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Editor's Note: In honor of our 33 1/3 sale ?
buy two new (not used or sale) books from Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series, featuring critical writing on seminal albums, and get a third free ? we're pleased to feature blog posts from some of the people behind the 33 1/3 series.]
Writing about Dylan's Highway 61 for the 33 1/3 series made me explore the reasons why the album, and Dylan's music in general, have had such a long-lasting emotional pull on me. But it also dredged up some other, less fashionable musical allegiances, one of which I feel the need to confess here: I still like the Moody Blues ? there, I said it. Not the really cheesy stuff like "Nights in White Satin" (my love isn't that unconditional), nor much of what they put out after Seventh Sojourn (it isn't that constant, either). I'm talking about the string of albums they recorded in their late '60s, early '70s heyday, the ones that stamp their ticket to prog rock heaven, especially In Search of the Lost Chord, To Our Children's Children's Children, and A Question of Balance. These records are my hidden passion and guilty pleasure, the discs I put on when no one else is around. The Moody Blues live in a whole other universe from the spare, spidery loners who form my musical staple: Dylan, Chris Whitley, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Nick Drake, Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith... And yet something about their music keeps drawing me back, and has been for nearly forty years of changing musical tastes.
The "Moodies" are the antithesis of cool. The band's name alone is embarrassing enough, though their album titles are not far behind, and the sleeve paintings are uniformly corny (one of them had the dubious honor of figuring in an art historical tome on kitsch). The portraits in the gatefolds ? velvet jackets, pageboys over pointed collars, mustaches and muttonchops ? are an object lesson in why early '70s fashion must never, ever be allowed back in style. Their lyrics often have enough bombast to make Spinal Tap blush, and their highly orchestrated, Mellotron-rich arrangements ? I think it was Billboard that dubbed them "Mantovani with teeth" ? can easily melt into syrup.
At the same time, this over-the-top quality is a distinct element of the band's appeal. Never content with the basic guitar-bass-drum lineup favored by their contemporaries, the Moody Blues featured as many as three dozen instruments on a single record, many of which they'd never played before. "We didn't believe there was anything we couldn't do," drummer Graeme Edge recalled. "We just figured we'd pick it up and one or the other of us would get something out of it." It seems like a recipe for disaster, but more often than not the multi-tracked agglomeration of sounds both familiar and exotic (guitar, tambora, cardboard box ? you name it), anchored by that signature, sweeping Mellotron, produced as rich a harmonic texture as anything in the pop catalogue. The music, even today, rewards close hearing through good headphones, and their albums are among the few from that era that have actually benefited from digital remastering.
And then there are those bizarrely comforting formulaic quirks, such as the fact that virtually every album from the period starts with some portentous (and frankly forgettable) spoken piece by Edge, followed by an up-tempo rocker, usually by guitarist Justin Hayward, then by a mellower, more introspective piece by one of the other members ? no Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards autocracy here: everyone in the band had their say. And in keeping with this collectivist sprit, the Moodies were probably the first rock band, a couple of years before Abbey Road's celebrated Side 2, to regularly run one piece into the next in a continuous suite.
Ultimately, however, the proof is in the songs themselves, and for my money a number of them not only rank with some of the best melodies of their era, but still hold up in today's post-grunge, post-techno world. These songs create a complex, enveloping atmosphere, a synaesthetic experience similar to what Flaubert had in mind when he claimed that his historical epic Salammbô was meant to "give the impression of the color yellow." For me, there are entire sections of the Moody Blues' albums that conjure an intensely visual environment. The second side of Lost Chord calls up golden afternoon light in a lush garden. A Question of Balance evokes the cool green of an English glade, clouds drifting over the horizon. "Out and In" (Children's Children), though ostensibly about cosmic exploration ? with a sound and arrangement remarkably similar to Bowie's "Space Oddity," recorded at virtually the same time ? puts me in a room in a house where I grew up, viewed in retrospect with a Hopperesque square of sunlight carpeting the wooden floor.
Admittedly, as with many longstanding musical fidelities, there is an element of nostalgia in my continued liking for this music. But the reminiscence is not of days of future passed for which these records provided the soundtrack: it's of places that I've never actually visited; scenes that I've experienced with the potency of real memory but that I encountered only, as the band would put it, "on the threshold of a dream." Their music is able, like none other I know, to spark a mental journey to places otherwise out of reach.
So no, the Moody Blues are not the hippest band on my iPod. But they are probably among the most enjoyed, in ways that will remain largely incommunicable. While they'll never replace the idiosyncratic misfits whose work touches my ear, mind, and heart most deeply, they provide a pleasure very different from the one offered by the I-can-do-it-myself school (not to mention the I'm-too-blasé-for-my-cat school). And they will no doubt still be there long after many currently appreciated artists, and some not-so-current ones, have been deleted from my playlist.