The Kinks And Video Multimedia

Someone commented in a review that our Rock & Roll Rehab Show at the Hayworth Theater reminded him of the Kinks’ shows of the 1970s. My friends and I went to the Kinks shows at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium back in the mid-Seventies and they were great. This was during the age of the concept album and Ray Davies, who was always rather English Musical Theater oriented anyway, wrote some nice little rock operettas.

My favorite Kinks’ concept album is School Boys In Disgrace. They never say just what exactly caused the school boy’s disgrace although a school girl seemed to be involved. At the show which utilized large screen video projection, we see that the school boy falls in love, knocks up the school girl, falls out of love instantly and then blames her for his being in ‘disgrace’. I enjoyed the show but my girlfriend at the time held it against me for liking it. It apparently wasn’t exactly feminist.

The Kinks’ previous concept albums were Arthur (Or Decline and Fall Of The British Empire) and The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. They made a real loose concept album in the late Seventies about social misfits called Misfits after another great album called Sleepwalker which was a return to the normal collection of songs.

The Seventies are not really known as a time of really great rock music but it was a time of real great rock concerts. Pink Floyd, Yes, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Genesis had huge live Prog Rock stage shows and the Rolling Stones’ shows were legendary. It should be of no surprise that some of the biggest selling albums of the decade were recordings of live concerts such as Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s Live Bullet, Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and Cheap Trick’s Live At Budokan.

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