Maybe you could hand over your Kinks' thread duties to your daughter in the meantime! Sunday non musical thoughts. Those haircuts are terrible, aren't they ? I'm not sure Ray's mulet from later in the eighties is necessarily better, but Rodford's and Gibbons' hairs are especially atrocious. Just like cover arts, the way musicians look has a dramatic impact on how we receive the music and how we respond to it. And I never understood the eighties as far as "style" was concerned. I lived them as a kid, I was far from being hip (as far as you could ever be) but even then, I knew all them sixties rockers were making fools of themselves when they tried to be well groomed and fashionable. Dave's hair is ok, I suppose, but his whole outfit is terrible as well (and just wait till Glamour comes along!). Was the sleeveless shirt already an integral part of the heavy metal panoply then?
I have no idea about the hair, and presentation is something I'm not really qualified to talk about lol ... I'm a jeans and tshirt kind of guy, or a shorts and tshirt kind of guy. I think the eighties looked the way it did as a reaction to the constant doomsaying of the era. The Cold War seemed to be at its height, and we constantly seemed to have "end of the world" documentaries and movies, and Nostradamus nonsense, and there seemed to be a general air of "End Times" all around. To that end, I think that a lot of the pop music was light and fluffy, and a lot of the fashion became bright and colourful ... almost like an act of defiance. I remember a quote from Cyndi Lauper, that I actually quite like - "I wear the brightest colours on my darkest days"
That's where you may be going wrong with your 80's analysis, by assuming there is a "style" and that "it" could be understood.
Oct 1963 - Nov 1966 - Kinks get a haircut Apr 1967 - Feb 1970 1965 Never Say Yes 1966 Trouble In Madrid Nov 1970 - Jun 1976 Ray interview Ray Interview with Studs Terkel 1969 The Kinks Move To Arista Records Feb 1977 Sleepwalker Life On The Road - OGWT 77 - ITV 78 Mr Big Man Sleepwalker - Mike Douglas - OGWT - Supersonic - SNL - Outtake Brother Juke Box Music - single - OGWT Sleepless Night Stormy Sky - OGWT 77 Full Moon - live 77 - Ray live Life Goes On - OGWT 77 Artificial Light Prince Of The Punks The Poseur On The Outside - remix Elevator Man Kinks Live Feb 1977 Ray acoustic Apr 77 Kinks Old Grey Whistle Test show 77 Kinks Live Dec 1977 Christmas Concert 1977 The Pressures Of The Road Nov 1977 Father Christmas - video - live 1977 - tv promo - Dave live May 1978 Misfits Misfits - tv 1978 Hay Fever - live? Black Messiah Rock And Roll Fantasy- the hotel room - live Paris 1978 In A Foreign Land Permanent Waves Live Life - US version - UK tv Out Of The Wardrobe Trust Your Heart - live 1979 Get Up 1978 The Misfit Record EP Lola live in the hotel room UK tv 1978 The Misfits Tour Live in Paris 1978 Sept. 1978 20 Golden Greats Jul 1979 Low Budget Attitude Catch Me Now I'm Falling - remix - alt mix - The Late Man, Sea Cows In Love Mix Pressure - live 1983 National Health Superman (ext. mix) - single/album mix - ext fan mix - video - straight mix 12" Low Budget - Extended mix - Live 89 - Ray Live In A Space A Little Bit Of Emotion A Gallon Of Gas - Live in 1982 - Full US single version - Alt mix Misery Moving Pictures studio outtakes Hidden Quality Duke Nuclear Love Maybe I Love You Stolen Away Your Heart Mike Konopka Restores the Kinks for the Velvel Reissues The Low Budget interview Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Aug 1974 Live At Cobo Hall Ray On Wonderworld The Kunks Ray on the Stones Compilations part 1 The Kinks (France 78) Dave Davies - AFL1-3603 Where Do You Come From Doing The Best For You Visionary Dreamer Nothing More To Lose The World Is Changing Hands Move Over See The Beast Imaginations Real - Dave live In You I Believe Run Wild Man June 1980 One For The Road - The Concert Video - The 1979 Setlists Opening/Hardway - Hardway video Catch Me Now I'm Falling - video Where Have All the Good Times Gone - video Lola - video Pressure - video All Day And All Of The Night - video 20th Century Man Misfits Prince Of The Punks Stop Your Sobbing Low Budget - video Attitude - video Superman - video National Health Till The End Of The Day Celluloid Heroes - video Slum Kids 79 live July 1980 The Live EP - Promo EP 1980 Waterloo Sunset EP Live at the Palladium 1980 Live In Frankfurt in 1984 Kinks live TOTP 1994 2005 Thanksgiving Day Ray live on Conan Obrien Oct 2018 Dave Davies - Decade - interview If You Are Leaving (71) Cradle To The Grace (73) Midnight Sun (73) Mystic Woman (73) The Journey (73) Shadows (73) Web Of Time (75) Mr Moon (75) - Why Islands (78) Give You All My Love (78) Within Each Day (78) Same Old Blues (78) This Precious Time (78) US Chart Stats The Music Industry Machine Mick Avory Pete Quaife - interview - Kast Off Kinks - I Could See It In Your Eyes - Dead End Street Rasa Didzpetris Davies John Dalton John Gosling Jim Rodford Ian Gibbons Andy Pyle Gordon Edwards Clive Davis
Because its a Sunday “free day” and The Late Man requested… One For the Road — The Cover I was a bit disappointed that when the “One For the Road” overview kicked off there were very few opinions shared about the cover. Maybe I missed them? Could it be that its deceptive simplicity doesn’t inspire deep inspection? Possibly. And yet there is more to it if one comes at it with an appreciation for design. For all the flak the Arista era takes for its music, on the whole that label’s releases consistently offer the smartest cover designs in the entire Kinks discography. Thematically, every Arista cover up to this point had gone with a concept that reinforced a larger overall idea (despite Clive Davis’s dictum to avoid concepts.) The previous LP’s no-frills packaging and a low-rent streetwalker suggested a low budget. Before that there were the Dali-esque deformed faces that implied misfits. And before that was a front cover/back cover depiction of the album’s protagonist’s masked/unmasked duality to highlight two extremes—e.g. the difference between night and day, wherein one who treats night as day would be a sleepwalker. So…what is the unifying theme of One For The Road’s design? I’ll get to it, but first a preamble paragraph about what makes a good design: The goal is to direct the eye with a satisfying rhythm that points the viewers eye to the essential part of the art. At its most basic level it is the purpose of putting a frame around a picture—to contain the eye. Designers, of course, like to push the boundaries of creativity and are always devising different (and more pleasurable) ways to engage the viewer. This ranges from how photo subjects are posed, the composition of artwork, and how graphic elements are selected and positioned. Almost all guide the eye by utilizing either literal or subliminal shapes, curves, lines, color, etc. If you are skeptical of this, it’s important to emphasize these shapes that lead the eye can be accomplished by the creator without consciously trying, or the viewer without being aware of them. A perceptive mind will simply know when something looks right; the shapes that result from this are a natural consequence. (I debated creating diagram examples of shapes leading the eye from previous Kinks albums…but, nah, posting images here is too burdensome. So too is importing Kinks covers in my design software and marking them up) The shapes on OFTR’s cover could not be more direct. It’s all straight lines and sharp angles, connecting and intersecting and guiding the eye in a continuous movement. Movement that suggest…wait for it…a touring rock band. A band on the road, you might even say. The concept here opts for using design elements with subliminal messaging. Some examples: — —- See how the narrow rectangular boxes containing the band name and album title are spaced to suggest the broken dividing line in a roadway? (In other words, that yellow bar across the top is a road with the center line being the broken blue lines.) — —- Straight lines are all over this cover. Some parallel, some skewed (angling lines, BTW, is a design devise suggesting swiftness of movement). The variety of arrangements mirror the variety of content on this album’s four sides, and also—it could be interpreted—as the variety of venues where a band on tour performs. — —- Another design characteristic about the lines: there are no bends or curves, suggesting a direct journey with a purpose, e.g. an iconic rock band confidently recasting its back catalog as stadium-rock crowd-pleasers without obstruction or detour. While Kinks fans are split on the direction the band heads on One For the Road and beyond, there is no question Ray and co. are going exactly in the direction they want. This design exudes the band’s confidence. — —- A powerful employment of triangles. Triangles created out of negative spaces and/or extreme points are often used in design to convey movement and energy. Trace an imaginary line with your eye, for example, from Rays shoulder to elbow to hand and back up the guitar neck to the shoulder where you started. It’s a triangle. That’s an easy example to spot, but look carefully enough at this entire composition and you’ll note it is structured entirely of similar triangles composed of intersecting lines and negative spaces—both elongated and compressed—pointing left, right, up, down. This is not a coincidence. There is a reason why this particular picture was chosen: it facilitates the design. All these imaginary triangles fit like puzzle pieces locked into place. They are snuggly connected, which wouldn’t be the case with a wrong picture choice. This is a very solid composition. — —— Notice the skewed rectangle containing the picture of Ray. It’s positioning creates a Magenta-colored border in the negative space that forms triangles that serve as pointers, framing the entire “canvas” to direct the eye in a continuous clockwise direction. Constant motion = a band traveling from one gig to the next, day in, day out. The eye stops with Ray because A) he is the focal point of the picture, and B) if one breaks down the shapes in your subconscious, most (not all) the triangles formed by his pose point the eye counter clockwise in the opposite direction. This is what the designer wants to do: dictate a rhythm for the eye to move until it meets the intended stoping point by asking the eye to reverse direction. Now maybe you are thinking: “but Martyj, if the idea is to emphasize the theme of a band on the road, why the subliminal approach? Wouldn’t it be more obvious to use a picture of the band in action, or posed on a tour bus, or—as they do on their 1988’s live LP “The Road?”—simply use a picture of a road? Yes, they could have done it that way. But albums are creative endeavors as a whole. Why not make smart design choices as a reflection of what the music within is aiming to convey? “One For The Road” is the Kinks statement of charting a new course, asking their audience to look at their old catalog in a new way. The cover asks that of the audience as well. Here’s the difference between these two live Kinks LP covers: “The Road” is obvious, bland, forgettable. “One For The Road” is subliminal, creative, bold….and memorable. (Oh, and also, “The Road” cover sucks. I’ll get my shot in now!) As for the final distinctive visual element here, let’s not overlook the color palette. One of the few comments I read in this thread about the cover referred to it as “pink.” Wrong. It’s Magenta, because the palette here is simply 100% levels of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, aka CMYK. Much like the word “font,” until the computer age the world at large was unfamiliar with CMYK. By now anyone who has replaced a cartridge in a copier or printer knows this letter combo. Every reproductive print color in the spectrum can be achieved with various percentage combinations of Cyan (blue) Magenta (red) Yellow and Black. It’s a subtractive process, meaning in order to create more colors, one subtracts from the percentages. Using them separately in their undiluted 100% form is a bold visual with a statement: this is color at its starting point. Starting point. That phrase is what makes this CMYK palette for this project so perfect. I tried to connect this palette with a “one for the road” theme, but can’t. But in the larger picture of Kinks chronology, “One for the Road” can be equated to a starting point:—the beginning of the band (individual memberships aside) that they would remain for the rest of their career, the final paradigm shift for a group whose identity sustained at least a half dozen changes in direction. I know…I know…this is all very subliminal and only comes clear retroactively. It probably wasn’t that focused when it was created, so if you think this is a stretch, fair enough. Let’s at least acknowledge it is a happy accident that it worked out perfectly after the fact. Finally I’ll say this palette makes the product distinctive in a record store display. Maybe that’s not relevant in 2022, but it was a conscious marketing choice in 1980. It really grabs the attention, with the M rightfully dominating the CMYK presentation, and the Y and C used as accents makes them all the more eye-popping. Now, to make this well-conceived cover perfectly Kinksian by throwing in a “kink” to undo it, I dock points from the overall package when I consider the gatefold. It’s fine on its own, but there is no attempt to carry over any of the cover design elements, which they at least do on the back cover. It would have been a stronger gatefold if it did. At the very least, the CMYK color palette should have been employed somehow. But…it wouldn’t be the Kinks if they didn’t find a way to deny perfection with a puzzling decision. Perhaps they thought the customer could appropriate the gatefold as a wall poster…and yet they included a separate poster in the package anyway? Puzzling. In summary, judging merely by design composition, the cover of “One For the Road” vies with “Everybody’s in Showbiz” and “Kink Kontroversy” as their very best.
@Martyj - I hope you don't mind me doing this. Loved the breakdown, and just wanted folks to have a reference for the excellent work you did here --------------------------- Because its a Sunday “free day” and The Late Man requested… One For the Road — The Cover I was a bit disappointed that when the “One For the Road” overview kicked off there were very few opinions shared about the cover. Maybe I missed them? Could it be that its deceptive simplicity doesn’t inspire deep inspection? Possibly. And yet there is more to it if one comes at it with an appreciation for design. For all the flak the Arista era takes for its music, on the whole that label’s releases consistently offer the smartest cover designs in the entire Kinks discography. Thematically, every Arista cover up to this point had gone with a concept that reinforced a larger overall idea (despite Clive Davis’s dictum to avoid concepts.) The previous LP’s no-frills packaging and a low-rent streetwalker suggested a low budget. Before that there were the Dali-esque deformed faces that implied misfits. And before that was a front cover/back cover depiction of the album’s protagonist’s masked/unmasked duality to highlight two extremes—e.g. the difference between night and day, wherein one who treats night as day would be a sleepwalker. So…what is the unifying theme of One For The Road’s design? I’ll get to it, but first a preamble paragraph about what makes a good design: The goal is to direct the eye with a satisfying rhythm that points the viewers eye to the essential part of the art. At its most basic level it is the purpose of putting a frame around a picture—to contain the eye. Designers, of course, like to push the boundaries of creativity and are always devising different (and more pleasurable) ways to engage the viewer. This ranges from how photo subjects are posed, the composition of artwork, and how graphic elements are selected and positioned. Almost all guide the eye by utilizing either literal or subliminal shapes, curves, lines, color, etc. If you are skeptical of this, it’s important to emphasize these shapes that lead the eye can be accomplished by the creator without consciously trying, or the viewer without being aware of them. A perceptive mind will simply know when something looks right; the shapes that result from this are a natural consequence. (I debated creating diagram examples of shapes leading the eye from previous Kinks albums…but, nah, posting images here is too burdensome. So too is importing Kinks covers in my design software and marking them up) The shapes on OFTR’s cover could not be more direct. It’s all straight lines and sharp angles, connecting and intersecting and guiding the eye in a continuous movement. Movement that suggest…wait for it…a touring rock band. A band on the road, you might even say. The concept here opts for using design elements with subliminal messaging. Some examples: — —- See how the narrow rectangular boxes containing the band name and album title are spaced to suggest the broken dividing line in a roadway? (In other words, that yellow bar across the top is a road with the center line being the broken blue lines.) — —- Straight lines are all over this cover. Some parallel, some skewed (angling lines, BTW, is a design devise suggesting swiftness of movement). The variety of arrangements mirror the variety of content on this album’s four sides, and also—it could be interpreted—as the variety of venues where a band on tour performs. — —- Another design characteristic about the lines: there are no bends or curves, suggesting a direct journey with a purpose, e.g. an iconic rock band confidently recasting its back catalog as stadium-rock crowd-pleasers without obstruction or detour. While Kinks fans are split on the direction the band heads on One For the Road and beyond, there is no question Ray and co. are going exactly in the direction they want. This design exudes the band’s confidence. — —- A powerful employment of triangles. Triangles created out of negative spaces and/or extreme points are often used in design to convey movement and energy. Trace an imaginary line with your eye, for example, from Rays shoulder to elbow to hand and back up the guitar neck to the shoulder where you started. It’s a triangle. That’s an easy example to spot, but look carefully enough at this entire composition and you’ll note it is structured entirely of similar triangles composed of intersecting lines and negative spaces—both elongated and compressed—pointing left, right, up, down. This is not a coincidence. There is a reason why this particular picture was chosen: it facilitates the design. All these imaginary triangles fit like puzzle pieces locked into place. They are snuggly connected, which wouldn’t be the case with a wrong picture choice. This is a very solid composition. — —— Notice the skewed rectangle containing the picture of Ray. It’s positioning creates a Magenta-colored border in the negative space that forms triangles that serve as pointers, framing the entire “canvas” to direct the eye in a continuous clockwise direction. Constant motion = a band traveling from one gig to the next, day in, day out. The eye stops with Ray because A) he is the focal point of the picture, and B) if one breaks down the shapes in your subconscious, most (not all) the triangles formed by his pose point the eye counter clockwise in the opposite direction. This is what the designer wants to do: dictate a rhythm for the eye to move until it meets the intended stoping point by asking the eye to reverse direction. Now maybe you are thinking: “but Martyj, if the idea is to emphasize the theme of a band on the road, why the subliminal approach? Wouldn’t it be more obvious to use a picture of the band in action, or posed on a tour bus, or—as they do on their 1988’s live LP “The Road?”—simply use a picture of a road? Yes, they could have done it that way. But albums are creative endeavors as a whole. Why not make smart design choices as a reflection of what the music within is aiming to convey? “One For The Road” is the Kinks statement of charting a new course, asking their audience to look at their old catalog in a new way. The cover asks that of the audience as well. Here’s the difference between these two live Kinks LP covers: “The Road” is obvious, bland, forgettable. “One For The Road” is subliminal, creative, bold….and memorable. (Oh, and also, “The Road” cover sucks. I’ll get my shot in now!) As for the final distinctive visual element here, let’s not overlook the color palette. One of the few comments I read in this thread about the cover referred to it as “pink.” Wrong. It’s Magenta, because the palette here is simply 100% levels of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, aka CMYK. Much like the word “font,” until the computer age the world at large was unfamiliar with CMYK. By now anyone who has replaced a cartridge in a copier or printer knows this letter combo. Every reproductive print color in the spectrum can be achieved with various percentage combinations of Cyan (blue) Magenta (red) Yellow and Black. It’s a subtractive process, meaning in order to create more colors, one subtracts from the percentages. Using them separately in their undiluted 100% form is a bold visual with a statement: this is color at its starting point. Starting point. That phrase is what makes this CMYK palette for this project so perfect. I tried to connect this palette with a “one for the road” theme, but can’t. But in the larger picture of Kinks chronology, “One for the Road” can be equated to a starting point:—the beginning of the band (individual memberships aside) that they would remain for the rest of their career, the final paradigm shift in for a group whose identity sustained at least a half dozen changes in direction. I know…I know…this is all very subliminal and only comes clear retroactively. It probably wasn’t that focused when it was created, so if you think this is a stretch, fair enough. Let’s at least acknowledge it is a happy accident that it worked out perfectly after the fact. Finally I’ll say this palette makes the product distinctive in a record store display. Maybe that’s not relevant in 2022, but it was a conscious marketing choice in 1980. It really grabs the attention, with the M rightfully dominating the CMYK presentation, and the Y and C used as accents makes them all the more eye-popping. Now, to make this well-conceived cover perfectly Kinksian by throwing in a “kink” to undo it, I dock points from the overall package when I consider the gatefold. It’s fine on its own, but there is no attempt to carry over any of the cover design elements, which they at least do on the back cover. It would have been a stronger gatefold if it did. At the very least, the CMYK color palette should have been employed somehow. But…it wouldn’t be the Kinks if they didn’t find a way to deny perfection with a puzzling decision. Perhaps they thought the customer could appropriate the gatefold as a wall poster…and yet they included a separate poster in the package anyway? Puzzling. In summary, judging merely by design composition, the cover of “One For the Road” vies with “Everybody’s in Showbiz” and “Kink Kontroversy” as their very best.
To be honest I was probably thinking so much about the album, that I probably never even considered the cover..... and yes I have always liked the cover. Love this post, it brings to light things I had never really brought to the forefront of my mind, but upon reading your post, all made perfect sense
Is there any significance in the double unbroken blue lines? It seems interesting looking more closely in hindsight that they go through Ray's head, and Dave's heart .... seems like it may have significance
Avid Martyj, your post on the One From The Road cover ranks w/your post about The Great Lost Kinks Album as one of the best of this thread. Thanks for taking the and using your expertise to explain the concept behind the cover, which is miles better than The Road's cover. The Kinks should have hired you to do their album covers!
Thank you, Mark. I indeed wanted to accompany my post with visual examples, but writing it alone was a lot of work. I simply didn't want to invest the time. Looking at those visuals, the triangles I mentioned really, really, really notice them. They are so obvious. And the gate fold...it would have been so simple to encase that image within a Magenta border with a few skewed lines of 100% Cyan. That would have worked perfectly.
Hmmm. Great observation about the head and heart. As for the double blue line...maybe it just gave the overall look a bit more 'heft' or balance? Or, perhaps because it's a double album? Nah...That's probably overthinking it. They would have likely made sense just as easily if it was a single LP.
I suppose tying in with the road theme you laid out, double lines on the road generally mean no overtaking, or do not cross... perhaps don't cross Ray's head and don't crossDave's heart or there will be issues lol Like you say though, probably overthinking it
How about the blue lines represent Ray and Dave as creative forces of the Kinks (head & heart) running parallel but together?
I'm sure if they were thinking that deeply about it, then that is the kind of thing that struck me. It's funny, I have been seeing this album cover for decades, and never really looked at it as anything but the album cover. It seems a little sad in some respects, because someone obviously put a lot of thought into it, but I have never generally been to perturbed by album covers, I just wanted to get inside to the music. For the record, if I didn't state it previously the Art Direction was by Howard Fritzson Graphic designer & art director, currently VP of Design, Legacy at SonyBMG. Some of his other covers and he won the grammy for art design for the Miles Davis' "Cellar Door Sessions 1970"
The double blue lines could be road markings? @Martyj I thoroughly enjoyed your lesson in design. I’ve done a few logos and such but that was a fantastic break down.
One thing I noticed is that perhaps it illustrates the dynamics of the band. Ray is *in front* of the blue lines. Dave is *behind* the blue lines.
I hadn't noticed that .... Or are they the ropes of the boxing ring, and Ray and Dave are in the ring, fighting it out
Till the End of the Day This works for me. It really is presented as a completely different song, with barely a nod to the original riff. Yet, you can sing right along with it and you know every word. This may have been how they would have arranged this had they written these lyrics in 1978 or 1979. Musically I think it fits right into Misfits. Personally, I like when artists re-think or re-imagine the arrangement of a song. Usually we see this with stripped down acoustic versions, and it’s rare to hear the song in a different genre. Not sure how many are aware, but several years ago Lionel Ritchie put out an album called Tuskegee that comprised of country-tinged arrangements and duets with country artists. It’s a really good listen, and I highly recommend it! Celluloid Heroes I knew the studio version for 20-odd years, but never knew this one until the past month or so. The intro is a nice addition, and I don’t mind the synth there. It’s ok, but that said, I think I prefer the video version, without the synth. Just seems more appropriate to my ears. I think I prefer Dave’s solo in the video version too. The song itself is performed extremely well in both versions. Not sure how much was overdubbed, but Dave’s backing vocals add so much when they come in.
It's interesting to notice that Ray is pictured as the lead guitarist while Dave appears as the singer. Maybe the title can be understood as meaning "2 different individuals who become One for the road". But also, maybe not.