My Top 1000 Songs #791: Around The Dial

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

"Around The Dial" is probably nobody's idea of a top Kinks song--certainly not compared to the endless well of undeniable late 60s and early 70s classics--but it's long been a personal favorite. When I started going down the Kinks rabbit hole in high school, spurred on largely by 1980's One For The Road career-spanning double-live LP, I was hearing them largely as an oldies act. Yeah, much of the material came from 1979's then-recent Low Budget, which I liked a lot, but it was the older stuff that excited me most and that sent me scurrying to the record store to pick up late 60s essentials like Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur.

So when Give The People What They Want came out in 1981, it was my first chance to get into Kinks music contemporaneously, as something brand new, and thus I felt a certain kinship with the record (IMHO, their last great album). Album closer "Better Things" has already shown up here, a wonderful track; but opener "Around The Dial" was more exciting to adolescent me, that spin through the radio dial cutting loose into a crunchy power-chord-rocker. It was far afield from the mellower late 60s stuff I adored, clearly enmeshed in Ray Davies' mid-70s return to non-thematic harder rock albums, but a wonderfully fun tune; and as I was still just a few years removed from my initial obsession with discovering rock & roll through the radio, its DJ-themed lyrics hit home.
Live 1982:

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