But also, I'm on a new kick of collecting episodes of the TV series "VH-1 Storytellers." I've posted a few of these already, but I want to post more because this seems to be something else that has slipped into a collective memory hole, much like the US Festivals. A handful of artists have released their Storytellers episodes on audio and/or video, such as Ringo Starr, David Bowie, Billy Idol, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson (as a duet), Meat Loaf, and Culture Club, so those remain well known. But from 1996 to 2015, a remarkable number of major musical acts performed full episodes for the VH-1 Storytellers show, yet most of the music seems to have been forgotten on bootlegs, other than those for a few really big names. I found a website that tracks missing TV episodes, and it turns out many episodes have entirely disappeared, with no audio or video to be found in the public domain. Others remain very obscure. So I plan to post as many good ones I can find on this blog.
It's fitting to start this new effort of mine with this Ray Davies episode, because it was the very first episode, and for good reason. Davies, the lead singer and main songwriter of the Kinks, was starting his solo career as the Kinks were breaking up. He wrote an autobiography titled "X-Ray," which was released in 1994. In 1995, he began touring in an acoustic format (only backed with an additional guitarist), alternating between reading excerpts from his book and playing songs. He called this tour "Storyteller." The people behind this TV show were so taken by his concerts in this format that they basically stole it for the show, even down to the nearly identical title. In his banter during the concert featured here, Davies even half-jokingly said of VH-1, "Out of this, they'll get a series and they'll copyright it, and they'll tell me to piss off" - which is basically what happened.
Three things make this series special, in my opinion. One is that while most acts didn't follow Davies in going fully acoustic, some did, and most at least stripped their sound back, resulting in different versions than what you'd normally find from their concerts. The second is that the episodes were almost always filmed in small clubs of a couple hundred people, resulting in a more intimate atmosphere, and better sound quality, than was typically the case, especially for the big name artists. And third, and really the whole point that was built into the title, was that the artists were told to tell stories relating to the songs. On the downside, these albums are pretty short, typically about 45 minutes, to make up an hour-long TV show with commercials. But a few of the bootlegs have managed to capture the full concerts which usually lasted much longer.
Now, getting to this album, I assumed this wouldn't be so interesting to me, because Davies released a live album in 1998 called "Storyteller" based on these same acoustic tours. I figured it would be basically the same, only shorter, since the Storyteller album is about 75 minutes long, and this is 45 minutes long. But it turns out that Davies has such a deep well of classic songs to draw from that there's almost no overlap. Only two songs - "London Song" and "You Really Got Me" - are performed on both! So if you have that album and like it, this makes for an ideal companion piece.
The sound quality here is generally excellent. However, I made a lot of edits to make it sound better. I was able to find two different videos of the episode, but no audio bootlegs. There were lots of little flaws in the main video I converted to mp3s. For instance, during each of the commercial breaks in the TV show, the show would stop and instead bits of songs from earlier or later in the show were played for a few seconds as teasers. I got rid of all that and stitched things together to make this sound seamless. It was lucky I found two videos to draw from, because sometimes there were missing bits in one that I could find in the other.
I did a more extreme edit for the song "Lola." Unfortunately, the show had a bad habit of starting each episode in the middle of a song, and that was the case here, with "Lola." The episode started with only about the last minute of the song. But then, even more annoyingly, the episode ended with more of the song, about the first minute, before fading out. Had it just been the first snippet, I would have let it slide. But with two snippets, I was tempted to put them together. So I moved the part at the end to the very beginning. However, that left me with a missing chunk of the middle of the song. I went looking for a bootleg of a similar acoustic performance from the same year, and found one. So this version is made up of three different parts stitched together. That's why it has "[Edit]" in the name. But in fact I could have put that in the name of many songs here, mostly due to editing the applause at the endings.
This album is 46 minutes long.
01 Lola [Edit] (Ray Davies)
02 talk (Ray Davies)
03 Sunny Afternoon (Ray Davies)
04 talk (Ray Davies)
05 Come Dancing (Ray Davies)
06 talk (Ray Davies)
07 London Song (Ray Davies)
08 talk (Ray Davies)
09 Celluloid Heroes (Ray Davies)
10 talk (Ray Davies)
11 Dead End Street (Ray Davies)
12 talk (Ray Davies)
13 A Well Respected Man (Ray Davies)
14 talk (Ray Davies)
15 Harry Rag (Ray Davies)
16 talk (Ray Davies)
17 A Well Respected Man [Reprise] (Ray Davies)
18 talk (Ray Davies)
19 To the Bone (Ray Davies)
20 talk (Ray Davies)
21 You Really Got Me (Ray Davies)
22 talk (Ray Davies)
23 Days (Ray Davies)
24 Waterloo Sunset (Ray Davies)
25 talk (Ray Davies)
alternate link:
https://pixeldrain.com/u/HsYc7s4E
I couldn't find any good photos of Ray Davies from this exact concert. I considered getting a screenshot from the video of it on YouTube, but that was low-res and blurry. So instead I'm using a photo of him on the "White Room" TV show from 1995.
Thank you
ReplyDeleteThank you! I always enjoyed the VH1 storyteller format
ReplyDeleteThese will be great. Thanks so much for putting them together for us!
ReplyDeletethanks a lot. I had this one as one big file. This is way better!
ReplyDeleteMany Thanks. This is brilliant.
ReplyDelete