Frequently understood as a minor achievement and companion piece to the masterful Muswell Hillbilies, 1972’s studio-/live-album hybrid Everybody’s In Show Biz has aged extraordinarily well and stands as an invaluable document of a masterful band at its loosest and most offhand. Filled with wry meditations on life on the road with a special emphasis on snacks, this oddball but inarguably great collection of tunes recalls the mirthful anything-goes mayhem of Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes, three years before those 1967 sessions would be officially released to the public. “Here Comes Another Day” and “Sitting In My Hotel Room” are classic tales of travel-sick tedium while “Celluloid Heroes” casts Ray’s lifelong love affair with cinema into bold relief, albeit with characteristic ambivalence. Antic live takes on Hillbillies tracks “Alcohol” and “Acute Schizophrenia Paranoid Blues” find the band in top form, pitched somewhere between a barrelhouse roots band and a Victorian vaudeville act. By turns cheerfully half-baked and sneakily poignant, Everybody’s In Show Biz is filled with shaggy, funny, ribald music of the sort which would soon be in too short supply on subsequent Kinks records over the next several years.