Ray Davies continues to wear his English citizenship like a badge. The Kinks have often used American musical idioms—especially variations on Richard Berry's "Louie Louie," as revived by the Kingsmen and by the Kinks themselves—but Ray has regularly used his considerable songwriting talents to anatomize situations of class and culture that are peculiarly English. Years of touring, boozing, and occasionally brawling onstage with his lead guitarist brother Dave haven't diminished it. His nostalgia for the afternoon of the Empire, and his interest in the music hall/vaudeville traditions of his youth, continue unabated. His early efforts at the stand-up crooner idiom were often exquisite,
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especially "Sunny Afternoon" and "End of the Season," and most recently he has shown ingenuity in adapting fashionable rock currents to his obsession.
Muswell Hillbillies, for example, used the idea that the cockneys are England's answer to the American cracker to validate a series of country & western essays that managed to maintain an implacably British flavor.
Everybody's in Showbiz, a double album containing a studio and a live record, is Ray's first extended look at America. The new songs deal for the most part with touring, and with the difference between Hollywood stereotypes and American reality, the live record comprises hard rock and vaudeville material from recent Kinks albums performed with juiced gusto, high spirits, and occasional rank sloppiness. But the four sides hold together remarkably well, since most of the song situations deal with show business and its facade of tinsel and celluloid. While the Rolling Stones on their two-record set sing about a mythical American South to music that suggests a chemically augmented roadhouse band in some improbable Arkansas, the Kinks sing about an only partially mythical freeway to Hollywood. Their tunes roll and lurch along, with born arrangements that forcibly reminded an English friend of the BBC Northern Light Dance Orchestra, several Gilbert and Sullivan-style mock-oratorios, and a Buckingham Palaceful of vaudevillian quavers and music hall ivory tickling. Some listeners may find parts of the album revoltingly reminiscent of the kind of entertainment favored by their mums and dads, but Davies isn't just trying to become the new Val Doonican; in fact, he seems to be magnifying and exaggerating the excesses of show business in order to call attention to its essentially grotesque character.
The album is not the homogeneously delightful sort of LP the Kinks were once known for; it has its ups and downs, its lapses and its masterpieces. The opener, "Here Comes Yet Another Day," is a fashionably bored touring song ("tune up, start to play/just like any other day") that rocks along nicely but has a curiously (and perhaps intentionally) unfinished quality; several of the breaks sound like a rhythm track waiting for a solo, and the tinny Toussaint-style horns don't
The Kinks entered the 1970s with the same stumbling, drunken surprise as The Faces – only long glimpses of confusion and sadness kept popping up between the episodes of hedonistic fun. The first half of this underrated platter about Englishmen on the American road features "Celluloid Heroes," Ray Davies' greatest song of the period. A concert occupies the second half.
