First, we made a few choices. To keep our tour under three hours in a city overrun by traffic, many sites needed to be cut, from an important spot in "Lola" to some phone booths employed for the '80s video of "State of Confusion." Knowing I'd be otherwise occupied later in the afternoon, I headed to Waterloo Bridge first thing that morning. A Waterloo sunrise was better than nothing.
Ray Davies, the band's chief songwriter, has always had a sense of place, and a keen eye for reminding us of what came before. In "Come Dancing," the band's 1983 hit, he crafted an upbeat pop song around what is largely a depressing reality.
It's not enough that the dance hall his sisters used to go to is gone. He reminds us in the song that the hall has been taken over, in turn, by a bowling alley, supermarket, and parking lot.
Listening to the song, I feel the melancholic tug of time's passage, even if nothing could be more foreign to me than a '50s-era English dance hall.
We met Ruocco on Denmark Street (the title of a 1970 Kinks song), once known as England's Tin Pan Alley because many music publishers set up shop here. Back in the '60s, at 25 Denmark St., you would have found Kassner Music, the publishing company that signed the teenage Davies, a deal that like so many ended in tension and lawsuits. Today, the street is largely made up of musical instrument stores. But standing there, Ruocco told me about how fans would leave notes and phone numbers for Davies, his younger brother Dave, drummer Mick Avory, and bassist Pete Quaife.
Next, we headed to the Archway Tavern, where the band was photographed for its mid-career masterpiece, "Muswell Hillbillies." Back then, in the early '70s, the pub was a drinking man's place, not the sort a woman might wander into alone. Today, from the looks of it, the Archway is something worse: A nondescript bar painted puke-green.
"It's sad," Ruocco told me as we knocked on the door in a failed attempt to get in. "Obviously things have got to change, but sometimes the change isn't for the better."
