“..Ray rejected several early takes, insisting on re-recording it to try and capture his band’s live energy. He was unhappy with the slow, bluesy tempo and kept urging the band to play faster.”
In the concert I went to several years ago Ray Davies credited his brother Dave with making the song an uptempo rocker. Ray said he wrote it more as an R&B song and Dave didn’t like it and wanted to play it faster as a rock song. He said Dave turned his back on the band, faced the studio wall, and in Ray’s words, played the chords that put the Kinks into rock and roll history.
It was Freddy Fender working with Dick Dale that gave us amps that could handle the overdrive. Dick Dale kept freezing the cones and causing the speakers to catch fire.