Ray Davies . . . With the Kinks Out : Acoustic O.C. Sets to Be Epilogue to ‘X-Ray’ Biography

It figures that when Ray Davies sat down to write his memoirs, he wouldn’t approach it like everybody else.

As front man and primary songwriter of the Kinks, Davies has led the uncertain but so far unending march of one of rock’s most conflicted and contradictory bands, one whose career trajectory resembles the jarring lines of a seismograph rocking to a major quake.

And yet the Kinks never broke under adversity, and they rocked themselves to first-eligibility election into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame six years ago, largely on the strength of their brilliant work during the mid-’60s to early-’70s period that is the focus of Davies’ autobiography, “X-Ray.”

His characteristically idiosyncratic authorial debut, now available in the United States after an initial publication last year in England, is set sometime during the second decade of the 21st Century. The teller of the tale is not Ray Davies, the middle-aged rocker who wrote it, but R.D., a septuagenarian vision of himself, who relates his life to an unnamed 19-year-old minion of the Corporation, an Orwellian institution of vast economic power and lust for unchallenged social control.

For mysterious reasons, the Corporation wants a biographical report on the white-haired, balding, tea-gulping, practically forgotten denizen of London’s cobwebby, rat-infested Konk Studios, former laboratory for the Kinks’ creative concocting.

R.D. turns out to be by turns crotchety and charming, egotistically manipulative and nakedly vulnerable to sudden terrors and bouts of black-cloud depression. Perhaps with good reason, the interviewer doesn’t entirely trust the old rocker’s veracity, and his journalistic skeptic’s stance allows Davies the author to deliver an alternately barbed and sympathetic commentary on his own past.

R.D.’s sometimes ribald, always detailed and vividly remembered story is peppered with flinty and pompous opinions on such broad subjects as the ‘60s (“that deceitful time” of “phony . . . euphoria”) and America (“one of the most repressed, backward-thinking places I had ever been to”).

The book also is quite revelatory about Davies’ most intimate relationships and his struggles to create while hanging on to some semblance of personal equilibrium. In his narrative, the Kinks find sudden stardom during ‘64-65, propelled by unprecedentedly urgent and hard-edged rockers such as “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” which, in concert, give the band an aura of incipient chaos and fan violence that anticipates punk rock (“Why can’t you be good boys, like the Rolling Stones?” screams an outraged Danish woman after a riotous Kinks show in Copenhagen).

By ‘66, Davies moves on to the biting social commentary and warmly personal, often heartbreakingly poignant meditations that are his greatest contribution to rock; the memoir details the moods and intentions surrounding such gorgeous and infallibly moving songs as “Waterloo Sunset” and “Days.”

But as Davies’ insight and sophistication as a songwriter grow, the Kinks’ popularity wanes. The band has always been cash-starved, even during its early, chart-topping run, thanks to contractual entanglements and resulting legal battles, whose chronicling could have been dealt with more pithily in the book.

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The otherwise crisp, wittily rendered narrative ends in 1973, clearly one of the most miserable years of Davies’ life. At 29, he endures the disintegration of the close-knit family that had been crucial to his inspiration as a songwriter; his marriage is kaput, wife Rasa having left with their two young daughters, Louisa and Victoria.

The book’s account of the Kinks ends with farcical near-tragedy as a distraught, semi-suicidal Davies impulsively but not-quite-intentionally gulps down a bottle of prescription tranquilizers during a stadium concert in London (“the rest of the band thought that this was one of R.D.’s better performances,” the narrator dryly notes).

But old R.D. ends his yarn on a note of equanimity before dying just short of the book’s finish line. In an upbeat ending, his by now won-over interlocutor takes from their encounter the gumption to quit the sinister Corporation; it will be left to this young avatar of the departed Ray Davies to tell the rest of his story and carry on the independent-minded spirit of Kinkdom that the Corporation had intended to squelch.

All of which has landed the real and still-kicking Raymond Douglas Davies, at age 51, on the road without the Kinks for the first time in his career. His tour includes shows Monday and Wednesday the Galaxy Concert Theatre in Santa Ana and Tuesday at the Henry Fonda Theater in Hollywood.

Joined only by guitarist Peter Mathson, a fellow North Londoner (but not a fellow Kink), Davies has begun giving concerts to promote “X-Ray,” interspersing songs (including some new ones) with reminiscences and readings from the book.

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On the phone last week from his book publisher’s office in New York City, Davies conversed with characteristic politeness and a mixture of forthrightness and reserve, speaking in a soft, amiable voice punctuated every so often by a wheezy, murmured chuckle.

Stripping down Kinks songs to solo-acoustic dimensions has given him and his fans some fresh perspectives on the material, he said.

“I don’t want you to think I take my work for granted, but last week, for example, I was rehearsing with a singer in England who possibly wants to record one of my songs, ‘Better Things,’ for a benefit. It’s a song that’s little known here, and I just said, ‘Oh, “Better Things,” that’s a good pop song.’ But I started singing it with him acoustic, and the words, actually--I didn’t realize how deep they were, ‘cause I thought it was a superficial song. . . .

“When you hear the songs like this and perform them like this . . . you live through what you experienced when you were writing it. Particularly with the book, the stories attached to them add a bit more spice to it.”

At his best on record, Davies often has come off as a vulnerable, ever-struggling and therefore endearing, warmly sympathetic figure, coping with problems keyed to the pitch of everyday humanity. In concert, this careworn Everyman transmogrifies into one of rock’s most gifted and charming hams, scampering every which way, mugging and camping about unabashedly and gathering the Kinks faithful for a draught of fun and fellowship that can fortify them for that niggling, doubt-plagued, paranoia-inducing world out there.

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Now, confined to chair or microphone stand as he plays acoustic shows, he says, “there are times when I feel like I’d like to break out there, just run onto a ramp and jump up in the air. I find the shows are physically not as tiring, but I find it more mentally tiring than playing with the Kinks. It’s like theater in a sense. There are no spaces in-between songs, and the whole event has to move along at a pace.”

He said that Penguin Books, his English publisher, first approached him about writing a memoir in 1988. “Originally I said I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want anyone to ghost it, and I just didn’t want to chronicle events and have anecdotes.”

Then he hit on the idea of casting the book as a series of encounters between his aged self and an interviewer who parallels his younger self.

“The young kid is not just a gratuitous character thrown in there. It’s me when I was 19.” So by creating the interviewer, Davies tapped into “a lot of the way I remember feeling when I was 19. The kid is there to tell the story of my subconscious, if you like.” He also is there to analyze and pierce the poses and defenses of the aged R.D.

“I’m interested in the giveaway things that people do when they’re trying to cover up a hurt or an embarrassment,” Davies continued, “and I find that covering it that way, it’s much more entertaining for me to write, and hopefully more revealing at the end of the day.”

The Kinks were always a bit out of step during the 1960s. They never went through a psychedelic phase or jumped on the peace-love-and-revolution bandwagon as did most other prominent bands of the time. Instead, Davies could be heard, by age 22 or 23, singing in the thin, nasal, creaky voice of a man three times his age while often bringing in musical flavorings from “old-time vaudeville revues,” as he once put it in a lyric.

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As “X-Ray” makes clear, the demands of being a 20-year-old husband and parent--a role precipitated by his girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy--curtailed his rock star gallivanting and forced him to keep the struggling Everyman’s perspective from which he wrote a remarkable streak of enduring, practically flawless albums: “The Kink Kontroversy” (1966), “Face to Face” (1967), “Something Else” (1968), “The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society” (1968), “Arthur” (1969) and “Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part I” (1970; no Part II ever appeared).

“Where I came from, there was a pretentious sort of tranquillity,” he said of his upbringing in the North London suburbs. “But it wasn’t really as easygoing as it looked on the surface in suburbia. Underneath, there’s lots of sadness and a lot of tension, and I think that stayed with me.

“Seeing my dad get ill and fall into early retirement because he got sick, seeing the effect it had on him. . . . Everybody says the ‘60s must have been great: fun, fun, fun, pop art, rock music. But you know, there’s a reason why I wrote ‘Dead End Street’ [a half-defeated, half-defiant anthem for the economically marginal]. It was the undercurrent, the sub-world. Things were going wrong, and maybe because I stayed in suburbia and I mixed with what I thought was basically the same people I’d always known, I could pick up on that.

“I’d like to have had a house in Paris or Belgravia, but I stayed--it’s pretentious to say ‘roots,’ but I stayed where I started, and maybe I picked up on the changes. Maybe if [the Kinks] had gotten a decent deal, I would have moved into a different place, written different material. But it worked for me in the long run.”

“X-Ray” ends with Davies’ home life crumbling; it seems he never did recover the familial closeness that mattered so deeply to the young rocker portrayed in the book.

“The book doesn’t go as far as that, but it was an appalling divorce, and I didn’t really see [my daughters] for a long time. I still don’t see one of them, but Victoria writes songs now; she sees me occasionally when she wants me to help her,” he said with a wan laugh. “But she doesn’t call me Dad; she calls me Ray. So there will always be that detached thing.”

That must be hard, his interviewer sympathizes. “Well, it’s not hard, it’s just I’m happy that she wants to see me at all,” Davies said quietly. “It’s a bonus. But deep down, you think, ‘Jesus, it’s Christmas again, where am I gonna go?’ There is an element of [sadness], but compared to all the things I have got, it’s not that bad, really.”

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In “X-Ray,” Davies writes about how he wrote his song “Two Sisters” partly as a way of sorting out the relationship of two brothers: steady, thoughtful, married Ray, staying home with the kids, and cheeky, free-roaming, still teen-age Dave whose life during the early days of the Kinks, judging from the book, was one long, enthusiastic debauch.

“What people don’t know about Dave [is that] he’s a really loving parent. You have to understand that he’s really good to his kids,” Ray said. “He’s got the family life I always thought I was going to have, and I never had it. In a sense, I’ve got what I always imagined him being, and I’m not so happy. It’s the way things work out.”

The fierce, 1966-vintage rocker “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” is perhaps Davies’ clearest statement of his determination to remain an outsider. In everyday life, he carried on his rebellion against noxious modernity by famously neglecting to learn how to drive.

However, the waning days of the 1990s find him motoring toward the next millennium with the rest of us. He says he finally became auto-mobile in the late ‘80s when circumstance forced his hand onto the steering wheel--a development he recounted amid much wheezy chuckling.

“Every partner I’ve ever had, living with or staying with or whatever, has been a driver. Suddenly, I didn’t have a partner who could drive. I moved out of London and got fed up with making train journeys, and I took the plunge one day. I took my test, and by a fluke I passed and I have to drive. So I’m just a regular [schmo] . . . like everybody else.”

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POP & ROCK LISTINGS, F17

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* Who: Ray Davies.

* When: Monday and Wednesday at 8 p.m.

* Where: The Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana.

* Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Harbor Boulevard, head north on Harbor and take the third right, Lake Center Drive. The theater is on the left.

* Wherewithal: $45.

* Where to call: (714) 957-0600.