Those of you who know me personally know that I’ve been an avid collector of recorded music all my life, and a musician for almost as long. I can’t imagine my life without the joy I get from hearing and playing music. For that reason, I’ve decided to start a semi-regular feature called “Tales From The Crates” (crates being a traditional method for storing recorded media, though mine also occupy shelves, boxes, tubs, and a distressing number of random flat surfaces in my home).
I couldn’t have been more than three or four when I heard it the first time. I loved hearing music – our house was often filled with it, from the radio, on record, or one of my Dad’s library of reel-to-reel tapes. Then as now, I appreciated and enjoyed every genre, but I didn’t have a particular style of music that I loved more than any other. Then I heard it.
Ba-RONK. Ba-RONK. Ba-RONK-RONK-RONK.
The Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night” was their fourth single, and their second hit, following hot on the heels of the towering “You Really Got Me.” I can’t think of a band that has announced their arrival with a more effective one-two punch.
It was the first song to affect me the way it did, and it still occasionally gives me chills to hear it. To this day, there’s something about those opening chords that leaps out of the grooves. It’s a sound designed to grab you by the lizard brain, right down in the lower chakras. It was so savage, so aggressive that right away, I couldn’t do anything but pay attention. First, that snarling guitar. Then, the drums.
“I’m not content to be with you in the daytime,” a voice sang in a slightly snide tone. “Girl, I want to be with you all of the time.”
At that age, like most small children, I knew about love. The concept of lust was still several years off, but somehow I knew that this song wasn’t just about love. The primal hunger was obvious in every sound coming through those speakers. Though I didn’t know the exact implications, it was clear that the singer wasn’t proposing an all-night game of checkers.
“The only time I feel alright is by your side,” he sang as the song shifted into second gear. The Kinks’ early songs often used this formula: heavy guitar, a verse, a bridge building in volume and intensity to a chorus you could scream. (My three favorite songs from this era are all cut from this cloth: “You Really,” “All Day,” and the often-overlooked B-side “I Need You,” which just might be the best of the three.)
There’s a guitar solo. It’s not carefully crafted or precisely articulated; in fact, it sounds completely extemporaneous. At times it sounds as though he’s literally wringing the notes out of the guitar. The whole song is urgent to the point of being frantic. Whatever else may happening in this song, the Kinks are not trying to be cool. This is adolescent id, in all its sweaty, awkward glory. The lyrics do mention “forever,” but only twice, before returning to the more pertinent day and night at hand.
When I listen to it now, it’s hard for me to believe that “All Day and All of the Night” does it all in 144 seconds, from that incredible riff to the four crashing chords that end it. Pop songs tend to be short as a rule, but compared to a lot of pop music, this one’s downright terse. It does a lot, in less time than it takes a lot of music to do a lot less.
At the end of those first two-and-a-half minutes, I was different. Before hearing it, I had been a kid who loved music, but with no specific preferences. By the end, although I would continue to love music from every genre across the spectrum, I had learned two things. I knew to the depths of my soul that, in the words of another song, rock and roll would always be, and that I would dig it to the end.
