The Kinks - "(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman"
1979
Give me seventies hard rock Kinks: Cleaned up around the edges and ready for heartland FM radio stations, still quirky and witty enough to bring a smile or a smirk. "Destroyer", "Do It Again", "Low Budget" - these are grade-A songs you don’t have to be a member of some B-side-collecting cult to enjoy. I remember years ago when Mojo magazine was on a mission to declare “Waterloo Sunset” the Greatest Song Ever Recorded*, and all I could do was shrug. This was at a time that I had gotten bored with sixties Kinks and no matter how hard Jimmy Page riffed on “All Day and All of the Night”, I still couldn’t get behind their proto-metal like I could with The Yardbirds or The Who. Plus The Kinks always had that frilly thing going, so there was always going to be some stupid Totally English crap song like “Sunny Afternoon” lurking and threatening to put me in a foul mood. (All the Brit bands succumbed to this jolly old nonsense: The Stones had “Something Happened To Me Yesterday”, I couldn't make it through a listen of Cream's Disraeli Gears last year because of it, and The Beatles' “When I’m Sixty-Four” is absolutely horrible. It's like they tried so hard to be American, that the Englishness would just seep out and cause unforced errors.) One night last winter, I gave a Kinks deep cuts playlist on Apple Music a shot, and nope: Dainty ditties about (probably) tea and crumpets or maybe somebody's mum. Not being into the velvet suit Anglophile thing and fueled by a couple of Surlys, I almost went on Twitter to declare The Kinks as overrated as The Beach Boys.
But. But. I remembered that in The Sopranos, The Kinks' "Living on a Thin Line" was used effectively in an episode that showed how disposable the girls who danced at The Bada Bing! were. Instead of badmouthing The Kinks, I instead assembled a seventies Kinks playlist. It was made up of mostly hard rockers, a good chunk of which were from the Low Budget album. Apparently, going to the Arista label in '76 paid off as The Kinks in that period recorded catchy, wry and/or poignant tunes launched solidly towards the mainstream. Hell yeah.
As for “(I Wanna Fly Like) Superman”, it packs a disco beat (all the rage in this era for FM stalwarts - The Stones, Kiss, and Rod Stewart also had disco songs) and has a killer riff that hints at disco-metal. While Superman himself is a complete and utter bore (he can fly, is really really strong, doesn't sleep with Margot Kidder zzzzz)**, Ray Davies just sings that he wants to be able to fly like him, not be him. Earlier on the same album, Davies sings in the voice of Captain America. Oddly, there were no bellows from the “don’t mix DC and Marvel” crowd.
*The Greatest Song Ever Recorded (my opinion this week) is Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean."
**And Superman is not from this planet. Can he be trusted? Would President Trump bar Superman from the United States? DC: I will send this story over the transom if I don’t hear from you soon.