HITS & MISSES COVER PHOTOS

Vegavision   2009-Aug-31 at 12:09:25 Does anyone understand or have any thoughts on the cover photos on the Hits & Misses compilations? The cover of Misses is particularly fascinating...an old car, a chalk drawing,possibly of the car wheel, Joni bending down drawing more chalk lines.... Any ideas? Is there any Pink Floyd style puzzle here???

JMFriend_Canada   2009-Sep-01 at 18:47:33 Hits and Misses - Hits - Hit by car - Joni laid out on road - body outlined in chalk as an accident scene... - Misses - Not Hit by car - Joni drawing with chalk on the road... The way Hits and Misses was done was interesting. Joni didn't not want to do a box set/a best of album but it was specified in her contract which resulted in her releasing the two afore mentioned CD's. The hits were commercially viable pieces but she felt that some of the better peieces that held substance would have been considered misses.

photog   2009-Sep-20 at 21:02:14 JM Friend - Interesting what you've said about the choice of cover photos, never knew about that. Do have some background info on the photo shoot however, as I was there, and that little white car was mine. The photos were shot by Norman Seeff and I was one of his assistants at that time. Norman worked with Joni several other times too, shot the covers of Hejira and Dog Eat Dog, among other things. And those dogs on the cover were not dogs, they were timber wolves! The street drawings setup was Joni's idea and was intended to be the cover for Chalkmarks in a Rainstorm. The drawing is a profile of the car, hard to tell from the angle of the shots used. That particular cover design went through many many incarnations, none of them using Hits and Misses photos, before Joni settled on a shot done by her husband, Larry Klein. Joni has always maintained creative control of all of her package artwork which is, as far as I understand it, pretty much unprecedented in the music business. There was a very nice shot from that session used for publicity at the time - Joni wearing a (fake) leopardskin jacket while sitting in a car (the make-up artist's) with leopardskin upholstery.

JMFriend_Canada   2009-Sep-21 at 14:09:51 PHOTOG - Congratulations - your car has gained immortality. Your comments are interesting. My comments were in relation to a conversation with Joni Mitchell some years ago. Norman Seeff had taken a lot of great shots over the years. I appreciated you telling your experience. The information that I had in regard to the cover shoot was not that much other than what I wrote. I can remember when Hits/Misses came out I was a bit disappointed with it as I expected artwork - but I guess photography is artwork. Thanks for sharing your experience.