You Really Got Me
The Story of me and The Kinks and how it changed my life.
It was late January 1965, I was 12 years old, just on the cusp of becoming a teenager. During the prior year I had become enamoured with British Rock and Roll. The Beatles had hit Australia and I was surely a fan but my hair stood up on my back when I heard a song called “You Really Got Me” by a new band called the Kinks. Apart from being gritty, distorted and dangerous the members of the band looked good to me. A bit less formal than the Beatles. It was just at the very beginning of the Mod movement, epitomised later by The Small faces and The Who. I wanted to look like that.
The track was released in England in August 1964 and probably got some airplay by the Australian spring when I was still in Form 2 at my new high school in East Bentleigh. I had been there for around a year by then but was still finding my way. I had discovered my own style of music almost 2 years earlier when I first heard Telstar by another British band called The Tornados.
Sometime during the summer holidays of 64/65 I heard that the Kinks were coming to Australia with Manfred Mann. I have to admit that I don’t know how I went about it but I convinced my Dad to take me to the concert which happened on either Friday, January 22 or Saturday, January 23 1965 at Festival Hall in Melbourne. I reckon that we went on the Saturday night. Sometime around this period my Dad had bought me a beautiful Red Maton hollow body guitar with a Bigsby tremelo arm that looked like something that one of these English rock stars would have used. He called it “the 100 Pound Guitar”. Let me tell you now that 100 pounds was a lot of money back in the early 1960s.
Ray Davies had written You Really Got Me in March of 1964 after he saw a beautiful girl in the audience of a gig that he did with one of his early bands. He wrote it on the piano in more of a jazzy blues style as a homage to the early blues singers and lust and passion “Girl you really got me, you got me so I can’t sleep at night”. His younger brother Dave played guitar and came up with the idea of slicing the cones of his speakers in his cheap guitar amp to get the gritty distorted sound that made the song stand out from whatever else was happening at the time, just like Link Wray had done when he recorded Rumble. F to G and back power chords and then G to A. Back then we had no idea how to get the overdriven distortion that made the track so mind blowing.
Needless to say I was so excited to go to Festival Hall on that night in late January 1965. I wish I could thank my Dad now because it was a milestone in my life and a pivotal point when I decided that I had to be in a band, something that happened a year later when I was 13.
Manfred Mann featured the original lineup with Paul Jones on vocals and harmonica. This was when they were still essentially a Blues Band, they had a hit called Diddy Was Diddy. The other band in the lineup was called The Honeycombs, they had a female drummer named Honey. Little did I know the connection to my earlier love of Telstar which was written by a mad innovator named Joe Meek, a London producer and music genius. They had a mini hit called Have I The Right which Joe Meek wrote and produced.
So there you go. This was a very special night in my life and You Really Got Me was as important in solar as it got my musical juices flowing.
