The Kinks' Ray Davies charges boomer crowd

For anyone under 30, the best way to hear the Kinks' music is watching the films of Wes Anderson. Pretty much any one will do - they are all larded with choice cuts indelibly wedded to strikingly precious visual tableaux. Anyone over 30 should have gone to the Tower on Saturday to see Ray Davies, who wrote and sang all those classic, quintessentially English pop songs.

The films lend the music a vitality and transgenerational reach that members of the Kinks are no longer capable of. The songs may transcend time, but the men who made them cannot. Dave Davies, brother of Ray and lead guitarist, is recovering from a stroke. Ray Davies almost died a few years back, shot in New Orleans by a mugger.

Saturday night, Ray looked in fine form: trim, dressed in a stylish suit coat and crisp white shirt, his modish bob spiked. And he was clearly happy to be there. "My favorite audience, Philadelphia," he said early on. "And my brother's, too." And the capacity crowd, a graying, boomer-centric gathering of the tribes, was jazzed to be in the same room.

But clearly, we were witnessing a great artist in the autumn of his career: The voice was a little foggy, to put it charitably; he still seemed to be finding his stage legs; the new solo album,

Working Man's Cafe

, is subprime Ray at best; and his hired-gun backing band packed all the emotional IQ of the house band on a late-night talk show. None of that mattered much in the moment, though.

Taking the stage alone, he began the first verse of "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" - a song that boils down

A Catcher In The Rye

to three minutes of deathless jangle-pop - as his four-piece band took up its instruments and kicked in for the Big Rock second verse. And we were off.

"Where Have All The Good Times Gone?" "Till The End of The Day," "A Well-Respected Man" and "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" followed. (And before the end of the night, we got "Sunny Afternoon," "You Really Got Me," "All Day and All of the Night" and, of course, "Lola").

Davies was smiling, and the crowd was ecstatic. Then came the scariest words you can possibly hear at a concert like this: "This one's from my new album." Like I said, kid, stick with

Rushmore

.