The Moody Blues

No major band has so relentlessly purveyed nonsense as have the Moodies; were it not for their titanic success, in fact, they might easily be dismissed as an odd and overlong joke. Since coming up with a name that offered sly tribute to the British beer M&B (in the hopes of a corporate sponsorship eons before that hideous practice became popular), the Moody Blues have been nothing if not commercial -- but it's the artiness of their symphonic rock that's truly crass, their self-importance offensive. Gods of '70s FM radio, they invented a sort of easy-listening psychedelia that resolutely combined the worst of both worlds. Long past their heyday, they've continued to produce mild echoes of the stuff.

Ironically, the Moodies started out great. With Denny Laine on vocals, their first smash was the bold and lovely "Go Now," a ballad version of the British Invasion pop they were masters of, when not performing credible Sonny Boy Williamson numbers and R&B fare along the lines of a sweeter Spencer Davis Group. The reissue of Magnificent Moodies captures this fine early period well. Laine soon left, however, and pomposity entered. Justin Hayward and Ray Thomas joined founder Mike Pinder to form the Moodies' new core and to pursue a new direction -- the fusing of rock and classical music. Recorded with the London Festival Orchestra, Days of Future Passed accomplished exactly that; with its theme of the passage of day into night echoing Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, the album produced the haunting "Nights in White Satin" and established the band as pioneers in a subgenre that Procol Harum and, later, ELO would develop much more winningly.

But the record also previewed a pretentiousness that soon became the Moodies' raison d'etre. Appalling, often hilarious, poetic introductions to the songs were an innovation. Hippie profundities de-livered in a voice-of-God manner, these musings introduced In Search of the Lost Chord, a bombastic meditation on Timothy Leary, astral planes and mantras; Children's Children's Children and Threshold were more of the same, their air of high serious-ness underscored by the mellotron, a keyboard capable of producing orchestral sounds. By now, the Moodies had found a pattern they would seldom depart from -- a long, portentous intro followed by a smooth, stir-ring ersatz rocker, and then roughly equal numbers of fast and slow songs trading in wide-eyed philosophizing.

"Question," "Story in Your Eyes" and "I'm Just a Singer" were huge hits, tricked out with furiously strummed acoustic guitars (ripped off from the Who) and played with absolute, unsmiling professionalism. With Octave, synthesizers became dominant, but the song remained basically the same. The '80s albums showed a slight but very welcome relaxing of the heavy lyrical content, allowing the band's one sure strength, melody, to come through clearly. But what the Moody Blues gained in accessibility, they'd lost in distinction; they now just sounded trite.

In the next decade, the band capitalized on its longevity not only by releasing a clutch of greatest-hits packages (Time Traveller is the most extensive), but by becoming a fairly massive live act. The bom-bast is best captured with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Outdoors, in the cavernous Red Rocks amphitheater, the band's best songs sound like pop Wagner -- which might have been their intention all along. (PAUL EVANS)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide