Date: 1965
Release: Essential #483
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Mod-rockers from the mid-60s, the Kinks understood how to crank out three-minute pop songs that were as catchy as Beatlemania. While the Davies Brothers were no match for Lennon/McCartney or even Jagger/Richards, they definitely put a little of fire under the feet of their rivals that kept them from getting too complacent. Their classic “All Day And All Of The Night,” opens the album with punk-sounding guitar riffs and sexually-charged lyrics that point the way towards the future of Rock and Punk. The album’s next smash hit, “Tired Of Waiting For You,” demonstrates why the Kinks unique 60s sound has remained so influential and appealing.

The timeless “Nothin’ In The World Can Stop Me Worryin’ ‘Bout That Girl,” included on the “Rushmore” soundtrack, leaves you wishing that the Kinks had recorded more acoustic tracks in the same vein. The very pretty ballad, “Something Better Beginning,” and the satirical, “Well Respected Man,” are both solid examples of the band’s formidable song writing skills. The most recent CD reissue combines the original UK release of the album with the non-LP sides from the same period, as well as some remarkable bonus tracks, making it a necessary acquisition for those who still only have their old vinyl. The immense talents of the Davies Brothers are in strong evidence throughout this quintessential recording of the British Invasion.

Date: November 22, 1968 (recording)
Release: Castle #481
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Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks once desperately, memorably sang of "nostalgia for an age yet to come," expressing a yearning for a simpler, happier time that actually never really existed. Now, Shelley may be one the finest pop lyricists the U.K. ever spawned, but it was a previous British generation’s staggeringly gifted songsmith who best captured this sense of bittersweet longing and loss of innocence.

That man was the genteel, smarmy-charmy Ray Davies, who in the Kinks‘ jaunty songs pined intensely for the romanticized, storybook Merry Olde England of his boyhood. But while his seemingly rosy-spectacled odes to the Golden Age Of Britain were populated with quirky, Dickensian characters and self-consciously clever anecdotes, it wasn’t all tea and crumpets and cricket games in Ray’s imaginary world, oh no. As was the case with the eternally vitriolic Shelley, behind Davies’ jolly Briticisms lurked a deep-seated sense of regret and mortality far too leaden for a man so young. Davies was a mere 24 years old when the Kinks released his ultimate masterwork of olde-world nostalgia, The Village Green Preservation Society—a concept album that announced its intentions to save Tudor houses, china cups, custard pies, Sherlock Holmes, and virginity from obsolescence within the space of its first singalong track–yet he already sounded like a weary old soul.

It may seem odd that a privileged, pampered rock star with every imaginable luxury at his well-manicured fingertips would sadly sing, "I miss the Village Green, and all the simple people… the church, the clock, the steeple/I miss the morning dew, fresh air, and Sunday school." But by age 24, Ray had experienced so many of stardom’s infamous ups and downs–all of which ought to be familiar to any regular Behind The Music viewer–that his obvious disillusionment in both "Starstruck" ("Watch out or else you’ll be ruined/’Cause once you’re addicted to wine and champagne, it’s gonna drive you insane") and "All Of My Friends Were There" (a fantasy about leaving the spotlight for good, in which he declares with relief, "Thank God I can go back to normal again") made perfect sense.

In his professional life, an injunction on the Kinks from touring America from 1965-69 had greatly damaged their once-skyrocketing career; on the personal side, Ray had accidentally impregnated his barely-legal immigrant girlfriend, resulting in their hasty shotgun marriage (that’s how it was done in those days). So surely the man had much to reflect upon before his 20s were even half over. It’s no wonder that he was prone to looking back fondly on sunny bed-and-breakfast vacations in "those days when you were happy, a long time ago" ("Picture Book") and penning such wistful lyrics as "Isn’t it a shame the way our little world has changed?" ("Do You Remember Walter?") and "Oh, how I love things as they used to be" ("People Take Pictures Of Each Other"). Life in Carnaby Street’s fast lane had obviously become too complicated for him.

The U.S. touring ban had also isolated the Kinks from the rock music world’s largest market—a country that exercised a larger influence on international pop culture than almost all other nations combined—so it was inevitable that he became more introspective, more wistful, and definitely more English. And of all the 1960s’ original British Invasion bands, the Kinks were certainly the most British-sounding. (This is probably why they never sold as many records in America as some of their peers, since bands that sound "too English" never fare too well over here—-note the lack of U.S. success for, say, Pulp, compared to a grunge band of Nirvanabes like Bush.) While the Who were splintering their guitars to bits, the Beatles were turning into bearded hippies, and the Stones were expressing sympathy for the devil, the Kinks were eschewing the true lust and raunchy feedback fuzz of their early hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day And All Of The Night" for gauzy-lensed tales of sweet puppy-love kisses by old oak trees and more pastoral musical influences like folk, country, and dancehall/swing. In an era of free love and Kool-Aid acid tests, this certainly couldn’t have seemed very hip or swinging.

And so, not surprisingly, Village Green was hardly a massive chartbuster, not even in Britain—but like the Beach Boys‘ Pet Sounds and the Stones‘ later masterpiece Exile On Main Street, both of which were commercial disappointments when first released, Village Green has come to be heralded as its creators’ crowning achievement, the Kinks‘ one must-have, touchstone album.

And with good reason. While it may not be very rock ‘n’ roll to yearn for the simpler times of yore, Village Green isn’t really a rock ‘n’ roll album per se. It’s more than that. It’s a labor of love—and of loss. It’s a Dickens novel, a family photo album, a vaudeville musical, and a book of memoirs all rolled into one. It’s a true peek into another world. Ray Davies so perfectly and lovingly recreates the long-lost London he remembers (or chooses to remember)—brimming over with unabashed, sometimes borderline-embarrassing sentimentality—that we, the listeners, don’t just wish we’d been there, we feel like we actually were. By the album’s end, we too are filled with nostalgia for an age yet to come.

Date: August 19, 1969 – February 6, 1970
Release: COLUMBIA #65570
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No other musician in the 20th Century explored the possibilities of music as fiercely as trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis. He frustrated critics and fans alike as he opened himself up to unexpected directions in musical thinking while continuously shaping and refining his remarkable skills on trumpet. Critics tried and tried to squeeze his musical journeys into a box called “jazz,” but Miles would have none of it. And then, in August of 1969, Miles decided he’d put all of us in an impenetrable box and dare us to break out.

Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it stopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course around the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon. I am asleep; I am dreaming, she thought. I’m having a nightmare. I want to wake up. Let me wake up. ‘Well!’ Charles Wallace’s voice said. ‘That was quite a trip! I do think you might have warned us.’

Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

While Miles did warn us with the electronic dabblings of his mid-sixties quintet and In A Silent Way, there is really no way to be prepared for the complete realignment of one’s musical schematic that is Bitches Brew. To even begin to understand what was created in these sessions, we need to get a little perspective on what led up to them: a phenomenally talented composer and trumpet player; a true musical seeker who squeezed every last morsel of musical information out of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Gil Evans, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane; a jazz cat for hire who barely clawed his way out of heroin’s grip; a man who influenced the evolution of an art form with his astonishing collaborations on recordings like ‘Round Midnight, Milestones, Miles Ahead, Sketches of Spain, Kind of Blue and In A Silent Way among many others arrives at the vortex of Jimi Hendrix and James Brown surrounded, as he’d always been, by the visionary musicians of the times: Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, Bennie Maupin, Wayne Shorter, Dave Holland, John McLaughlin – just a few of who would participate in Bitches Brew.

Clearly, Miles Davis was at the precipice of something massive, something almost unsettling in its hugeness. Sure enough, this sprawling team of talent would create with Miles the most impenetrable, incendiary, and finally revelatory musical experiment of his lifetime.

Meg gasped. It wasn’t that Calvin wasn’t there and then that he was. It wasn’t that part of him came first and then the rest of him followed, like a hand and then an arm, an eye and then a nose. It was a sort of shimmering, a looking at Calvin through water, through smoke, through fire, and then there he was, solid and reassuring.

When listening to the music of Bitches Brew and The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions, space and time tremble, quiver, and become elastic. One moment, you’re traveling rapidly, furiously backward toward the Big Bang- the next, you’ve stopped and hang suspended, a million light years from nowhere, curling dangerously across some cosmic bump. Then, all at once, you’re surging forth, speed increasing, any ability to gauge time lost in the burn, spinning and tumbling upward, downward, outward. Images – the elapsed time of an orchid in bloom, pixilated fast-motion fragments of urban decay – careen, stop, rewind at another speed, only to flicker forth cautiously. There is a feeling of expanding, contracting, implosion, stillness. The rules of physics have become open to interpretation. The grid upon which the universe is mapped ripples slightly – patterns shift. Towering creatures of color and light groan and sway. The thread between the first cell and the end of time coils and uncoils wildly like a snapped powerline in a hurricane, twisting and spewing energy. . .

What was created in this music – in its probing, tentative tempo, its evolving rhythms, its blasts and blurts and belches of melody – was something strangely familiar yet entirely original, entirely its own thing. What coalesced as these ten to twenty musicians fed frenzy-like off the brash impulses of one another was a music that literally lifted itself away from their conscious control and began making its own decisions. At times fearsome, others breathtaking, Bitches Brew is music as liberated organism, surging and soaring, gorgeous and terrifying, taking you dark and fantastical places to which only it holds the map.

“If you’ve hurt Meg, any of you-” Calvin started, but suddenly Meg felt a violent push and a shattering as though she had been thrust through a wall of glass.

Much like the music contained within it, this box set feels mythical, a lot like some otherworldly text unearthed halfway across the cosmos. The construction of the 148-page book along with the art and the graphic design throughout is intensely aesthetic. The photographs of Miles and the essay by Carlos Santana are the jewels of the package. One complaint is that the track information is buried amidst the many pages and clumsily found – I recommend photocopying those pages, drawing or painting on the copies while listening to the music, and then posting them someplace accessible. And while Miles biographer Quincy Troupe’s expansive 70-page essay is flush with compelling insights, ranging from the influence of Jimi Hendrix priestess Betty Mabry on Miles’ flow to the significant use of overdubbing and other new postproduction techniques, his lengthy track-by-track analysis feels belabored and seems to miss the point.

Suffice it to say that much of the previously unreleased material travels along similar time wrinkles, some of it leaving unanswered questions for the listener to forever puzzle over. That’s both the punishment and the reward. The haunting riddles of Bitches Brew rip at us and taunt us – however, the willingness to engage those riddles and ghosts, fully and with heart, produces thevisceral joy that can shatter the box Miles put us in. That joy, while exhausting and unnerving, is his legacy and his gift to us.