When The Kinks released their first big hit ‘You Really Got Me’, they didn’t just up the ante on the British invasion of the United States pop charts. They inadvertently laid the groundwork for punk rock with a raw, rasping power-chord riff that shook rock and roll to its foundations.
It seems strange, then, that this riff wasn’t a deliberate act of songwriting at all. It was an accident which came about while brothers Ray and Dave Davies were trying to work out the guitar chords for their favourite song from across the pond.
The elder Davies initially wrote the song on his family piano at home, at much slower tempo with a jazzy swing to it. When he showed it to his younger brother, however, the band’s lead guitarist was insistent that the piece should be led by a guitar hook.
Meanwhile, the manager of The Kinks, Larry Page, had been encouraging them for a while to model their sound on a song from overseas, which was the most successful single on their record label at the time. The song was a lo-fi rock recording with a simple yet powerful three-chord riff, which had British teenagers doing a new wild dance move called “the shake”.
When the Davies brothers were trying to play this song by ear, they accidentally inverted the chords of its guitar riff to the rhythm of its main vocal line. And just like that, their own killer riff was born. ‘You Really Got Me’ had its hook.
The group’s producer, Shel Talmy, has confirmed that they brought ‘You Really Got Me’ to him with the guitar riff already in place. “It was there the first time they played that song in the studio and it was Dave’s invention,” Talmy told Sound on Sound in 2009. The younger Davies had taken his older brother’s laid-back jazz tune and added a dollop of dirty garage rock rawness taken straight from the United States’ Pacific Northwest.
So, what was the song they took from?
The garage rock anthem that The Kinks’ famous brothers had been trying to work out was The Kingsmen’s raucous 1963 single ‘Louie Louie’. If we sing the song’s main chorus line alongside Dave Davies’ amp-busting riff for ‘You Really Got Me’, the inspiration is obvious. The rhythm is identical, and the riff’s chords match the melodic pattern for Kingsmen frontman Jack Ely’s intonation of the lyric “We gotta go”.
Ray Davies and co were such big fans of the track that they worked it into their live sets from late 1964 onwards and released their cover version on the EP Kinksize Session. Ironically, their version fails to replicate The Kingsmen’s iconic riff in its entirety or Ely’s intonation in his delivery of the song’s vocals.
But ‘Louie Louie’ had already served a much more important purpose for The Kinks than its appearance on their setlists. And thanks to ‘You Really Got Me’, its influence extended to another British Invasion first hit later in 1964.
The Who’s Pete Townshend was trying to work out the chords Dave Davies had used for his riff when he came up with the hook for his band’s debut single ‘I Can’t Explain’. We should be thankful guitar riffs are so difficult to master.
