“It was the first heavy guitar riff rock record,” says Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, adding that he really doesn’t like the term ‘heavy metal’. Still, the sheer simplistic brutality of the 1964 classic You Really Got Me was not only a crucial element of metal, but also punk. It’s slack-jawed and punchy, wastes neither time nor energy. It’s the sound of youthful impatience. The apotheosis of lust. Or, as Dave puts it: “a love song for street kids.”
It wasn’t meant to be that way. One of the first five songs that Dave’s brother Ray ever wrote, You Really Got Me was supposed to be a sophisticated walking blues, the sort of smooth and easy 12-bar one might expect of Big Bill Broonzy, Lead Belly or, perhaps more appropriately, considering the song started its life on piano, Gerry Mulligan. The tempo and style remained comparatively sedate right up to the point that it was recorded as The Kinks’ third Pye single.
Producer Shel Talmy’s sluggish original version buried the guitars in reverb and the band were determined to re-record, but the record company weren’t prepared to pay out for a further session due to the The Kinks’ first two singles having bombed. Ultimately, the band dipped into their own pockets and transformed the song into the restless beast we all know and love.
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The stripped-to-the-bone rebore of the core riff (inspired by Jimmy Giuffre’s The Train And The River, finally nailed while working out the chords to The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie) and its distorted guitar sound that launched a million garage bands was achieved by Dave setting about the speaker cone of his Elpico ‘Little Green’ AC55 amp with a razor blade and then boosting its volume through a Vox AC-30.
As is frequently the case with the battling Davies brothers, this story is not without controversy, with Ray claiming in a 2014 radio interview that he’d created the distortion himself: “We cranked up the amplifier and I stuck a knitting needle in it.”
“I alone created this sound,” Dave responded on Facebook. “I am just flabbergasted and shocked at the depth of his selfish desire to take credit for everything. I never once claimed songwriting royalties on You Really Got Me, yet this song would not have happened without my guitar sound.”
The frantic guitar solo that follows Ray’s heartfelt scream of ‘Oh no!’ (reportedly deployed to cover up Dave audibly telling Ray to “fuck off” as he offered encouragement – a story later refuted by Talmy) was not played by Jimmy Page, despite apocryphal tales and claims to the contrary by Deep Purple‘s Jon Lord, who also claimed to have played piano on the song. Page, by his own admission, did play on some Kinks recordings, but not on You Really Got Me.
“This is a result of internet meddling and muddling,” Page told Rolling Stone. “I wasn’t on You Really Got Me, but I did play on the Kinks’ records. That’s all I’m going to say about it. But every time I do an interview, people ask me about You Really Got Me. So maybe somebody can correct Wikipedia so people won’t keep asking me.”
However, there may be a version of You Really Got Me that does feature the future Led Zeppelin man.
“The [version] of You Really Got Me that was actually released was the third [recording],” Ray Davies said in Ritchie Yorke’s book, Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography. “There was a demo thing with Dave playing lead, a second cut which may have had Jimmy Page on it (and which Pye Records still have in their vaults) and a third which definitely had Dave on it.
“I know because I was standing right next to him when he played on it. And that’s the one which was released.”
To focus exclusively on You Really Got Me as a guitar record, remarkable only for Dave’s ‘invention’ of the riff, is to do sole composer Ray a severe disservice, because his vocal performance is utterly extraordinary: the very definition of the sex-crazed lout; mod-era juvenile delinquency incarnate. Terminally frustrated rock’n’roll angst to the bone.
“When You Really Got Me came out, it was so different,” Dave told The Guardian. “It seemed as if nobody liked it – until it became an international hit. I remember hearing it on the radio for the first time in my mate’s Humber Super Snipe. I was transfixed. I thought it was someone else. I said: “Is that us? That’s us!”
The song was released as a single on August 4, 1964, and hit the top of the UK chart the following month, before making the top ten in the US.
In the decades since, You Really Got Me has been covered by artists as varied as Van Halen, Iggy Pop, Sly & the Family Stone, Mott the Hoople, Lords of the New Church, David Essex, Oingo Boingo, Robert Palmer and Toots and the Maytals.
And to bring things full circle, You Really Got Me‘s status as ground zero for heavy metal was unofficially recognised in 2010, when Ray Davies joined unlikely forces with Metallica for a blunt-force version of the song on his See My Friends duets album.
“The original Kinks version was more jazzy and had a slippery kind of vocal,” explained Davies. “With Metallica, it had to be more full-on.”