Master Raymond Douglas Davies was born 60 years ago today, on June 21, 1944. Happy #60, Ray!

For starters, by any rights Ray Davies should be rated one of the top 10 greatest songwriters in the rock music tradition. He's just that good.

Of course, the Kinks made their name with some of the most brilliant simple two and three chord rock and roll singles ever recorded, notably "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" in 1964.

Ray and the boys rapidly expanded the palette with contemplative ballads such as "So Tired of Waiting for You." Ray has been famous for the daydream stuff, "Sunny Afternoon" and "Lazy Old Sun."

He's got his own little genre of pop social satires, totally rockin' good stuff like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "Harry Rag" and "Apeman."

They could always return to their teenage rock roots to touch base and revitalize, such as "Victoria" and "Low Budget."

To those who share the religion, "Rock and Roll Fantasy" may sound like the greatest and saddest song about losing faith in the music. Then again, he wrote the equally brilliant "You Can't Stop the Music." That kind of thing shows why they would be called Kinks.

True to their name, they had a lot of kinks, most notably homosexuality versus social conservatism. On the one hand, Ray Davies wrote some really gay stuff, starting with "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion." No one else has made as big a pop hit as gay as "Lola" — give or take maybe "Karma Chameleon." Then, of course, there's "David Watts" — possibly their best song, with the perfect pop hooks and the furious gallop detailing class envy and pure confused teenaged homosexual desire.

Yet on the other hand, Ray Davies has been the most hardcore conservative in a social preservation type sense, most famously with the whole album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. Even as the 60s youth social rebellion was peaking, Ray was writing "Rosie Won't You Please Come Home." In the brilliant "Two Sisters," Ray took the side of the housewife and mother over the "wayward lass" of a sister.

Perhaps Ray's best expression of conservative thought running against the "sex and drugs and rock & roll" grain would be the brilliant diamond hard smackdown of "The Hard Way," in which a teacher breaks it right down for some smartass punk. "I'm wasting my vocation teaching you to write neat, when you're only fit to sweep the streets."

"Conservative" here means more a broad sense of favoring old, quiet and traditional over new and flashy, rather than any particular political affiliation. Indeed, Davies has often exhibited a kind of class consciousness associated with liberalism, or even Marxism. There's a sense that he WANTS to believe in Marxist stuff, but just knows better.