But In Her Dreams, She Was Far Away

Seven Reflections on the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies

One

“This is the age of machinery/ A mechanical nightmare/ The wonderful world of technology/ Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare”

It’s been fifty-five years since Ray Davies inaugurated the Kinks’ Muswell Hillbillies album with this opening salvo, a sentiment that maps almost eerily onto our contemporary moment: Backed by a jaunty, bouncing, proto-alt-country soundtrack, Davies stands athwart the train of history muttering “stop.” His tone is puzzled, frightened, conspiratorial. “We’ve got to get out of here, we’ve got to find a solution,” he speak-sings, talking to who knows, perhaps himself. The opening track is called “20th Century Man.” Its chorus goes: “I’m a 20th century man, but I don’t want to be here.”

Muswell Hillbillies is not the best known or most celebrated of Kinks albums, but it possesses a very good argument for being the band’s most thematically and musically visionary. Running side-by-side with the back-to-basics ethos of the Dead and Neil Young, the instrumentation is a delightfully ramshackle mélange of various American idioms: country and western, Dixieland, and troubadour folk. It’s a loose and spry admixture, a blueprint-setting template for Will Oldham and the Silver Jews. It’s also the backdrop for one of music’s most harrowing accounts of creeping modernity, a nightmarish conflation of runaway technology, constant surveillance and a bureaucratic state so immovably entrenched that resistance is futile. An ironist of the highest order, Davies no doubt understands the powerful disjunction between the rollicking sound of his band and the gradual unraveling of his mind, as on the honky-tonk piano and cheerful brass that introduces “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoia Blues” and its emphatic declarations:

“I’m too terrified to walk out of my own front door

They’re demonstrating outside

I think they’re going to start the third world war”

And so it goes over twelve songs and forty-five minutes, replete with nightmarish confections addressing diet fads, weird holidays, mysterious and menacing government figures, self-medication through binge drinking, and the strong imperative to avoid other humans at any cost. The burlesque corporate merriment, the bone-deep anxiety, and the tribal provincialism will feel eerily familiar to any 21st century man or woman. Taken together, it functions as a remarkably prescient overview of the fractious and mentally perilous feeling of our current times, where cute cats and war crimes co-mingle insensibly in our social media feeds, and your new toaster probably comes with a microphone pre-installed.

Two

Going outside is a mixed thing for me. On certain days, I actively dislike it. Too many variables.

On the other hand, those who know me best know that I am a distance runner of some non-trivial degree of compulsion—nothing I could be committed for—but say eight to ten miles, six days a week. Gotta go outside for that. The trade-offs are everywhere, but then you could say this for so much of life. I enjoy routine, which is a gentle way of saying that without routine I am not a viable person. Let’s split the difference: I crave routine.

So every day, I run the same route. Hopefully around the same time at the same pace. Inevitably, as a consequence of my affliction, every day I see the… exact… same... people. Under the leafy trees and pounding on the sidewalk, now you see them two hundred yards away. It’s Ron, with his wild but admittedly cute golden retriever-lab-mix puppy, and he’s walking and wearing headphones and I am running and I have ear buds, and now we must—I must—in some way communicate my humanity. “Hello!” I bellow as I pass him, making eye-contact with both he and his dog. He smiles and says something back, that of course I cannot hear over the strains of the Specials album I have just pressed play on at pulverizing volume levels. He seems friendly—even exuberant—but for all I know he could be saying: “On this jog, I hope you die!” And I would not know. And so I scream back, “Yes! Thanks!”

Three

Cue the whimsical slide guitar, the swaggering riff which itself sounds a bit like a teasing joke, catchy as meningitis. This is how the fourth song on Muswell Hillbillies begins. Then Ray starts in with one of his character studies. And this one is a doozy.

“Fat flabby Annie was incredibly big

She weighed just about sixteen stone

And then a fake dietician went and put her on a diet

And now she’s looking like skin and bone”

Now, it goes without saying that Ray should not be calling anyone “fat, flabby Annie.” There is absolutely no cause for this. Even if Annie were like “just call me ‘fat, flabby Annie,’ I like that nickname,” he still shouldn’t call her “fat, flabby Annie.” There are times Ray says things that make you cringe, but we knew this going in. What is truly interesting about “Skin and Bone” is exactly what his point of view on all of this is. Let’s consider what we know so far from Muswell Hillbillies:

Ray, or someone very much like Ray who is narrating these songs, would prefer not to be here—that is, in the 20th century. He regards the entire thing—that is the passage of time, or what is commonly called “progress”—as an egregious mistake. When would he have actually liked to be born? Apparently, around the Elizabethan era, give or take a century.

“You keep all your smart modern writers

Give me William Shakespeare

You keep all your smart modern painters

I’ll take Rembrandt, Titian, Da Vinci and Gainsborough”

We can triangulate these data points and surmise that, basically, for Ray, everything had begun fully going to hell by 1800 at the latest. This is an aggressive read of history, but not an uninteresting one, and certainly crucial for understanding the psychology of the man. What else? Well, the pace of contemporary life, with its hassles of paperwork and such, has made him paranoid to the point of not functioning. This has metastasized into a true dilemma:

“I don’t trust nobody

But I’m much too scared to be on my own”

He needs a crowd of people, but he can’t face them day to day.

He has been gone, on the third track, on a “Holiday.” It doesn’t take a deep read of the lyrics to suggest that maybe the “holiday” in question was the euphemistic kind:

“Holiday,

Oh what a lovely day today,

I’m so glad they sent me away,

To have a little holiday today”

“Ray, you’ve been watching the milkman through binoculars for five straight hours. Why don’t we send you somewhere nice and quiet? So you can feel better? You know, a holiday.”

So, this is where we find Ray, institutionalized basically, as he gets very excited about fat, flabby Annie’s new diet and exercise regimen, of which he does not approve. Ray thinks that the person at fault for Annie’s dramatic weight loss is a “fake dietician”—more modernist snake oil—but nothing he describes seems all that out of the ordinary. Annie has cut back on carbs—alcohol and buttered scones. She’s also exercising more. She’s doing yoga and meditating. This makes Ray insane. I’m not sure why. He says she looks like she’s going to die, and furthermore that she’s become terrifically unpopular—the true consequence of this self-improvement scheme.

“She used to be so cuddly

She used to be so fat

But oh what a sin, she’s gotten so thin

That she’s lost all the friends that she had”

I have no idea what to make of any of this. I can’t imagine cutting off a friendship with someone because they went on a diet. “Skin and Bone” is a very funny song, but what is he trying to tell us? Is Ray somewhere right now, maybe even in Muswell Hill, fuming about Ozempic? We can circle back to this.

Four

Ray is just getting started on his consumption-related passion plays.

If “Skin and Bone” is a Salinger short story, then “Alcohol” is a Dreiser novel.

An indelible first verse worth quoting, the kind of thing you’d dream of reading along in a Playbill:

“Here is a story about a sinner,

He used to be a winner who enjoyed a life of prominence and position,

But the pressures at the office and his socialite engagements

And his selfish wife’s fanatical ambitions”

That’s where everything goes to hell.

Here we encounter one of Ray’s parlor obsessions—an individual of great prestige driven beyond reason by his duties, as a person of society. As an American woman attending from comfortable but modest means, this is the anthropological area of Kinks music that I least well understand, which is not to say I find it uncompelling. The man in this song is under tremendous pressure, at any rate, to maintain his place of prominence and position. But he can’t.

“His selfish wife’s fanatical ambition,

It turned him to the booze,

And he got mixed up with a floozie

And she led him to a life of indecision.”

A life of indecision! Horrors!

It gets worse:

“The floozie made him spend his dole

She left him lying on Skid Row

Here is a story about a sinner,

A drunken lag in some Salvation Army Mission”

This is like one of Dylan’s great reversal-of-fortune epics of the “he that was first/will later be last” type, only as P.G. Wodehouse would have written it. The refrain goes, per the title: “Oh demon, alcohol.” And then, pleadingly, “sad memories I can’t recall,” but as with “Skin and Bone,” there is a strong feeling amidst the sturm-und-drang that the true culprit isn’t food, or drink, or fake dieticians or KGB milkmen, but rather the baffling ordered systems around us. Ray is lost in the supermarket. He is not shopping happily.

Five

In the English language there are very few songs as sad and poignant as “Oklahoma, USA,” a British peasant’s fantasy of a better life that never was any more likely to manifest whether in the mines of Wales or the Dust Bowl of Tulsa. What comes through is the intuitiveness of the connection.

To drive North from Dallas to Tulsa you must pass Muskogee, where you will encounter a sign that says something like “Muskogee, OK. Pop: 2856, Home to Merle Haggard.” I went to Tulsa recently, after Southwest Review’s remarkable Frontera Fest where I interviewed the amazing Amanda Petrusich for my podcast Known Associates in front of a live audience, saw Ryan Davis and his Roadhouse Band, watched a screening of Pump Up the Volume hosted by the novelist William Boyle, and danced at an afterparty. That was in Dallas. Then I drove to Tulsa. It’s interesting that Ray fixates on Oklahoma on one of his most astonishingly vulnerable ballads of misplacement. The Kinks had been banned for bad behavior from touring the States, so it’s unlikely to have arrived from some personal experience.

For all of his combustible combination of tough guy swagger, sepia-tinged nostalgia, crushing vulnerability, and unabashed working-class pride Merle Haggard is the closest American peer to Ray Davies. In song and life, the two geniuses are rebels equally distrustful of establishment mores and counter-culture pieties. Vested with deep-seated patriotic identifications and deeply-felt working class roots, they view the complications of modern life as tragically unnecessary—technology as subtraction by addition. Both hearken to and lament bygone eras, where genteel mores and common sense overrode the chaos and insanity of modern times. The distinct strain of small “c” conservatism that can be heard in Haggard’s defiant, born-poor anthem “I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am” is reflected in Davies’ like-minded refrain “I’m Proud to Be a Muswell Hillbilly Boy.”

The future-shock pessimism of Ray’s “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?” would later be echoed in Merle’s marvelously despairing “Are the Good Times Really Over?”

I love Tulsa, and not just because of the magic of the Guthrie and Dylan Centers, Church Studio and the Drillers. I have run down the River Parks trail, adjacent to a giant green space called “the Gathering Place” down the Arkansas River for miles and miles. You see all kinds of interesting things. People playing basketball, people walking and jogging, turtles sunning themselves on some fortuitous river rocks, a current penitentiary (I think?) and maybe the remnants of an old one, abandoned train yards and some still running. An emphatic woman walking by me as I jog lifts her arm and rotates it in the Arsenio Hall way, whooping and hollering. I guess she could be saying, “Keep it up! I hope you die!” But that is not the vibe.

Six

With all due respect to Ray and his well-honed and earned paranoia—this is the age of machinery and mechanical nightmares. So far as I can see it, there are only two plausible outcomes for the AI clusterfuck: one—either the thing doesn’t do much beyond flatter our vanity and confuse Google searches, in which case a spectacular stock market bubble is going to implode with 2008-levels of consequence for the global economy. On the other hand, perhaps the hype is real for once, in which case we are looking at an estimated fifteen to twenty million jobs lost, with no recourse, no retraining, no solution to the problem of displacing proud individuals with long careers in an unneeded, unasked-for, zero-sum Battle Royale with the very notion of human labor. And yes, we’ve been here before.

The Democratic party has a tendency to not remember all of the ugly, miserable stuff about Clinton— Bill, I mean. When Bill Clinton rammed NAFTA through at the peak of his political power in 1994, some statesmen and citizens warned against it. A strange brew—running the gamut from Dick Gephardt to Ross Perot—vehemently opposed the remaking of global trade in the name and image of the investor class. We were, or at least I was, naive. Everything looked pretty slick, and I was a teenager and Clinton and Tony Blair and the whole cabal seemed very appealing, even when you had that sinking feeling you occasionally get as a kid when you realize your parents are in over their heads. Sometimes it’s inevitable. Ray talks about this:

“Even my old Dad

Lost some of the best friends he ever had

Apparently, his was a case of acute schizophrenia too”

No child should see their father like that.

Entered into heedlessly, NAFTA turned into a miasmic historical tragedy. The devastated families of the once proud working classes, turned violently against a Democratic party that had made accommodations with the new money changers, stupidly seduced once again by the shiny object.

Now we stand at the brink of a second bite at a poisoned apple.

Seven

In some respects, it’s funny to say, we fought the first skirmishes of American revolution over tea. ”No taxation, without representation,” supposedly went the quaint cry of the Boston dissidents who, furious about tariffs, insouciantly dumped English tea—usable tea—into the Boston Harbor. Nowadays you can get tea anywhere—Starbucks, Giant, Cosi Coffee, Publix—wherever. Not so in those times. The supply chain was far less reliable, and these Bostonians were quite possibly destroying their lifeline to caffeine for days if not weeks. This is particularly impressive to me. Americans forgoing stimulants is unlike us.

I asked my bandmate and oracle Peter Holsapple to describe Muswell Hillbillies, and he told me this:

“Ray has an appreciation of the lost cultures of both Britain and the US. Muswell Hillbillies brutally critiques both, and of course Ray is having a grand old time.”

Peter Holsapple and me having a grand old time listening to Orson Welles read adcopy. I am also wearing my Kinks ’83 USA tour shirt, a tour that I was not old enough to attend, but evidently they DID play Long Island.

I’m a 21st century woman. I named my band the Paranoid Style, after my two favorite pastimes—fashion and glancing over my shoulder. Do I want to be here? It would seem to be my only choice. But in my dreams I am far away.

Have a cuppa tea.