The Kinks were such a great band. The story goes that, to produce the desired dstortion in their guitars on "All Day and All of the Night" they stuck needles into the speakers in their amplifiers. I've always loved their song "Better Things" too. Well, not always, but ever since I heard it...They must've been new speakers. When I first saw them (let me count the years ... not) they didn't need to "produce" the desired distortion, their speakers were so knackered that they were rattling in their boxes.
I was playing in bands at that time (and for years afterwards), and I solved the problem of producing humbucking-type distortion by having my brother-in-law, who was an electronic technician, alter the amp circuitry so that I could get "11 out of 10" (hi there, tsuwm and Nigel!). He basically replaced the standard Holden pre-amp circuitry with Marshall pre-amp circuitry. You overdrive the pre-amp and a nicely, unevenly distorted sound is presented to the power amp to fire at the speakers. I don't believe that the Kinks didn't know about this if I did!
Producing electronic sustain was a completely different problem. Sheer volume is the only real answer to this in terms of the big boys ('ello, Led Zep, Deep Purple and Jimi), but the rest of us used various kinds of electronic gimcrackery to get what we wanted or near as dammit, at lower volumes. The pickups on my Gibson SG were specially overwound (as were Pete Townshend's), and I put the output from my Strat through a box which attenuated the sound to some extent before it hit the amp.
And despite what Keiva has said above (I think it was him), the Kinks didn't substitute anything for "muddled" in their live performances of Lola, or at least not the two I saw. Unlike the Stones' "Star Star", where they did substitute words on stage - "fuckin'" for "proper" - Jagger belting it out with gusto and with unsubtle pelvic thrusts for every substitution.
