How Bob Dylan Influenced The Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon”

Bob Dylan inspired countless musicians, including a few of his own contemporaries. One example would be the pop rock outfit The Kinks, who were inspired by Dylan to record the famous 1966 song, “Sunny Afternoon”.

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Bob Dylan inspired Ray Davies of The Kinks to write “Sunny Afternoon”, but it wasn’t “inspiration” in the general sense. While writing the song, Davies was exhausted and over it living in London. He had a desire to express himself, despite being quite ill at the time.

“I’d bought a white upright piano,” said Davies. “I hadn’t written for a time. I’d been ill. I was living in a very 1960s-decorated house. It had orange walls and green furniture. My one-year-old daughter was crawling on the floor and I wrote the opening riff. I remember it vividly. I was wearing a polo-neck sweater.”

Despite the creative flow, Davies wasn’t happy about his life at the time. The Kinks were blowing up, sure, but he was growing sick and tired of the British government at the time. “Sunny Afternoon” is a bit more political than one might notice from a single listen.

“The only way I could interpret how I felt was through a dusty, fallen aristocrat who had come from old money as opposed to the wealth I had created for myself,” Davies continued.

How Bob Dylan Inspired The Kinks with “Maggie’s Farm”

So, Ray Davies wrote “Sunny Afternoon” while physically ill and emotionally (and financially) sick of British taxes. What does that have to do with American poet and songwriter Bob Dylan, exactly?

A lot, actually. The song isn’t just written from the perspective of a newly wealthy man losing a bit of money. Rather, “Sunny Afternoon” makes a mockery of wealthy elites and their particular brand of lifestyle. Bob Dylan did something similar with his famous song, “Maggie’s Farm”. You might remember that track as a point of contention among angry folk fans when Dylan famously performed the aggressive proto-punk criticism of American capitalism at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Davies himself said that he was listening to Dylan when he was working on “Sunny Afternoon”.

“At the time I wrote ‘Sunny Afternoon’ I couldn’t listen to anything,” said Davies of that period. “I was only playing ‘The Greatest Hits’ of Frank Sinatra and Dylan’s ‘Maggie’s Farm’… I just liked its whole presence, I was playing the ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ LP along with my Frank Sinatra and Glenn Miller and Bach. It was a strange time. I thought they all helped one another, they went into the chromatic part that’s in the back of the song.”

Photo by King Collection/Avalon/Getty Images

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