The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys is the sixth album by Traffic and was released in November 1971

As with other Traffic albums, The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys featured different forms and offshoots of rock including jazz rock, progressive rock, as well as classic rock and roll

Designed by Tony Wright, the cover is intended to describe what Traffic’s music sounds like. The checkerboard dance floor represents rock n’ roll (the grounding of the band and a point of departure). The walls are elemental, the clouds on the left representing water in its most ethereal form (the endless transition of day to day life), while the marble on the right represent the earth at its most enduring (indestructible ‘spirit’). And of course there is no ceiling on the cube – the ‘sky is the limit’, leaving the impression of the endless possibilities of life

That interesting phrase of a title came from a friend of Capaldi’s, actor Michael J. Pollard. Pollard’s face will be familiar if you watch a lot of movies and TV from the 1960s and 1970s — he’s most famous for his role in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde, where he played accomplice C. W. Moss. The story goes that Capaldi and Pollard were brainstorming movie plots one day when Pollard came up with the phrase. Capaldi considers the phrase descriptive of the rebel generation of the 1960s

As Capaldi explained :

Pollard and I would sit around writing lyrics all day, talking about Bob Dylan and the Band, thinking up ridiculous plots for the movie.
Before I left Morocco, Pollard wrote in my book [the line] ‘The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.’ For me, it summed him up. He had this
tremendous rebel attitude. He walked around in his cowboy boots, his leather jacket. At the time he was a heavy little dude. It seemed to
sum up all the people of that generation who were just rebels. […] The ‘Low Spark’, for me, was the spirit, high-spirited. You know, standing on a street corner. The low rider. The ‘Low Spark’ meaning that strong undercurrent at the street level

Inherent to classic-era culture is artwork. Corporate sponsorship made it possible (and necessary) to promote records with significant artwork, in this case Tony Wright’s. For the original pressing, the sleeve to “Low Spark” was cut into a clipped parallelogram, resembling a two-dimensional cube, a box of mirrors reflecting cloudy blue skies overlaid on a chess-board, which is the bottom panel of the cube. The essence of cool