The Kinks - All Day and All of the Night The Day-By-Day Story Pt 1: 1940-1971 is a thoroughly researched history. Davies reportedly believes it'll kill the market for his own book

Andrew Sandoval wears a lot of hats. He’s a singer-songwriter who has released five under-the-radar sunshine pop albums, a radio DJ who has spent the last 15 years hosting Come to the Sunshine on WFMU, a co-founder of the Wild Honey autism non-profit, a Grammy-nominated reissue producer who has worked on albums by everyone from Van Morrison and the Beach Boys to Big Star and Elton John, and a concert producer who spearheaded the Monkees reunion tours of 2011 to 2021, and masterminded their 50th anniversary celebration. He’s also a walking encyclopedia of 1960s pop and author of The Monkees: The Day-by-Day Story of the ’60s TV Pop Sensation and The Bee Gees Day-By-Day Story: 1945-1972.

His newest book is The Kinks – All Day and All of the Night The Day-By-Day Story Pt 1: 1940-1971, which he co-wrote with fellow Kinks obsessive Doug Hinman. It chronicles the band’s saga from the birth of the Davies brother all the way through the release of their hit album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One. Like Sandoval’s Monkees and Bee Gees books, it’s not a traditional biography, but a day-by-day guide that exhaustively traces every single recording session, concert date, television appearance, and writing session in astoundingly granular detail. (It’s available for purchase here.)

Turn to page 182, for example, and learn that the Kinks played Memorial Hall in Cheshire, England, on January 1, 1966, sharing the bill with the Notions and the Pack of Cards, and five days later were on Top of the Pops to lip-synch “Till the End of the Day,” rehearsing between noon and 6:00 pm. Turn to page 150 and learn that Kinks bassist Pete Quaife attempted to fly back to England from Los Angeles with a gun on July 25, 1965, but it was confiscated by U.S. customs. Later that month, Pye records released “See My Friend” as a single in the U.K. NME‘s Derek Johnson wrote the song “almost hypnotizes you into playing it over and over again.”

Editor’s picks

Sandoval wasn’t even born when all of this was taking place, and didn’t learn the band existed until he was nine years old in 1980. “My older brother went to see them at the Hollywood Palladium on their One for the Road tour,” says Sandoval. “He came home that night from the concert, we were in our bunk beds, and he’s telling me about these guys, Ray and Dave Davies, who were fighting on stage. He was really animated about it. And I was obsessed with music, so it registered with me. And then a couple years later, he got us tickets to see them at the Forum in 1983 on their State of Confusion tour.”

His older brother was a fan of their newer work, but Sandoval quickly fixated on the band’s 1960s catalog, especially their 1968 masterpiece The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. “That remains my personal favorite album of all time by any artist,” says Sandoval. “Ray Davies communicates something about the human condition and friendship on that album that I don’t think any other songwriter ever did, in a very subtle way…I don’t think I’ll ever know enough about it, to be honest.”

In 1997, shortly after the Kinks finally broke up following decades of acrimony, Sandoval’s band backed up Dave Davies at a charity concert. “I was obsessed with Dave’s solo work,” says Sandoval. “And so the first thing he said to me was, ‘Okay, so what do you want to play?’ And I said, ‘I want to play [1967’s] ‘Susannah’s Still Alive.’ He goes, ‘Okay. Well, what key do you play that in?’ And I said, “G, like the record.’ He goes, ‘All right, you start it.'”

Davies was so impressed by Sandoval’s chops and extensive knowledge of his song catalog that he hired him as the guitarist and musical director for his first solo tour. Sandoval spent two years on the road with his childhood idol, while still working as a reissue producer for Rhino, and appeared on Dave’s 2000 live album Rock Bottom, which was recorded at the Bottom Line in New York City.  

Related Content

Four years later, Kinks expert Doug Hinman published The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night: Day-by-Day Concerts, Recordings and Broadcast, 1961-1996. When he regained the rights to it around the time of the pandemic, he came across Sandoval’s day-by-day Monkees books. The two music historians began talking, and decided to team up for an updated version of the Kinks book.

At first, they planned to merely flesh out Hinman’s original 2004 book. “When we were trying to insert in the new information and new gig dates and corrections and other things, it just set everything off into a different direction,” says Sandoval. “I thought we’d be much better served not to be correcting the corrections, but just doing everything right from the ground up and giving people who already had the original book something entirely new.”

They drew on Hinman’s extensive collection of vintage Kinks press clippings, including foreign language articles that are now much easier to translate than they were two decades ago, and Sandoval’s archive of 1960s weekly U.K. music newspapers, including NME, Disc, Music Echo, and Music Maker. “There’s a dearth of information online about certain things,” says Sandoval. “But if you do the digging, the stuff is there in these print sources. We even had access to also more obscure things like a newspaper called Midland Beat and others called Music Now and Top Pops. As you’ll see in the book, there’s all these citations for these arcane music papers that are long since deceased, but all of it went into the big blend of how we put the book together.”

Whenever possible, they relied on primary sources, including studio logs, rather than interviews conducted decades later with the central figures. “A memory drift occurs over a long period of time,” says Sandoval. “And trying to nail down certain details, it’s harder now than it was 25 or 30 years ago talking to the people, because recollections have faded. As much as possible, we used contemporaneous reportage of the events we discuss in this book.”

Tragically, most of the multi-track masters from the Kinks recording sessions in the 1960s have been lost. “There’s literally maybe five or six multi-track tapes from the 1960s,” says Sandoval. “I’m talking about their entire span of all of their great, amazing records in that period from 1964 to 1969. I’ve been on the trail of this stuff for more than 30 years, but they were probably wiped or disposed of at some point.”

Brand new technology, however, is finally giving him a chance to dig deeper into the recordings than he ever thought possible. “Ray talks a lot about playing piano on a lot of their records,” says Sandoval. “And if you listen to a song like ‘Set Me Free,’ you don’t hear piano. But if you put it through a de-mixing program, you hear the piano, and you hear that it’s very much in the style of Ray’s playing from the period and the other things he plays on. So we went to that extent of extracting that to see what the truth was behind all the details we had.”

This is an intense labor of love that nobody on earth besides Sandoval and Hinman would likely even attempt. But that doesn’t mean Ray Davies is thrilled their book exists. The issue stems from Ray’s desire to one day release his own coffee table book about the Kinks. According to Sandoval, Davies believes The Kinks: All Day and All of the Night will affect the market for his, which Sandoval says Davies has yet to begin writing.

“Am I going to be Ray’s good friend or best friend?” Sandoval asks. “I don’t think that that’s a possibility now. And I’m not doing anything to try and upset him. But in my lifetime, I want this book to exist for other Kinks fans so that they have a basis of research. It’s the most definitive source for the material that you could get.”

Trending Stories

A rift with his single favorite songwriter isn’t something he hoped to experience in his life, but Sandoval is rather sanguine about the matter.

“That’s a trade-off when you work with artists,” he says. “I’ve had a very close relationship with a lot of different artists that I admire, and it’s difficult because you don’t always walk away as best friends. But that’s never been my goal. My goal is I want to know the truth about your music, I want to know where it comes from, and I want to know why it exists the way it does, and why it sounds like it does. And then I think from that, maybe I’ll understand why it makes me feel the way I feel. That’s the truth I’m seeking.”