In 1979, Raymond Douglas Davies found himself leading his band The Kinks on a world tour at a scale that would have been unimaginable for most of their career on the road. Supporting the hit album Low Budget, which completed a trifecta of comeback LPs after Sleepwalker in 1977 and Misfits the following year, Ray roamed the stage at venues that held thousands of fans, like Red Rocks, Universal Amphitheatre and Milwaukee Arena.
Recording a live album, and filming some shows for a release on those new-fangled videocassettes, was an innovative strategy: Time-Life (VHS/Beta) and Arista Records (double-LP) produced the very first simultaneous record/video release in June 1980.
With his guitar-slinger brother Dave (who he’d introduce on stage as “the raging bull of the Les Paul”), original Kinks drummer Mick Avory, the young keyboardist Ian Gibbons, and ex-Argent bass player Jim Rodford behind him, Ray embraced his frontman role, and the changing repertoire at his disposal. His songwriting had always mixed romantic ideals and cynicism, miniature depictions of English life and ruminations on philosophy’s big questions, but on the last three studio albums he’d also found a new, commercial groove that appealed to American audiences that barely remembered the Kinks of the ’60s. At the time he told writer Bill Holdship, “I like to feel that every show is the last one we’re going to do because that gives us the fire.”
When once asked, “How seriously should rock and roll be taken?” Ray replied, “As seriously as the CBS News.” During the 1979 tour, he told NME’s Charles Shaar Murray, “It’s going back to what we were when we started. We thought, ‘Well, we can’t write songs like the Beatles or sing harmonies like the Hollies, so let’s do something we can do. We know you can hit a riff and you can play an offbeat and I can sing in a limited sort of way and write something around that and use the materials that are there.’ That’s what we’re doing, and that’s why I think the [recent albums] worked.
“I don’t know where I fit on the social scale anymore,” he continued. “I’ve got working class beliefs, but I’m a fool, because I still believe in the common man, and that’s the only strength to me. I don’t know where I stand, because I’ve been successful and that’s taken me out of the normal working class.”
Mostly recorded between March 1979 and March 1980 by several different mobile studio trucks, One for the Road rose to #14 on the Billboard album chart, and “Lola,” the single drawn from the two-disc set, got considerable airplay. (Nick Newell is also credited with overdubbing some post-concert keyboards.) Although Avory and Dave Davies were known to occasionally fight onstage and off during this period, the album is nothing but good vibes, in a party atmosphere.
After a heavy-metal-ized, all-instrumental intro of “You Really Got Me” at earsplitting volume, the setlist begins with “Hard Way” from Schoolboys in Disgrace, likewise amped up compared to the relatively decorous original studio take. This is the template for One for the Road: the delicate, detailed, even fey decorum of past Kinks performances mostly replaced with muscular, neo-punk arrangements full of manic energy. Avory especially seems to have remade his drumming style to emphasize a 2/4 slam over elegant fills.
The first of six Low Budget songs featured in the set, “Catch Me Now I’m Falling” gets a cheer from the crowd at Providence Civic Center when Ray sings, “Now I’m calling all citizens from all over the world/This is Captain America calling.” Dave makes the most of his theft of the riff from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” while Ray’s lyrics spin a geo-political metaphor: “I stood by you through all your depressions/And I lifted you when you were down/Now it’s your chance to do the same for me.”
Originally the B-side to 1965 hit “Till the End of the Day,” “Where Have All the Good Times Gone” is beautifully placed to resonate with the previous number, reaching back to the pun on “depression”: “Well, I lived my life and never stopped to worry ’bout a thing/Opened up and shouted out and never tried to sing/Wondering if I’d done wrong/Will this depression last for long?” The blend of the brothers’ voices on the chorus is part of the enduring Kinks signature. Dave’s guitar cleverly recycles the riff from “All Day and All of the Night,” their 1964 hit single, which was itself like “You Really Got Me” played sideways.
Ray teases the audience with the acoustic guitar opening to “Lola” before demanding a sing-along, in which the crowd rowdily participates. The lyric’s clever ambiguity and soaring chorus makes “Lola” peak Kinks and an evergreen favorite.
Coming off like the Buzzcocks playing Chuck Berry via a riff copped from Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça Plane Pour Moi,” the Kinks blast Low Budget’s short, delightfully unhinged “Pressure,” leaning on its minimal chorus, “Pressure, pressure/I got pressure/Oh, yeah!” Next up is “All Day and All of the Night” in all its ragged glory, recorded at Rutgers University. On the video release, you can see Dave getting on his knees and throwing all kinds of “rock god” shapes as he relentlessly delivers his proto-metal riffage.
Related: Our Album Rewind of the Kinks’ 1977 Sleepwalker
A standout from 1971’s Muswell Hillbillies LP, “20th Century Man,” is given an over-egged performance, with nods to the Who and the Yardbirds in the arrangement. “Misfits” is a fine, wistful lament (“Though it’s cold inside/I know the sun is going to shine again/Because you know what they say/Every dog has his day”) for which Ray uses his “Waterloo Sunset” voice, and Dave’s short solo at 2:30 is emotionally spot on.
“Prince of the Punks,” the B-side of the “Father Christmas” 1977 single, was triggered by Ray’s relationship with the gay punk Tom Robinson. The vitriol is real (“Tried to be gay, but it didn’t pay/So he bought a motorbike instead/He failed at funk, so he became a punk/’Cause he thought he’d make a little more bread”), but the song itself is a Chuck Berry/Beach Boys pastiche that at the time was questionable and is now embarrassing.
The majestic “Stop Your Sobbing” was on The Kinks’ 1964 debut album, and was covered by the Pretenders in 1979, just before their lead singer Chrissie Hynde and Ray Davies began a romantic relationship. One can imagine the Shirelles or Ronettes doing it.
Four tunes in a row from Low Budget—the title track, “Attitude,” “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” and “National Health”—prove that even with weak material this version of the Kinks could whip up an audience and entertain the hell out of them. On the One for the Road video, you can see the sweat-drenched Ray acting out the songs, drawing the crowd into his fictional scenarios, where physical weaklings have comic book dreams and the guy shopping at thrift stores imagines prosperity. Ray’s advice to a loser in the pub is to change his attitude: “The ’80s are here, I know ’cause I’m staring right at them/But you’re still waiting for 1960 to happen.”
Recorded in Zurich, Ray’s touching “old Hollywood” tribute “Celluloid Heroes” gives Dave plenty of solid soloing time, and another “la-la-la” audience sing-along ensues across a solid seven-minute performance. A full-bore “You Really Got Me” has Ray roaming the stage like Mick Jagger, and two of his best tunes, “Victoria” and “David Watts,” serve as dessert, with the first drawing energetic audience participation from the Zurich crowd and the second—a brilliant song about the singer’s admiration for an English private school’s “head boy”—greeted with more polite applause, although the Syracuse audience does sing along with Ray’s quick rendition of Harry Belafonte’s “Day-O,” telling the crowd, “We gotta go home.”
The tapes and video from the tour were mixed and edited under Ray’s supervision, so he’s the one who decided to leave out his brother’s solo turn on the British hit “Death of a Clown,” and a number of Kinks klassics that were performed at most venues, including “Sunny Afternoon” and “A Well Respected Man.” Critics who disliked live albums on principle or thought the Kinks weren’t great in person mostly came around. Two Rolling Stone writers weighed in: Dave Marsh wrote, “This set is so hot I’m prepared to renounce my skepticism and admit that this is the great rock band its partisans have always claimed,” and Fred Schruers agreed that “Kinks concerts, once the chanciest of propositions, now have the friskiness and precision of One for the Road as a model with which to be compared.”
Original members Ray, Dave and Mick are still with us, so rumors of a Kinks reunion have been persistent ever since their last live performance in 1996, even though the brothers and their drummer have been feuding for most of their lives for one reason or another. In 2023 Avory told a reporter, “I don’t think it’s possible now—one thing, health-wise. [Dave was still recovering from a 2013 stroke.] And I don’t think we could ever work it out because Dave wanted to do it one way, and Ray wanted to do it the other—which was quite normal thinking for them.”
The album is available in the U.S. here. Their catalog, including many expanded editions, is available in the U.S. here and in the U.K. here.
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2 Comments so far
Jump into a conversationRecorded in my State of Rhode Island! A really great live album, and the overall vibe, is outstanding. An excellent document of a band, in all its glory.
I actually passed on a road trip from Ct. To Providence being disenchanted with the release of Low Budget with its mediocre sound and production. One For the Road ended up being their Kiss Alive and basically ended any reason to ever the studio version again. With below average releases in 1979 from rock heavyweights like Zeppelin, KISS, Nugent and Aerosmith the Kinks of all bands helped save rock with this release as it was easily the most played party record my senior year in High School.