Most days, I listen to Van Halen, Foo Fighters, or Green Day
to help me through my “Thirty Minutes of Hell” workout, you know, something
high energy and especially loud, which helps drown out the sounds of me panting
and the occasional groan. Today, though, their brand of accompaniment doesn’t
strike me right, and so I go with something else: The Kinks’ Live - The Road. As the title suggests, it is a mostly live album, a collection of songs
recorded in concert by that most English of English bands circa 1987.
It seems an unlikely choice, I know, but it works surprisingly
well. The Kinks happen to be my all-time favorite band, and they flat out know
how to rock in concert. I crank through the first three songs, and before I
know it, I’ve already whittled twelve minutes off today’s timed descent into suffering.
The fourth song begins. It’s “Come Dancing.”
If you were around in the eighties, you might remember “Come
Dancing.” It was the last big hit The Kinks ever had. It’s a bright, breezy
song with a wistful, melancholy message, the kind that Ray Davies is so adept
at writing. It’s the kind of song that seems crafted specifically to be remembered
fondly. It’s the kind of song that you could easily imagine being sung in an
English pub during the wee hours of the morning a hundred and fifty years from
now.
