There are a lot of hit songs out there that have shown staying power through the years. But how many of them have influenced countless others through a combination of splendid inspiration and clever innovation?
The Kinks have just such a song in their catalog. “You Really Got Me” can stake as strong a claim as any song to launching both hard rock and garage rock. And a destructive act helped it achieve all that.
A Memorable Dancer
The Kinks originated when brothers Ray Davies and Dave Davies felt that the name The Ravens was a bit too square for the kind of music that they were playing. Someone watching them at a pub thought that their colorful clothes made them look “kinky.” It was just a short adjustment from there to The Kinks.
Pye Records signed them to their first record deal. But their first two singles, both covers, had failed to gain any traction. The group decided that they’d try an original song, since Ray Davies was a budding songwriter.
Davies looked through his catalog of songs and went back to one he’d written a few years before when he was in an outfit that played jazz and R&B. While with that group, he’d been mesmerized by a girl dancing in the crowd one night while they played live. Although he never met her, he wrote “You Really Got Me” about how she made him feel that night.
Dave the Knife
When The Kinks played live, they made a wild noise. Lead guitarist Dave Davies was responsible for a lot of that via the sheer force of his playing. But when the group went into the studio to record “You Really Got Me”, they were disappointed by the way that the engineers tried to clean up their song.
The group didn’t feel the original version of “You Really Got Me” captured their live sound. Dave Davies decided to do something about it with his recently purchased amp, as he explained in the book Anatomy Of A Song:
“I had just learned to shave, so I took one of my razor blades and slashed up the amp’s speaker cone. I had no idea whether what I had done would work, but when I plugged in the guitar, I was blown away by the raucous sound that came out. It was gritty. Up until then, rock guitars in London had sounded very clean and polished, except for blues players. But the blues sound wasn’t what I had in my head then. It was just rage.”
Second Time’s the Charm
Ray Davies was thinking along the same lines as his brother. He made a similar move, punching holes in the preamp speaker of bassist Pete Quaife. With these adjustments, The Kinks took another crack at recording “You Really Got Me”.
This time around, the band delivered a studio performance akin to the frenzy of their live shows. Music fans went wild over this relatively new sound and made the song a massive hit single.
The Kinks soon refined their sound to better serve Ray Davies’ delicate songwriting. But they’d already made enough of an impact with “You Really Got Me” to influence hard rockers for generations.
(Photo by Tom Hustler/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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