KEYS TO THE KINKDOM

Ray Davies isn’t talking to the press on this Kinks tour of America, and even though I’m nominally representing the fourth estate myself, I don’t blame him a bit. My editor apologized to me for our lack of an exclusive on the Kinks, saying that the band’s recent, unprecedented string of chart hits—“Superman." “Catch Me Now I’m Falling,” and “A Gallon Of Gas,” all from the goldmine LP Low Budget, which has allowed the Kinks their greatest incursion of American radio since the similarly flukey success of “Lola” in 1970—had apparently “gone to Ray’s head.”