The Moody Blues - A Question Of Balance

I had this album on 8-track as a kid, and even with the limited visibility of A Question Of Balance, the cover art freaked me out.

I don’t know how well you can see it here, but look at it. That dude with cloud hair used to freak my shit as a kid.

What freaks me out now is how much I used to appreciate what was inside that 8-track cartridge instead of what was on the outside.

Like Days Of Future Passed, the Moody Blues were early favorites in my musical upbringing, but they were the sort that began to fade from my appreciation as I got older.

A good example of this is a strange encounter I had with a girl I met at community college. I used our local campus to take advantage of a better student-to-professor ratio for subject matters that I wasn’t extremely proficient in. As a result, my first year of college was spent studying crap like math and science, living at home, and frequenting local bars.

On one day, the professor was late to our class and I struck up a conversation with a nearby student who seemed nutty, but not crazy enough to pursue an intimate encounter with. I started off with a typical “What kinds of music do you like?” introduction and was completely unprepared for her excited devotion to the band The Moody Blues.

It was around this time when I began to question the Moody’s place in rock and roll’s hierarchy, but the girl came off as such an obsessive that I wasn’t going to get into a philosophical debate on the merits of the band.

I did find it strange that she related so much to them, so I inquired where it began.

It started with her father, who filled that blank slate daughter with a trip to a Moody Blues concert and the rest was history.

She went on to voice her love of Justin Haywood in the same manner that girls voiced attraction to Duran Duran, and that is where I bowed out.

As a young adult navigating higher education while examining the rock and roll road I had arrived on, I began to question the landmarks of that road, asking “Were they worthy of further consideration?”

For the rest of the semester, I avoided any meaningful contact and the strange encounter placed further doubts on my opinion of the Moody Blues.

For A Question of Balance, my concerns again rested on the lyrics.

Drummer Graeme Edge returns with the stupid “Don’t You Feel Small” where he attempts to make us appear insignificant by the unlikely method of whispering his lyrics.

Flautist and mustache man Ray Thomas delivers “And The Tide Rushes In,” a nice ballad that attempts so hard to so significant, but ultimately fails with Thomas’ inability to carry a linear thought throughout the tune.

None of this should be surprising for a band that allows such democracy in their creative process. The reality is that probably only two members should be allowed next to pen and paper-Justin Hayward and John Lodge-as everyone else manages to come up short during their lyrical output.

Hayward walks away with the blue ribbon for “Question,” the album’s lone hit and most well conceived song.

The last place award may go to Mike Pinder for the abysmal “Melancholy Man” which manages to be even more morose than the title suggest. By the end of it, Pinder is yelling “I’m a really lonely man” in between pleads of “Pity me! Pity me!” A slow-fade at the end makes it seem like it’s going on forever.

How ironic is it that an album originally designed to show the Moody Blues in a stripped down fashion manages to sound just as bloated as its mellotron-heavy predecessors?

And that is the ultimate failure of the Moody Blue’s legacy. It relies too much on the notion of the band’s importance in relation to Days Of Future Passed-an album that really benefited more from when it was released than what was in it.

Future albums came at a rate of a record a year, and with that kind of schedule, flaws in the band member’s contribution became audibly evident.

A Question Of Balance is no exception.

With one stellar cut, a handful of tolerable tunes, and an even larger percentage of eye-rolling progressive bloat, it follows a pattern that poses a bigger question: do the Moody Blues deserve the perception of challenging art rockers, or are they merely treading water and barely staying afloat.

The Moody Blues - Days Of Future Passed

As a child, I fell in love with the Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed.

They played with an orchestra, so you know it’s good.

Or at least, that’s what I thought as a child.

When I got older, I bought Days Of Future Passed (again) on cd.

After listening it to it again on that digital platform, I didn’t feel the same way.

In fact, I disliked it so much that a few years later I sold it back at a loss.
During that time in my bedroom as a kid, I studied the liner notes. If I recall, they had the transcript of the intro/outtro that bookends Days with an embarrassingly bad bit of prose. Bongwater made fun of it on their version of M.B.’s “Ride My See Saw,”, reading a bit of the monologue at the end of the song before Ann Magnuson lets out a sarcastic “Wow” after the “We decide which is right and which is an illusion” part.

I’m really not doing it justice, but trust me when I tell you it’s awful.
And there should not be any “cringe-inducing” moments on an album that likes to refer to itself as a “classic album.”

There are, however, two wonderful songs-both of which are part of the rock and roll vernacular-that are just great enough to put Days Of Future Passed into a category a notch above dismissing it.

Those songs, “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights In White Satin,” are perennial favorites and rightfully so.

But are they “rock songs?”

They are not.

They are wonderfully executed pop songs that just happen to be the focal points of an album that’s referred to as the first effort to combine classical and rock music.

Never mind that rock and roll by nature is an art form that puts the power of musical creativity into the hands of the common man, the very notion of a classical/rock album devoted to the everyday life of the common man is in itself an oxymoron and an event that shouldn’t be praised very loudly to begin with.

But the Moodys left their previous role as R&B purveyors to focus on a concept album with their new members (Justin Hayward and John Lodge), taking advantage of their label’s request to help Deram market stereophonic platters.

And since nothing says “in living stereo” better than an orchestra, they hired the London Festival Orchestra and conductor Peter Knight to create orchestral arrangements that blended the songs together.

The strategy works great on the aforementioned hits and “Dawn Is A Feeling,” but when the Moodys can’t match wits lyrically, the combination sounds forced.

Nothing, however, is as forced as the pretentious malarkey that fills member Graeme Edge’s “Morning Glory” intro and “Late Lament” outro.

Ironically, for an album originally developed to coincide with “Deramic Sound” (Deram Records’ version of what you and I call “stereo”) the label did a shitty job of securing the results. Subsequent generations were forced to listen to this “landmark” release on hissy safe copies as the original tapes were lost or destroyed.

Even attempts at patching together a definitive re-issue has been plagued with shoddy techniques and lazy research, hinting at the possibility that perhaps the label heads never really took this project seriously from the beginning.

And after listening to Days Of Future Passed, maybe you shouldn’t either.

The Moody Blues - Days Of Future Passed

On the back cover of The Moody Blues’ Days Of Future Passed album, there’s a picture of the Moodys sitting in a conference room of Deram records, discussing the new album. When I was younger, I imagined the band discussing ideas on how to make the album awesome. It also looked like the room itself-probably just another boring, mundane conference room-was a futuristic lab where the band discussed such heavy topics like the phases of the moon and symphonic arrangements.
Today, my cynicism has replaced all of that youthful space-talk. For all I know, they were probably sitting around, discussing ideas of how to take The Beatles’ foray into art a step further, utilizing a willing orchestra and a hare-brained idea of a day in the life, pun intended.
I was duped into believe that Days Of Future Passed was some kind of artistic statement all the way into my first few years of college. It was then that I re-purchased the album on cd-because all works of art should be listened to in the highest of fidelity, right?
Nothing could have prepared me for the magnitude of unchecked pretention that awaited me when I re-interpreted this album. Evidently, I must have picked up the needle whenever the narrator came on at the beginning and end of the album, reciting some bullshit poetry that was probably composed during the same time that aforementioned photo was taken. Bongwater later parodied this with a straight face for one of their albums, only added a sarcastic “Wow.” at the end.
There is no “Wow” at the end of the Moody’s original version. They really believe this shit.
Understand, this was a pop band prior to the recording of this album. Listen to “Go Now” when the band featured Denny Laine and then listen to “Nights In White Satin” featuring a newly appointed Justin Haywood. Haywood clearly had an impact on what the Moody Blues were to become: a counterfeit piece of motel room art packaged under a fraudulent claim to be a classic piece of work.
The two hits, “Tuesday Afternoon” and “Nights In White Satin,” are fine pieces of detailed pop. They stand out as decent pop singles even during a period when artists tended to throw everything in the mix to make it sound “modern” or “psychedelic.” The difference is how the Moodys used traditional orchestration, a mellotron, and a finely structured pop song to convey itself. Great pop? Absolutely. High art? No way.
Aside from those two nice moments of pop single bliss, the rest of is a bloated piece of haphazard filler, hastily arranged and incorrectly attributed. It’s “importance” is essentially the work of the orchestral arrangers who follow the same lines as when they arrange current pop hits for the MOR sect. There’s no redeeming value to the album, it does little to convey the emotion of the time or the passion of the band itself. It’s a novelty that benefited from becoming one of the first few concept records of the modern rock era and one that heavily incorporated orchestration into the song cycle. While it proved to be one of the first to use these strategies in the song structure, it does little to excel on actual songs.
Because when you take away the orchestration, you’ve got about twenty minutes of actual songs. And when you take away those aforementioned singles, you’re left with silly musings of the day (sample verse: “Fishes biting/So Exciting/Lunchtime sounds so inviting”) each one delivered by a different member of the Moodies and, therefore, each one fluctuating in consistency.
I later learned that this album was totally the brainchild of the record company who wanted one of their pop acts to work with a full orchestra so that they could promote the label’s new line of enhanced stereo. Since the Moody’s were already under contract, under debt, and with no real possibility of turning their plight around, they were chosen to assist with the project. As luck may have it, the album took off which then posed a bigger problem: how to follow it up. But thanks to their experience with Days Of Future Past, the Moody Blues learned a very important lesson: they could forge a career one album at a time even when that album only really had a few notable tracks within its pompous sleeve.

True story: I once met a chick that was a total Moody Blues fan. I mean, she would not shut up about them and the more she talked about them, the more I was convinced she was a complete wack job. I have no recollection of her name or where we met-I only remembered to steer clear of her and run away. The memory of her devotion to this bunch of blowhards was something that I'll never forget-or understand why.