And the ones that do exist... add such an interesting character to those records but there's so much missing that we just have the finished product and that itself is so magical and maybe that's that's part of the whole thing but talking of things missing i want to start going through a few things early on in the book as we go through there's a bunch of um early demos you mentioned as you go later on the book you mentioned this doesn't exist or this etc but these early ones you don't really specify things like one fine day that's all I want tell you what I say etc do those exist at all or are they just

Well, some things do exist and we do say, you know, an acetate of this exists in the collection or whatever else.

So, you know, it's hard to say that they don't exist at all.

But as far as we know, Doug and I have not turned them up.

Now, I've had some very odd experiences.

occurrences in my life.

The strangest amongst them in record collecting was I was in London in 2019 and I was there with my girlfriend at the time who I'm now married to, but she said I was going to meet up with my friends in London who I've had for years and years.

It's there's a real transition point there.

Right.

It's it's personally important to me that the history is out there.

But but I got to revisit, you know, many funny things, instant incidents with Peter and Nez and Davey and stuff, just hilarious stuff.

Those guys were just amazing.

So funny.

And, you know, off off screen and just in everyday life, you know, It's no wonder they were the monkeys.

That's the thing I get to really in this book is it starts out with a story that I do tell one personal story in the introduction, which is I was standing with Bert Schneider, who was the co-creator of The Monkeys with Bob Rafelson.

printed on high quality 157 gsm matte paper packaged in a decorative outer cardboard box and shipped in a second box for a safe worldwide transport so that is something that is uh that's pretty sharp now do you want to discuss the pricing on these or

Yeah, it is.

And a very different book than Ray's book, X-Ray, which has a ton of amazing information in it too, but, um, but couched in a, in a sort of science fiction story as well.

Um, as all our favorite, uh, you know, people from the '60s can't just do the standard thing.

They've gotta, it's gotta be conceptual.

Um, anyway, so, so from there, that had nothing to do with the reissues.

In 1997, I got contacted through Doug Hinman, who's the co-author on this book and the generator of all the fantastic research, uh, of my, of the new book.

And, um, he said, "My friends, uh, are doing some stuff with Castle Sanctuary, and they're looking for stuff." And at that time, I'd already been involved in reissues for about seven years working for Rhino.

Sure

How did the Kinks differ from other bands in their approach and their attitude toward recording? It seems like they tended to work quite quickly, at least in the early years, while some other artists spent inordinate amounts of time over their records.

Well, there is an economy to what they do, but it's not necessarily in the same way as other contemporary groups from the 1960s.

The Kinks might only spend a day in the studio doing... a single, whereas other groups might spend, you know, later in the 60s, you know, a week or whatever else.

However, Ray's penchant for re-recording material, remaking until he was happy, I mean, begins in 1964 with You Really Got Me.

And what we hear on our favorite record from that year is the third version, the third recorded version.

And in fact... you know, the make or break of the band, and also unheard of that an unknown band with two singles to their credit on Pi, the first of which barely charted and only charted on one, and it may have been a fiddle, Long Tall Sally, and then You Still Want Me, which doesn't chart at all, and is considered to be one of the rarest records of that year, although it was pressed twice with two different label styles, so I'm not sure.

I always feel like whenever somebody says, oh, that record only sold 227 copies, I'm like, where do you get that information? That's sort of what this book does.

What do you think actually happened based on all the different sources you've consulted?

What's your particular, what was the particular fascination with the Kings? Have you always been a long-time admirer?

Yeah, going back to, I don't know, about six or seven years old, my brother was a big Kinks fan as well.

We all have older brothers who are Kinks fans, I think.

And he had been to see them in America.

You know, this book deals with their earliest era, really, 64 to 71, the Pi era, as it would be known in the UK, or the Reprise era here in the US.

But in the States, they had a whole other rebirth of sort of AOR rock music.

records and my brother was caught up in that and he went to see them and he was describing them to me one night and I thought these guys sound really fascinating I was obsessed with music from the time I was about four and going to concerts and all kinds of things at a young age and I was like I want to see these guys so I got to see them the first time when I was 11 and what's crazy to me is so that was at the height of come dancing being a huge hit in the uk and also the us although i think it was a us hit first and then picked up back in the uk um but so they were huge in america and then 12 years later i was actually on stage playing with dave davies uh in in a band and uh and how did that happen Very randomly, very randomly, but just a stroke of good luck.

So the thing that fascinated me when I first saw this book was how difficult is it to find out day by day what the Kinks did? I mean, did they leave a kind of document trail behind them? Are they an easy group to research or a difficult