How Low Budget Brought About The Kinks’ Second Act
Happy 45th Anniversary to the album that belatedly made the band rock stars in America
With Low Budget (45 years old this month), The Kinks rebuilt themselves for a new era, a new sound, and even a new nation.
During their first decade, The Kinks established a quintessentially British aesthetic. Ray Davies’ songs masterfully depicted people, places, and situations that could no more comfortably exist outside of Old Blighty than a Mr. Bean cosplay event could.
A preposterous tangle of business and political BS kept The Kinks from touring America in the second half of the ‘60s and building on the success of their early hits. So, they seemingly stopped thinking about the U.S. market. Between 1969 and 1975 the band busted out a long string of highly theatrical concept albums that seemed worlds away from anything American audiences might embrace en masse.
But in the late ’70s, The Kinks began recording for Arista, swapping outsized arrangements and heady concepts for concise tunes and a comparatively stripped-down, high-impact production. Records like Sleepwalker and Misfits made more sense on big American stages than Preservation Acts 1 & 2 or Schoolboys in Disgrace, combining the proto-punk edge of mid-’60s classics like “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” with the lyrical smarts Ray quickly developed. The result: The Kinks belatedly ramped up their path to U.S. stardom.
By the time they toured America in support of 1979’s Low Budget (not insignificantly released in the U.S. before the U.K.), The Kinks were a bona fide arena rock attraction. The punchier approach they’d been pursuing since ‘77, the less parochial lyrical concerns—it all came together on what would be the biggest American success of their career.
Ray Davies had kept his eyes open as the band spent more time in the States. Some of the songs on Low Budget seem to address specifically American issues, taking a more topical tack than most previous Kinks material.
“Catch Me Now I’m Falling” is the most overtly Yank-oriented track, with Ray taking the role of “Captain America” calling out to his nation’s allies for a helping hand as the U.S. starts sliding down the tubes, with a cop of the “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” riff so blatant it had to be ironic. An FM staple in America, the song’s relevancy has never quit increasing.
“A Gallon of Gas” is a more granular investigation of American woes, bemoaning the era’s oil crisis and resulting gas shortage, over a Chicago-tinged blues-rock backing. “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” emerged as a reaction to American influences on both the business and musical fronts. Arista boss Clive Davis was pushing The Kinks for a hit single, so Ray wrote what he says was originally intended as a joke, since he reportedly had little love for the disco grooves the track revolved around. Intentions notwithstanding, the tune nearly nicked the U.S. Top 40, which was no mean feat for the band in those days, and it turned out to be a classic Kinks antihero anthem to boot.
Low Budget’s title track originated as a similarly wry reaction to record company troubles. Arista had been withholding tour support and Ray’s response was to write a tongue-in-cheek tune about being “a cut price person in a low budget land.” The guitars get rather Stonesy here too, but not as deliberately as on “Catch Me Now,” and the song stands as one of rock’s greatest plaints about the perpetually underfunded.
The rough-edged attack of tracks like “Attitude,” “In a Space,” and “Misery” underlines the extent to which the New Wave revolution was working its way into The Kinks’ world. New Wave avatars the Pretenders had recently released their cover of The Kinks’ “Stop Your Sobbing,” showing that the river flowed both ways. And of course, Chrissie Hynde would soon occupy a major role in Ray’s life, with the rock ‘n’ roll power couple eventually creating a new human together.
Low Budget is a window into what the late ‘70s were like. But it also set The Kinks up nicely for the next decade, ensuring that people (or at the very least, American people) would be paying a lot more attention to what the band was cooking up. And they had plenty more up their sleeves.
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