It's a fun album, for sure. By the way, it's worth pointing out that, in the UK, even though their albums (mysteriously) never sold I don't think the Kinks were ever discarded as boring old f*rts during the punk era. That could be simply because they weren't really successful enough to be seen as dinosaurs but I think it's also to do with Ray Davies not being a Jagger or a Rod Stewart or a Jimmy Page etc.
You Really Got Me Here we go, off to the races. Ray in both camp mode and aggressor, how can this be? Dave falls to his knees for a guitar solo that almost goes off the rails thanks to a rambunctious fan (I think it’s a baseball cap in his hand), but Dave just swats him away and gets on with it. I remember, sometime in the mid-80’s, and after midnight, watching MTV with a friend and this clip was played. My friend Rich was a big AC/DC fan who didn’t know much of the Kinks. He was floored by how much they moved around on stage, for an old band! Pure Rock ‘n Roll. Victoria More high energy rock and the Kinks are on a roll. Things again reach a fever pitch. The clattering keyboards and frantic pace make this song one of my favorites on this album. David Watts Two songs in a row that reference the Queen and on this one Ray wants all he has got. Well, he doesn’t know water from champagne, either. A nice old nugget to close the show.
Might as well add this today while it’s era and context appropriate: for some reason, a cover of ‘Bird Dog’ by The Everly Brothers was a regular feature of The Kinks sets in this era, perhaps a telling tip of the hat to that formative embattled rock/pop fraternal duo. Might have made a good ‘exclusive’ for the album.
You Really Got Me As has been stated this is fast and someone is in a hurry and perhaps has plenty to prove, this was particularly noticeable in the LP Version where i thought i hear Mick struggle at times with his rhythm fills. Dave and Ray are no doubt liberated with their propulsive and crunchy rocking but of course it cannot be a direct reflection of 1964 with that original perfect vocal repose and overall tension full of less is more nirvana. As for the guy touching Dave's fretboard well that's down to Dave, you get that close and a door is opened for excited fans.
Victoria An always welcome track even though i miss the land of hope and glor-i-a section. Of The two i prefer the video version as I feel Dave's solo serves the song better and it has a little restraint and stays closer to rootsy rock "n" roll!
I’m amazed at how good Ray’s voice sounds on this track after a full live set. I’d expect more ragged, rawness…but, nope. Sounds good.
David Watts Not much to say about this but a good addition to the album given there's nothing else from '67-'68, the Jam's cover and most of all that it's a very fine song. As for Day-o we find it's had its day and is mercifully short.
Bingo - that sums the album up nicely for me! There's a handful of songs that I like and are different enough from the studio versions that I may want to hear again, so I'd pick up the CD if I saw it cheap somewhere, but it's not something I'd hunt down or pay a lot for as I'm unlikely to play it much.
"20th Century Man", "Misfits", "Victoria" : Where have all the bridges gone ? I still have to give this album a whole headphone listen (it's either car or headphone, unfortunately I don't have the time or living room disponibility for dedicated Hi-Fi listening). I love a lot of it already, but I still stumble on the Low Budget side. I have to watch the video too, but I have even less time for that. The colours are not very engaging. At first sight, I thought that Ray's weird movements made him look like a sort of cubist Mick Jagger, but on second thoughts that may be precisely part of what's endearing with this performance. The raw, imperfect, uncalculated aspect of it.
You Really Got Me You can't blame Ray for taking YRGM in a much heavier direction at this time given heavy metal and hard rock was big again on both sides of the Atlantic. That classic riff cuts through the distortion to remind us where it all began sixteen years earlier. I don't think I'll ever tire of this song. Victoria This was always a rowdy live number so it's appropriate that it's placed near the end of the show when the audience is (hopefully) going off like a cracker. Even those fans who jumped onto the Kinks in the late seventies and perhaps hadn't heard Arthur would have been able to enjoy singing/shouting the wonderful chorus. David Watts Unlike in real life David Watts gets a real thrashing here. Ray would have been thrilled that the Jam successfully covered it - giving Ray the cover to make it a two-minute angst attack befitting the times. Still, I don't think the Jam were big in America so I wonder why they closed with this on the live album given YRGM would have offered a more thunderous exclamation mark. The Album None of my minor quibbles prevents me from enjoying this album immensely. It's full of energy - as live albums should be - and retains just enough of the traditional Kinks charm and quirks to be seen as part of the continuum rather than an outlier in their catalogue. EDIT: another reason I love this album is that it reminds me of the only time I saw the band live (1982).
That sounds very much like it's from the 1980 New Year's Eve show at The Palladium - a great show and great recording that a couple of us have mentioned in the last couple of weeks.
Thank goodness! As I mentioned during Schoolboys in Disgrace I had a condensed lifetime of caning during my schooldays. I'm not a fan of corporal punishment though I only had experience on the receiving end.
Indeed, they were a pretty young band !!! Ray and Dave were 34 and 32, Mick 35, Gibbons 27 (the youngster), Rodford (the old geezer) 38. That's quite young, even for rock'n roll. I'd say that's part of the appeal of this record : the listener's able to hear the sixteen years career, the breadth of material, the experience of touring, the consummate art of showmanship and the echo chamber provided by all that shared History within themselves and with at least part of their audience. But at the same time, they're still extremely young guys, capable of winning Grand Slam tennis tournaments, Formula 1 races, 100m Olympic races, NBA rings or soccer's Ballon d'or and Champions' leagues. Easy! As a whole, I think that's what this record's all about, a kind of "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" perspective on the rock'n roll life and however they'd been approaching it since 1972. They had to adjust to newer trends, newer sounds, newer ways, and they did it by just looking in the mirror and seeing rather young blokes, whereas starting with Here Comes Yet Another Day from Everybody's in Show-biz, they'd consistently presented themselves as a rather old act, tired of the old routine. There's no rock'n roll fatigue on One for the Road, quite the opposite, and I think that's what appeals to the most enthusiasts among us. I have a ticket somewhere at home from a November 1979 Paris show that a friend who attended gave me (here's the mind blowing setlist I found online : Sleepwalker/ Till the End of the Day / Where Have All the Good Times Gone / Lola / Misfits / Low Budget / Superman / You Really Got Me / A Gallon of Gas / Everybody's a Star / A Well Respected Man / Death of a Clown / Sunny Afternoon / All Day and All of the Night / Pressure / Twist and Shout / Unknown / A Rock'n Roll Fantasy / Victoria / Attitude. I was 9 years old at the time… So there, that wasn't for me. But we were talking great live albums the other day, and I think the best of them are the ones that generate a sentiment of jealousy from those who listen towards those who actually attended the tour. Listening to Celluloid Heroes or this frantic sixties quasi-medley, that’s exactly what I felt, about @Paul Mazz and the likes. Bitter jealousy!! I wish I'd been a little older (then – but so much younger now) to be there and get my ass kicked by one of the most exciting bands ever.
I have an all hands call starting in five minutes with the attorneys in my firm so I’m going to keep this brief. Clearly I like this album a lot so there’s nothing new I’m going to say about any of today’s songs. I think all three of them are good solid examples of the band playing earlier hits with some degree of modernization . All three are played exceedingly well in my opinion. YRGM would be the best of the three for me, I love seeing them reinvent it as an even harder rocking version of the original. Dave is a great guitarist but there’s no way he’s going to out flash Eddie Van Halen, And at the same time in no way embarrasses himself. Victoria and David Watts are simply fast paced exercises and delivering really great songs that we get the crowd bouncing. It’s a nice way to end the album. It’s nice to see that some of the fans here appreciate this album. It seems like the chatter has died down a little bit, but I guess that’s to be expected considering we’ve already talked in detail about the lyrics and some construction of everyone of these songs. I am looking forward to jumping in to GTPWTW (I know we have a few things first) and hoping the chatter will pick up again as I think that’s a great Album.
One From the Road ends with the 1-2-3 punch of "You Really Got Me"/"Victoria"/"David Watts", the first song the most important ever in their career, the one that invented the hard rock sound & the Kinks remind everyone of that w/their performance. The other two were among the most hard rocking songs of the 1966-69 period (which Mike Stax of Ugly Things has called their "Crushed Velvet" period) and their performances are amped up from the originals. I think that One From the Road was a solid live album that showed that the Kinks were a contemporary band w/a wide ranging repertoire, although I still think they leaned a bit too much on Low Budget. This was Our Headmaster's first Kinks album and if this lead him to the joys of the remainder of their catalogue and ultimately attempting to heard a bunch of Krazy Kats like us in this thread (and sometimes succeding! ), then it has performed its mission.
Avid Fortuleo, I got to see the Kinks 6 times & Ray 3 times. I'm just jealous that you can understand what Francoise Hardy is singing about!
Yea... we'll hit four days of Dave, and then hopefully with Give The People What They Want on Saturday folks will feel more connection, and join back in fully, because it certainly has plenty to talk about on it. Hopefully covering One For The Road properly hasn't discouraged people. It may not currently be a favourite, but we covered it in pretty quick time, and either way, it is still one if the most important albums the band released
have been listening and reading along as I try to meet a deadline that is still looming so, as a songwriter friend used to say before he played me a new, unpolished song, "caveat, caveat, caveat; disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer." One thing I remember from this era is the unbridgeable division between the punks and the metalheads. You couldn't get a guy who was into Zep and Sabbath to listen to Never Mind the Bollocks, and no punk would be caught dead with an Aerosmith album. What's amazing about the Kinks is that they got covered by cutting-edge punk bands like the Jam & the Pretenders as well as neo-dinosaurs like Van Halen, and drew fans of both genres. As noted in the discussion of some of the leftover tracks from the late 70s sessions, the Kinks certainly could've re-branded themselves as a power pop/new wave band (the Romantics covered She's Got Everything in January 1980). They had the history, the chops, and the credibility to be the grandfathers (or fathers) of that genre. But they also had the history, chops etc to put themselves out there as progenitors of metal/arena rock. They clearly chose the latter. At the time, to me, that seemed like a huge mistake, and I stopped buying new Kinks LPs after Misfits (I never lost my love for the "crushed velvet" period). But in 2022, I'm Billy Joel, and it's still rock n roll to me. The punk/metal dichotomy seems dated, false, and artificial; what I want out of rock music is energy, commitment, and sincerity. & I don't see any lack of that (in fact there's an abundance of it) on this LP. I took my 12 year old daughter to a Bikini Kill concert on Friday night. The girls are all in their 50s now, but they were still screaming 2 minute songs about revolution & anarchy, & my girl was pumping her fists, jumping up and down, and yelling herself hoarse singing "double dare, triple f*cking dare you girlfriend." You lose yourself in a great live show, you merge with the crowd and the performers -- and you have that sudden transcendent rush of affirmative rebellion. Something has to fall apart, to burn to the ground, for something new to be born. There's beauty & truth in discordance and chaos, elevated and sanctified by melody and harmony. & One From the Road has all of that. Thanks to this thread and @mark winstanley for introducing me to it. Random-ass notes: For all the metal dressings & exclusion of melodic bridges of their earlier songs, they decided to end Victoria with that little (descending?) coda that takes us right back to 1969. // Ray is just indisputably awkward trying to jump around and gesture like a big rock star, and it's unutterably endearing. // I played the last three songs on the way to school this morning and asked for my daughter's comments per @Fortuleo 's suggestion. She was in her Monday morning sullen tween mode and just said "I don't have anything smart to say, it's just really good." Which actually says it all.
I listened to Give The People for the first time in a while last night. It was good. Don't think I've enjoyed it quite that much since the first time I heard it. A lot to talk about there.
