Music for Roctober - #15 - The Kinks
It's best not to analyze The Kinks' "You Really Got Me." Write the lyrics on a piece of paper and it looks nothing like poetry; more like a series of statements. As one critic writes, it may be so popular because no garage band could screw it up. That may be true but there is so much more to the song. Ray Davies is expressing what every teenage (and likely older) male has felt when he sings "Girl, you really got me going; you got me so I don't know what I'm doing." On that base level he connects well with his audience.
The song was also groundbreaking for the edgy guitar sound. Davies cut the speakers in his amps and shoved pins in the membrane to get that rough guitar sound:
"I didn't like any of the guitar amps we had at the time, and I got ahold of this little amplifier from a radio shop that was just up the road. It was only a little 10 or 12 watt amplifier, and one day, in a fit of frustration, I cut up the speakers with a razorblade. That's how I started to get the distorted sound [that carried over to the records]."
It is an incredibly raw song, especially for 1964. This is heavy metal before the metal.
"You Really Got Me" scored #1 on the UK Charts and #7 on the U.S. Charts. In 1978, Van Halen would take their version of the song to #36 on the U.S. Charts. For me there is nothing like the original version by The Kinks. Need I say Volume Up?
The song was also groundbreaking for the edgy guitar sound. Davies cut the speakers in his amps and shoved pins in the membrane to get that rough guitar sound:
"I didn't like any of the guitar amps we had at the time, and I got ahold of this little amplifier from a radio shop that was just up the road. It was only a little 10 or 12 watt amplifier, and one day, in a fit of frustration, I cut up the speakers with a razorblade. That's how I started to get the distorted sound [that carried over to the records]."
It is an incredibly raw song, especially for 1964. This is heavy metal before the metal.
"You Really Got Me" scored #1 on the UK Charts and #7 on the U.S. Charts. In 1978, Van Halen would take their version of the song to #36 on the U.S. Charts. For me there is nothing like the original version by The Kinks. Need I say Volume Up?
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