Sweet Fancy Moses, We Are Not Worthy Of That Ray Davies Show On Saturday Night
Here is a testament to the majesty of the songwriting catalog of one Ray Davies, who appeared with a rock band, a 40-person choir, choir director David Temple, and himself on Saturday night at the Temple Performing Arts Center: He played for two hours and he didn’t even really make a dent in getting to all the great Ray Davies songs that are out there. The gig — rescheduled after a bout of illness saw Davies cancelling his Philly date at the Kimmel last year — opened with a solo Davies set from Davies, in which he played Kinks tunes great and small, from “Waterloo Sunset” to “Misfits.” Then, after a 20-minute intermission, he returned with band and choir — 40-some voices dedicated to playing Greek chorus to selected Kinks tunes in a grand Anglican church stylee. It was truly something to behold. The meat of the set was devoted to a selection of songs from Village Green Preservation Society, arranged with choir in mind and played as one long, standalone piece of music; and lest you think old Ray take himself too seriously, the man seemed to take as much pleasure in seeing his own Village Green work (which he described at the outset as being “the biggest flop ever”) performed with choir as he did doing a goofy little dance during the “scooby-dooby-doo” part of “Picture Book.”
You don’t see shows like this often, where a legendary artist stands before you, in complete command of a truly baffling body of work, and both has fun with it but also lets you know that, for him, this is a matter of life and death. And you can’t predict at all when you will see a show like this — last one that comes to mind at this desk was Leonard Cohen, two years ago at the Academy of Music — but you wish that you could. If only because, if you could, you’d round up space aliens and children and future generations and people who’ve given up on life altogether and show them, and say, “See this? This is a thing called MUSIC. Do you see what it can do? It’s amazing! It really, really helps, doesn’t it?!”
Previously: Holy Crap Noel Gallagher Sucked On Friday Night
