Looking at Dave Davies’ Open Road and a Career That Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll

 "It’s nice to be appreciated,” says Kinks guitarist, singer and songwriter Dave Davies after I talk at length about the breadth of his contributions to rock ’n’ roll. One of rock’s great ravers and guitar innovators, Davies made history with his older brother Ray in The Kinks, a band I saw at Nashville’s now-vanished Tennessee Theater in August 1980. Dave’s crunching guitar chords and frenetic licks seemed to turn the curly-haired woman in front of me into a pink rock ’n’ roll poodle, and I remember visualizing Ray as Laurence Olivier in the 1960 film The Entertainer. It was a great evening for a Kinks obsessive who had absorbed the band’s ’60s and ’70s music.

After The Kinks disbanded in the ’90s, the younger Davies revived his solo career, but it came to a halt when he suffered a stroke in 2004. Gradually, he returned to recording and performing, and last month he released his fourth studio album since the stroke. He returns to town this weekend to play his very first Nashville solo shows on the tour for Open Road, a contemplative post-psychedelic record that contains some of his most nuanced music.

Dave cut Open Road with his son Russ, a noted electronic musician. “He really kind of pushed me on some things, and he gathered the whole project together, really,” Dave tells the Scene from his home in New Jersey, where he spends part of the year. Open Road finds Davies, who turned 70 this year, mourning the death of youth and exploring other Kinks-sized topics — the band’s genius was always for animating the dramas of everyday life. But it doesn’t sound anything like The Kinks’ ’60s recordings, and it’s worth revisiting those to put Open Road in context.

The ’60s tracks reveal Ray as a brilliant songwriter with a gift for encapsulating ambivalence, while Dave’s exuberant guitar work give his songs shape and a kinetic energy that often verges on anarchic. Written by Ray, The Kinks’ 1964 single “You Really Got Me” — both a breakout hit for the band and a foundational rock tune — twists a simplified Latin rhythm into mania. Ray sneers the lyrics, and Dave plays chords in open fifths that would later be called “power chords.” Dave’s impatient, skittering eight-bar solo cemented his reputation as the inventor of a junk-rock guitar style that would influence such acolytes as Johnny Thunders and Alex Chilton.

Dave’s contributions to The Kinks’ sound continued to grow. Hear his way with a proto-power-pop guitar riff in 1965’s “Come On Now,” his exuberant solos on 1966’s tale of class resentment “House in the Country,” and the comic embellishments that turned Ray’s “Holiday in Waikiki” even more droll. Influenced by American blues and country, Dave and The Kinks created a new kind of popular music that noted the perils and injustices of modern life. I mention the great Southern blues musician Big Bill Broonzy, and Dave returns to the enthusiasms of his youth.

“Oh, Broonzy was essential then,” he says. “He had everything: He looked cool and he moved cool. He was quite handsome. But there was everything in the house when we were growing up, from Perry Como to Fats Domino to Hank Williams, who I regard as more of a rocker than country. He was kinda both.”

An engaging, scruffy vocalist in his own right, Dave sang 1966’s “Party Line,” a country-style two-step that ended up on the brilliant Face to Face album. Aficionados treasure songs he wrote during the late ’60s, including his sinister 1969 tune “Creeping Jean” and his dreamy 1967 Something Else by the Kinks track “Funny Face,” as well as that album’s “Death of a Clown,” a major hit. But perhaps his greatest moment in The Kinks is his performance of “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” the flip side of the 1966 single “Sunny Afternoon.” Singing with Ray, Dave makes you feel the ambition — and the resentment — that drove the Davies brothers to seek fame.

Dave brings all of those skills to bear on Open Road. In the opening “Path Is Long,” he looks back on five decades marked by creative thrills as well as legendary disagreements and disappointments, with the enlightened perspective that only living through those years can offer: “Just look at what we have become / Life here is beautiful,” he sings. The title track, whose lyric about wanderlust is a reminder that resting on your laurels is plain boring, features fevered guitar work that’s as vital as anything he’s ever concocted. 

Dave Davies didn’t turn out to be like everybody else, and we’re better for it.

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