I was surprised when one YouTube comment bemoaned the fact that The Moody Blues are not in The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. I checked and it is so. It’s a travesty. They were a great and important band.
Experts may scoff at my ignorance, but I always thought of them with Pink Floyd: A bit over the top, great lyrics and a deep,lush and instantly recognizable sound.
This long excerpt is from Bruce Eder’s terrific profile of The Moody Blues at AllMusic. I highly recommend the entire piece, though Bruce could use a refresher course in paragraph construction:
In contrast to America, where home stereo systems swept the country after 1958, in England, stereo was still not dominant, or even common, in most people’s homes — apart from classical listeners — in 1966. Decca had come up with “Deramic Stereo,” which offered a wide spread of sound, coupled with superbly clean and rich recording, and was trying to market it with an LP that would serve as a showcase, utilizing pop/rock done in a classical style. The Moody Blues, who owed the label unrecouped advances and recording session fees from their various failed post-“Go Now” releases, were picked for the proposed project, which was to be a rock version of Dvorák‘s New World Symphony. Instead, they were somehow able to convince the Decca producers involved that the proposed adaptation was wrongheaded, and to deliver something else; the producer, Tony Clarke, was impressed with some of the band’s own compositions, and with the approval of executive producer Hugh Mendl, and the cooperation of engineer Derek Varnals, the group effectively hijacked the project — instead of Dvorák‘s music, they arrived at the idea of an archetypal day’s cycle of living represented in rock songs set within an orchestral framework, utilizing conductor/arranger Peter Knight‘s orchestrations to expand and bridge the songs. The result was the album Days of Future Passed. (Continue Reading…)
