KINKY

Garage rock and punk started right here, with this fuzzy guitar riff in "You Really Got Me" by the Kinks. Ray Davies wrote the song, and his brother Dave played the guitar through an amp shredded with a single-sided Gillette razor blade, launching a thousand distorted guitars. The rest is history. Listen, and see why this was rated 4th in the 100 Greatest Guitar Songs of All Time by Rolling Stone magazine.


Still kinky in 1970, the boys play "Lola," a song about a strange date with a man dressed like a woman. Between garage rock origins and nearly baroque songs about English country life -- with the occasional kinky episode thrown in for good measure -- these rockers have secured a prominent place in the pop music pantheon.

To read the Rolling Stone article, click HERE.

ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT

These heavy, fuzztone riffs launched a thousand garage bands. The Kinks were a highly influential British Invasion band, and the true ancestors of punk -- and they did it with style. The Beatles may have been more creative, the Stones more bluesy, but the Kinks were a crack little outfit that blasted riffs like nobody else. They changed over the years, and created little baroque masterpieces of English life, but I prefer the early angry years. Ray Davies was something of a genius. I always expected him to grow up to be Vincent Price, but maybe it was just the Edwardian outfit. At any rate, dig this clip from Shindig, in 1965!

For Kinks 101, from the Onion, click here.