The problem facing The Kinks when they released The Village Green Preservation Society in late November 1968 wasn't merely the competition-- Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, Led Zeppelin's debut, and the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet offered plenty-- but that this subtle, funny, surreal, and at times almost tender record could have been recorded on another planet. During the summer of 1968, stateside fans were hooked on a high-intensity diet that had them jonesing for aggressive, overstated fare like "Street Fighting Man" and "You Shook Me" and "Communication Breakdown". The disconnect between The Kinks and the rock world's rapidly narrowing palette could hardly have been more pronounced. Compare the Stones' bombastic, urban "Sympathy for the Devil" with understated work like "Village Green", bouncing along like a horse and buggy as Ray Davies paints the landscape: "Out in the country, far from all the soot and noise of the city..."
Critics praised the album, the public ignored it, and Davies-- surveying the scene-- asserted that it wasn't created for public consumption. Intentions aside, The Kinks simply moved on, leaving small knots of fans to pledge secret allegiance to Village Green. However, as years passed and the weather changed, its following grew, and finally, one day, the verdict reversed and the album was touted as a masterpiece. Ironically, it might have happened sooner had the band not been so prolific up through the late 80s.
Intricately sketched and brimming with unusual arrangements, The Village Green Preservation Society was the first clear look at an iconoclastic, imaginative and sometimes brilliant artist as he came into his own. Audiences used to sizing up work on a scale created for rock gods and counter-culture icons were forced to consider this album as a piece of conceptual art. The Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards duos towered over and shaped the sensibilities of a vast army; Davies explored a deeply personal world that confounded fans even as it provoked their curiosity.
There's a clue to who he was in the song "Animal Farm", which opens with a cascade of chords played on a warm, acoustic 12-string, the folk music staple once used on songs like the Rooftop Singers' 1963 hit "Walk Right In". Davies' opening lines, forced to share space with the tongue filling his cheek, are a mouthful. "This world is big and wild and half insane/ Take me where the animals are playing," he sings, raising the Union Jack, while looking back through the chaos of the day to find a simpler, safer world.
The peculiar sensibility that first raised its head on 1965's Kinkdom with the hit singles "Dedicated Follower and Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" looks different in light of The Village Green Preservation Society. Before the latter album was released, those songs seemed like parody or blue-collar humor; in retrospect, Davies was showing a quirky, iconoclastic hand that would soon be more relevant to his music than the hard-rocking "You Really Got Me". It's also interesting to consider Village Green as a carefully sculpted product of Ray Davies' singular artistic vision. The album is commonly regarded as having the feel of solo work, and if this is a matter of opinion, the songs are singular enough as to probably make collaboration difficult. More than that, at a time when rock instrumentalists were beginning to stretch out, The Kinks' playing here always serves the songs, and Davies' vocals in particular.
By 1968, as the prevailing rock idiom tended to position music as an armored vehicle ready for battle, Davies did his best work with a quiet, ironic smile. The album-opening title cut begins with a simple groove built around acoustic guitars, over which Davies offers a bend pledge of allegiance to the mundane curiosities of modern life; in "Do You Remember Walter", he reminisces, perhaps as a geriatric adult; and on "Last of the Steam Powered Trains", he borrows and bends the first few bars of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful"-- an ode to the miseries of heroin.
The Village Green Preservation Society has been declared the band's masterwork in some quarters, and I'll agree-- if only because my favorite Kinks album, built around "You Really Got Me", "All Day and All of the Night" and "Tired of Waiting for You", has never been released. Even so, the album had received proper recognition long before the release of this three-disc set, which repackages the original album and adds a slew of extras: Bonus tracks are here in spades, along with a collection of period studio noodlings and a separate mono version of the entire LP.
Of course, while the special presentation does include a few interesting pieces-- looser non-album tracks like the humorous "Mich Avery's Underpants", "King Kong" and "Wonderboy", while hardly worth the price of this set, offer added insight into the album's sessions-- it's mostly padded by mono mixes that would be of little interest to anyone but the staunchest archivists. As such, disc one, the original album expanded with four bonus tracks (including a knockout version of "Days") provides the real meat: 36 years after its first release, The Village Green Preservation Society, loaded with so much imagination and possibility, stands more than ever as a vital work, and as one of rock's first classic, one-of-a-kind albums.
