BEHIND THE SONG: You Really Got Me Ray Davies wrote this with the help of his brother (and Kinks guitarist) Dave. Ray played it for Dave on piano, and Dave tried it on guitar. Their first version was 6-minutes long. Dave Davies got the dirty guitar sound by slashing the speaker cone on his amp with a razor blade. The vibration of the fabric produced an effect known as fuzz, which became common as various electronic devices were invented to distort the sound. At the time, none of these devices existed, so Davies would mistreat his amp to get the desired sound, often kicking it. The amp was a cheap unit called an Elpico. Before they released this, The Kinks put out 2 singles that flopped. If this didnt do well, there was a good chance their record label would have dropped them. When the Kinks heard the first version they recorded of this, they hated the results. It was produced by Shel Talmy, their manager at the time, and Ray Davies thought it came out clean and sterile, when he wanted it to capture the energy of their live shows. Dave Davies girlfriend backed them up, saying it didnt make her want to drop her knickers. The Kinks record company had no interest in letting them re-record this, but due to a technicality in their contract, The Kinks were able to withhold the song until they could do it again. At the second session, Dave Davies slashed his amp and Talmy produced it to get the desired live sound. This is the version that was released. Talmy thought the first version was good, and also would have been a hit if it was released. This first version was slower and had more of a Blues sound. The Kinks didnt have a drummer when they first recorded this, so Talmy brought in a session musician named Bobby Graham to play. When they recorded this the second time, Mick Avory had joined the band as their drummer, but Talmy didnt trust him and made him play tambourine while Graham played drums. One other session musician was used - Arthur Greenslade played piano. Just before Dave Davies started his guitar solo at the second recording session, his brother yelled to encourage him. Dave got a little confused, but they had only 3 hours of studio time so he kept playing. He pulled off the solo despite the distraction. The first line was originally You, you really got me going. Ray Davies changed it to Girl, you really got me going at the suggestion of one of their advisers. The idea was to appeal to the teenage girls in their audience. Davies got the idea for the guitar riff from Tequila by The Champs. This was the first hit for The Kinks. It gave them a lot of publicity and led to TV appearances, magazine covers, and 2 gigs opening for The Beatles. They didnt have an album out yet, so they rushed one out to capitalize on the demand. This first album contained only 5 originals, with the rest being R&B covers. Ray Davies wrote this with the intention of making it big crowd-pleaser for their live shows. He was trying to write something similar to Louie Louie, which was a big hit for The Kingsmen. It was rumored that Jimmy Page, who was a session musician at the time, played guitar on this track, which the band strongly denied. According to a 2012 interview by Finding Zoso with producer Shel Talmy, Jimmy Page did not play the lead guitar on the song. However he did play rhythm as Ray Davies didnt want to sing and play guitar at the same time. Ray Davies: I made a conscious effort to make my voice sound pure and I sang the words as clearly as the music would allow. Ray Davies was 22 when they recorded this. Dave Davies was 17. A cover of this was the first single for Van Halen in 1978. Eddie Van Halen would spend the next several years developing new guitar riffs, and like Davies, was known to manipulate his equipment to get just the right sound. The powerful rhythm guitar riff was very influential on other British groups. The Rolling Stones recorded Satisfaction, which was driven by the rhythm guitar, a year later. The Who played this at many of their early concerts. Their first single was I Cant Explain and was also produced by Shel Talmy. The sound borrowed heavily from this, as Pete Townshend played a dirty guitar riff similar to what Dave Davies recording. The Kinks next single was All Day And All Of The Night, which was basically a re-write of this, but was also a hit. This was used in the 2004 video game Battlefield Vietnam. Jon Lord played the keyboard part on this track years before he became a member of Deep Purple. He recalled with a laugh to The Leicester Mercury in 2000: All I did was plink, plink, plink. It wasnt hard. Ray Davies recalled in an interview with NME how his brother Dave created the distortion effect on this song. Said Ray: We stuck knitting needles in the speakers, or in Daves case, he slit the speakers with a razor blade. In those days we played records on a radiogram so loudly that they all sounded fuzzy. We thought, Thats a great sound, without realizing the speakers were buggered. Everyone else was using really clean guitar sounds, so for You Really Got Me we hooked a little speaker up to a clean amp and came up with thunderous, unaffected, pure power. Ray Davies told The NME that the Van Halen version of this tune is his favorite Kinks cover. He explained: It was a big hit for them and put them on a career of excess and sent them on the road. So I enjoyed that one. youtu.be/S7ffgqjcH40
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 11:31:08 +0000
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