Classic Boat 11.2022

The Kinks’, Muswell Hillbillies and Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s a Star released through BMG in celebration of the 50th Anniversary. It combines two of the Kinks’ classic 1970’s albums - Muswell Hillbillies, the album the band toured in America; and helped define them as a rock band in the U.S.. And Everybody’s In Show-Biz – Everybody’s a Star; the album that was written in reflection of the tour.

In May 1965, Lou Reed was a 23-year-old staff songwriter and session musician for Pickwick Records in New York, churning out doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll “soundalike” singles to be sold in drugstores. There he was introduced to his future Velvet Underground bandmate, the Welsh-born John Cale, when the label put the two of them together for a house band called The Primitives. (They would go on to make the jokey novelty song “The Ostrich.”) Reed could write teen pop hits at a rapid clip, but his real creative focus essentially starts with this foundational document, Words & Music, May 1965, which he made with Cale and which includes the first known recordings of some of the Velvets’ most well-known songs. There’s almost nothing thematically linking his former dime-store hits-for-hire and these strands of The Velvet Underground’s underbelly-surveying DNA. But the collection (the first in a series of archival releases) does highlight the songwriting discipline and rigor that would see Reed through countless stylistic changes and a 50-plus-year career as one of America’s most important artists.