Ray Davies Gives a Performance That’s Fit for a Kink : Pop music review: After a slow start, his concert at the Galaxy becomes something truly special, a fully realized one-man theatrical. He’ll do another show tonight.

Ray Davies has described himself in song as “one of the survivors,” but more than that he is one of the great originals.

No other rocker has been gifted with as potent a combination of talents and abilities as has Davies, the driving force of the Kinks since 1964: comic wit and timing, an actor’s hamminess, joy and ferocity in rocking out, and invention, warmth, insight and grace in song composition.

Now to those attributes we can add solid literary command. Davies’ concert Monday night at the Galaxy was his U.S. debut as a solo act as he moonlights from the Kinks on a brief tour to promote his vivid, stylishly rendered and characteristically offbeat autobiography, “X-Ray.”

Backed only by a guitarist, Peter Mathson, Davies offered much more than another fashionably “unplugged” evening. This was a fully realized one-man theatrical, coherently structured and beautifully paced. Davies’ two-hour performance astutely balanced songs old and new with reminiscences and readings from the book; his and Mathson’s guitars laid down bluesy licks to keep the flow going during and between the spoken interludes.

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Davies, who returns to the Galaxy tonight, found room within his theatrical structure to allow for some of the looseness and spontaneity that come with a prime Kinks show. His wit was as sharp in rejoinders to audience jests and requests as it was in the show’s scripted laugh lines. Particularly hilarious--and triumphant--was his wonderfully acted re-creation of a wittily barbed faceoff he had with John Lennon in 1964, as the just-emerging Kinks were about to open a show for the Beatles.

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Davies’ stage program followed the basic outline of “X-Ray,” ranging from childhood through the early ‘70s, when his marriage crumbled as the Kinks re-established themselves as a hit act in America following a three-year absence.

The show’s triumph wasn’t instant, as Davies took a while to warm up. He appeared nervous at the start and rushed the early readings. His singing voice was sniffly and scratchy and wavered badly on some high notes as he began with three jaunty nuggets, “Dedicated Follower of Fashion,” “Autumn Almanac” and “Sunny Afternoon.”

The enthusiastic, partisan crowd of Kinks fans was happy to oblige with lusty sing-along refrains. But it was an under-capacity crowd, a result of the $45 ticket price, an un-Kinkly sum for a rocker who always has sung from the point of view of the misfit and the underdog.

The creaky opening sequence offered a perhaps unintended premonition of what may be in store 20 years hence for Baby Boomer rock fans and their heroes: It struck one that sing-and-clap-along scenes like this will unfold in retirement community meeting halls between aged rock fans and the hardier, longer-lived stars who, having come up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, will be called upon to continue knocking out the oldies in their own 60s and 70s.

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But Davies was on track by his fifth number, “20th Century Man,” delivering it with a bluesy fire that incinerated any thoughts of retirement homes. The galloping tune also served as a reminder that, along with his other talents, Davies is a very strong rhythm guitarist.

Removed from the tumult of a Kinks show, Davies was free to lift some gratifying obscurities from his extensive trove of quiet, reflective, seldom-played gems. With “See My Friends,” “I Go to Sleep,” “Two Sisters” and “Village Green,” he sang as if in a reverie, summoning all the sheer loveliness and deep poignancy the songs possess.

This was music so humane, and so fully and fervently felt in Davies’ performance, that to hear it was to be granted a privileged moment. And no concert ever had a warmer, more elegiacally satisfying climax than this one did, as Davies lovingly etched two of his greatest achievements, “Days” and “Waterloo Sunset,” with a special mixture of pathos and dignity.

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He premiered six new songs derived from his memories of the period covered in “X-Ray.” “She Was Really Animal,” by far the best of them, offers a pained but nevertheless fond portrait of a volatile early romance. Its intimacy might give a glimmer of hope to Kinks fans worried by the blandness and remoteness of the band’s two most recent albums, “U.K. Jive” (1989) and “Phobia” (1993).

“On reflection, it was not all crash and bang, broken bottles and abuse,” Davies sang in openhearted reminiscence. “There were sunsets in the sand, holding onto caring hands.”

The other new songs included a rather routine, topographically top-heavy ode to the London of Davies’ youth, and “The Ballad of Julie Finkle,” a promisingly moody, folk-tinged tune celebrating the girl who was his first muse.

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“To the Bone,” the title track of an existing live Kinks album that hasn’t been released in the United States, is a tough if lyrically commonplace mid-tempo rocker that fit in well between rousing renditions of the classics “Dead End Street” and “Lola.” “Art School Babes” gave a wry account of what happens when raging post-adolescent hormones get mixed with pseudo-intellectual pretensions. All in all, the new batch, intended for a Davies solo album, promised better things than suffering Kinkdom lately has come to expect.

At 51, Davies the recording artist may yet have something else to offer. In this simplest and most personal of his many onstage experiments with rock-as-theater, he truly is something special.

* Ray Davies plays tonight at 8 at the Galaxy Concert Theatre, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd., Santa Ana. $45. (714) 957-0600.