All Night Stand. The Thoughts. 1966. Planet

 I sometimes forget the influential importance of the British Invasion in a way that just does not happen to me with folk country or American blues. Is this because I was born in 1966, the year the Beatles—with whom the British Invasion is forever linked in my imagination—famously retired from live performance, and so, by the time that I became aware of their great achievement, their legend was already a fait accompli, the greatest rock story ever told, and therefore sometimes, often times, easy to take for granted. In the States, the musical excitement we generally associate with the early to mid-sixties was born from honky tonk jukeboxes and the emerging garage rock and urban soul scenes. Overseas in Great Britain a new generation was busy configuring its experience of the Chess-Sun dynamic, merging the spirited aggression of the former with the primal, working class authority of the latter, then clarifying the resulting admixture with a centuries old gift for melody. Only the Kinks, however, could navigate the long and short distances between Sun and Chess poles with deft power and sophistication. You can hear all the requisite pop elements come together on All Night Stand, written by Ray Davies and released by the Thoughts in September, 1966. Its quintessential British Invasion, generating the kind of excitement that comes with being young and alive in a world that, eager to repair itself after bleak years of slaughter and ruin, was now flush with buoyant creative energy. A transatlantic exchange of musical ideas—as fecund as it was influential—was quickly established, and continued in various forms for the duration of the rock and roll era. By 1966, the British Invaders were fully maturing from their respective beginnings, actively leaving behind their early, instantly accessible sound. Popular music was evolving into a diversification of styles that was driven by global expectations of social and cultural change, as well as by their reactionary, sometimes violent, resistance. The exuberance of this early sixties music later informed the best rock and roll, especially when artists in the next decade went to combat against mediocrity—including 50s nostalgia—by adding the flash of the contemporary to the energy of British Invasion pop. By the time of grunge and hip-hop, however, music audiences considered themselves far too clever to enjoy their grandparents’ music, and it was unceremoniously segregated by commercial forces to an oldies ghetto from which it still makes the occasional appearance for marketing appropriate programming, like advertising commercials and reality based variety specials. From the 2001 Rhino box set Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire and Beyond


Dec 01 021

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