The seventies were a rough road for the Kinks. Their early proto-metal chord-crunching (see “You Really Got Me” and “All Day And All Of The Night”) had given way later in the ’60s to an operatic, witty, nostalgic, and distinctly British vision that saw the group delivering one expansive concept album after another under the leadership of frontman/chief songwriter Ray Davies and brother/lead guitarist Dave Davies.
By the mid-70s, though, after dabbling in country and music-hall stylings and delivering three straight rock operas, it seemed the band, among the most resilient of the original British Invasion era, had worn out its welcome with both the record-buying public and the group’s label. After being dropped by RCA, the boys landed a new contract with Arista on the condition that they put their artsy pretensions behind them and get back to basics.
Their first album for RCA, 1977’s Sleepwalker, was tighter, poppier, heavier and—let’s be frank—noticeably less challenging than what had preceded it. Ironically, it scored a minor hit with Ray’s “Juke Box Music,” a bitter lament dismissing his own life’s work as “only juke box music.” Once he began to emerge from his sulk, though, things got interesting again.
With 1978’s Misfits, the Kinks commenced a mid-career renaissance that was at once startlingly successful and deeply ironic. Even as Ray Davies mocked his own artistic compromises and the narrowness of the public’s tastes, the songs he produced grew more focused and harder-hitting, and the broad audience he was often in the process of insulting lapped up his every snarling word.
The essential argument of Misfits is that only weirdos and freaks really care about rock and roll—and by the way, they’re also delusional and self-destructive. At least, that initially appears to be the message of the plaintive title track and the cautionary “A Rock ’N’ Roll Fantasy,” but there’s more. In the end, “Misfits” evolves into a gentle call to action: “This is your chance, this is your time / So don’t throw it away / You can have your day.” And while he spends much of “Fantasy” deriding a unnamed third party’s life of illusion, this one also finishes with a call to action, this time for Davies himself: “Don’t want to spend my life, living in a rock ‘n’ roll fantasy / Don’t want to spend my life, living on the edge of reality.”
This album, too, is where Davies begins to figure out how to fold his penchant for odd, witty character studies into a more straightforward rock format. Yes, “Hay Fever” is ridiculous—but it rocks. Davies takes aim at insecure trend-chasers, and scores a bullseye, with “Permanent Waves.” And the narrator of the jaunty road song “In A Foreign Land” runs away to dodge taxes and ends up “all out of jack and I can’t go back” but seems more content to have said “goodbye to the champagne and caviar set” anyway.
Never one to back away from touchy subjects, Davies imagines a “Black Messiah” designed to jar the sensibilities of his audience and then, having long since introduced us to “Lola,” pulls off another brilliant ode to transvestism with the playful, matter-of-fact “Out Of The Wardrobe.”
Still, the two cuts that got this teenaged rocker’s blood pumping were the fiery, propulsive “Live Life,” a bracing reminder to live in the moment and carry on through hard times, and rollicking closer “Get Up,” the musical antidote to the album’s despairing opener, in which Davies grabs the listener by the lapels and exhorts them: “Somebody gotta get up and shout / Somebody gotta give us some clout / You’re the ones who can make it all work out / It all depends on you.”
As a child of the ’70s—I was 15 when this one came out—Misfits was in fact my point of entry for The Kinks, and earned my loyal admiration through several years and albums to follow (true confession: a creature of my times, I was startled to learn after falling hard for Van Halen that “You Really Got Me” was an old Kinks song).
Misfits is the moment where Ray Davies figured out how to channel the muscular brio and cutting wit that had earned the Kinks a record contract in the first place into a punchy, modern sound. Yes, he compromised in terms of musical approach, but he never gave an inch when it came to the subject matter of his songs or the passion with which he delivered them. Misfits is a testament to the power of change to both reinvent and rejuvenate an artist.