Oh boy, there's quite a tangled story with this set. First off, note that this is all unreleased, like nearly all the music from this festival. And it's from an audience bootleg, again, just like nearly all of the festival. However, we're lucky this is one of the better sounding audience boots from it.
Okay, let's get to the story. Keep in mind that while the festival was funded by computer multimillionaire Steve Wozniak, the main organizer was Bill Graham, who was easily the best known and most important concert promoter in the U.S. at the time. Also keep in mind that the festival was really damn hot. On this, the second day, the high temperature was "only" 106 degrees Fahrenheit, a few degrees less than on the first day. The heat and sun had made the crowd lethargic during the first day, but they had gotten more lively after the sun went down. So it was understandable why the Kinks would have wanted to go on later. And one more thing to keep in mind: I just looked it up, and the sun set in this region on that date at about 7:15 P.M.
Okay, now that you know all that, here's an except from a Rolling Stone Magazine article about the concert that came out shortly after it happened:
[T]he Kinks most assuredly did care when they appeared, and by their reckoning, they shouldn't have gone on until after dark. But they were scheduled for 6:20 P.M., before [Tom] Petty, before [Pat] Benatar and before dark - and a couple of weeks' worth of protests [by the band] didn't change that. So they resorted to the next best thing: as the clock reached 6:20, the Kinks were nowhere in sight.
For Bill Graham, that was the cardinal sin: screwing with his smoothly run show. Graham was fuming when the band's manager - sans Kinks - parked his Mercedes backstage. Graham bodily ejected him, ordering a forklift operator to upend the car unless he left. He left.
Finally, twenty minutes after they were supposed to have taken the stage, the Kinks pulled up and strolled to their dressing room. Graham was still seething. "Five minutes!" he screamed at a band assistant as he towered outside. Five minutes later, he pounded on the door, yelling, "NOW!"
The band finally emerged. [Lead singer] Ray Davies walked slowly, loitering by Benatar's door, a big, bemused smile on his face. Graham simply watched; if looks could kill, they'd have had to take Davies home in a paper bag. When the band got to the base of the stage stairs and then stood around with no apparent intention of taking the stage, something snapped in Graham.
In two strides, the promoter was halfway up the stairs, shouting at Davies and a Kinks aide. "All right, that's it!" Graham finally bellowed. He galloped up the rest of the stairs, and it was clear that as soon as he made it to the microphone, the Kinks would be off the bill. Before he got there, Davies and crew were on their way onstage. By then, it was nearly dark. The band played a sloppy, flashy set. The two video screens were not used.
So that's a pretty wild story right there. But the power struggle is even more interesting if you listen to the banter between songs made in this recording. For instance, the Kinks seemed to end their set a few songs early (despite giving the longest performance of the day already), telling the audience that they wanted to keep going but weren't allowed to play any longer. That obliged Graham to go out on stage and ask the audience to cheer louder so the Kinks would agree to keep playing. Then, Davies said snarkily, "I consider this truly a great honor to be asked by the one and only Bill Graham to do an encore for his, the pitiful, the pinnacle... of something."
I'm guessing at that moment Graham was contemplating just how many years he'd have to serve in prison if he murdered Davies on stage!
In retrospect, I think both Davies and Graham were at fault. Davies showed a complete inability to be diplomatic, in fact showing almost a childlike glee at snubbing authority. Based on this incident, I can easily see why the Kinks were banned by a musician's union from touring in the U.S. from 1965 to 1969. They were the only famous band to get banned like that, at least in that era.
But on the other hand, Graham was known to have an explosive temper, and he didn't cover himself in glory either. For instance, it was a petty move for him to turn off the huge video screens only for the Kinks set.
It's strange he was so insistent on sticking to the time, given that there were only two more acts to follow the Kinks, and each of the big acts in the festival played sets that lasted about an hour each. So if the Kinks went on when they were supposed to, and the following acts played the expected amount of time (which in fact is what they did), Day Two would have ended before 10 P.M. That would have been shockingly early for a massive festival like this, where delays of many hours were the norm. In fact, for many big festivals like Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, the last acts of each evening often didn't finish their sets until after sunrise! And given the extreme heat of this particular festival, I'm sure the crowd would have much preferred to have less of the acts during the day and more of them at night.
In any case, I think it's a safe bet that the Kinks never took part in any concert or festival organized by Bill Graham after this. That alone would have impacted their popularity in the U.S. for the rest of their career, because Graham organized so many concerts, especially big festivals like this. For instance, this probably explains why the Kinks and/or Ray Davies never played at any of the yearly Bridge School Benefits despite being a great fit for the acoustic format of those concerts, since that was still operated by Graham's organization long after Graham died in the 1990s.
One final note. In his 2013 book "Americana," Davies wrote: "...The Kinks kept their side of the bargain at the US Festival; we honored our word and, more than anything else, delivered a knockout show, which was all that mattered at the end of the day." That's not just self-promotion either. I've read praise for the performance elsewhere. Probably, the conflict with Graham got the band all fired up.
Moving on to the music presented here, the Kinks released their studio album "Give the People What They Want" in 1981, and many of the songs played came from that. They would release the album "State of Confusion" in 1983. One song they played here, "Bernadette," would appear on that album. Another one, "Entertainment," was supposed to go on that album, and was even announced as "Here's a song from our next album." But it ultimately wouldn't make the cut. It would finally appear on the 1989 album "UK Jive."
This album is an hour and 25 minutes long.
045 Introduction [Instrumental] (Kinks)
046 Around the Dial (Kinks)
047 The Hard Way (Kinks)
048 Where Have All the Good Times Gone (Kinks)
049 Catch Me Now, I'm Falling (Kinks)
050 talk (Kinks)
051 Destroyer (Kinks)
052 Yo-Yo (Kinks)
053 talk (Kinks)
054 Lola (Kinks)
055 Entertainment (Kinks)
056 talk (Kinks)
057 Low Budget (Kinks)
058 Back to Front (Kinks)
059 talk (Kinks)
060 Art Lover (Kinks)
061 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
062 talk (Kinks)
063 Come On Now (Kinks)
064 A Gallon of Gas (Kinks)
065 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
066 Bernadette (Kinks)
067 talk (Kinks)
068 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
069 talk (Kinks)
070 Pressure (Kinks)
071 You Really Got Me (Kinks)
072 talk (Kinks)
https://www.upload.ee/files/17500956/VA-1982USFstvlDay0204TKnks_atse.zip.html
alternate:
https://pixeldrain.com/u/yBEFyCuT
alternate:
https://bestfile.io/K455aNnPjdKajmM/file
The cover photo is from this exact concert. I used the Krea AI program to improve the detail.
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