THE MOODY BLUES GET RHYTHM

THE MOODY BLUES GET RHYTHM

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by Hank Bordowitz

During the last decade, when the adolescents of the '50s took control of the media (and everything else), there was a sudden wave of '50s nostalgia, sparked by American Graffiti. The result was such odious occurrences as people taking Sha-Na-Na seriously and the actors from both Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley forming rock 'n' roll bands, the latter group going so far as to put out a record as Lenny and the Squigtones. As this decade has progressed, '60s nostalgia has run amok. The Monkees have made a comeback. Robbie Robertson, George Harrison, Neil Young and Rod Stewart are on the charts. People are wearing faded jeans and tie-dye shirts once more.

Which brings us to the Moody Blues. They've been around for nearly 25 years, give or take a three year layoff here, two years to make a record there. So these are the guys who can put this whole rock/pop thing into perspective, 'cause they've been living it, non-stop, for a quarter of a century. If they were dogs, they'd be ancient.

'In the 60s,' recalls John Lodge, erstwhile bass player and vocalist for the band, 'what we were doing now didn't exist. There'd be CREEM and Rolling Stone. There was no MTV. The amount of exposure that people expect you to do is enormous. It's as long as you want it to be. But it wasn't in those days. The only FM stations, really, were local college stations. You'd go there at two or three o'clock in the morning and listen to and play albums and talk about music. Everything else was AM Top 40.'

The Moodies have been pulled away from their country estates to play a more sophisticated round of meet-the-press in the wake of the release of their latest opus, Sur La Mer. As we sit down to chat, it's the end of the day, their second of facing guys like me, with our tape recorders and video tape machines, and our questions. Frankly, it seems to be wearing thin for Lodge's fellow traveller, guitarist and vocalist Justin Hayward. Hayward says he would like to get one of those hand-held copiers.

'The people ask you a question,' he smiles wanly, 'and you run it across the answer sheet and pull off a piece of paper.'

This mix of perspective on the past and inclination toward high-tech is one of the razor blades that the Moodies have been riding for some time. Sur La Mer only serves to accentuate this. At one moment they're telling you how wonderful the ideals of the '60s were. A few minutes later, a woman sighs her digitally-sampled way, rhythmically and in key, through the PG-13 rated 'Deeper,' which is everything you might imagine with a title like that. Lodge also sampled his bass on 'Miracle' to avoid the vagaries of playing with strings.

'The sound is just not consistent enough,' he claims. 'As you get higher, the sound gets thinner. So we sampled my bass and MIDIed it up with the drums.'

As for the idealism, you just have to listen to 'Vintage Wine,' an unabashed paean to their salad days.

'I remember the taste of the vintage wine/from '63 through to '69/ I'm proud of the things we believed in then ...' Hayward quotes himself. 'We believed in peace, love and good vibes, and that we could make the world a better place. I think if we believe in that now, we'll be okay.

'I got so sick of people saying, 'It's all a bunch of shit, the '60s.' I don't think it was. I like to be positive about it, so I'd like to put it on record that I believed in it.'

'The big problem is,' Lodge adds, 'nowadays, with the media when they're talking about the '60s, they're talking about the commercial side of it. There was a commercial side of it, everybody knows there was a commercial side, but there was a real side, which I'm concerned with, which was the music, which was people coming together, which was Americans traveling around Europe going to meet people, which was Australians coming across 8,000 miles to Europe and America. The pop art and all that, that was a total commercial thing, but there was something better than that below it.'

Clearly, this is another razor that the Moody Blues ride. Certainly they were and are recording 'artists,' but when recording 'artists' record, the result is generally called 'product'—not art. The commercial side of things was not particularly good to the Moody Blues, in fact. So they did something about it, and Threshold records was born. And suddenly the Moody Blues were more than a band, they were a business.

'We wanted Threshold,' Hayward explains, 'because we wanted control over Our own tapes and particularly our album sleeves. They were very important to us, putting nice pieces of art together, and our sleeves did get a bit outrageousi. We'd have 10-12 page books with the sleeves, which were very expensive. We were actually paying for those. They'd come off our royalty. And we were on lousy royalty.'

While the royalties have become better, they still get outrageous with their cover art. Sur La Mer is named after the painting that graces its cover, the work of modern impressionist painter Nicholas de Stael. To secure the artwork, they had to assure the artist that they would not tamper with it in anyway, save shooting it down to fit on the album cover. And one assumes, they had to come up with a pretty fair amount of money. But then again, the Moody Blues wanted control of their destiny.

'Threshold became difficult when we started to approach it as a business,' Hayward continues. 'We thought it would be a great idea to be the great benefactors of pop. We have lots of friends who are great musicians. All it got us was ending up where instead of being musicians ourselves, we were sitting across the desk dealing with someone else's lawyer and manager. It was madness.'

'We were trying to find tour support for them,' Lodge laughs. 'And we'd say, 'Just a minute. We're trying to do that for ourselves!' '

To cite another example of how crazy this was, you only have to look at a group called Trapeze, a band that was unable to really find an audience on Threshold. The personnel of that band included talent like Glenn Hughes,

Mel Galley and Dave Holland. These guys went on to work with bands like Deep Purple, Whitesnake and Judas Priest.

'I'll tell you something even more amazing,' John snickers. 'During Christmas, I did a charity show with Mike Rutherford of Genesis, and Mike says, Til bet you don't remember this, do you. We actually came to be on Threshold, and you auditioned us.' Genesis. That was a long time ago.'

But the Moody Blues have a lot in common with Genesis, and Pink Floyd, and any number of other bands that have survived the slings and arrows of fickle fate and fans. A

Moody Blues show is an interesting experience. When you're pushing 30, concerts can make you feel like something out of the Paleolithic Era. But at a Moody Blues concert, such a person (yeah, me) fits neatly in the mean age of the audience. And the Moodies have enough of a repertoire that their show is a non-stop stream of recognizable tunes, with just enough current material to make the record company happy. Where many more venerable bands curtail their live endeavors, the Moodies spend a lot of time on the road. This was brought to the fore when Lodge and Hayward checked into their New York hotel and drummer Graeme Edge was sitting in the lobby. He looked at them in shock.

'What?!' Edge jumped to his feet. 'Are we on tour and nobody told me?'

Part of the reason that Sur La Mer comes over two years after the band's previous LP, The Other Side Of Life has to do with the Moody Blues' touring habits.

'We took five months to make the album,' Hayward says, 'and 18 months on the road. We toured a lot behind the last album.'

'We did 180 shows in America alone,' Lodge adds.

'These days, touring is a huge operation,' he continues. 'Now you carry your own stage, your own lighting, your own sound. So you've got road crews in England and road crews in America, and fax machines and electronic mail, and they all bring it together.

'It was all done by road 20 years ago, in a bus, in a truck. You'd go to the U-Haul station, your road manager would rent a truck, youvd load it up at the airport with the equipment, we'd rent a Hertz car and set off. It literally was that. Gig list and we'd be away. The gigs weren't there then. The amphitheaters, the stadiums, they weren't there at that time.'

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'It feels to me,' Hayward interjects, 'that the big difference is, in 1968 there were 80 people or 150 people who wanted to see us. In 1988 there are 15,000 people who want to see us every night, so that's how the operation has changed, and that's how the venues have changed, really.

We want to get there more efficiently and the best way we can and try and be comfortable with it too, and not go through some of the hardships that were a real pain about touring. Driving everywhere was bad. We fly now, which is nice. It's lovely. We can leave at a particular time of day now, which is a great luxury, instead of driving all through the night. Driving tours are fun for the first ten days, but then they can really start to smell.'

'It's not fighting about who gets the back seat,' Lodge comments. 'It's who's driving. It's when five guys are sitting everywhere, but there's no one sitting in the driver's seat.

'The first car we ever rented in America was automatic,' he recalls. 'We didn't have automatic cars in England at that time. We were stick shifting. We rented our first car, and we thought out of D1, D2 and D, D1 must be the one you use to drive. We couldn't figure out why we blew an engine out after 100 miles, driving along at 90 miles per hour in D1. But when the breakdown truck came, everything became clear.

'One of the things we always used to try to do was get in the U-Haul truck. It meant you didn't have to drive, and they always had big, comfortable seats, so that was fun. And of course, Holiday Inns became famous in the '60s. All through rock 'n' roll.'

Not that the Moody Blues went in for trashing hotel rooms or throwing TVs out the window, or any such behavior.

'The trouble was,' says Lodge, 'when the TV went out the window, what did you do? You had nothing to watch.'

Even if they'd rather watch the telly than trash a hotel room, there is still enough life in these guys that they can pull it off live. It's not high energy rock, but then, the Moody Blues were never about that way anyway.

'We were 'underground, psychedelic ...' what was the other word?' Lodge searches his memory for the adjectives that at one time described the band. ' 'Progressive.' Right. Great word.'

'Very arty.' Hayward agrees.

'I think it's really important for the young kids to have their own bands,' Lodge concedes, 'their own heroes, their own stars. You always have to have that music coming up behind you. People have got to have something they believe they found for themselves. When you are 15 you can't go, 'Well, I've discovered the Moodies.' It's impossible. They've got to discover their own bands, their own artists, and as they go through that, they hopefully come out and look further and further and hopefully end up with the Moodies, Floyd, Bob Dylan.'

While Lodge and Hayward express a great deal of respect for their contemporaries, they seem to be worried about the current crop of rising rock. The English music scene may be healthy on the outside, spawning monster hits, but it is very much a flavor-of-the-month scene as well.

'A lot of the bands now are producers' bands,' Lodge observes. 'The producer comes in, gets it set up, and it's very similar, I think, to what happened in the early '60s, which brought about the British revolution in music, where you had what was called bubble-gum type music. It was very instant, you chewed it, it was sweet, it was great, and then you threw it away.'

'Curiousity Killed The Cat, I think as people, they're going to have a struggle coming back,' Hayward adds. 'Whether they're making it here, they were very fashionable a couple of years ago, but it seems to be over for them, because they're not in the teen magazines anymore. Which is unfortunate, because they made some really good records. Johnny Hates Jazz is really, as we see it in Great Britain, kind of techno-pop. Very well made records. Perfectly made records, but technically put together and almost made on a graph, with computers and stuff. Wet Wet Wet are a real solid sort of soul band. But I feel for them, too. There's a terrible danger in being really hip and fashionable in Great Britain, because a month later, you're going to be unfashionable. Things change so quickly. It's so immediate.'

'There's a danger of booking the ticket too far in advance for the concert,' Lodge wryly notes,' 'cause there may not be one.'

And this may be the key to the Moody Blues longevity. Even when they were dressing in blue suits and playing soul covers, they were not the most fashionable band in the word. While this is often anathema in rock, it seems to work for them.

'I think we've survived by not following any trend or fashion,' Hayward agrees, 'by being true to ourselves. And we've gone through the periods, because of that, where people have said, 'Gawd, the Moody Blues are a load of shit, aren't they?' And we've come out of the other side of that, because we stuck to our guns and played the music we want to hear.' SI