Goldmine, invitingly: “So, a new Kinks compilation album?”
Dave Davies, proudly: “Yes!”
Goldmine, sarcastically: “How many is that now?”
Davies, despairingly: “Ohhhh. A thousand. A lot.”
Record collecting used to be so easy.. A string of albums, a clutch of singles, a few EPs if you were looking to Europe, and the occasional greatest hits collection to remind us of the good old days. Today, not so much. There’s formats to fuss over, vinyl variations, collectible clock faces, box sets — whatever happened to the good old days when you just wanted one of everything? And “everything” really wasn’t much?
Tell that to Kinks collectors. Even at the time — and we’re talking U.K./U.S. releases up to 1970-71 — there was a dazzling discography to decipher. And a lot of compilations to wade through.
Let’s put things into perspective. If you beatified The Beatles, but not to the point where you needed every variant of all the Vee Jay cash-ins, and Hamburg-era hotchpotches, there was effectively one greatest hits record, A Collection of Beatles Oldies, and the Hey Jude roundup of singles and B-sides.
If you studied the Stones, Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass), Flowers and Through the Past, Darkly were the lot until ABKCO uncorked the Hot Rocks pairing. The Who had Direct Hits, Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy and the John Entwistle-only The Ox.
And then there was The Kinks., and got the ball rolling. The promo, the black-jacketed two LP (as it has become known), and in 1971, and we’ve not even thought about the grandaddies of all “period” Kinks collections, 1972’s and the following year’s G. Throw in the second volume of that same year, and The Kinks’ catalog had been
