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….

Please Stand Up

In three monumental instances, an anonymous fan has dramatically impacted a band’s direction, yet to this date has never come forward, and thus remains unknown – even after the story has been told countless times, and will be told again here by me.

Moody Blues.   By now the ‘Blues are best known for pretentious prog-rock masterpieces like December 1967’s Days of Future Passed.  Before that, though, they had one album, The Magnificent Moodies, full of R&B tunes which sound nothing like their later material; Justin Hayward and John Lodge weren’t even in the band.  Hayward, the guitarist/vocalist, replaced Denny Laine (later to wind up in the Wings with Paul McCartney) and bassist/vocalist Lodge replaced Clint Warwick.  Instead of obvious MB favorites like “Tuesday Afternoon” or “Nights in White Satin”, Ozzy Osbourne covered “Go Now”, which dates from MB Mark I, so to speak.

What pushed them into prog territory was a chance encounter with a disgruntled fan after a show in Stockton, wherever that is.  Despite a new lineup, they were still doing their R&B set.  The fan bitched at them for a terrible show and a waste of 12 pounds and a ruined evening with his wife.  Drummer Graeme Edge concurred with the fan’s assessment: a change was needed.  After the record label had asked them to do a cover of Dvorak’s Symphony #9 in stereo, they simply decided to make their own concept album, about the passage of a day from dawn to midnight:  Days of Future Passed.

I read the account in the most recent PROG magazine article (cover story) on the Moody Blues.  But to date, that mysterious couple appears lost to history.

Deep Purple.    In December 1971, Deep Purple were due to record the album which would be Machine Head at the Casino in Montreux, Switzerland.  Before that, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention played a concert there, which was interrupted by “some stupid with a flare gun…burned the place to the ground.”  They had to record at the Grand Hotel next door, using the “Rolling Truck Stones thing” (mobile unit).  One song which came out of the recording sessions was the story of the whole debacle, better known as “Smoke on the Water”, with its classic riff.  Without the flare gun incident, the album would have been recorded at the Casino, without “Smoke on the Water”.   Who knows how it would have sounded, but it would have been without the band’s ultimate anthem.

But the gun nut?  Somehow this person has never come forward to take the blame – or the credit – after over 40 years.  

Pink Floyd.   On the 1977 In the Flesh tour for the Animals album, Pink Floyd were now playing stadiums, far larger venues than the UFO club in London where they started out as the house band for the London equivalent of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in California – for which the house band was the Grateful Dead.   Instead of tight, intimate venues, the band faced a vast multitude of faceless fans.  Some of these fans were rather rude and boisterous.  Something in Roger Waters snapped, and at the show in Montreal, he spit on a fan.   Afterwards, shocked at his own behavior, Waters realized that an invisible wall had somehow erected – either by circumstances or by Waters himself – between the band and its fans.  Waters explored the concept further, into what we now know of as The Wall album.

   To date, I am not aware that the Spit Victim has ever come forward, perhaps (in French Canadian accent) “ees me, ‘e spit on!  I am zee inspiration for ze Wall!  Ou sont mes royalties??”

** IN fact, since none of these persons have come to light, perhaps they are all… the same person!  A mysterious muse who remains anonymous, yet spurs the great and mighty minds of music to greater heights.   Someone had to tell the Moody Blues they sucked, so they would write Days of Future Passed instead of repeating The Magnificent Moodies yet again.  Someone had to shoot off a flare gun in the Casino, to inspire “Smoke on the Water.”  Someone had to incite Roger Waters to spit on him, so we could enjoy The Wall. 

So, Mr. Mysterious Musical Muse, a Real Man of Genius, Bud Light salutes you.

Enhanced Musical Appreciation

…in the form of set of digital wireless headphones.  I know people have been enjoying music on headphones for quite some time, but these are digital (super high quality) and wireless, avoiding the need to string a long cable between the stereo and the headphones – you can walk around with them on, which is much more convenient.  I got them for my birthday and recently began listening to a series of CDs I’ve had, but until recently have not been able to fully appreciate them.  The best I can imagine describing it is like being INSIDE a fishbowl or aquarium with the fish and marine life, instead of simply seeing a 2 dimensional painting. 

 Some of the “quad” mixes are Hybrid SACD, so they’ll play in regular CD players – like the CD player in your car stereo.  But others are DVD-Video, so they only play on DVD players.

 The Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed.  The Moody Blues albums, from Days onward, are all in stereo – no mono versions.  In fact, the label expressly intended Days to be a showcase of its new stereo technology (1967).  In 1972 Days and the subsequent albums (except for In Search of the Lost Chord) were remixed in quadraphonic sound.  The recent releases are in Hybrid SACD format, meaning they play on regular CD players.  Nonethless, the effect in quad is fanatastic. 

 Black Sabbath, Paranoid.  This is a recent Deluxe Edition, the quad version is in DVD-Video format (only plays on DVD players).  This was the only Black Sabbath album that has a quad mix.  On the headphones, the air raid siren on “War Pigs” pans from left to right. 

 Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon.  I had gotten this a few years ago – this edition has the album cover looking like a stained glass window.  It’s Hybrid SACD so it plays on regular CD players.  As you can imagine, this album in true quad is phenomenal.  "On the Run", a song I usually don't care for, is much better, "Money" is far more intense, "Us and Them" has more depth, and "Any Colour You Like" really hits you in the nuts.  Awesome!

 King Crimson.  In the Court of the Crimson King, Lizard, and Red.  These were recently remixed in 5.1 Surround by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree.  The 5.1 remixes are in DVD-Video format, so they only play on DVD players.  Of the three, Lizard is by far the most dazzling in its remix: there is lots of stuff going on that you’d never notice in a non-quad mix. 

 Deep Purple, “Maybe I’m A Leo” and “Lazy”, from Machine Head.   Good versions, but not as impressive as the other ones.

 I still have a few to listen to: Brothers in Arms (Dire Straits), Stormbringer (Deep Purple), Still Life (Opeth), Paradise Lost (Symphony X), and Systematic Chaos (Dream Theater).  These are all 5.1 Surround/DVD-Video format CDs which will not play on a regular CD player.   I also have Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic, which doesn’t play in anything, because it’s in DVD-Audio format; to my knowledge only Playstation 3’s will play that format – none of the DVD players at Best Buy will.

Moody Blues - Nights in White Satin Isle Of Wight Festival

One of their best songs (aka Knights of White Satan), the closing track on "Days of Future Passed", performed live at the 1970 version of the festival on August 30, on the same night as Free, Donovan, Pentangle, Jethro Tull, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Richie Havens, and Hawkwind (who were in another tent). Enjoy!