Quote
stonehearted

Quote
Big Al

Quote
with sssoul

and Mick Avory (who's still alive) did all right with the Kinks

Whilst I am sure that Avory developed to become quite the competent drummer in time, it was session-musician Bobby Graham whose skills were preferred on the majority of early Kinks recordings. Didn’t Richards or Jagger once make reference to how ‘awful’ Avory was, or am I misremembering?

Dave Davies explains, from a 1996 magazine interview (with Peter Dogget, Record Review, April 1996):

Is it true that Mick didn't play on the Kinks records?

He certainly didn't play on the original records, because we were auditioning drummers right up until we did our first gigs. We used a sessionman on "You Really Got Me", "All Day and All of the Night", "Tired of Waiting For You", because Mick was slowly being integrated into the recording side. He played on the albums, but not on the early singles, up to "Everybody's Gonna Be Happy", I think. Later on, he played on most records until he left, except for some tracks on "Misfits", because we were going through a really strange time. That was another period when Ray and I joined forces again in a crisis, with this feeling that we still had something left to do, that it wasn't over yet.

Full interview at: [www.davedavies.com]