Fact #128662

Ray Davies RECALLS The Kinks' FIRST US TOUR…
WHY DID YOU FALL OUT WITH YOUR MANAGER Larry Page, AT THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL?
We didn't fall out with him. We didn't know what was being done. I just wanted to finish my tour and get home, write some songs and mow the lawn. But there was a dispute with the promoter in Nevada, that I didn't know about...

AND HE WAS ARRESTED IN PHILADELPHIA...
Was he? Well, there you are. I didn't know that. So that's where the trouble started and then we went onto the midwest and another promoter must have ... you must remember this is America, the sixties, English people coming over with long hair, playing American music. They didn't want us there. The kids wanted us there but the establishment didn't want us. They were looking for a way to make an example of somebody ... you talk about all these people, bluesmen, like the Stones, having hard times, being outrageous, the only band to my knowledge that were really made an example of were The Kinks. It cost us three years of our prime career because we couldn't go back there.

I don't think many people realise that. I could see the trouble starting in Nevada, because there was trouble backstage with the promoter. I never really found out the trouble. The promoter fell out with my manager. I think Larry and Robert fell out with the agent. They were cutting bad deals, and I think Larry was in dispute with them. Nothing to do with what we were doing. By the time we got to The Hollywood Bowl Page was nowhere around, or he was mixing with everybody else ... All I know is that by the time we got to the end of the tour in Seattle ...we went to San Francisco, the same promoter tried to get us ... we turned up at the gig in San Francisco and were not allowed to go on stage, because the same promoter was in dispute. Again we didn't know what was happening.

I think Larry had developed a complex. I think he wanted to be like Col Parker. He went around wearing a commander's hat. I think he was even arrested somewhere for impersonating an officer. You see, this man had a bad career as an artist. He wasn't really successful.

LARRY SAYS HE ONLY LEARNED YOU WEREN'T GOING ON STAGE AT HOLLYWOOD BOWL BECAUSE A GUY FROM THE DAILY MIRROR IN LONDON RANG AND TOLD HIM...
What? Rang and told him I wasn't going on? Why would I not go on at the Hollywood Bowl? I was going on after The Righteous Brothers, The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Sonny And Cher, Sam The Sham ... this was one of the seminal gigs of that period. Why would I not want to go on? We went down a storm.

By the time we got to Seattle, it was chaos. Everybody was shouting at us, calling us names. Any names they wanted to pick up on. I was just glad to get out of America. And as a result, that ban took place. We were intimidated a lot. In the mid-west, a guy ... he didn't really hurt me, but people were trying to intimidate us everywhere we went.

It must have been like a knock on, if he got arrested over taxes in Philadelphia, the next promoter was in Indiana and that's where ... in the Midwest ... and that's where we had real problems. I was really provoked and verbally assaulted. I just thought it was the terrain, part of the mad Midwest.

You see, where you're in a ... we were wrapped in cotton wool, you know? When you're thrown out there like that, all these other things going on, we were stupid teenagers, and we were interested in playing gigs and meeting people like Sam The Sham, playing with The Hollywood Argyles, all these incredible people we'd ony heard about and never dreamt we'd be playing with. We were just interested in that. It wasn't our fault that these other people were stirring up the shit around us. You live in a sort of goldfish bowl and this stuff goes on.
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Dave Davies (guitarist, The Kinks] : What I think happened at Hollywood Bowl, from what I could glean from Ray at the time, was just that he and his wife Rasa were very much in love and they really wanted to be together, but they couldn't.

I think there was some kind of behind the scenes foul up between management and the unions on the American tour, and we were caught in the middle.
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Pete Quaife (bassist, The Kinks] : In general, that whole tour was bad. It hadn't turned out to be the American tour we'd been promised. We'd had a couple of big hits, so it should have been a good tour. It started off really well. We were doing nice big theatres. Then it started to degrade into silly little tv shows and smaller venues, crappier hotels. We played in one Hicksville country club where the punters didn't even know who we were. We ended up in a plane flying through a hurricane. It shouldn't have been in the air but nobody cared.

I didn't see too much of the Hollywood Bowl incident. I knew what was going on but, by this time, I'd learned to distance myself from it. With the Davies's you could see it in the eyes, that something is cooking. And whenever I saw that, I got as far away as possible. I stayed out of the way.

When we got out to LA, we'd been doing all these horrible little gigs and we get to Hollywood Bowl and I think Ray realised that this was the place to make a stand. The crowd wasn't that big. It was supposed to have been a Kinks tour but we played in one place where Sam the Sham and the Pharoes were headlining over us. Dave Clark was headlining at another gig.

After that Hollywood Bowl gig, everybody pissed off back to England. Just deserted us. We stood outside the hotel, didn't know where to go, what to do, who to talk to. It was just the four of us. There was still gigs to do, but we didn't even know where they were. We placed a call to Robert and Grenville and they sent this guy who owned a chain of launderettes across the States, I've no idea where they got him from, and he was to look after us. He was loud and pompous, but he proceeded to arrange everything. He took us out to Hawaii, then we flew back to San Francisco where it all sort of fizzled out and me and Mick flew back to London via Chicago