Breeze Blows Leaves of a Musty-Coloured Yellow

The Kinks — "Autumn Almanac" (1967)

I woke up yesterday morning to a vision of the Catskill Mountains heavily shrouded by fog, and the perceptible feel and smell of fall in the air. We’re still about a week and a half shy of the autumn equinox — and we’ll probably experience at least a few more crazy heat surges before and after fall officially falls — but it sure seemed yesterday like the package had arrived early.

This has been a difficult summer for me in many ways, one filled with loss, sorrow, illness, financial struggles, crazy storms and swarms of annoying insects, and I’ve watched quite a few folks who are near and dear to me grappling with variations on similar themes. But it’s also been a summer overflowing with love, friendship, adventure, beauty, music and creativity, and because of that I’m slightly hesitant to embrace the incoming autumn with open arms. I just have to remember that all those good things don’t have to come to an end just because summer is (about to be) over.

Of course, wafting in on a wave of melancholy is what autumn does. School begins again. Harsh reality intrudes on blissful summer romances. The super-saturated colors of fall presage the monochromatic bleakness of winter. As Robyn Hitchcock sang on “Autumn is Your Last Chance” from his wonderful 1984 LP I Often Dream of Trains, “The leaves have never looked as good/As now they’re going to die”.

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But that’s okay, because fall also comes with numerous benefits. I will finally be able to bust out my jackets, boots and long-sleeved shirts again. The aforementioned insects will (for the most part) disappear, and the aforementioned leaves will put on one hell of a farewell show. I’ll be able to cook in my kitchen again without turning my entire apartment into an oven. Halloween and Christmas, two of my favorite holidays, will hover excitingly in the distance. And late-’60s UK pop and psychedelia will somehow sound better to me than at any other time of year…

I currently have exactly 1,030 items in my Discogs wantlist. Some of these records are simply put there to remind me to keep an eye out for upgraded or alternate format versions of records I already own — like, say, a “holy grail” reel-to-reel tape of Ahmad Jamal’s gorgeous But Not For Me. The records on the list that I don’t already have run a pretty wide gamut in terms of music style and genre and degrees of rarity and affordability. These include a number of ‘60s and ‘70s UK singles that are pretty easy to find over on that side of the pond, but which I figure will have to wait until my next trip to England (whenever that will be) to track down, since overseas postage costs can get pretty insane pretty quickly.

Which is one of the reasons I was so overjoyed this past Sunday to find a pristine UK copy of The Kinks’ “Autumn Almanac” while digging through a box of random singles at Rocket Number Nine in Kingston. It’s a very common record in England, having reached #3 on the UK charts in the fall of 1967. The record missed the charts entirely over here, however, so there aren’t many US copies floating around; and if you do find one, it’ll likely set you back at least fifty bucks, which is definitely not the league I’m playing in these days. So to find such a nice copy in my backyard for just a couple of bucks felt like a real stroke of luck. Plus, it couldn’t have better timed, for there is no more perfect musical evocation of fall’s myriad joys and melancholies than “Autumn Almanac”.

The Kinks’ run of singles from 1964 to 1970 — from “You Really Got Me” to “Lola” —was absolutely, inarguably stunning. But for me, the real sweet spot begins in late 1966 with “Dead End Street,” peaks twice with 1967’s “Waterloo Sunset” and 1968’s “Days,” and stretches through 1969’s “Victoria”. This was the golden period when, with his band banished from the States for various infractions, Ray Davies really leaned in to his Englishness and created one wonderful three-minute encapsulation after another of the small delights and mortifying indignities of village (and occasionally city) life in the less-swinging sectors of the British Isles.

Most of the singles and B-sides from this era were collected on The Kinks Kronikles, the “kompilation” that did so much to transform me into a Kinks kultist, and that’s where I heard “Autumn Almanac” for the first time. Cut just a few months after the sessions for 1967’s Something Else by the Kinks ended and before the ones for 1968’s The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society officially began, “Autumn Almanac” was fated to be a non-LP single. (Another great non-LP Ray Davies song from the period, the snarky “Mr. Pleasant,” wound up on the flip in the UK, while the b-side in the US, France and other territories was “David Watts”.)

Still, “Autumn Almanac” would have sounded cozily at home on either album. Like a shuttered window of a Cotswolds cottage, the song opens to reveal a winsomely bucolic scene:

From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpillar
When the dawn begins to crack
It's all part of my autumn almanac

Breeze blows leaves of a musty-coloured yellow
So I sweep them in my sack
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac

The rest of the song could have easily continued in this vein, with Ray simply rattling off charming images of a fall day, but there’s nothing that simple about “Autumn Almanac.”

“It's a miniature movie, basically, that unravels itself as you are listening to it,” Andy Partridge of XTC said of the song in a 1997 interview with Musician magazine, “and it has all these little movements or scenes. And they all seem to take place in the kind of mythical cozy London that the Ealing studios always had in their films, like The Lavender Hill Mob. The song just keeps turning and changing; you see a new facet every few seconds. But there's nothing unsettling about the fact that there are so many parts. Normally that would just be the death of a song, it would just scramble peoples brains.”

By the song’s third lyrical section, Ray has moved on to the local Friday evening social gatherings, where the warmth of familiar company down to he pub or in someone’s living room serves as a welcome alternative to the wind and rain outside. But there’s a bittersweet element to this, as well, and everyone there knows it whether or not they’re willing to admit it:

Tea and toasted, buttered currant buns
Can't compensate for lack of sun
Because the summer's all gone

From there, the song transforms into a pub singalong complete with some grousing about “my poor rheumatic back” thrown in, followed by a rundown of the ideal weekend: football on Saturday, roast beef on Sunday, and a visit to Blackpool if a bank holiday allows. But while this sense of routine is comforting, the lines “This is my street and I’m never gonna leave it/And I’m always going to stay here/If I live to be ninety-nine” sound both defiant and claustrophobic. Is Ray poking fun at Englishfolk for whom change of any sort is absolutely anathema? Is he identifying with them? Probably both.

Musically, the song is equally jaunty and creaky, like it’s being banged out on an old upright piano whose pedals are in serious need of a good oiling. “Autumn Almanac”’s horn parts were actually created on a mellotron, whose woozy tape loops give the song a distinctively “overserved” feel. The record reminds me of arguments I used to have nearly 40 years ago with a friend and fellow music obsessive who dug Ray Davies’ songwriting, but felt like the production of the Kinks’ mid/late ‘60s records left much to be desired. For me, though, the rickety production values only add to their timeless, otherworldly vibe; a full, pristinely-recorded horn section might have overwhelmed “Autumn Almanac,” or put it at risk of sounding merely like a generic pop record instead of a wonderfully eccentric miniature.

The Kinks were not known for their psychedelic tendencies, and I’d be hard-pressed to name five examples of them getting legitimately trippy… but they definitely do so in the closing seconds of “Autumn Almanac”. As the song stomps to its cheery, cider-fueled conclusion, a mellotron and harpischord suddenly rise up out of the mix and churn backwards over each other, creating a hurdy-gurdy effect that is alluring, transportive and a little unsettling. I can practically smell the pleasing aroma of wood smoke in the crisp fall air; but at the same time, I get the sense that there may well be something sinister lurking out there in the darkened woods beyond the stacked-stone walls of the village, something that’s much older than the ancient local pub or church.

“Yes,” says Ray, eyebrow cocked in knowing amusement. “YES.”

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