Same difference?

I finally got around to reading X-Ray three decades after the fact. I was in trepidation because reading Pete Townshend’s autobio had left me soured on the man and his music, and I certainly didn’t want that to happen to my most beloved band of all time (it’s a head/heart thing - while no one can deny the genius of the Beatles, we all know where our heart lies). To get this out of the way first, as every single reviewer mentions it: the framing device of Ray being interviewed by an anonymous Face in the Crowd from The Corporation is stupid and really, really interrupts the flow. But cut that out, when he’s engaging in stories of the Kinks’ early days, it’s actually interesting. As any fan of the Kinks should know, Ray is a born storyteller, and if he’d never gone into music, he could have made a mediocre living as a second-rate short story writer at a second-rate provincial MFA workshop (this is not an insult - there are few industries as oversupplied with massive talent.) As often is the case in rock star autobiographies, he focuses on things that I don’t care about and too much on the mundane details of lawsuits and copyright royalties (Ray is such a whiner he did, in fact, loosely base one the Kinks’ Klassic LPs, Lola, about how much the music industry is run by corrupt gangsters and sucks).

2 - I know that Ray is always hiding behind characters in his songs, but the seedy character he plays in this

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Some book critic called this Nabokovian and that’s right: the memoirs of a dirty old man, an unreliable narrator that you can’t trust. Too much seedy sex (I’ll never look at Eydie Gorme’s tits the same way again), of all ambisexual variety. It seems that while Ray was the suburban hubbie married too young, Dave was the rock star (see “Two Sisters”), and Mick Avory was the pervert up for anything. Was everyone in this band bisexual?!

Anyway, I’m no prude, but too much unpleasantly unsavory sex scenes of blow jobs in toilets. I mean, it’s honest of the experience of every ’60s rock star, but is it necessary to hear about it?

3 - It might be nice to hear about the actual music. There’s not enough about that or Ray’s songwriting, which is why I came here in the first place. The bit about “See My Friends”, which directly inspired the entire career of the Velvet Underground, is a bit of an outlier. According to legend Ray’s inspiration from Indian fishermen droning from his hotel window and almost bannned by the BBC for its alleged homosexual subtext.

The book is by no means complete. It ends in 1973 with his divorce from his long-suffering wife (aren’t all rock star wives long-suffering?).

In sum, it really didn’t change my mind or feelings about the Kinks, as most everyone who’s a fan is well aware that Ray is a problematic autistic who can only observe other human beings from an analytical distance.