As everybody knows, selecting a “favorite song” seems pointless. Most people, I think, love music (whether they know it or not) and treasure countless songs and melodies. That being said, my favorite song and record is “Till The End Of The Day”, written by Ray Davies and recorded by The Kinks on November 3-4, 1965 in Pye Studios (Studio 2), London. When released as a single, the song reached the No. 6 position in the UK charts and the No. 50 position in the US charts. The song was used by The Kinks as their set opening number for years and concluded the first side of their magnificent The Kink Kontroversy lp, the group’s first (unacknowledged) “concept” album.
Unlike other “favorite songs” of mine, including “Police Car” by Larry Wallis and “Shouting In A Bucket Blues” by Kevin Ayers, both masterpieces of structure and expression, and different from anything else under the sun in the rock music universe, “Till The End Of The Day” lifts the soul in its several verses by setting the table of life’s opportunities and painting a picture of an original, perpetual and reoccurring morning. All we need to know and do is to be here and be ready. We are not alone in the song (there are two of us – “you and me”), but we are and remain free, separate and self-determined individuals. Without cribbing, counterfeiting or in any way “deriving”, Ray Davies is stating something that comes very close to John Keats’: “beauty is truth, truth beauty/that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know".
“Till The End Of The Day” is a magnificent song, which apparently resulted from the great American songwriter Mort Shuman’s advising Ray to “work with chords you like” when Davies was beset by his first bad case of writer’s block following the period of the early big hits and prior to the famous “Sunny Afternoon” nervous breakdown. Dave Davies’ guitar solo is the best of his career and retells the story of the song in a few taut, incisive notes and phrases. It would be his song as much as Ray’s (as so many Kinks songs are) except for the fact that Ray Davies’ depressive, yet determined, energetic personality is the song’s musical and lyrical fingerprint.
Till The End Of The Day
Lyrics
Baby, I feel good
From the moment I rise
Feel good from morning
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Yeah, you and me
We live this life
From when we get up
Till we go sleep at night
You and me we're free
We do as we please, yeah
From morning, till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Yeah, I get up
And I see the sun
And I feel good, yeah
'Cause my life has begun
You and me we’re free
We do as we please, yeah
From morning, till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
You and me we’re free
We do as we please, yeah
From morning, till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
From the moment I rise
Feel good from morning
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Yeah, you and me
We live this life
From when we get up
Till we go sleep at night
You and me we're free
We do as we please, yeah
From morning, till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Yeah, I get up
And I see the sun
And I feel good, yeah
'Cause my life has begun
You and me we’re free
We do as we please, yeah
From morning, till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
You and me we’re free
We do as we please, yeah
From morning, till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Till the end of the day
Chords
D5 C5 A (intro)
C5 D5 F5 C5 D5 (Baby I feel good)
C5 D5 F5 C5 D5 (From the moment I rise)
(feel good)
F G Bflat A ( from Morning, till the end)
C5 D5 F5 C5 D5 (of the day)
Dmin C F C (you and me)
Dmin C F C (we live our life)
Dmin C F A7 (from when we get up till we sleep at night)
Dmin C F C Bflat (you and me we're free, we do as we please yeah from)
F G Bflat A Dmin C (morning till the end of the day)
Dmin C (till the end of the day)
Oh – did I mention how much I like “Feel A Whole Lot Better”?
Curtis,
ReplyDeleteIt is of course hardly any easier to nominate one's favourite Kinks song that to nominate one's favourite star from the bewildering plenitude of brilliances in the night sky, but... were one to attempt the project, and to try to channel back to one's initial reactions (and naturally those reactions ought to bear more weight, as they were doubtless benefitting from a greater total of synapses, the ruined and ageing brain being what it is...), I think the laurels would go to:
"See My Friends".
Maybe you had to be there, then... but I was, and so it is.
Not of course that "Till the End of the Day" is not itself representation of genius of a maximal order.
Thanks for the post, then. (This one even caught Angelica's attention, never easy as she is ever the critically discerning reader of the firm.)
(By the by, that beach trip of yours sounded wonderful, making me rue my solitary confinement...)
Tom:
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading and writing (and Angelica also). I love See My Friends. It has that remarkable quality of seeming to appear out of nowhere, whereas Till The End Of The Day obviously descended from You Really Got Me, All Day And All Of The Night and I Need You. The fact that See My Friends succeeded on the UK charts is also amazing, but that really was a golden era of innovative pop songs and prodigious, prolific creation. If you’ve never heard it, the group gave an excellent rendition of the song on the UK version of their “live in the studio” To The Bone album. It sort of stunned me because I’d previously seen an old lip-synched performance and I always thought the song was sort of unperformable and meant for record. Till The End Of The Day always moved and excited me. It was the first song I saw The Kinks perform live at the Fillmore East in 1969 when they resumed touring the US and it really stood out and affected me intensely and unexpectedly following the 9-11 attack on New York.
The beach was great and we’re lucky to be about 90 minutes closer to Avalon in Philly than we were in Tuxedo, although both are nice drives. This morning saw the red-billed hoopoes again and we’re not fooling ourselves – it’s definitely they and they must be escapes – and dolphins also beyond the second line of waves. Now I’m back at my desk and about to download some hours of continuing legal education programming for my biennial attorney registration. (Only six hours to go and I intend to finish by Wednesday.) I’m sorry you couldn’t join us at the beach. It would be good to meet you either on your coast or mine. I’m doing some work for a SF-based "multi-platform entertainment" start-up (the “iQol" concern I mentioned previously), so if the start-up gets going, I’ll be visiting. Actually, I suggested Beyond The Pale to them as a programming opportunity (I can see it working in a tv format along the lines of, but much better than, what MTV tried to do when they featured John Ashbery’s poems for a period as “interstitial programming”), but the company is still at too early a stage to act on anything definitively, including, at the moment, paying me. That being said, I think the BTP format could be adapted to television -- especially interactive television -- very effectively because that medium "scrolls". I've shared BTP with friends and you've created something really terrific on a number of levels.
We who are about to glaze over salute you.
Curtis
Curtis,
ReplyDeleteThanks for invoking those coruscating wall-of-truth moments. It is an unexpected (and maybe undeserved) stroke of good fortune to see all my friends have not yet gone over the river. As to the intriguing proposal, naturally I'm honoured, flattered (this despite an abiding depressive realism, "my bad" as the incorrigible player says after booting or blowing something, yet again). As tonight however, at the beginning of the End of the Night, I am probably as exhausted as you are (though to no such high purpose alas), may we agree to continue to pleasantly converse, anon?
Yes, indeed, of course. I'll be off in a couple of hours to Secaucus, New Jersey to have lunch with an old friend who works for a company my former company did business with. One doesn't often hear about trips to Secaucus for lunch, but that's the way it has to be. Only three hours to go in my "continuing legal education" sojourn, thank heaven. My next hour's credit will be earned via cell phone (unhealthy, I think) in a Secaucus parking lot between noon at 1 pm EDT today.
ReplyDeleteCurtis
A trip to Secaucus for lunch, something almost Whitmanian in that, Curtis.
ReplyDeleteI spent the summer of 1950 in Plainfield. The big event was a trip to Elizabeth, for I forget what.
By the by, your Avalon/Cape May outing has become the stuff of legend. My "Piping Plover" post, instigated by you of course, now has some lovely birding correlations from your fellow Pennsylvanian Don Wentworth, a onetime resident of the Jersey shore. Check it out when the pace relents a bit.
Raining heavily here all through the livelong night, give me a nice dry Secaucus parking lot any time.
Secaucus trip successful on all counts. I earned legal credit while sitting in the parking lot reading Peanut.
ReplyDeleteEveryone, I believe, "multi-tasks" all the time. The only reason this activity was ever assigned a graceless name was a desire to somehow "productize" and "monetize" it.
Which brings me to describe my first experience with a "carpetbagger consultant" in 1987. I had just arrived at a new job, which represented a big break for me -- it was the job I'd been looking for and waiting for and had struggled to obtain. A consultant had been hired by the company to institute a "paperwork reduction project". This sounded like a very good idea to me on a number of levels. All employees -- hundreds of us -- were required to complete a long questionnaire that was a sort of "time and motion" study detailing our various paperwork activities. As someone brand-new to the organization, many questions were irrelevant and inapplicable to me, but I gamely completed the study only to find at the conclusion that I was a day late in handing it in. I sheepishly and in a paranoid frame of mind approached the consultant, who had a fearsome reputation and a lot of influence with the president of the company, apologizing for being late. She looked at me peculiarly and then told me to keep my document -- the paperwork reduction project had been abandoned. No further explanation. That struck me as extremely odd (what did it signify in terms of the future trajectory of paperwork at the company?) , but it set a tone and formed a pattern for my downhill relationship with consultants that persists to this day.
My only experience with Elizabeth is that it's the exit from the NJ Turnpike to the Verazano Narrows Bridge. I've been driving that road for so long that I suppose this qualifies as a lot of experience, actually, because it means either that I'm approaching home or just getting seriously underway on my journey, both of which are things you feel intensely.
I hope it has stopped raining. I spoke to a friend in Novato yesterday who was describing your weather to me and it sounds just awful.
Curtis