The Kinks' career has spanned more than 30 years, through various record labels and lineups (the original members from the Kinks' glory days in the '60s, bassist Pete Quaife and drummer Mick Avory, split from the band in 1969 and 1984, respectively). Their story is riddled with the usual difficulties and a few novel ones, including an altercation between the band and a bloc of unions and promoters here in the States that prevented the Kinks from touring the U.S. for the last half of the '60s.

Davies also became embroiled in legal battles over the rights to his songs, which he'd naively signed away as a fledgling musician. (He names names, bitterly, in his 1970 screed "The Moneygoround.") The consensus is that Davies always seemed to pour more of himself into his work than into his personal life, and in 1973 his young wife of several years, Rasa, left him, taking the couple's two daughters with her. The episode led to a drug overdose and an emotional breakdown, which caused Davies to announce from a concert stage that he was retiring from music for good.

He came back, of course: Davies and the Kinks still had plenty of life left in them. The '60s had brought the band a torrent of hit singles in the U.K., although in the States, the only Kinks songs to reach top 10 status were "You Really Got Me" (1964), "All Day and All of the Night" and "Tired of Waiting for You" (both in 1965). The band wouldn't crack the U.S. Top 10 again until the release of "Lola" in 1970. With that song Davies made pure genius out of gender confusion, but I've always marveled more at the song's minute but loaded details, like Davies' tossed-off description of his paramour's "dark brown voice."

In the '70s, Davies and the band began to devote themselves to larger-scale projects, voluminous epics that sometimes seemed to grow beyond their control. When it was released in 1969, "Arthur, or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire" was greeted largely as an imitator of the Who's "Tommy," although "Arthur" had been completed by the time "Tommy" arrived on the scene. (And for my money, it hangs together much better than Pete Townshend's overgrown opus.)

On the whole, albums began to take precedence over singles in the '70s, and Davies rode the trend, writing songs that would fit into the larger, overarching theme of a particular album -- it was an approach he'd first explored with the band's beguiling 1968 love letter to English country life, "The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society." Davies and his compatriots knew how to work discrete songs into a larger, meaningful whole. The band's terrific (and underrated) 1971 LP "Muswell Hillbillies" was a backwater-blues record of sorts, a work that sounded like Americana even as it mined evocative details of English urban life. A fragile, shivery ballad off that LP, "Oklahoma USA," about an English girl who in her dreams lives on the far-off plains of America, may qualify as the loveliest middle-era Davies song, with its Chinese puzzle of a line: "If life's for livin', then what's livin for?"

As the '70s unfolded, Davies' concepts got bigger and more unwieldy. In 1973, the Kinks released the first part of Davies' first full-blown rock opera, "Preservation Act I." The public hated it. The following year, the band released the opera's concluding half, "Preservation Act II." The public hated it more. Before long, though, the Kinks would usher in an era of bigger album successes stateside than they'd ever had before: Their 1977 LP "Sleepwalker" became a major U.S. hit, as did "Give the People What They Want" in 1981.

In their latter career the Kinks could now and then pull off a good song (the musical self-mockery of "Destroyer," off "Give the People What They Want" was a high point). But even though the band had become more successful than ever in the United States, their later work can't be characterized as particularly beguiling. It's uneven and largely uninspired. Davies personal life became fodder for gossip in the early '80s, when he became romantically involved with the Pretenders' Chrissie Hynde. (Hynde and Davies produced a daughter in 1983, but the two never wed and eventually separated.)

The Kinks haven't officially disbanded, although Davies has moved on to tackle a broader range of projects in the '90s. His "X-Ray" was published in 1995 (Dave followed in 1996 with his own autobiography, "Kink"), and earlier this year he published an admirable if not exactly sparkling book of short stories, "Waterloo Sunset," loosely based on some of his songs. In the mid- to late '90s Davies also performed a series of live shows under the title "Storyteller," in which he read from his work, told stories about his life and played old songs and debuted new ones.

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