YOU REALLY GOT ME at 60 🎸 🇬🇧

The Kinks released the beyond-monumental #1 single You Really Got Me 60 years ago today. It just occurred to me that The Beatles are the Russian Space Program to Ray Davies' Apollo 11; The Beatles may have done everything ELSE first and better, but Davies stuck the Apollo 11 moment with You Really Got Me in terms of both its immediate impact and its influence over the next 60 years. Rock criticism was made for hyperbole but it is not hyperbole to give You Really Got Me credit for punk, proto-punk, post-punk, hard rock, Van Halen (whether I like it or not), metal, heavy metal, and the list just goes on & on.

The song's story has been told ad nauseam:

Ray Davies wrote the famous riff for “You Really Got Me” on piano, then showed it to his brother Dave. Dave had been experimenting with getting a distorted sound out of a little Elpico amplifier he’d purchased, which he achieved by slashing the amp’s speaker cone with a razor blade.

There's nothing I could say here's that not already splashed out all over the Internet today by much smarter people, but this is a song for which its musical & cultural impact truly deserves to be celebrated today, and tomorrow and every day after that.