It's an overcast Saturday in Los Angeles, and Ray Davies is on the road again. The longtime leader of the Kinks is in the back seat of a car sent by his label, riding from LAX to his hotel in tinted glasses and a Panama hat, a small suitcase between his knees. He looks pleased.
He was in San Francisco the night before, and in about nine hours Davies would be onstage with his new band at the Wiltern, performing 90 minutes of Kinks songs and material from his quietly ambitious new album, "Working Man's Cafe." It's only his second solo album since the Kinks broke up in 1996, more than three decades after the band emerged as a leading force in the '60s British Invasion. From the beginning, Davies was among his generation's most influential songwriters, spanning proto-metal ("You Really Got Me") to the wistful and theatrical ("Sunny Afternoon").
He still works hard at it. "I'm finding my feet," Davies says quietly. "People say, 'Why did the first album take so long?' I didn't really want to do one."
Back in the '70s, coming to L.A. often meant watching Randolph Scott westerns well into the night on the TV at his hotel. "The heroes and villains were clearly defined," Davies says. He looks out the window and sees oil pumps beside the road. "Culver City . . . I wrote a whole short story about driving past Culver City."
Davies published his collection of short stories, "Waterloo Sunset," in 1997. Like the Who's Pete Townshend, he became known for lyrics with a literary flair, balancing sweeping musical statements with satire and vivid storytelling.
On "Working Man's Cafe," Davies aims his songwriting at recent life experience, including the trauma of being shot in the leg by a mugger in New Orleans in 2004. "Morphine Song" is based on his night in intensive care, a moving scene set against a playful melody of horns and acoustic guitar, with Davies' refrain, "Listen to my heartbeat . . . someone help me off of the ground."
"I just want to make good music," Davies says. "If it engages some of the real-life things that have happened to me, that's quite good, because I've rarely done that."
At the Wiltern, Davies would be as energetic a performer as fans might remember, hopping and running in place during the charged "All Day and All of the Night," a song still explosive and thrilling in a new century, as rough and fiery as a fresh Jack White riff. But the bullet wound still bothers him.
