"You Really Got Me"

After weeks of listening to the guys flail away at their guitars, struggling with chord changes and structure and bombastic arrangement, I thought I might give up. Why not? Sparing the world a cover version of Van Halen’s “Right Now” seemed like a good idea.

I had agreed to sponsor this “rock band” at my school with enthusiasm. I’ve played in my share of rock bands, after all, even if my instruments — piano and saxophone — betray my patrician jazz roots. Auditions produced five boys eager to make some noise. We were all set.

How, then, did we get bogged down? As I should have known from the start, the guys’ eyes are bigger than their stomachs. They want to be rock stars but they aren't yet a band. They have no garage or suburban basement to call their own, only this school music room with a middle-aged teacher who — let’s be frank — isn’t much of a Van Halen fan. Weeks into the project, the band can’t perform a single song from beginning to end.

The solution? Three chords. A simple, driving beat. Sneering but pleading vocals. Done.

Listening to The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” was also a solution when I first heard it in 1975. In an era dominated by the likes of James Taylor, Yes, REO Speedwagon and Jethro Tull, “You Really Got Me” was a punk song you hadn’t heard yet because, well, punk didn’t exist yet. In your yearning for something more direct, something without a bank of leisure-suit synthesizers or keening sentimentality, you found this virtual oldie — a rough-edged rocker that sounded more like a complaint than a love song.

“See — don’t ever set me free. I always wanna be by your side.” Ray Davies sang this line like the crazy threat it was. It was punk before its time, but it was proto-emo too: “You got me so I can’t sleep at night.” A perfect balance between vulnerability and demand, “You Really Got Me” solved one of the central puzzles of adolescence: how to be enslaved (by adults, by the world you didn’t understand but, mostly, by girls) but also to take charge.

Taking charge still means playing the song’s insistent guitar riff with blunt force. So I hand my students the chords and instruct them to play like sledgehammers. Almost immediately, the kids develop a sense of groove. The drummer hits that first snare shot, then stays steady as the guitars push and pull. All the frustration of prior rehearsals evaporates. When the bass player comes in on vocals, the kid sounds like Ray without even knowing it. He shakes the words “night” and “side” just like Ray, and he naturally fills the space after the words “don’t know where I’m going” with that guttural “eahhhh” like I hoped he would.

But if “You Really Got Me” ever meant anything to you, you wonder how the kid will handle the break, Ray lamenting, “Ohhh, noohhh!” and then that strangled scream, just before the frantic and restless guitar solo. I hold my hand in the air to keep the guitars at bay, and the kid does his best — a fade downward on “noohhhh,” then a falsetto shout. Not bad.

I’ll admit to being just slightly disappointed when the band tells me they’d played the song so easily because they are familiar with . . . Van Halen’s cover of “You Really Got Me.”

Still, the song’s the thing, as even Van Halen understood. It grips your ear. It thumps your heart. It sneers some and then begs you for more, knowing you’d surely say “no” but for the guitar solo.

It’s really got you.