Soft Rock in Motown
Tony Clarke is a member of The Moody Blues. He doesn’t perform with them. He hasn’t been with them right from the start and he isn’t in any of the group’s publicity photos. But he is part of the group. He produces their albums. So far Tony is best known within the music business as The Moody’s producer, but he was in the United States recently to put together an album with Rare Earth.
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Soft Rock in Motown
Tony Clarke is a member of The Moody Blues. He doesn’t perform with them. He hasn’t been with them right from the start and he isn’t in any of the group’s publicity photos. But he is part of the group. He produces their albums.
So far Tony is best known within the music business as The Moody’s producer, but he was in the United States recently to put together an album with Rare Earth. Before that he’d produced the soon-to-be-released album by The Four Tops.
Rock music lovers may find a Moody Blues’ producer a strange choice to work on The Four Tops, Rare Earth or any other Motown record. The Moodies is a soft-rock group, though Tony wouldn’t like that name.
“We have always tried to keep a good balance on the albums,” Clarke said. “The Moodies have never gone in for the hard, freaky music. Also, when you see them live you’ll find out they aren’t all that soft. They are loud and much of what you hear on record is increased in volume on stage.”
Soft could also describe a form of music rather than volume. The Moody Blues are soft in that there is a trace of classical and folk in their music. You hear violins and “other fancy stuff” on their albums. “The strange thing about that,” and nobody believes Tony when he says it, “is we didn’t use any violins or any other musicians on any Moody album. All that is done within the group,” with the help of a melotron, a $50,000 instrument that produces sound equal to that of a full-fledged orchestra. “I don’t use studio musicians, except in the case of The Four Tops lp. I recorded the music and they came to London and did the voices.”
The Moody Blues type of “soft” may be a result of their interest in music and Clarke’s producing background. He used to be a staff producer, usually working with symphony orchestras and the like. His boss brought him a tape of the group and for the first time he got interested in one particular band. It was at a low-ebb in The Moodies’ career so the combination was good for everyone.
Whether it’s unique in the pruducing business or not, Clarke has a strange way of making records. “I take the artists and sit at a table for an hour or so and decide what we’d like to hear if we had a record player in front of us. Then the musicians sort of go off by themselves and write songs. Eventually somebody comes up with a tune everyone likes and we start work on it. All the Moody Blues albums were done that way and the Rare Earth lp is a result of that also. I’ve discovered it’s the best way for me.”
The chance to work with other types of groups is something Tony feels is good for him and his career. “1 could get quite content sitting back and doing Moody Blues albums all the time. It’s good to work on something different though. It's also good for my production company. I get to see how Motown markets the business.”
The Moody Blues and Tony are involved in their own record company. It’s distributed through London Records in America, but the whole product is handled completely by The Moodies. “You get taken so easily until you find out that nothing, absolutely nothing can happen until the record company gets that piece of tape with the music on it. We used to offer ourselves and our product to the record company and they’d take it from there. Now we don’t worry about release date or how many sales we’re missing by not getting the product on the market. The idea is to produce an album acceptable to us then worry about other things.” It also means a great deal of the profit stays within the group rather than going to other businessmen.
“The band and I recently moved to a small village outside London where we’ll work from. Other than removing the need to commute we also get to control our business hours. A few hours each week takes care of our work. We can then spend the rest of the time doing what we really like to do. If you allow yourself to get deeply involved in the business side of a record company, you lose sight of the creative side. That has hurt other groups and we don’t want to break up The Moody Blues.” Mike Gormley
