The Moody Blues Revisited

 

It looks like I covered this band – back in 2008.  At that time I’d only digested three of their albums, and none of the solo albums – nor had I seen them live.  As it is, the band has 16 studio albums, starting with The Magnificent Moodies (1965) and finishing up with December (2003), a Christmas album.  Of the individual band members, Justin Hayward (singer/guitarist) has 8 solo albums, John Lodge (singer/bassist) has 3, including the most recent release (2015) of any band member, 10,000 Light Years Ago, and two each by Graeme Edge (drummer), Mike Pinder (keyboardist), and Ray Thomas (flutist).  

The band started out as a mediocre rhythm & blues band, guitar & vocals handled by Denny Laine and bass played by Clint Warwick.  They had one album, The Magnificent Moodies, and one hit single, “Go Now”, which Ozzy Osbourne covered. 

Prog Phase. But this direction wasn’t feeling right.   They dumped Laine & Warwick, replaced them with Hayward and Lodge, and swerved into the prog rock direction with a concept album, Days of Future Passed (1967).  Like In the Court of the Crimson King with King Crimson, the first is arguably the best.  The album covers the hours of the day, from morning to night.  “White satin” refers to a gift of white satin bedsheets Hayward received and found impractical.  The Mellotron is heavily featured in the album along with classical orchestration.  The overall impact is epic.  I tend to combine it with In The Court of the Crimson King (1969) and Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother (1970) for a prog rock trio listening experience. 

The following albums, In Search of the Lost Chord (1968), On The Threshold of a Dream (1969), To Our Children’s Children’s Children (1969) [I don’t think any band members have great-grandchildren yet], A Question of Balance (1970), Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (1971), and Seventh Sojourn (1972), continued the prog rock theme, with varying levels of competence and enthusiasm.  While not really psychedelic, the band did pay homage to Timothy Leary on “Legend of a Mind” on Lost Chord.  Of the original series of prog albums, I would put Days of Future Passed at #1, Seventh Sojourn a strong #2, On The Threshold of a Dream a distant third, and the rest are OK.  They are all on Spotify, but here’s something nice: with the exception of Lost Chord, they are all available as not merely digitally remastered, but the disc is dual layer, with CD players reading the CD audio layer, and a 5.1 Surround mix on the disc as well, which DVD players can read.  Moreover, Days, Lost Chord, and Children have a bonus disc – single mixes, out-takes, demos, and “live in the studio” kind of items.  This is material you’re likely to listen to far less often than the album itself.  Kudos to the band for making the 5.1 mix so easily accessible instead of part of a $100 boxed set. 

Hiatus & Solo Albums.  The band had a rather lengthy hiatus between Seventh Sojourn and Octave, during which time the various members set about doing solo albums.  Hayward and Lodge teamed up together with their first (Blue Jays), and then veered off separately.  After that the members alternated from MB to solo here and there.  I find the later solo albums to be as commercial as the contemporaneous MB albums.  None are absolute stinkers, but most will be interesting to listen to once or twice out of curiosity but not deserve the regular rotation that Days and Seventh Sojourn enjoy – at least for me.

Return and the Rest.  With Octave (1978), the band resumed its career, albeit moving away from a prog flavor and pushing heavily into a pop/commercial direction.  These were Long Distance Voyager (1981), The Present (1983), The Other Side of Life (1986), Sur La Mer (1988), Keys of the Kingdom (1991), Strange Times (1999), and the aforementioned December (2003).  Of these, I found The Present to be the strongest, with the rest being fairly snoozeworthy; not bad, but not particularly memorable.   

Isle of Wight 1970.  When Woodstock rolled around in August 1969, the Moody Blues were off in Europe touring – a decision they later regretted.  When the Isle of Wight Festival came round, they were determined to attend, and did.  I have the DVD of the performance.  Setlist:   Gypsy; Tuesday Afternoon; Never Comes The Day; Tortoise And The Hare; Question; The Sunset; Melancholy Man; Nights in White Satin; Legend of the Mind; Encore: Ride My See Saw.  Obviously I couldn’t make that show (just a baby at the time). 

I managed to see them live, at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, on March 26, 2010 (after I wrote my prior blog).  Setlist: The Voice; The Day We Meet Again; Steppin’ in a Slide Zone; Gypsy; Tuesday Afternoon; Lean On Me (Tonight); Never Comes The Day; Peak Hour; I Know You’re Out There Somewhere; The Story In Your Eyes; Your Wildest Dreams; Isn’t Life Strange; The Other Side of Life; Driftwood; Higher and Higher; Are You Sitting Comfortably?; I’m Just A Singer (In A Rock’n’Roll Band); Late Lament; Nights in White Satin; Question; encore: Ride My See-Saw.    That’s 12 songs from Days through Seventh Sojourn (none from Magnificent Moodies), and 9 from Octave and later.  Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder were long gone.  Edge was there on the stage with a drum kit, but a second (younger) drummer was also on stage doing most of the heavy lifting.  Since the Moody Blues aren’t generally known for having two drummers, live or in the studio, I suspect the new guy was there to get the job done and Edge was permitted to pretend to be playing along – maybe his drums weren’t plugged in (!).  Hayward and Lodge were front and center getting most of the work done, confidently so. 

Genesis comparison.  By now we’re familiar with the Phil Collins era of highly commercial music.  Of course, you’ll hear plenty of advice to seek out the prior prog phase with Peter Gabriel.  Well, I listened to all of them – From Genesis To Revelation (1969) through The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) (the last of the Peter Gabriel albums), and even indulged in the next two, A Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering, the last with (guitarist) Steve Hackett.   So far as I could tell, “Fifth of Firth” from Selling England By The Pound, was the strongest, heaviest song, on which Hackett can actually be heard playing.  The rest was …(disgusted face by either Dan Levy or Kirsten Wiig).  I recently had the pleasure of reading a heavy volume on Hawkwind, Days of The Underground, by Joe Banks.  In addition to reviewing the band’s albums from the self-titled debut through Levitation, there are interviews with band members, Doug Smith (manager), Stacia (dancer), and Michael Moorcock, the famous sci-fi author.  He’s asked why Hawkwind was the only band he had any substantial collaboration with, since prog bands are well known for having sci-fi/fantasy themes.   His response is that he found prog bands to be unbearably pretentious, and Hawkwind were notable for being not pretentious at all.  When it comes to being pretentious, I would put Genesis at the top of the list.  Moreover, bands like Pink Floyd at least give us some razor sharp guitar work from David Gilmour – or some nice psychedelia like Piper at the Gates of Dawn.  What Genesis gives us is 100% pretention and 0% any backbone. 

Where do the Moody Blues fit into this equation?  Well, I start from a core musical preference of hard rock.  My favorite two bands are AC/DC and Black Sabbath.  So my excursion into prog music is inevitably going to be judged on a standard of that nature, even if the two genres are far apart from each other.  The net result is that a prog band has to have some hint or element of heaviness in there somewhere.  King Crimson certainly does; and Pink Floyd get it done as well - as do Camel, of course.  The Moody Blues, thanks to some excellent guitar work from Justin Hayward – the heaviest songs being on Seventh Sojourn – manage to cross that threshold and keep my attention.  “Ride My See Saw” and “I’m Just A Singer (In A Rock’n’Roll Band)” serve the purpose of up-tempo rock songs.  Also, the band has a fair amount of humor injected into the equation and don’t take themselves nearly as seriously as you would expect from a prog band.  So I can count the Moody Blues as a prog band that I genuinely enjoy, even if I’m not inclined to listen to all of their material over and over again.  Your mileage may vary….