It always sounds like such a dismal proclamation to declare that an artist's best work is behind him -- and it's a dangerous assumption to make, because who ever knows? It's more crucial to hold up a person's best work and affirm, and then reaffirm, that it's in no danger of slipping into the ozone. Ray Davies spent his youth -- gave it up, in fact -- writing songs that some of us will carry around, like a talisman in a hip pocket, forever.

The Ray Davies of the '60s was a peculiar creature, a world apart from other gifted contemporaries like Jagger, Lennon or McCartney. He was as modern as any of them, and as much of a rabble-rouser (though he had infinitely more dimensions than Jagger). The disaffected, feral virility of 1964's "You Really Got Me," the Kinks' first top 10 hit (in both the U.S. and the U.K.), is very real, both an irresistible come-on and a sexual scowl you can hear.

Equally genuine, though, is the blushing, sunburned fondness of the 1967 "Autumn Almanac," a song that celebrates old-time fixtures of English life like seaside holidays and currant buns, even as it tugs gently away from their lulling, compelling current: "This is my street/and I'm never gonna leave it/And I'm always gonna stay here/if I live to be 99," Davies sings, the honeyed smoothness of his voice unable to hide a flutter of homesickness, as if he secretly wished he could live that life. Even in the thick of the swinging '60s, arguably one of the best times in history to be a young man, Davies was an old man trapped in a young man's skin. He never scoffed at the idea of simple human comforts, but it was his curse and his salvation that he also knew how confining they can be.

Davies has a rare gift for combing through strands of useless, habitual nostalgia to come up with the golden threads worth salvaging. Sometimes a way of life is discarded for good reason; other times it's thrown away out of nothing more than thoughtlessness or boredom. Like a rag-picker with superb taste, Davies has always known how to separate the things that drip with preciousness from the things that are truly precious. Doilies: toss. Teapots: keep.

There's loads of charm in the way Davies sings fondly of roast beef on Sundays and dismal English weather. But as endearing as his Anglo-centric vision can be, it's far from benign. As critic Greil Marcus wrote, "Commercial failure turned Ray Davies back on himself. What he found were the futile aspirations to gentility harbored by the English working class: the pain of living within limits one could not afford to damn, because that would mean admitting they existed."

Davies may have seen the bleakness of those aspirations, but he never confused it with hopelessness. If I had to compare him with an actor, I might choose the late, and extraordinary, Sir Alec Guinness as the closest equivalent. Davies, like Guinness, could easily slip into the role of the English everyman, without ever being condescending or overly mannered. His vocal style, like Guinness' gentle chameleon face, is nondescript and immediately distinctive at the same time. In fact, his direct, sometimes elegant phrasing has probably been informed more by the great British song-and-dance man Jack Buchanan than by Elvis. His songs clearly owe a debt to English music-hall tradition; when his brother Dave was getting into rock 'n' roll in the early '60s, Ray was still infatuated with Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Which isn't to say that Davies is a particularly gentle soul. He's no stranger to sexual posturing -- that's obvious from songs like "You Really Got Me" and "Lola." But you could spend hours reeling off the other qualities that fly like sparks from his work: His wit and punditry, his always-brushed-with-dignity rambunctiousness, his stiletto-sharp social commentary in songs like the 1965 "Well-Respected Man," an acid indictment of the hypocrisy behind English propriety.

But if Davies has ever understood anything, it's the romance of isolation, a sense of the clarity gained by being on the outside of things: Loneliness is a small price to pay for self-knowledge. That's the declaration that creeps out from behind the guitars, twirling like a corps of ballerinas, in "I'm Not Like Everybody Else." The song is a miracle of self-protection masquerading as self-revelation, the on-the-spot struggle of a singer who's torn between wishing he could keep his secrets private and wanting to let them out in the open to breathe. The almost breathlessly desperate line "I don't want to live my life like everybody else" emerges from an earlier one, "I don't want to go to bed like everybody else," as if going to bed and simply living were the two crucial bookends of life. For the duration of the song, at least, it seems that they are.

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