The Kinks were at a crossroads. As they entered the 1970s, the British pop/rockers hadn’t yet ascended to the next toppermost level, even after achieving new heights following the songwriting leap Ray Davies took with the still poignant 1967 track, “Waterloo Sunset.” It took two critical back-to-back albums, November 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies and August 1972’s Everybody’s in Show-Biz, to fully get them there—and then they never looked back.
Me, I never owned pristine or even new copies of either album on vinyl. That said, I have the cleanest used copies of both the 1971 and 1972 RCA Victor 2LP that I could find—and I was quite fine with it. I found certain comfort in the hominess inherent in the grooves of either album, whether it was the folkie despair of “20th Century Man,” the accordion-enhanced “Oklahoma U.S.A.” on , or the cosmic “Lola” vibes of “Supersonic Rocket Ship” and star-culture poignancy of “Celluloid Heroes” on .
