Album Review: The Moody Blues – In Search of the Lost Chord (2018 Remix)

The Moody Blues – In Search of the Lost Chord

April 10, 2019

ALBUM REVIEW

OVERALL (OUT OF 10): 7

 

Look, I’m no dummy. I know I shouldn’t like The Moody Blues. I know no rational, reasonable human being could come up with one single, solitary defensible reason that justifies liking The Moody Blues. They are the guiltiest of guilty pleasures – but I’m gonna go ahead and plead guilty on this one. I know there is a lot I should hate about them. I hate dumb lyrics. I hate overblown pretension, and they were pretty much the gold standard of pretension in the Sixties. And I really, really, really hate bad poetry. The Moody Blues tick all of those boxes. I am fully cognizant of the irony of giving a positive review to a band like The Moody Blues on a website called “Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews”. So I’ll go ahead and be brutally honest for a minute – I know if there were any justice in the universe at all, The Moody Blues would be viciously and mercilessly pilloried in every review they ever got. I am perfectly aware that I should be spending the next several paragraphs telling you how really awful their albums are. I probably can’t describe the band any better than Jim Miller did in the first Rolling Stone magazine review of a Moody Blues album way back on December 7, 1968:

“…what is obviously a fine, tight English rock group has chosen to strangle itself in contextual goo. Ironically almost every one of the rock tracks has something to recommend it—but what might have been a quite capable, even exciting, album is willfully turned into something musically akin to Milo’s chocolate cotton. Which is too bad.”

Agreed. But I take issue with Mr. Miller’s assessment that “The Moody Blues are part of the English rock group family that includes as nearest relatives the Hollies, the Beatles, and the Who. All these groups give prominence to their vocal work, and all still adhere to the basic English rock instrumentation (guitars, bass, drums, occasional organ or piano) with occasional orchestral augmentation.” This couldn’t be further from the truth – The Moody Blues were completely unique in their musical configuration. What other rock band ever consisted of a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, a Mellotronist, and a flautist (and this predating Jethro Tull by a couple of years)? The Moodies were unlike anyone else on the scene, and still are.

I can’t even tell you why I like The Moody Blues. Maybe they touch the hippie dippie place deep in my soul that I try my best to pretend isn’t there. Maybe it’s the spiritual angle – I don’t know that any band epitomized the phony, cheap spirituality of the Sixties like they did, but even though I know it’s unforgivably shallow, their millimeter-deep philosophizing still has a sort of weird charm. Maybe it’s because they honestly did have a knack for coming up with great melodies, and when you get one of their songs stuck in your head, it’s there for the foreseeable future. Some of them were great musicians – Justin Hayward was an underrated guitarist, and John Lodge was able to play a tight bass, sing an incredibly high harmony, and grin like the Cheshire cat all at the same time on stage, which is no mean feat (Ray Thomas, on the other hand, was a flute virtuoso approximately on the level of first chair in your average high school marching band). They had intriguing song titles like “Tuesday Afternoon (Forever Afternoon?)” and “Are You Sitting Comfortably” and “Dr. Livingstone, I Presume”, which always piqued my interest as I sorted through the budget cassette tapes at Kmart when I was growing up before I had ever even heard any of their songs. Their album covers piqued my interest almost as much – I don’t know who did the cover art for their classic albums, but I still think they are pretty cool, very mysterious, and almost magical.

Perhaps the biggest thing about the Moody Blues that endears them to me is Mike Pinder’s use of the Mellotron. He was the best Mellotron player of the Sixties, bar none. Allegedly he had worked at the Mellotron factory and had made some special modifications to his, and that may or may not be true, but it is absolutely certain that no band employed the Mellotron half so effectively as The Moody Blues. It gave their songs a dreamy, otherworldly quality, and I’m convinced it fit the mystical vibe of their songs far better than an actual orchestra would have (Live at Red Rocks and Hall of Fame prove quite conclusively that the Mellotron was far better suited to those old Moody Blues songs than a real orchestra). The Mellotron gives a magnificence and grace to the Moodies’ “Core Seven” albums that is undeniable. No less a rock expert than Pete Townshend once said that listening to their albums was like going to church because they were so beautifully produced and constructed.

If you are a true Moody Blues fan, you already know what the “Core Seven” are. For those of you who aren’t, the “Core Seven” are the seven albums from Days of Future Passed to Seventh Sojourn inclusive. And of those seven marvelous albums, I find that In Search of the Lost Chord is one of the ones I listen to the least. When I find myself in a Moody Blues mood, I am far more likely to reach for Days of Future Passed or To Our Children’s Children’s Children, my personal favorites in the vein of potheaded pseudo-philosophical Mellotron rock. Compared to what I consider to be their best albums, In Search of the Lost Chord has the same awkward lyrics, shallow attempts at profundity, and goofy hippie platitudes as the rest, but in addition it has one fatal flaw – perhaps no song in all of recorded history makes me cringe as much as “House of Four Doors”. It makes me cringe even more than “We Built This City on Rock and Roll”, which is generally considered to be the worst song in the vast annals of bad rock songs. Upon my death should I find myself consigned to Hell for a lifetime of petty misdeeds – which is a distinct possibility – I will be horrified if I find “House of Four Doors” on continuous repeat on the loudspeakers as I am being endlessly flayed, drawn and quartered, broken and wheeled, eviscerated, impaled, incinerated, or otherwise tortured. If I hear “We Built This City” over and over for eternity I will consider it a tender mercy by comparison.

You may be wondering what could possibly be that bad about “House of Four Doors”. Well, I’ll tell you. The perceptive Mr. Miller described it as “an overblown piece of literal psychedelia with four (count ’em: four) squeaky door sound effects sandwiched in between some rock mood music.” The song starts off with our intrepid band of musicians apparently wandering aimlessly around in the forest when “mystery spread its cloak across the sky”, causing them to lose their way until “through the leaves a light broke through, a path lost for years leads us through” to the House of Four Doors. After entering the House, each transition from one room to another is signified by the sound of a door slowly creaking open – I don’t know what they were going for with this sound effect, but where they landed was “annoying”. But we get to hear it again and again as they move throughout the house. And just why are they wandering through the rooms in this strange house? According to “The Moody Blues Frequently Asked Questions List” (http://otten.freeshell.org/moodyblues/FAQ-5-11.htm), which I consider to be the final word on all of the Moody Blues-related questions I find myself pondering from time to time,

The four doors are supposed to conceal four different musical ages:
Door 1: medieval (folk/flute)
Door 2: baroque/classical (harpsichord)
Door 3: romantic (some fans hear this section as a variation of Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 1 (`a la “House of Four Doors”), while others hear Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue”)
Door 4: modern era (a rock band playing “Legend of a Mind”)

So I am not too sure exactly what the band’s academic background in music history was that qualified them to divide music history into four ages like that, all I know is I feel a huge sense of relief when they enter Door 4 and the band launches into “Legend of a Mind”, when it seems we are finally free of the ridiculous House of Four Doors and its stupid creaky door sound effect. But guess where we end up after “Legend of a Mind” ends? That’s right, back in the House of Four Doors, where we are informed that

House of four doors
You’ll be lost now forever
House of four doors
Rest of life’s life forever

What a brainless song. They must have been high as a kite when they wrote that one. All by its lonesome, “The House of Four Doors” Parts 1 and 2 hopelessly taints ISOTLC. While most other songs on the album aren’t bad, they still suffer guilt by association. Let’s talk about the song unfortunate enough to be stuck smack in the middle of “House of Four Doors” parts 1 and 2, “Legend of a Mind”. “Timothy Leary’s Dead/No no no no he’s outside looking in”. Fun fact, Timothy Leary wasn’t dead when the song was recorded, but he is now. And the world doesn’t miss him. It’s hard for me not to have a intensely visceral negative reaction to a song extolling the virtues of the idiot who gave us the disastrous “tune in, turn on, drop out” mantra that made a wreckage of the life of anyone foolish enough to heed its call in the Sixties. The song itself is kind of catchy I guess, but there are all kinds of brilliant, noble people they could have memorialized in song, and Timothy Leary is not one of them. I regard it a waste of a decent melody. As our good friend Jim Miller said in Rolling Stone, “If you don’t listen to the words it sounds like a better than average rock song with interesting flute work by Ray Thomas and appropriately swooping cellos—but then there are those insane lyrics that keep bombarding you with Timothy Leary’s name.” The mid-section of the song is pretty cool though, everything grinds to a halt, we have a few introspective flute passages, a little Justin Hayward guitar comes in, and next thing you know swooping Mellotron strings bring us to a grand musical climax. Shame it was wasted on a tribute to the likes of Timothy Leary.

But you know, those are really the only things that offend me about the album. Oh, wait, I forgot, there is the obligatory Graeme Edge doggerel that was inevitably included on those old Moody Blues albums. Edge was a truly awful poet, I guess his band mates were too toked out of their minds or something to notice, but his poems are bad, bad, bad, really bad. One of his poems opens the album with “Departure”, while another is the penultimate track on the album and is even worse, “The Word”:

This garden universe vibrates complete
Some may get a sound so sweet
Vibrations reach on up to become light
And then through gamma, out of sight
Between the eyes and ears there lie
The sounds of color and the light of a sigh
And to hear the sun, what a thing to believe
But it’s all around if we could but perceive
To know ultra violet, infra-red and X-rays
Beauty to find in so many ways
Two notes of the chord, that’s our full scope
But to reach the chord is our life’s hope
And to name the chord is important to some
So they give a word and the word is Om

That is literally some of the worst poetry I have ever heard. Graeme Edge was an appalling poet, and I wonder if he didn’t realize it on some level, because Mike Pinder was usually the one who read his poems on the records. It was almost like he was embarrassed by them so he had someone else recite them, and he damn well should have been mortified by them. You “breathe deep the gathering gloom” you pretentious pot-addled poetry-mangling twit.

So those are all the really bad parts of the album, and you may be expecting a zero rating after all the bashing I have done. But as much as it pains me to admit it, there are some other parts of the album that are so sublime, so magnificent, so gorgeous, that I love the album in spite of myself, even if for me it is one of the least frequently played of the “Core Seven” albums. “Ride My See-Saw” has about the most awkward, rushed vocals I have ever heard in a song (“Riiiiidddde, ridemyseesaw”), but all the same the guitar is irresistible, I love the midsection with the Mellotron and high vocals, and the groovy vibe sucks me in against my will. This song has been played at every Moody Blues concert since 1968, they’ve been playing it for fifty years now, but it never seems to get old for them.

“Visions of Paradise” is about as Sixties mellow as a song can get, the descending flute run at the beginning of the song and gentle guitar fingerpicking is so gentle and relaxing, and all the Indian instrumental accoutrements are a nice touch. “Voices in the Sky” is such a pleasant song – in the Eighties there was one of the countless Moody Blues best-of compilations called “Voices in the Sky – The Best of the Moody Blues” with a picture on the cover of someone laying in a field looking at the sky, and that is probably the best description of the overall vibe of the song I can think of. Surprisingly passionate middle eight on the song, I really love that too. I also love the off-kilter beat of “The Best Way to Travel”, and you know what, I also kind of like the sentiment of the song: in some ways, “thinking is the best way to travel” indeed. Too bad the band seemed to do more toking than thinking when they wrote a lot of their songs. “Dr. Livingston I Presume” has that silly charm that so many of Ray Thomas’ songs have – the guy was a complete cheeseball, but there’s something about his ridiculous songs like “Another Morning” and “Floating” that are oddly compelling, and every once in a while he whipped out a real classic like “And the Tide Rushes In” or “For My Lady”. “Om” takes the whole album out on the mellowest note of all, a gentle mix of high harmonies, flute runs, and sitar. The perfect song to drift off to sleep to after listening to the album late at night. It is an album with some absolutely lovely moments, and I can’t bring myself to hate it because of them.

But the absolute high point of the album, the song that all by its lonesome would make ISOTLC a classic and may be the Moody’s greatest moment this side of “Nights in White Satin”, is without question “The Actor”. In his review, Rolling Stone’s Mr. Miller highlighted Justin Hayward’s vocal on this one, stating that he “does one hell of a job; beautiful, unabashedly emotional singing”. The melody is almost painfully beautiful, and Hayward’s vulnerable, anguished vocal matches the song perfectly. Hayward doesn’t have a powerful voice, but in this song that works to his favor; there is a tangible ache in his voice, radiating a heartbreaking sensitivity. This is a song where the Mellotron really shines, and while Ray Thomas was no flute virtuoso à la Ian Anderson, he always came up with tasteful, if simple flute parts. His flute work on this song is outstanding, the opening flute flourishes give the song its introspective edge. John Lodge’s high background vocals in the chorus are absolutely haunting. One of their all-time best songs, perhaps one of the very best examples of each member of the band firing on all cylinders, and this song alone is worth the price of the purchase.

The 50th Anniversary release of In Search of the Lost Chord has a new 2018 remix that is absolutely stunning. It is almost worth sitting through the horror of “House of Four Doors” to hear the clarity of the percussive instruments zipping across the stereo field, and the flute intro to “The Actor” is a revelation, the two flutes playing in harmony are separated on opposite sides of the stereo field where before they were clumped together, making it all the more enchanting. If you are going to listen to the album, the new 2018 stereo remix is the way to go, unless you are into surround sound, then the new 5.1 mix may be your cup of tea. I personally think each and every classic album from the Sixties that can be remixed should be – purists would whine about how their cherished memories are being screwed around with, but I say if we can clean up the components of those old recordings and make them more distinct, why wouldn’t we? The recent remixes of Sgt. Pepper’s and The White Album are amazing, taking the experience of listening to those albums to a whole new level. I live for the day we get a good remix of Revolver, and would literally kill just about anyone on the planet for a good remix of All Things Must Pass. We music lovers should do everything we can to support the trend for remixing classic Sixties albums, in my opinion, because I feel it does so much to improve the listening experience, memories of the original mixes be damned. You still have the original mixes, you can still listen to them if you want. As far as remixes go if you don’t want it, don’t buy it, but don’t whine about it to the rest of us.

While ISOTLC isn’t the best of the “Core Seven”, even the worst of them were still great albums, flaws and all regardless. Unfortunately, after taking a break for a few years after 1972’s Seventh Sojourn, when the band regrouped for 1978’s Octave the magic was gone, and when subsequently Mike Pinder was booted out of the band for refusing to go on tour for that album, the Moodies as we knew and loved them were gone forever. Patrick Moraz took over on keyboards for 1981’s #1 album Long Distance Voyager, and while it wasn’t a bad album, “The Voice” and “Gemini Dream” debuted a new synthesizery sound that just wasn’t the same. Even when “Your Wildest Dream” returned the band to the Billboard Top Ten and fueled another decade of album releases, despite the chart success, they were never the same band again. The “Core Seven” will always remain unique among rock albums.

It may be true that when I am in the mood for the Moodies I reach for Days of Future Passed or To Our Children’s Children’s Children or On the Threshold of a Dream far more often than In Search of the Lost Chord – these albums are far more consistent and are all “House of Four Doors”-less. But that doesn’t mean ISOTLC isn’t a worthwhile listen, and the highlights rival those of any other of the “Core Seven”. We are blessed to live in a an age when skipping the weak tracks on an album is far more easily accomplished than the days when vinyl ruled the world, and with a few surgical excisions, ISOTLC becomes a remarkable, even crucial listening experience. Skip a few tracks for the sake of your ears, but make sure you give the rest a good listen sometime before you die.

 

“Hopefully next time around the Moody Blues will leave their London Festival Orchestra and Yantra at home and get together a straight-ahead, no b.s. album of rock; judging from even these albums they should be quite capable of doing this and, furthermore, doing it well.” – Jim Miller, Rolling Stone, December 1968

“What are you talking about?  There are plenty of bands who do straight-ahead rock – any band can sound like that,  but no band ever sounded like The Moody Blues in their prime.  We’re damn lucky they didn’t listen to you, Mr. Rolling Stone Reviewer.” – Brutally Honest Rock Album Reviews