The Kinks - To the Bone (Live) (1993-1994)

The Kinks are great! At this point, I've posted 11 stray tracks albums by them, plus another four BBC albums, plus several more by Ray or Dave Davies. But I'm not done with them, not by a long shot!

Next on my list is fixing their 1990s (albums) "To the Bone." It's hard to even say what year it came out in, because a single album version was released in Britain in 1994 and a double album version was released in the US in 1996. They were based on the same set of performances. But even though the British version was half as long as the US one, it contained two songs not on the US version ("Waterloo Sunset" and "Autumn Almanac").

So partly, I wanted to gather all the tracks from both versions in one place. But more important is that "To the Bone" really is two albums in one, and I wanted to separate the two. Basically, in 1994, the Kinks recorded a bunch of songs in a semi-acoustic style in front of a very small studio audience. It was the Kinks' attempt to ride the popular wave of "Unplugged" albums in the early 1990s. But for whatever reason they decided to mix in these recordings with some professionally recorded concerts from 1993 and 1994. Then they mixed the live and (mostly) studio tracks in no apparent order on both versions of the "To the Bone" albums.

What I've done is to simply make an album out of all the true concert tracks, and then another album out of all the in-the-studio semi-acoustic tracks. I think that makes a heck of a lot more sense, from a listening point of view. So here's the first of two albums, the live one.

The Kinks only released four live albums, including this one. Their previous one, "Live: The Road," from 1987, wasn't that good. So this serves as the last Kinks live album. They were in much better form in 1993 and 1994 than in 1987.

The vast majority of this album comes from two concerts, one in late 1993 and one in early 1994. So I've clustered the tracks from each show together, with the 1993 one naturally coming first. There's one more song taken from another 1993 concert. I stuck that at the very end, since the song in question is "You Really Got Me," and that's a great show closer.

I also stuck in one extra unreleased song, an acoustic version of "Scattered" that comes from a Swedish TV show in 1994. I put it here because I think it's a really nice performance, with just Ray and Dave Davies, and I didn't have any other good place to put it. (I'm planning on posting another album of performances from the BBC and other TV or radio appearances from this era, but that already has a different version of the same song on it.)

In case you're curious, this makes for a 57 minute long album. I'll follow this with the studio "To the Bone" album, which is around the same length.

01 Do It Again [Acoustic] (Kinks)
02 Do It Again (Kinks)
03 Celluloid Heroes (Kinks)
04 I'm Not like Everyone Else (Kinks)
05 Days (Kinks)
06 Scattered [Acoustic] (Kinks)
07 All Day and All of the Night (Kinks)
08 Sunny Afternoon [Acoustic] (Kinks)
09 Dedicated Follower of Fashion [Acoustic] (Kinks)
10 Autumn Almanac [Acoustic] (Kinks)
11 Lola (Kinks)
12 Come Dancing (Kinks)
13 Till the End of the Day (Kinks)
14 Give the People What They Want (Kinks)
15 State of Confusion (Kinks)
16 You Really Got Me (Kinks)

https://www.imagenetz.de/hhFb4

The British and US versions of "To the Bone" have totally different album covers. So it made sense to me to use one cover for each of the two albums I've made with the rearranged song orders. Since the British version came out in 1994, and all the songs here are from 1994 or earlier, I've used the British one here without making any changes to it.