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Popular music is full of stories of rock groups that were lucky enough to have a #1 single almost right away but then unable to duplicate their success. The record label might stick with them for a year or two, but without sales, the groups lose their contracts and are never heard from again. You’ve no doubt heard such artists referred to as “One-Hit Wonders.”

The Moody Blues, who went on to become one of the most successful British progressive rock groups in history, came pretty close to being saddled with that dubious distinction. They signed a deal with Decca in early 1964 and, before the year was out, they topped the charts in England with “Go Now,” which also broke into the Top Ten in the US. Like much of their repertoire at the time, “Go Now” was a cover version of a rhythm and blues song recorded by an American soul singer, Bessie Banks, with lead singer/guitarist Denny Laine as the front man.

*Their 1964 #1 single, featuring (L-R): Thomas, Warwick, Edge, Laine and Pinder*

But then they struggled unsuccessfully for nearly two years to come up with another hit, and Decca was ready to drop them from their roster of artists. Laine grew frustrated and left, as did bassist Clint Warwick. The core group of keyboardist Mike Pinder, flutist Ray Thomas and drummer Graeme Edge soldiered on by welcoming new members Justin Hayward on guitar and John Lodge on bass.

(Lodge died last week at age 82, and with Pinder, Thomas and Edge all passing away over the past eight years, this leaves Hayward as the sole surviving member.)

The group had built up a debt that Decca wanted to recoup, so they came up with a plan: Use the Moody Blues to create a rock music version of Dvorak’s classical music piece, “New World Symphony,” to help promote the label’s new subsidiary, Deram Records, and its new high-end sonic development they called Deramic Stereo. The band had little choice but to go along.

The Moodies’ revised lineup quickly reached the conclusion that the project wasn’t going to work, but with support from their producer and engineer, they boldly proposed to write a cycle of original songs about “everyman’s archetypical day” (dawn, morning, mid-day, late afternoon, evening, night) which would then be expanded and connected by classical music passages, written and conducted by Peter Knight and recorded with a session “orchestra” that called themselves the London Festival Orchestra. To their everlasting credit, the label agreed.

The album they got, “Days of Future Passed,” was fairly astounding. It is regarded as one of the very first concept albums, released in 1967 in the wake of The Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” and Pink Floyd’s “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” neither of which utilized classical music structures and instruments as comprehensively as The Moody Blues did. Although Decca had little hope that the album would sell much, it became a surprise hit, reaching #27 in the UK on the strength of its two singles, “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon” (#19 and #24 respectively).

It should be noted that the album tanked badly in the US at the time, and critics savaged it. Rolling Stone said, “The Moody Blues have matured considerably since ‘Go Now,’ but their music is constantly marred by one of the most startlingly saccharine conceptions of ‘beauty’ and ‘mysticism’ that any rock group has ever attempted. They are strangling themselves in conceptual goo.” Truth be told, I’ve found the album to be a bit tiresome to listen to all the way through, and the orchestral sections seem rather heavy-handed. But “Days of Future Passed” stands as a landmark LP in its creative blending of rock and roll arrangements with classical song structures and instrumentation.

In the UK, the album’s success gave the group the green light to continue their experimentation. Fortunately, Pinder was exceptionally well versed in the Mellotron, an analog antecedent to the synthesizer. It was designed as an organ-like device that used tape heads activated by the touch of keys, and tape loops comprised of the sounds of horns, strings and other instruments generating an eerie, orchestra-like sound. Pinder, who not only knew how to play it but also once worked for the company that developed and built them, was able to perpetuate the group’s use of orchestral sounds without the expense of hiring classical musicians for the recording process.

*“In Search of the Lost Chord” cover, 1968*

The next Moodies LP, “In Search of the Lost Chord,” revealed the depth of talent of the band’s five multi-faceted musicians. Pinder worked the Mellotron and added piano, harpsichord, autoharp and tambura; Hayward took over on lead vocals and played acoustic and electric guitar, sitar and keyboards; Lodge handled bass, cello and vocals; Thomas provided flute, oboe, sax and French horn and vocals, and Edge played drums and percussion and contributed spoken vocals. All five were songwriters as well, giving the album a wonderful diversity within the group dynamic. Lyrically, the songs examined themes like higher consciousness (Thomas’s ode to Timothy Leary and LSD, “Legend of a Mind”), spiritual development (Hayward’s “Voices in the Sky”), quest for knowledge (Lodge’s rocker “Ride My See-Saw”) and imagination (Pinder’s “The Best Way to Travel”). All this proved to establish the group as pioneers of the new “progressive rock” genre, and gurus of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic, while also showing robust sales in the mainstream, reaching #5 in the UK and #23 in the US.

Not that the Moodies were purveyors of 20-minute epics with multiple time signatures like their prog-rock successors (Genesis and Yes, for example). They wrote what were at heart pop songs, but wrapped them in gorgeous arrangements, with lush harmonies and rich instrumentation (the defining sound in “Nights in White Satin” isn’t guitar, it’s flute). They understood the capabilities of the studio in a way few of their contemporaries did, and in a band packed with capable songwriters, Lodge more than held his own. “Ride My See-Saw” showcased Lodge’s talents: you can hear the earlier R&B band in the rhythm section, but the vocals are layered so deeply the song becomes almost hymnal. It’s very much of its time, but also entirely fantastic — the sound of pop evolving in the moment, in the studio.

Over the next four years, The Moody Blues honed and embraced this formula, offering five rich, diverse, sonically engrossing albums that achieved ever-higher positions on the charts in both the UK and the US, and Canada and Australia as well. “On the Threshold of a Dream” and “To Our Children’s Children’s Children,” both released in 1969, cemented their reputation as an “album band,” with tracks that segued into one another. Their trippy album cover art further sealed the deal, giving their attitude-adjusted audience something to look at while the music played on. “A Question of Balance” in 1970 and “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour” in 1971 brought The Moodies back to the singles charts with two vibrant Hayward compositions: the melodramatic “Question,” with its frenetic acoustic strumming, and my personal Moodies favorite, the hard-rocking “The Story in Your Eyes.”

The band toured incessantly throughout this period, and because some of their pieces proved too daunting to attempt on stage, they found themselves consciously writing tunes that could be more easily recreated in a live setting. Consequently, “Question,” “It’s Up to You,” “Melancholy Man,” “Dawning is the Day,” “The Story in Your Eyes” and “Our Guessing Game” from the 1970-1971 LPs became regulars on their concert setlist.

*The Moody Blues in 1970: Ray Thomas, Mike Pinder, Graeme Edge, Justin Hayward, John Lodge*

An unusual thing happened in 1972. While the group’s accurately titled album “Seventh Sojourn” became the first to reach #1 on the US album charts, its two Lodge-penned singles — “Isn’t Life Strange” and “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” — made the Top 40 but were completely overshadowed by the re-release of “Nights in White Satin.” A disc jockey in Washington had been signing off with the five-year-old song, and listeners began clamoring for it. Interest spread to other US markets, and soon Decca/Deram chose to re-release it as a single. It not only soared to #2 on the US Top 40, but also brought “Days of Future Passed” to #3 on the US album chart, giving The Moodies TWO albums in the Top Five in December 1972.

*Re-release single of “Nights in White Satin,” 1972*

Non-stop touring and recording eventually took their toll. The 1973 tour to support “Seventh Sojourn” saw the Moody Blues living a lifestyle more commonly associated with Led Zeppelin. As Lodge recalled in the liner notes for a reissue of the album: “We had our own Boeing 707 aircraft which was decked out with TVs and sound systems everywhere. We had our own butler and our name written on the outside of the plane. I had a very empty feeling knowing that things had got this excessive.”

Encouraged by the band’s propensity for vague but faintly profound-sounding lyrics, fans took to thinking the group members possessed more wisdom than they actually did, a situation that provoked these lyrics in Lodge’s “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)”: “And if you want the wind of change to blow about you, / And you’re the only other person to know, don’t tell me, / I’m just a singer in a rock and roll band.”

Consequently, The Moodies chose to go on hiatus for a few years, much to the displeasure of their record label. Pinder had grown tired of England and relocated to California to start a new family there, and Hayward, under pressure to come up with new Moody Blues-like material, teamed up with Lodge and their longtime producer Tony Clarke to make an album as a duo (“Blue Jays”) in 1975, which reached a respectable #16 in the US and #4 in Britain, even without any noteworthy singles.

The whole band reunited in 1978 to record the rather flat “Octave” LP with the below-average single “Steppin’ in a Slide Zone,” but Pinder was so dissatisfied with the result that he refused to participate in the subsequent tour and officially left the group for good. It seemed that the music scene had moved on, eschewing prog rock for disco, funk, New Wave and heavy metal.

In 1981, though, The Moody Blues came roaring back with “Long Distance Voyager,” a synthesizer-driven #1 pop/rock album carried by two Top 20 Hayward hits, “Gemini Dream” and “The Voice.” Pinder’s replacement was Patrick Moraz, a keyboard wizard who had similarly replaced Rick Wakeman in Yes for a spell several years earlier. The Moodies’ triumphant return to touring, including songs from throughout their catalog, was made possible by the industry’s improved technical improvements in concert sound. I saw them in concert that year, and again a decade later in a double bill with Chicago, and found their show exhilarating.

This album, and those that followed over the next decade (1983’s “The Present,” 1986’s “The Other Side of Life,” 1988’s “Sur La Mer” and 1991’s “Kings of the Kingdom”), bore only a little resemblance to the psychedelia and mind-expanding albums of the band’s prime, but the accessible melodies, crisp production and Hayward’s ever-present voice kept the band in the limelight. Indeed, Hayward’s catchy pop song, “Your Wildest Dream,” and its similar sequel, “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” got as much exposure as anything they’d ever done. Still, there were precious few memorable deep tracks behind the singles, certainly a discouraging development to older fans.

*The Moodies in 2002, L-R: Edge, Hayward, Lodge, Thomas*

The band’s last time in the recording studio was in 2003 when they cobbled together a Christmas-themed album called “December,” which came and went quickly, like most seasonal records. The Moody Blues, augmented by additional performers on stage, continued performing well into the 2010s, with Hayward and Lodge carrying the load. First Thomas and then Edge were forced to reduce their participation due to health issues. Thomas ultimately died of cancer in 2018, and Edge passed away of cancer in 2021.

Lodge never took music lightly. He always saw in it the potential for something more than entertainment. In a 2023 interview, he was asked what “psychedelic” meant to him, and his answer was thoughtful: “I hope your mind will explore the music and take you wherever the music takes you. It’s not a case of just singing along, it’s listening. It can be one note and that transports you somewhere. And I think you can conjure up experiences and stories in your mind where the music takes you. To me, that’s psychedelic. You have to listen to things, not just hear them.”

I can’t think of any other rock band that had the audacity to offer tracks of cosmic poetry, spoken rather than sung, on almost every album. “In the late 1960s we became the group that Graeme always wanted it to be, and he was called upon to be a poet as well as a drummer,” said Hayward about Graeme Edge in the wake of his death. “He delivered that beautifully and brilliantly, while creating an atmosphere and setting that the music would never have achieved without his words.”

There’s a song on “Long Distance Voyager” that, while not one of their better efforts, perfectly describes how The Moody Blues were perceived in their later years — “Veteran Cosmic Rockers.” Their spacey music and intelligent lyrics mesmerized a sizable fan base during their 1967-1974 era, and their 1981-1991 period perpetuated The Moodies brand as a worthy rock band that absolutely deserved their long-overdue induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

As Edge himself put it in a 2008 interview, “I never get tired of playing the hits. I think we have a duty. You play ‘Nights in White Satin’ for them. You’ve got to play ‘I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),’ and you’ve got to play ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ and you’ve got to play ‘Question.’ It’s our duty, and the audience’s right.”

R.I.P. John Lodge, and The Moody Blues as a band. You left a valuable legacy.

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Goodbye stranger, it’s been nice

Posted on September 12 by brucehhackett

Ever wonder how rock bands come up with their names? For example, what, exactly, is a Supertramp?

Around 1900, the legendary Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw took an interest in an unknown writer named W.H. Davies, who had spent several years traveling the rails in the United States as a vagrant and beggar while developing a talent as a poet. In 1908, Davies wrote about his peculiar life in the critically praised book “The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp.”

More than sixty years later, a fledgling British band known as Daddy was founded by two songwriting musicians — Rick Davies (no relation to the author) and Roger Hodgson. Soon enough, they wanted a new name to avoid confusion with another group called Daddy Longlegs, and their guitarist Richard Palmer, a fan of the Davies’ book, suggested Supertramp. It took a few more years before the group found success, but Supertramp went on to become one of the more popular progressive rock/pop groups in the UK, the US, Canada and much of Europe during the late ’70s and early ’80s.

This week, Rick Davies, who co-founded the group, played keyboards, sang and wrote more than half of their celebrated 10-album catalog, died of cancer at age 81.

I confess I wasn’t much of a fan of Supertramp at first, based on the early singles “Dreamer” and “Give a Little Bit,” written and sung by Roger Hodgson, whose high-pitched voice grated on my nerves in much the same way that Rush’s Geddy Lee did. (Well, not THAT bad, but it can be pretty annoying at times.). So I didn’t buy Supertramp’s albums, and therefore wasn’t exposed to the more bluesy, progressive rock songs that Davies wrote and sang, which were every bit as fundamental to the group’s oeuvre as Hodgson’s more melodic pop.

That changed big-time in 1979 when, along with millions of other music fans, I heard the song “Goodbye Stranger,” featuring Davies’ gritty voice and an explosive rock arrangement. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “this is Supertramp? This is way meatier and more interesting than the other stuff I’ve heard from them.”

The tune emerged as one of four hit singles from their multiplatinum #1 LP “Breakfast in America,” which brought the band worldwide fame. While Hodgson’s songs and vocals dominated the airwaves (“The Logical Song,””Take the Long Way Home” and the title tune), Davies’ keyboards and sax man John Helliwell’s powerful riffs gave the overall sound serious heft, and the album’s stellar production won a Grammy that year.

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When Davies and Hodgson first joined forces in England in 1969 as founders of the band that would become Supertramp, they were an unlikely pair. Davies came from working class roots and preferred blues and jazz; Hodgson was a private school kid who leaned more heavily toward pop and music hall genres. Their earliest recorded songs were joint efforts, but starting with their third album, Davies and Hodgson wrote independently and always sang lead vocals on the songs they wrote.

Supertramp began recording around the same time as other British progressive rock groups like Genesis and Yes, but those groups found their audiences more quickly and had significant commercial success in 1971 and 1972. Supertramp didn’t catch on until their lineup changed in 1973-74, adding Helliwell, bassist Dougie Thomson and drummer Bob Siebenberg, and they came up with the quality material that comprised their breakthrough album “Crime of the Century,” which included Davies’ compelling “Bloody Well Right,” a bitter critique of the British economic caste system, and other sophisticated works by Davies like “Rudy” and “Asylum,” and Hodgson’s “School.”

It’s not a stretch to make a few comparisons between the songwriting of Davies and Hodgson and the John Lennon-Paul McCartney partnership. In The Beatles, Lennon and McCartney started out writing songs together, but their different sensibilities and influences led them to write separately, and their final three or four albums contained songs written almost exclusively by one or the other. The same thing happened in Supertramp. Also, Lennon’s love for the rock ‘n’ roll of Elvis Presley contrasted with McCartney’s preference for the pop of Buddy Holly, much like Davies’ rough-edged tunes were at variance with Hodgson’s sweeter melodies.

Hodgson ruminated on that difference in a 1979 interview: “We realized that a few of the songs on ‘Breakfast in America’ really lent themselves to two people talking to each other, and at each other. I could be putting down his way of thinking and he could be challenging my way of seeing things. Our ways of life are so different, but I love him. That contrast is what makes the world go ’round, and it’s what makes Supertramp go ’round as well. His beliefs are a challenge to mine and my beliefs are a challenge to his.”

*Supertramp (from left): Rick Davies, Dougie Thomson, John Helliwell, Roger Hodgson, Bob Siebenberg*

Sadly, though, that divergence in styles and inspirations proved to be, eventually, Supertramp’s undoing. Where the two songwriters had initially respected each other’s work in an “opposites attract” sort of way, Hodgson felt he was growing apart from not only Davies but the rest of the band, both musically and spiritually. As the group contemplated their follow-up to “Breakfast in America” in 1982, Hodgson made it clear he wanted a pop album, while Davies had his sights set on returning to the prog rock of past albums, even putting forth a complex 16-minute piece that would be the album’s cornerstone. They both bristled at having to compromise their own vision, and the resulting LP, “…Famous Last Words…,” felt jarringly contradictory to many critics and to the band members themselves.

Said Davies at that time, “It’s been said that there’s a certain amount of friction that’s inevitable when you’re involved in a creative process. It’s like two people are painting a picture on the same canvas. Somebody wants to put red there and somebody wants to put blue. You have problems, and the picture doesn’t get finished. In the past, we’ve always been able to work around it, but as we’ve progressed, it has become more difficult.” Said drummer Siebenberg, “It became a diluted version of what it started out to be. It was really neither here nor there.”

*Davies (left) and Hodgson during the band’s glory years*

Still, Supertramp charted a triumphant world tour in 1983, and I saw them perform in September of that year in what turned out to be one of Hodgson’s final dozen shows as part of the group’s lineup. I found it to be a superb, professional gig, full of both songwriters’ better songs, including their two hits from “Famous Last Words” — Hodgson’s “It’s Raining Again” and Davies’ “My Kind of Lady.”

Hodgson then made good on his vow to go solo, and within a year, he charted respectably with his debut LP, “In the Eye of the Storm,” reaching #46 in the US, and the singles “Had a Dream (Sleeping With the Enemy)” and “In Jeopardy,” which peaked at #11 and #30, respectively, on US rock charts. A follow-up LP in 1987, stalled at #163. His third and (so far) final studio album, 2000’s “Open the Door,” didn’t chart at all in the US. Hodgson has devoted most of his energies in the ’90s and beyond to performing, sometimes with a band, sometimes on his own, including several high profile events in Europe and Canada.

Davies, meanwhile, forged ahead with Supertramp, firmly in control as they followed his progressive rock vision on the 1985 LP “Brother Where You Bound,” which peaked at #21 on US album charts. The remaining foursome of Davies, Helliwell, Thomson and Siebenberg augmented their instrumentation with a handful of additional musicians (including Pink Floyd’s guitarist David Gilmour) on the ambitious 16-minute title track and the brilliant “Cannonball” single, and they toured relentlessly in Canada, the US and Europe.

In 1987, they tried a new approach for their next project, “Free as a Bird,” setting aside their progressive rock and employing synthesizers and dance-beat rhythms instead. Said Davies years later, “I thought we could be more modern and build it up with computers and drum machines and have people come in one by one, but that makes you lose the band spirit a little bit. Each time we went in, we would try to give it something different, and it ended up a lot more machine-based than anything we’d done before. That was good and bad, but I think it had some interesting songs on it.” (I agree; tracks like “Thing For You,” “An Awful Thing to Waste” and the title song are all worthy entries in the Supertramp repertoire, but in general, it’s a failed experiment that stalled at #101 on US album charts.)

They toured behind “Free as a Bird” for six months in 1987-88 before collectively agreeing to call it quits. But in 1997, they rallied with additional musicians on the album “Some Things Never Change,” which failed to chart in the US, and again in 2002 with “Slow Motion,” which suffered the same fate. Davies conceded in 2007, “These were last-ditch attempts to make things happen again, but the life had gone out of the band by that point.”

An effort was made in 2010 to honor fans’ requests for a true Supertramp reunion with both Davies and Hodgson on stage together, but that fell through. “I know there are some fans out there who would like that to happen, and there was a time when I had hoped for that, too,” said Davies. “But in order to play a great show, you need harmony, both musically and personally. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exist between us anymore, and I would rather not destroy memories of more harmonious times between all of us.”

A final Supertramp tour of Europe was announced in 2015, but Davies’ first bout with cancer interfered, and although he fought it off for a while, it returned and eventually claimed him.

“It was an honor to share the stage with Supertramp back in the ‘prog-rock’ days of the ’70s,” said David Pack, guitarist/singer/songwriter of Ambrosia, the LA-based band with a similar prog rock/pop dual personality. “Rick along with Roger wrote and sang so many classic songs that were the soundtrack of our lives way back when. What a legacy. Bloody well done, Rick!”

R.I.P., Rick Davies. It’s an egregious omission that you and Supertramp are not yet in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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The Spotify playlist below features the Supertramp songs written and sung by Rick Davies, in honor of his recent passing. For the sake of completeness, at the end I’ve added eight songs written and sung by Hodgson.

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