby making an entirely different aural experience for fans. Davies decided to pull both the U.K. and U.S. configurations of the albums, but not before Pye Records jumped the gun and released advance copies to the press. Positive reviews began to accumulate for the original Village Green, but no album appeared in the shops because Ray had decided to completely reconfigure the album.

Davies did attempt to persuade Pye to release a double album (since the release of the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out and Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, the double album was becoming an accepted format for the extended artistic statement), something the label rejected no sooner than it was proposed. Had they allowed this, we would have had a masterpiece on the level of other double-LP sets released that same year: Electric Ladyland, Wheels of Fire, and the White Album. In the end, both Pye and Reprise released a fifteen-song Village Green, but the press had already given their collective thumbs-up to the original twelve-track album, making this official release a confusing collection among the press and fans. The result was one of the lowest-selling albums of the Kinks’ career. It would be fifty years before the album qualified for Gold record status of one hundred thousand copies sold. The album also suffered at the register because the calm and gentle tenor of the record did not fit in with the sonic extremes of Hendrix, Cream, and the Beatles. Not unlike the Beach Boys’ Friends album (also from 1968), Village Green was a relatively calm and peaceful album, and like Friends, it accrued negligible sales; only their hard-core fans would assign this record any importance in the larger catalog.

The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society also marked a series of endings for the band. They would not have an album charting in the United Kingdom for many years to follow, and it was the last album on which original bassist Pete Quaife performed.

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