Sitting by the riverside and a great Kinks album

I love sitting down by the riverside,
Watching the water go flowing by.
Oh, golly gee, it is heaven to be
Like a willow tree.
The Kinks, "Sitting By The Riverside," 1968.

Probably the greatest album most people have never heard is The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. It was a stupendous commercial flop, as Kinks mastermind Ray Davies chose to wrap a series of music hall-flavored songs focused on the inhabitants of a bucolic English small town--stylistically the album could not have been more uncontemporaneous--it was released on the same day as The Beatles' White Album. Two weeks later, the Rolling Stones released Beggars Banquet.

All three albums are considered classics now, but it would take years for the Village Green to catch on.

I thought about the album this morning while running this morning, that's the North Branch of the Chicago River in the photograph, and "Sitting By The Riverside" is one of the tracks on Village Green.

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