Dave Davies, cofounder and lead guitarist of the Kinks, outside of Mint Designer Boutique in Tenafly. Photo: Rebecca G. Wilson
Dave Davies, cofounder and lead guitarist of the Kinks, is sitting in a back booth at Miller’s Bakery in Tenafly on a quiet afternoon. Between sips of a cappuccino with almond milk, he reflects on creating the abrasive, thunderous, duh-DAH-dah-duh-DAH guitar sound that is essential to “You Really Got Me,” the epoch-making song released 60 years ago this summer.
“When I came across the tone for ‘You Really Got Me,’ I was stunned that you could do that with a guitar,’’ he says.
A little bake shop in New Jersey might not be the first place you’d think to find the English music icon but, as anyone who follows his active social media accounts knows, Davies divides his time between his native London and the Bergen County home of his girlfriend, Rebecca G. Wilson. But he is not merely a part-time visitor to the Garden State. He is a celebrator of its glories—a Jersey guy with a British passport.
You can find him flipping through the used and rare vinyl at BB’s Records in Bergenfield (“We consider him not really a customer, but a friend,” says the store’s Anna Pantoliano) or picking up gluten-free pasta and rice pudding from Jerry’s Gourmet in Englewood. He indulges his love of vegetarian dishes at Rudra Indian Bistro in Teaneck (“He would never brag about himself,” says owner Vinay Kallee) and is known to ask the crew at the Cottage Bar just down the street to switch the television over to an English football match featuring his beloved Arsenal.
“I think Dave fits right in,” E Street Band member and Middletown-raised Steven Van Zandt says. “He has a working-class sort of journeyman mentality, as most of us do in New Jersey, because we’re not quite New York and we’re not Philadelphia.”
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In the booth at Miller’s, Davies, 77, wears a straight-brimmed black fedora, a purple Ben Sherman shirt, and a black coat with a Nehru collar. A necklace of tulsi wood meditation beads from India, a gift from a poet friend in London, is draped from his neck. His manner is warm, talkative and modest. He doesn’t, for example, mention that Jimi Hendrix himself once asked Davies how he got the sound for “You Really Got Me.”
Dave Davies with the Kinks, circa 1964 (bottom left, below brother Ray). Photo: Alamy
The story is part of rock ’n’ roll lore. As a teenager with a love for messing with the electronics in amplifiers, he hoped to conjure new sounds for the gigs he was playing around London with his older brother, Ray. Inspired by what he called a “brainwave,” he slashed the speaker cone of his tiny, 10-watt Elpico amp with a razor blade, causing the edges to vibrate against the outside shell of the speaker. The result was “a visceral, jagged roar when I played my guitar,” Davies writes in his 2023 autobiography, Living on a Thin Line, now out in paperback.
But the first few singles released by the fledgling Kinks, whose members also included Pete Quaife on bass and Mick Avory on drums, didn’t employ the razor-induced roar. “We had a couple of flops,” Davies tells New Jersey Monthly.
Then the band went into the studio to record “You Really Got Me,” which had been knocking the kids out during live shows. The record company didn’t think much of it. The producer favored a slow, reverb-saturated version that buried the guitar sound. The band persisted, recording the version we all know now—with Davies’s monster signature riff drenched in homemade distortion.
Released in the U.K. on August 4, 1964, “You Really Got Me” rose to number one on the charts, surging past tunes by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. The arc of the song’s influence is long. Regarded as the foundation stone for heavy forms of rock (metal, punk), it has been covered by generations of bands (from Van Halen to Oingo Boingo to Green Day) and celebrated by the likes of Leonard Bernstein, who once called it “a really terrific song, a barbaric number.”
Davies was just 17 years old when the song hit, the youngest of eight children (six sisters, followed by two brothers) who grew up in Muswell Hill in north London. Ray, three years older, was moody and brilliant. Dave, the spoiled baby of the family, was outgoing, rebellious and spiritual.
His book details the full story, including his famously contentious relationship with his older brother (“Ray and I are muddling along okay”); the early disastrous tour of America that kept the band out of the country for four critical years; the time Avory struck him on the back of the head with a hi-hat, knocking him unconscious; his relationships with both women and men (“I happily explored the possibilities without ever attaching labels like ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’ to what I was doing”); the groupies, the trashed hotel rooms, and the horrors of drugs and alcohol; his evolution into a songwriter who penned Kinks classics like “Death of a Clown,” “Susannah’s Still Alive,” “Strangers” and “Living on a Thin Line”; and, finally, his emergence from a life of physical and mental turmoil into a kind of state of grace.
“As I look around me, everyone seems to be carrying a sadness, or a loneliness, and we really have to support and nurture each other to make our lives richer and more meaningful,” he writes.
In 2011, Davies met his Jersey muse. Wilson, then a freelance writer, interviewed him for Punk Globe magazine. Initially an online flirtation across the ocean, the two started dating when Davies toured the United States in 2012. She now serves as his personal assistant and occasional backup singer.
They share an easy camaraderie, telling stories about the rescue cats and dogs they have fostered over the past decade. Wilson has no problem parting with the animals after permanent homes are found. Davies, who has been known to bottle-feed kittens, has a harder time. “I’m a soft touch,” he says.
The most powerful impression one gets speaking to Davies is how profoundly music has shaped his life. He speaks reverently of performers like Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, the Everly Brothers and Hank Williams, whose songs enraptured him as a kid in Muswell Hill. There, in the back booth of Miller’s Bakery, he sings, “Hello, Mary Lou, goodbye heart,’’ the signature opening line of Rick Nelson’s 1961 hit of the same name, his voice catching with emotion. “Wow. The tone. The guitar. The voice.” Music spills out of him. It is his gift to the world.
The interview over, Davies and Wilson walk across Washington Street to pose for pictures in front of Mint Designer Boutique, attracted by a pair of decorative guitars in its window. The shop’s owner, Simona Blumenfeld Kornberg, emerges with a broad smile at the sight of the rock star. “What a surreal and exhilarating experience,’’ she says.
A group of high schoolers in hoodies and backpacks wander by. Even they are impressed. The phones come out. Everyone gets a selfie with the great Dave Davies of the Kinks.
Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York.
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