This is Captain America Calling

The Kinks : Catch Me Now I'm Falling

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On July 10, 1979 The Kinks released Low Budget, their biggest selling album in the U.S., peaking at #11 in the charts. Recorded quickly, mostly in New York, the album has a rough quality and no sign of the years The Kinks spent creating double album length rock operas. Now living in New York, Ray Davies takes on inflation ("Low Budget") , the gas crisis ("A Gallon of Gas")  and, on "Catch Me Now I'm Falling", America's foreign diplomacy:

Now I'm calling all citizens from all over the world 

This is Captain America calling 

I bailed you out when you were down on your knees 

So will you catch me now I'm falling 

While U.K. critics were lukewarm about Low Budget ("Low Budget is actually worth spending money on."--Melody Maker), the American critics were more welcoming. The album would make the Pazz + Jop year end critics poll at #40, and David Fricke of Rolling Stone wrote 

There is, however, no energy crisis on Low Budget, the hardest rocking Kinks record in recent memory...the Kinks haven’t mounted this kind of rock + roll attack since Lola. Low Budget may not be the best of their twenty-odd albums released in America, but it’s not bad either. 

Well Known Groover

The Kinks : Prince of the Punks

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In August of 1977, EMI signed Tom Robinson Band, waiting until Ray Davies released the "prince of the punks" from his Konk recording contract under the agreement that Davies would get 10% of everything Robinson earned over the next two years. Robinson and Davies did not part under the best of circumstances. In "Prince of the Punks", Davies snarls "He acts working class but it's all bologna/He's really middle class and he's just a phony/He acts tough but it's just a front,/He's the prince of the punks. "

It was a heady time for Robinson who would soon have a UK#5 hit called "2-4-6-8 Motorway"

"Within nine months we'd made the transition from signing on at Medina Road dole office to Top of the Pops, Radio One, EMI Records and the giddy heights of the front cover of the New Musical Express".

But there's still some drama awaiting EMI and Robinson who wanted his next single to be the year old "Glad To Be Gay". Was the world ready?

40 Year Itch: "My name is Ray Davies...and I am dying"

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On July 15 1973 Ray Davies told fans at London's White City Stadium he was quitting the Kinks. To quote Davies:

"I'm fucking sick of the whole thing. I'm sick up to here with it."

Looking "haggard and ill" according to Sounds Magazine, Davies was a pill popping freak who describes the theatrical, rock operatic years between 1973 and 1975 as a time "in my life, in my career, when I should not have been allowed to put any records out." In the Summer of '73 his wife Rosa had moved out and taken the kids with her. Davies took more pills, slipped into a depression and had already wound up in a hospital one time after a rumored suicide attempt.

Then came the White City show which Davies recalls in his "unauthorized autobiography" X Ray.


Every song seemed to resonate inside Raymond Douglas. He sang songs like "Holiday", "Celluloid Heroes", "You Really Got Me", "All Day and All of the Night". Each song had a meaning about his own life. There was obviously a lot of self-pity involved, but he could not escape these emotions, there was no escape, this was the real world come tumbling down on Raymond Douglas' fantasyland. At the end of the concert he announced that this was the final concert by the Kinks, but the PA company accidentally turned off the sound system, and so nobody heard the resignation speech. It would have ended with 'The Kinks are dead, I am dead." Well-meaning people helped R.D. away from the stage, but he wished that he had just died.

Davies was still wearing stage make up when he checked into the hospital telling the attending nurse:

"Hello my name is Ray Davies. I am the lead singer of The Kinks. And I am dying"

There was talk of having Dave Davies take over the band but Ray returned for what would be an unproductive period commercially. The albums Preservation Act 1(1973), Preservation Act 2 (1974) Soap Opera (1975) and Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975) each have a song or two to recommend.

From the first album, the US single "Sweet Lady Genevieve" --a true nugget--was released in August of 1973.