May 27-June 2, 2004
music
Rock 'n' Roll Research Press' one-man preservation society.
Doug Hinman's Kinks book was almost finished.
For almost 20 years, he had been working on a day-by-day chronicle of the British Invaders' career, which ran from their first violent burst of fame in 1964 with the revolutionary "You Really Got Me" to 1996, when they quietly slipped into a limbo they've yet to re-emerge from.
Hinman had interviewed band members, queried record labels for documentation and pored over dusty bound volumes of old newspapers. But something still eluded him, even as he came up against the book's final deadline. He had only one unconfirmed date from the band's notorious 1965 U.S. tour, which had culminated in getting the group banned from this country; they wouldn't set foot on these shores again till 1969.
He tried every newspaper from the town the show supposedly occurred in. On a last-minute whim, he phoned the berg's local library and asked if there was anyone in the building who knew anything of the gig. Lo and behold, one of the librarians had gone to the show, and as it happened on her birthday, she could easily recall and confirm the date for Hinman. The last piece of the puzzle was in place.
On the phone from his home in Rhode Island, Hinman delivers the punch line: "And of course the week the book comes out, someone on eBay has a ticket to the show."
For Kinks fans, Hinman's book, The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night (Backbeat Books), published earlier this year, is a treasure trove. Using an immensely readable day-by-day structure, Hinman notes the tours, release dates, studio time, interviews and reviews. He also gives a glimpse into the power struggles and stormy relationships that seemed to plague the band from day one. Though Hinman rarely editorializes, his writing pulls back the curtain on the band's precarious existence, revealing an oft-poignant glimpse of the two principal players -- the ever-battling Davies brothers, Ray (vocals) and Dave (lead guitar).
This day-by-day model for rock tomes was popularized in the late '80s with Mark Lewisohn's Beatles books. But whereas the Fab Four had their every recording date and live gig meticulously logged -- not too surprising given their status as cultural avatars -- shaggy misfits like The Kinks operated on a considerably lower radar range.
"They cancelled every other show, or shuffled the schedule," Hinman says. "You can drive yourself mad trying to figure out what actually transpired." The touring structure for bands 40 years ago was radically different from what occurs now. "A lot of these tours back then were done haphazardly. The schedules would change on a daily or weekly basis. A lot of times if you're lucky enough to know they played somewhere, you go and gather the newspapers from that town and there's just nothing. It would turn out it was a local radio station-sponsored show and all the advertising was done on the radio.
"Part of my problem is that people don't understand the difficulty in going back to the '60s and trying to put this together, 'cause they just assume, well, just look on the tour shirt. But it just doesn't exist in one place." Many times, he can't get a full confirmation or an exact date, so he has to present different versions of a story, or give a more general time frame.
Hinman, a record collector since his youth, is also a former pro musician. When he was a touring drummer, he'd scour local libraries for information on his favorite bands. "I think I was frustrated by the lack of real information in a lot of your standard biographies." By the '80s, Hinman had established himself as something of a Kinks authority.
When his original book idea, the chronology plus full discography, proved untenable, he self-published the latter as You Really Got Me: An Illustrated World Discography of The Kinks 1964-1993 in 1994. Thus, his Rock 'n' Roll Research Press was established; through it Hinman also published a collection of academic writings on The Kinks, and a chronology of Jeff Beck's career entitled Jeff's Book, which he co-wrote with a Norwegian Beck fan named Christopher Hjort.
In the meantime, though, the Kinks chronology had gone on the back burner. In the early '90s, Hinman got married and started a family, and he's parlayed his love of research into a career as a librarian. "It was frustrating, 'cause I felt I had an unfinished behemoth on my back all these years," he says. "But I didn't want to put it out unless it was done the right way. I'll credit my editor and publisher, who saw the diamonds in the rough."
"Good down-and-dirty research has value," Hinman believes, "and really that wasn't introduced into the field of rock 'n' roll till the mid- to late-'80s. And there's still a lot of junk out there. The Internet alone, you get these fan sites [run by] very overzealous fans who just don't understand that just because you see it somewhere, that doesn't mean it's true. People throw information out there and it's unverified and that's where I think my experience researching and my experience as a librarian helped, in that I realized you have to document what you're doing."
For more information, go to www.rocknrollresearchpress.com.
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