The Kinks could have quite easily become much, much, more successful than OTL--all you have to do is keep Dave Davies away from the booze so he doesn't punch anyone or get a manager who's willing to still pay the band in cash, and they don't lose the American Federation of Musicians' license and get to tour the US for the whole British Invasion. The Kinks were always a lot more ostenatiously British than their contempories, as well, which would have given them a real advantage for an Anglophilic American audience.
Of course, this would arguably be a curse in disguise. Without the enforced exile in the UK, Ray Davies wouldn't be pushed back into returning to his roots so heavily. At best, you might still get Face to Face just as a function of the band's maturity, but becoming an American smash hit could preclude stuff like Waterloo Sunset and Village Green Preservation Society being written in favour of more stuff in the vein of You Really Got Me. So the band that succeeds could bear very little relationship with the band we all know and love.
Some more thoughts on this:
It's maybe too pessimistic to write off Anglo-Kinks completely. After all, the *gags* Beatles still got to try out the sitar at the height of their fame. Still, without the sour grapes of forced exile, it'll be much less full-throated and constant--something like
Village Green, Shangri-La, or
Waterloo Sunset might appear in the middle of an album that's pretty much just an updated Kinks Kontroversy, but the total embrace of Merry England the band went through would be absent. There's a chance it could show up as part of Ray Davies' late style when he was making those ludicrous concept albums.
This does leave us with two artistic wells to tap. The first, and most obvious, is the music industry--as early as
Face to Face you can see the roots of
Lola vs Powerman in
Session Man. In a TL where the Kinks are much more integrated into showbiz, those themes are going to come to the fore, and
!Face to Face might have
!Session Man as its more typical song and
!Dead-End Street as an outlier.
The second is one of Davies' historic influences. One of the first people he sought advice from in music was Alexis Korner, the father of British blues, and a lot of the band's earlier covers were R&B standards like
Long Tall Sally. Davies was something of a musical magpie (shifting through the Seventies and Eighties from punk to prog), and he's in the country this style that influenced him was from, at the dawn of Motown and blue-eyed soul. A lot could happen from there...
But also I think a big factor holding them back was their production. Compared to many of the top bands of the day, their records sound unpolished and tinny which doesn't allow the great songwriting to shine through. I've often wondered what some of the songs would have sounded like if George Martin had produced them.
Good point. A better producer could bump up ticket sales and prevent their American tour being such an unmitigated disaster
without fixing the bad behaviour on tour--which, in turn, will have a knock-on effect on expectations for the band generally that might lead to Dave Davies straight-up getting stabbed.
I agree that the Kinks could have become more successful, although I think the Kinks' ostentatious Britishness was more of a disadvantage to American audiences, it put them in the niche/quirky category whereas the Beatles were able to straddle the line more effectively (Sgt. Pepper for example, is full of Victorian music hall and dry wit but also has mainstream pop songs and psychedelic influences). Many of the Beatles/Stones' lyrics were quite simple so had universal appeal, whereas many of Davies' lyrics are more sophisticated but intended for British ears.
Fair enough, yeah--a lot of the Britishness was due to missing out on the British Invasion and doubling down on Anglophilia, but Davies' wordiness will still put the band at a disadvantage.
