James Brown invited me onstage to join him in “Sex Machine”

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One night when we had come back from Ratner’s to the Fillmore between shows, we walked into our dressing room to find a roadie getting “serviced” by a groupie. While the band and I tried to quietly manoeuvre our way around the “event,” Ken Jones was disgusted, “Streuth, it’s blow-job central ’round here; you think they would have had the decency to use the toilet like anybody else! Where do they think they are, Scandinavia?” Anyway, Mick Avory astutely observed, “Why hide such an event in a closet when you can perform it in public for the world to see?” The manners of society were breaking down, morals were being destroyed daily by these new liberal freedoms, and there was nothing anyone could do about it. People could perpetrate any deviance they wanted, anytime, anywhere, day or night; the most outrageous acts were allowed to take place, but not — according to Jonesy — in the Kinks’ dressing room.

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Despite the turmoil within the band, Grenville Collins notes that “all divisions melted away when the Kinks were confronted by external opposition . . . they would become a pack of wolves.” And no one, promoters or star, could escape the wrath of the Kinks, as English pop star Bobby Shafto found out one evening in the fall of 1964. Avory tells the story: We used to get this girl to come along and do a rave. . . . She would do a little striptease and we’d all play tambourines. The only available room was the one Bobby Shafto was in. He came in and made a fuss. He started doing the star bit, so we had a little kafuffle with him. Nothing terrible. We just put him in his place. Collins then had to contend with Shafto’s screaming and tearful manager: “Those disgusting, filthy, animalistic creatures have just beaten up my star.”