Apeman You Really Got Me All Day And All Of The Night The Kinks

Apeman Album: Lola vs. Powerman And The Moneygoround, Part 1 (1970)
You Really Got Me Album: The Kinks (1964)
All Day And All Of The Night Album: The Kink Kronicles (1964)
by The KinksShow more

On "Apeman" Ray Davies had to re-dub the line "the air pollution is a-fogging up my eyes" for the radio, and for their November 1970 performance on Top Of The Pops, because it sounded too much like "the air pollution is 'a f---ing' up my eyes." The Kinks had the same situation with their previous single, "Lola" where Ray had to replace the line "Where you drink champagne and it tastes just Coca-Cola" with "Cherry cola" for airplay.

John Gosling (aka "The Baptist") wore a gorilla outfit while sitting behind his keyboards during the Kinks' Top of the Pops performance of this song.

The Kinks were able to perform this song in America because a year earlier, the musicians' union ban they incurred in 1965 had been lifted. They drew the ire of the union on their first American tour that year by clashing with technicians and cutting sets short. The ban kept The Kinks out of sight in the US until 1969.

The song was covered by former Marillion singer Fish for his 1993 album Songs from the Mirror.

This appeared in the 1986 Robin Williams movie Club Paradise.

Ray Davies wrote the lyric to "You Really Got Me" after watching girls dancing in a club. It's not the most articulate lyric, but that's the point: The guy in the song is so infatuated, all he can do is mutter at the girl how she's really got him.

In 2015, he told Rolling Stone: "I just remembered this one girl dancing. Sometimes you're so overwhelmed by the presence of another person and you can't put two words together."

Davies expanded on the song's inspiration during a 2016 interview with Q magazine: "I was playing a gig at a club in Piccadilly and there was a young girl in the audience who I really liked. She had beautiful lips. Thin, but not skinny. A bit similar to Françoise Hardy. Not long hair, but down to about there (points to shoulders). Long enough to put your hands through... (drifts off, wistfully)... long enough to hold. I wrote 'You Really Got Me' for her, even though I never met her."

Dave Davies got the dirty guitar sound by slashing the speaker cone on his amplifier with a razor blade. The vibration of the fabric produced an effect known as "fuzz," which became common as various electronic devices were invented to distort the sound. At the time, none of these devices existed, so Davies would mistreat his amp to get the desired sound, often kicking it.

According to Dave, the amp slashing happened in his bedroom in North London when he was irate - he had gotten his girlfriend, Sue Sheehan, pregnant, and their parents wanted to keep them from getting married. Instead of doing self harm, he used the blade on the amp to channel his rage. The amp was a cheap unit called an Elpico that had been giving him problems - he decided to teach it a lesson!

In the studio, the wounded Elpico was hooked into a another amp, which Dave recalls as a Vox AC30 and producer Shel Talmy remembers as a Vox AC10. The sound they got changed the course of rock history, becoming the first big hit to use distortion.

Davies and Sheehan stayed apart, but she had the baby, a girl named Tracey who finally met her father until 1993.
"You Really Got Me" is the first hit for The Kinks. Before releasing it, they put out two singles that flopped: a cover of "Long Tall Sally" and a Ray Davis composition called "You Still Want Me."

If "You Really Got Me" didn't sell, there was a good chance their record label would have dropped them, but the song gave them the hit they were looking for. Soon they were making TV appearances, gracing magazine covers, and playing on bills with The Beatles as an opening act. They didn't have an album out when the song took off, so they rushed one out to capitalize on the demand. This first, self-titled album has just five originals, with the rest being R&B covers - standard practice at the time for British Invasion bands.
The Kinks recorded a slower version with a blues feel on their first attempt, but hated the results. Ray Davies thought it came out clean and sterile, when he wanted it to capture the energy of their live shows. Dave Davies' girlfriend backed them up, saying it didn't make her want to "drop her knickers."

The Kinks' record company had no interest in letting them re-record the song, but due to a technicality in their contract, they were able to withhold the song until they could do it again. At the second session, Dave Davies used his slashed amp and Talmy produced it to get the desired live sound. This is the version that was released. Talmy liked the original: He claimed it would also have been a hit if it was released.

Ray Davies came up with famous riff on the piano at the family home. He played it for Dave, who transposed it to guitar. Their first version was 6-minutes long, but the final single release came in at just 2:20.

The first line was originally "you, you really got me going." Ray Davies changed it to "girl, you really got me going" at the suggestion of one of their advisers. The idea was to appeal to the teenage girls in their audience.

The final version of the song was recorded in July 1964, with Ray Davies on lead vocals, Dave Davies on guitar, and Pete Quaife on bass.

The Kinks didn't have a drummer when they first recorded the song a month earlier, so producer Shel Talmy brought in a session musician named Bobby Graham to play. When they recorded it the second time in July, Mick Avory had joined the band as their drummer, but Talmy didn't trust him and made him play tambourine while Graham played drums. A session musician named Arthur Greenslade played piano, and Jon Lord, years before he became a member of Deep Purple, claimed he played keyboards. Lord recalled with a laugh to The Leicester Mercury in 2000: "All I did was plink, plink, plink. It wasn't hard."

Released in the UK on August 4, 1964, "You Really Got Me" climbed to #1 on September 16, where it stayed for two weeks. In America, it was released in September and reached a peak of #7 in November.

Ray Davies is the only songwriter credited on this track, even though his brother Dave came up with the signature guitar sound. This was one of many friction points for the brothers, who are near the top of any list of the most combative siblings in rock. When they recorded the song, Ray was 22 and Dave was 17.

Ray Davies wrote this with the intention of making it big crowd-pleaser for their live shows. He was trying to write something similar to "Louie Louie," which was a big hit for The Kingsmen.

Shel Talmy, who produced this track, came to England from California and brought many American recording techniques with him. To get the loud guitar sound on "You Really Got Me," he recorded the guitar on two channels, one with distortion, the other without. When combined in the mix, the result was a loud, gritty sound that popped when it came on the radio.

"I was using some techniques I worked out on how to get a raunchier sound with distortion," Talmy said in a Songfacts interview. "It wasn't that difficult because I had done it before in America."

Talmy added: "It helped that Dave was as good as he was, and that he was quite happy to listen."

Talmy later produced the first album for The Who, My Generation.
It was rumored that Jimmy Page, who was a session musician at the time, played guitar on this track, which the band stridently denied. According to producer Shel Talmy, Page didn't play on this song but did play rhythm guitar on some album tracks because Ray Davies didn't want to sing and play guitar at the same time.

Ray Davies took pains to make sure we could understand the words. "I made a conscious effort to make my voice sound pure and I sang the words as clearly as the music would allow," he said.

A 1978 cover of this song was the first single for Van Halen, who played lots of Kinks songs in their early years doing club shows. Eddie Van Halen spent the next several years developing new guitar riffs, and like Davies, was known to manipulate his equipment to get just the right sound.

The powerful rhythm guitar riff was very influential on other British groups. The Rolling Stones recorded "Satisfaction," which was driven by the rhythm guitar, a year later.

According to Ray Davies, there was a great deal of jealousy among their peers when The Kinks came up with this song. He said in a 1981 interview with Creem: "There were a lot of groups going around at the time – the Yardbirds, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones – and nobody had really cracked with a sort of R&B #1 record. The songs were always sort of like The Beatles. When we first wanted to do a record, we couldn't get a recording gig. We were turned down by Decca, Parlophone, EMI and even Brian Epstein came to see us play and turned us down. So I started writing songs like 'You Really Got Me,' and I think there was a sheer jealousy that we did it first. Because we weren't a great group – untidy – and we were considered maybe a bit of a joke. But for some reason, I'd just had dinner, shepherd's pie, at my sister's house, and I sat down at the piano and played da, da, da, da, da. The funny thing is it was influenced by Mose Allison more than anybody else. And I think there was a lot of bad feeling. I remember we went to clubs like the Marquee, and those bands wouldn't talk to us because we did it first."

The Kinks' next single was "All Day And All Of The Night," which was basically a re-write of this song, but was also a hit.
This has been used in these TV shows:

The Simpsons ("The Canine Mutiny" - 1997)
Mad Men ("The Other Woman" - 2012)
Shameless ("Hurricane Monica" - 2012)
Blue Bloods ("Model Behavior" - 2011)
Daria ("Legends of the Mall" - 2000)
WKRP in Cincinnati ("Frog Story" - 1981)

And in these movies:

Minions (2015)
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel (2009)
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
The New Guy (2002)
Hilary and Jackie (1998)
Private Parts (1997)
A Bronx Tale (1993)
She's Out of Control (1989)
Night Shift (1982)
Over the Edge (1979)

It also appears in the video game Guitar Hero II (2006).
Ray Davies recalled in an interview with NME how his brother Dave created the distortion effect on this song. Said Ray: "We stuck knitting needles in the speakers, or in Dave's case, he slit the speakers with a razor blade. In those days we played records on a radiogram so loudly that they all sounded fuzzy. We thought, 'That's a great sound,' without realizing the speakers were buggered. Everyone else was using really clean guitar sounds, so for 'You Really Got Me' we hooked a little speaker up to a clean amp and came up with thunderous, unaffected, pure power."

In a Rolling Stone interview, Ray said that they "evolved" the sound by putting knitting needles in the speakers when recording this song. That statement prompted a rebuttal from his brother Dave, who wrote in to explain: "I alone created the guitar sound for the song with my Elpico amp that I bought. I slashed the speaker with a razor blade, which resulted in the 'You Really Got Me' tone. There were no knitting needles used in making my guitar sound."
One of the many things the Davies brothers disagree on is the Van Halen cover. Ray loves it. He told NME it is his favorite Kinks cover. "It was a big hit for them and put them on a career of excess and sent them on the road. So I enjoyed that one."

Dave Davies is not a fan. He told Rolling Stone: "Our song was working-class people trying to fight back. Their version sounds too easy."
The Who played this at many of their early concerts. Their first single was "I Can't Explain," also produced by Shel Talmy with a sound clearly borrowed from "You Really Got Me," as Pete Townshend played a dirty guitar riff similar to what Dave Davies' did.

The Kinks based All Day And All Of The Night on their first hit, "You Really Got Me." In their early years, The Kinks' record company pressured them to follow up hits very quickly, which created what lead singer Ray Davies described as an "assembly line" of songs. In this case, the tactic worked well, with the sound-a-like tune scoring them another hit.

Kinks frontman Ray Davies wrote this lusty rocker where the guy can't stand to be away from his girl even for a minute. He called it, "A neurotic song - youthful, obsessive and sexually possessive."

This was produced by group's manager, Shel Talmy, who helped The Kinks get a loud, dynamic sound. Talmy, an American who came to England when he smelled opportunity, also produced the first album for The Who.

The Kinks recycled the basic riff in the song "Destroyer," the style of which bares a resemblance to that of many Talking Heads songs, from that group's 1981 album Give The People What They Want. "Destroyer"'s lyrics contain references to other Kinks songs, including "Lola."

During a July 12, 2006 concert at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, Ray Davies explained how the song was originally rejected by his record company because it was "too blue-collar, too working-class" and because the record execs thought the guitar sounded like a dog's bark.
You might notice some similarities between this song and the 1968 Doors song "Hello, I Love You." According to Ray Davies, his publisher wanted to sue the Doors over it, but Ray refused to take legal action.

There was a persistent rumor that Jimmy Page played guitar on some early Kinks songs, including this one. When Ray Davies was asked about this in a 1981 interview with Creem, he replied: "I remember Page coming to one of our sessions when we were recording 'All Day And All Of The Night.' We had to record that song at 10 o'clock in the morning because we had a gig that night. It was done in three hours. Page was doing a session in the other studio, and he came in to hear Dave's solo, and he laughed and he snickered. And now he says that he played it! So I think he's an asshole, and he can put all the curses he wants on me because I know I'm right and he's wrong."