Assuming that a healthy percentage of it carried falsified ID, the average age of the audience at this year’s Los Angeles Kinks concert might have been 20. But the average IQ must have been three or four times that.

Behold The Kinks’ new konstituency.

They littered the parking lot with shattered liquor bottles, did the members of this audience, and filled the restroom sinks with puke. Having apparently partied with all their might on the way to the Fabulous Forum, the home of the Los Angeles Lakers and Kings, a lot of them lay moaning and mumbling in the aisles once they finally got there.

The average age of the audience at this year’s Los Angeles Kinks concert having been 20 means that its average member wasn’t yet old enough for nursery school when ’‘You Really Got Me” came out, and was in about the third grade when “Lola” set a shocked world to trying to figure out whether its heroine were really its hero.

But at least one member of the Forum audience that night—the one in orange velour tie—was old enough to have been a Kinks fan from the night during Christmas vacation in 1964 when “You Really Got Me” got him so excited when it came on his car radio for the first time that he nearly made a complete mess of one of lower Sunset Blvd.’s more treacherous curves, and consequently nearly didn’t: report back for the rest of nis senior year, graduate without honors (how could he continue to overachieve in the classrooms of his high school when there was a British Invasion raging outside?), and grow up to be the rock critic the West Coast most loved to loathe.

For that old chap, who’d adored The Kinks for seven of the best years of his life (and who, in his 30s, had developed a penchant for the melodramatic turn of phrase), the concert was sort of an Altamont of the soul.

In his day, the old chap had been famous for his love of The Kinks. That he was much more famous for his love of The Kinks than he was for his own music did indeed frustrate him. But he took consolation in the feeling that there was scarcely a more wonderful group in rock with which to be so relentlessly associated. They were alternately funny and touching, ever tuneful, and their lyrics explored a constellation of concerns—social ecology, if you will—that no other group had ever thought to.

“You Really Got Me” got me so excited that I nearly didn't report back lor the rest of my senior year.

And they made such exquisite noises. For instance, people invariably think of The Beach Boys when the subject of pop harmony singing comes up, but nothing they ever recorded approached The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” in the gorgeousness of its choral ooh-ing.

There’d been a time too when the old chap hadn’t just adored the group’s music, but also felt the most intense affinity to the guy who wrote and sang it.

Five years after he barely avoided crashing his car on one of lower Sunset Blvd.’s more treacherous curves, he found himself doing much freelance writing for The Kinks’ record company, largely on the basis of the rapturous things he’d writen about them in his college newspaper.

A woman he’d loved had broken his heart a couple of months before, and it hadn’t yet shown signs of recovering. In one of the selftorturing gestures that characterized that period of his squandered youth, he’d moved into that part of his city in which there was always something there to remind him.

Having rigged his phone so that he could make calls, but not receive them, he went days without speaking to anyone, days just watching the inmates of the convalescent hospital across the walk for hours on end from his second-story window. Days just wandering, as though invisible, among the human debris that littered the beachfront 30 seconds to the west. Whole days under headphones, listening five and six times in a row (thank you for the daze) to Tommy and The Stooges and especially The Kinks’ Arthur—that astonishing collection of songs about the frustrations of English working class life that Davies sang with sufficient passion and rage to make one who’d never even been to England, and knew nothing of class, tremble with indignation.

There’d been no more agonizingly lonely and purposeless a time in the Kinks fan’s life. So when The Company flew him to Manhattan to greet The Kinks and convey to them how pleased it was that they’d deigned to tour American markets for the first time in four years, it seemed to him, with his flair for self-dramatization, to be saving his life.

He clung to his friendship with Ray Davies as though to a life preserver in a furious sea. As demanding of attention as the most neurotic groupie, starstruck beyond any recognition of propriety, he could hardly be pried from the Davies side, even when it came time, for instance, for the group to go gladhand local program directors. There was even an embarrassing confrontation with The Company’s L.A. promotion man.

Davies himself, two years the fan’s senior, but wiser by several eons, seemed to recognize that he’d somehow been stuck with the job of making his fan’s life worth living, but uttered not a syllable of protest, was never anything but patient and magnanimous. Indeed, it was he, to whose comfort both its combatants were ostensibly committed, who defused The Confrontation in a way that spared the fan what might have been a fatal amount of embarrassment.

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This was no ordinary rock star.

When he’d come to The Company’s Burbank offices earlier in the year, Ray had worn an orange velour tie of which he was clearly fond. And only fittingly, thought his fan, who was convinced that in his entire lifetime he’d seen no more wonderful a garment.

It took Davies about five seconds, once he realized how his fan loved it, to make him a gift of it.

This was no ordinary rock star.

The friendship dissipated shortly thereafter, but the fan’s love for the group endured even after Davies ceased to be rock’s most melodic humanist—a dealer in the most extraordinarily touching, compassionate songs—and became instead a writer of tedious laments about the life of the touring musician, and then an indefatigable rockoperamonger. The fan’s love endured in the face of these appalling developments because no one else in rock had ever seemed more his audience’s friend onstage than Ray Davies, nor any group, in an age of ever greater fascination with technology and technique, more blissfully near to chaos from first bar to last than The Kinks, those wonderful slobs of drum and fretboard.

But they got greedy. They wanted a hit so bad that they made a disco record. They wanted a hit so bad that they cannibalized their own repertoire (as in the woeful “Destroyer”). They wanted a hit so bad that they cannibalized others’ repertoires (as in the woeful “Catch Me Now I’m Falling,” the only notable thing about which is how brazenly it appropriates the riff of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”).

They got no hit, but after Van Halen launched themselves with “You Really Got Me,” they came to be perceived as sufficiently... awesome...by association to quit playing venues where one could feel the warmth of Ray Davies’s (it’s pronounced “Davis”) personality even from the cheap seats, and to set up shop in the sorts of venues to which their fans are admitted only after goons from local college athletic teams pat them down for weapons. (The old fan often wonders if his resenting that sort of thing means he doesn’t understand rock ’n’ roll anymore.)

Playing in arenas which God had intended for basketball and Journey, they felt compelled to crank up the volume and sustain on their guitar amps to the point at which they remained distinguishable from other favorites of the circuit mostly by virtue of neither Ray nor Brother Dave having the...awesome...chops that are the arena genre’s stock in trade.

They were ordinary rock stars. And less The Kinks anymore than XTC were.

The fan in the orange velour tie was as saddened by their Forum show as those around him—especially the conscious ones—seemed to be gladdened by it. He’d never felt older than he did as he made his way through the shattered Jack Daniels bottles and back to his car. On whose radio he never seems to hear anything quite as exciting these days.