I write about music because I love music. I have never entertained the possibility of making money for my efforts through paid subscriptions and advertisements, and I’ve never applied for a job as a critic on any of the popular music rags. This stance comes from my personal values, and I don’t begrudge critics who earn money for their work as long as they show signs of having listened carefully to the music, performed the necessary research to provide helpful background information, and keep an open mind.

So when I read a review by a salaried critic who had already made up his mind before listening to a single note, and couldn’t be bothered to perform even the most basic research on the players and background, I got seriously fucking pissed. Here’s Jim Miller’s review for Rolling Stone, ironically published on December 7, 1968, strengthening the notion of a “date which will live in infamy.”

If Days of Future Passed is the Moody Blues being self-consciously “beautiful,” In Search of the Lost Chord is the Moody Blues being self-consciously “mystical.” Too bad again . . .

The dilemma of this whole album is illustrated by “Legend of a Mind,” featuring a nifty lyric about “Timothy Leary’s dead.” 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. Mike Pinder’s “The Best Way to Travel” sounds indebted to Pink Floyd, while the inevitable sitar pops up painlessly on Justin Hayward’s “Visions of Paradise.” Whoever does the vocal on “The Actor” and “The Word” (they run together) does one hell of a job; beautiful, unabashedly emotional singing . . .

Hopefully next time around the Moody Blues will leave their London Festival Orchestra and Yantra at home and get together a straight-ahead, no bullshit album of rock; judging from even these albums they should be quite capable of doing this and, furthermore, doing it well.

Jim couldn’t have had much of an ear if he was unable to identify Justin Hayward’s voice on “The Actor” after listening to two of Justin’s vocals that appeared on the same side. As many of you are aware, there is no “beautiful, unabashedly emotional singing on “The Word” because Mike Pinder narrates the piece. Miller’s closing statement tells us that he wanted to Moody Blues to be another rock band among the plethora of rock bands and forget all that nonsense about trying to expand the reach of rock music.

Fuck that guy and fuck Rolling Stone. It’s hardly surprising that a magazine with Jann Wenner at the helm would demand that rock ‘n ‘roll remain stuck in neutral; in Oliver Julien’s Sgt. Pepper and the Beatles: It was Forty Years Ago Today, one-time Rolling Stone employee Lester Bangs opined, “In the sixties rock and roll began to think of itself as an ‘art form’. Rock and roll is not an ‘art form’; rock and roll is a raw wail from the bottom of the guts.” Because Wenner was at the helm of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Moodies would have to wait decades to earn a spot in that worthless institution; Jethro Tull is still waiting (though if he were so honored, I think Ian Anderson would tell them to fuck off). 

I’ve always felt that the best thing about rock is its inclusivity and openness to innovation. It’s ironic that musical explorers within a genre originally identified as a form of rebellion would face ridicule from critics for challenging the norm. In an interview with Acoustic Storm, John Lodge challenged the moribund minds in the music business:

ACOUSTIC STORM: How has the band’s early mystical reputation affected the group’s development? Have there been some positives and also maybe some things that in hindsight you felt may have held back the band?

LODGE: Well, I think it hasn’t held the band back from the audience point of view because they’ve always had a special relationship with the band. But I think a lot of people in the music industry have never been able to understand the Moody Blues because every time they think we come up with something they can positively put away in a particular drawer, we do something different and then they say, “Oh, what have they done there? …something different.” So, we’ve always been not everyone’s favorite band in the music business because they’ve never been able to isolate us. But that’s something important–we needing to have our own music that the listener can relate to. The mystic point of view is the same thing as well, because a lot of people in the music industry didn’t actually want to go that route after all. But the listeners did. Also, the 60’s and 70’s was a different time period than today. People’s minds were in different places.

The success of Days of Future Passed encouraged further exploration of musical possibilities, and the Moody Blues were determined to go down that road on In Search of the Lost Chord, the music business be damned.

*****

The history of the lost chord myth dates back to 1860 and the publication of the poem “A Lost Chord,” written by Adelaide Anne Procter, Queen Victoria’s favorite poet and a sort of protégé of Charles Dickens. Seventeen years later, Arthur Sullivan put the lyrics to music, and “The Lost Chord” became a smash hit, “the biggest commercial success of any British or American song of the 1870s and 1880s” (Wikipedia). Below you will find the stanzas that might have inspired the Moody Blues to use the title for an album concerned with exploration, discovery and the quest for inner harmony:

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel’s psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexèd meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I said “might have inspired” because there is no existing evidence that the Moodies even knew about the poem or song. Justin Hayward explained to Tony Sokol on Den of Geek that the inspirational source was Jimmy Durante, who sang the song “I’m the Guy Who Found the Lost Chord” for the 1947 film This Time for Keeps.

So the serial language mangler with the big schnozzola turned out to be a guru.

In an interview with Vincent Barajas on Outre, Justin Hayward elaborated on the real-life influences behind In Search of a Lost Chord.

“Myself, Pinder and Ray were dabbling in everything, trying to guzzle as much spiritual and psychedelic information as we could possibly get. We were racing toward it all the time—reading every book, investigating every kind of religion, having all sorts of psychedelic experiences. We met Timothy Leary in 1968 on our first tour of America, me Mike and Ray stayed with him on his ranch for a week or so, and we had a wonderful time. We went through a lot of religious experiences together, we tended to read the same books. I remember us all reading the Bhagavad Gita, and The Tibetan Book of The Dead, and doing all of these things together. So what we were saying was sincere, we weren’t just picking up bits of information and using them in songs. We were actually living this stuff at the time, I suppose like many other people, but we took it a lot more seriously than most other musicians, and we were able to put it into music in a more accessible way than some of the other musicians who were really seriously into it, but who were inaccessible in their music.”

I’m more of a Tao Te Ching kinda gal, but I’ve read the major Asian texts, and all of them deal with inner harmony in one way or another. The counterculture that flourished in the sixties rejected the materialist basis of society and the authoritarian, “thou shalt not” orientation of mainstream religion, and like their beatnik predecessors, turned to the East in search of enlightenment and inner peace. As Justin noted, the Moodies weren’t the only musicians to embrace that trend, but In Search of the Lost Chord was one of the more comprehensive enlightenment efforts released during that period in music history. For the most part, the music is suitably soothing and the lyrics impressionistic (though as would often be the case with progressive rock, occasionally unintelligible). The production is exceptional, as the Moodies, producer Tony Clarke and engineer Derek Varnals were determined to make the most out of stereo technology. Unlike several albums of the era marked by dumb-ass “Wouldn’t it be cool to put the drums on the far left and the bass on the far right?” panning decisions, the stereo mix on In Search of the Lost Chord is purposeful and beautifully executed.

The tracks melt into one another seamlessly, but I grew up listening to an LP and took notice of the contrasts between the two sides. To my ears, side one is “awakening and exploration” and side two is “the dawning of enlightenment.” Since I’m the boss and the only employee of this blog, I will split the narrative in half.

On with the show!

*****

Side One

“Departure” (Edge): The album opens with a lovely arpeggio played on either an autoharp or the mellotron that ends with a WHAM! Graeme Edge enters to recite his poem in a voice so soft that you can barely hear the first four lines over the rising figure from the mellotron. The poem is essentially an ode to the five senses and the natural world, implying that therein lies the path to enlightenment:

Be it sight, sound, smell or touch
There’s something inside that we need so much
The sight of a touch or the scent of a sound
Or the strength of an oak with roots deep in the ground
The wonder of flowers
To be covered and then to burst up
Through tarmac, to the sun again
Or to fly to the sun without burning a wing
To lie in a meadow and hear the grass sing
To have all these things in our memory’s hoard
And to use them to help us, to find

Graeme’s voice becomes clearer as the tension from the mellotron continues to rise, eventually enhanced by an echo effect as his delivery becomes more frantic . . . until he vanishes in a cloud of hysterical laughter and WHAM! The band starts to rock! A thrilling opener indeed!

“Ride My See-Saw” (Lodge): With Lodge pumping away on bass, Justin ripping riffs on the Telecaster he played when he was a kid, Pinder filling the background with mellotron swoops and the singers engaging in three and four-part harmonies, it’s no wonder that the Moodies frequently opened their concerts with “Ride My See-Saw.” In addition to its innate danceability, the arrangement allows everyone to get into high gear from the get-go, presenting a powerful, unified front.

In the liner notes for the 2008 SACD Deluxe Edition, Lodge recalled, “The song was about leaving school and going out into the world and finding out it wasn’t what you thought it was and it isn’t what you were taught in school. It is actually much bigger than that. ‘Ride My See-Saw’ was about riding my life and seeing where we go with this thing. I am still doing that now.”

Aren’t we all. Though some fans viewed them as gurus of a sort, all the band members came from the lower and middle classes, and the struggle for awakening is grounded in that experience:

I worked like a slave for years
Sweat so hard just to end my fears
Not to end my life a poor man
But by now, I know I should have run . . .

Left school with a first-class pass
Started work, but as second class
School taught one and one is two
But by now, that answer just ain’t true

It’s no wonder that the band’s most passionate followers shared similar backgrounds. “There is a fan intensity for us in Britain which I hope and pray is still there because every few years we do a tour and we need to sell it out or else the whole business knows about it the next morning. It’s still very strong, but in truth, it’s America for us. Especially places like where we are now, the industrial working-class parts of America. Funnily enough, it’s all the places that we came to on the very first long tour of America when we opened for a band called Canned Heat in ’68. They were the best boogie band I’ve ever seen, and they were great to us and took us on our bus and made it easy for us. But their audience was all of these kinds of places, the Midwest through working-class America, and that’s been our territory ever since.” (Justin Hayward interview with Paul DuNoyer). 

The key shifts from F to D minor on the word “true,” followed by a spirited display of wordless harmonies that transitions back to F major and Justin Hayward’s guitar solo. All of his guitar work on the song was made up on the spot, and at first, he thought the solo was “a little weird,” but his mates loved it. The tab tells us that he started on the two middle strings, dropped down to A and D, made a quick trip to G before riffing on the high E string, then back down to the bottom. The ad-lib approach resulted in a solidly structured composition that he justifiably identified as his favorite solo of all time.

Having found that the math of lower-class conformity wasn’t going to work, the narrator concludes he needs to find an alternative to the see-saw:

My world is spinning ’round
Everything is lost that I found
People run, come ride with me
Let’s find another place that’s free

Our working-class stiff is now an explorer setting out for places unknown in the hope of finding something better . . . which just happens to provide a solid, thematic transition to the next song.

“Dr. Livingstone, I Presume?” (Thomas): The chorus “We’re all looking for someone” was used in the title sequence in The Tyrant King, a 6-part serial “drama” for children, where three kids follow clues to learn about historic sites in London. The music of the Stones, Cream, Pink Floyd and the Nice also found its way into the show.

I think the producers missed an easy layup by not including the whole song somewhere in the script, because the simple repetitive lyrics would have appealed to an audience of primary school denizens. In addition to the multiple repetitions of the chorus, the three explorers (Livingstone, Scott and Columbus) are asked the same questions: “What did you find there?/Did you stand awhile and stare? Did you meet anyone?” The answers differ according to their specialty areas, but in the end, all admit that “I’ve still not found what I’m looking for.” I wish the ghosts of Art Fleming and Alex Trebek could have made an appearance after that line and said, “Sorry, (Dave, Bob, Chris), but the correct question is, ‘What is someone?”

Ray did manage to make two important points: we could all use a partner in our journey through life, and achieving fame and wealth is not the be-all, end-all. It’s a pleasant listening experience, but I wish the song had a bit more meat on its bones.

“House of Four Doors” (Lodge): Jim Miller labeled “House of Four Doors” as “an overblown piece of literal psychedelia with four (count ’em: four) squeaky door sound effects.” I have to confess that when I hear those squeaky doors, I feel an overwhelming urge to run out to the tool shed and grab my trusty can of WD-40.

Psychedelic music was chock-full of cheesy sound effects, largely because imagination extended far beyond the technical limitations of the time (and not every band had the opportunity to record with George Martin and Geoff Emerick). However, I have come up sure-fire way to eliminate the irritating noise in a jiffy: ask Steven Wilson to remix the album and replace the creaky door sound with the whoosh that accompanies the opening of automatic doors on the Enterprise! Because Star Trek was airing when the Moodies recorded the album, it’s the ultimate period-specific solution!

In an interview with Aribelle Mireham (quoted on Wikipedia),” Lodge explained his thinking behind the song: “I wrote a song once called ‘House of Four Doors’, and that really is about an approach to life that I think everyone can have. Open a door, see where it takes you. It might not be where you want to go, but at least you’re going along, and you don’t know where it’ll go eventually.”

Love the approach and its connection to “awakening and exploration,” but the lyrics are quite awkward, and I don’t think a shot of WD-40 could have saved them. I get the gist of what Lodge is trying to say when setting the scene—verse one: humans have lost their way; verse two, a light shines through the darkness; verse three: we learn that we have choices beyond current reality in the metaphorical House of Four Doors—but when he starts opening the doors, he loses touch with basic English syntax:

Loneliness, the face of pilgrims’ eyes was known
As the door opened wide

Beauty they had found before my eyes to see
And to the next door we came

Love of music showed in everything we heard
Through the third door where are we?

So, at this point, our choices are lonely journeys, some form of beauty, and I guess music, but we don’t know “where are we.” Each is followed by a musical passage designed to reflect the specific mood: acoustic guitar and flute for loneliness; harpsichord and cello for beauty; and a grand orchestral mellotron for music. The closing verse echoes Dante and adds a touch of suspense to the proceedings:

Enter in all ye who seek to find within
As the plaque said on the last door

There seems to be a word missing in “Enter in all ye who seek to find within.” Find peace? Find beauty? Find the wedding ring that you dropped down the drain? Who’s lurking behind that door?

OMIGOD! It’s Timothy Leary! I thought he was dead!

“Legend of a Mind” (Thomas): The fourth door simply had to lead to the psychedelic experimentation of the era, but people who never studied that page in history incorrectly believe that it was all about getting high and tripping out, and are unaware of the connections to Eastern mysticism. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, authored by three psychologists (Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass) and published in 1964, argued that “death” can also mean “ego death” and that psychedelic drugs can be employed to facilitate that symbolic passing:

. . . it is one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn. Symbolically he must die to his past, and to his old ego, before he can take his place in the new spiritual life into which he has been initiated.

Leary, Timothy; Alpert, Richard; Metzner, Ralph. The Psychedelic Experience (Function). Kindle Edition.

Or, if you prefer, “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/It is not dying/It is not dying.”

So, when Ray sings “Timothy Leary’s dead,” followed by “No, no, no, no, he’s outside, looking in,” he means that Leary died a metaphorical death by searching inside to detach himself from his ego, and his means of transport lay outside the accepted religious practices of Christianity.

Of course, the Moodies had no way of knowing that Leary’s ego would return in full force and he would become something of a publicity hound.

Philosophy aside, “Legend of a Mind” is a fabulous piece of music on many levels. While Ray Thomas deservedly draws most of the attention for his beautifully phrased lead vocals and his exceptional flute solo in the instrumental segment, what I love most about the song is the spirited collaboration of the cast, all of whom make significant contributions to the arrangement. I should note that when I refer to the “cast,” I’m talking about all the band members and the two guys in the booth, for the care that went into the mix earns plenty of kudos. The sensitive panning and creative use of patches to differentiate sounds made a world of difference in terms of clarity and focus.

The song begins gently with Justin plucking four arpeggios on acoustic guitar in the far right channel. Ray enters the scene, his voice placed in the middle of the left channel, quickly joined by Graeme playing a light, steady beat. Ray moves to the right channel to deliver the second line, his voice tinged with a touch of reverb. Once Ray completes the phrase “looking in,” Mike’s swooping mellotron and Lodge’s pulsating bass appear in the left channel. Mike withdraws from the scene to give Ray room to return to the left channel, and after a repetition of the right-side shift, Graeme cues the upward increase in intensity with a hearty fill, while Ray’s voice moves to an open space a bit to the right of center to deliver the punctuating lines:

He’ll fly his astral plane
Takes you trips around the bay
Brings you back the same day
Timothy Leary, Timothy Leary

A repetition of the opening verse follows, and to forestall the expected boredom, the boys alter the arrangement. Justin shifts to an electric guitar, and while Ray remains in the off-center right for the odd-numbered lines, he becomes part of an echo-drenched chorus in the even-numbered lines. In addition to freshening the arrangement with new sounds, the choral lines add a touch of grandeur to the soundscape while opening the door to additional dynamic shifts.

Once the second go-round fades and Justin repeats his four arpeggios, the band makes the first of several rhythmic changes that appear in the composition, as Graeme and Lodge double up on the beats for the bridge. Backed by the thumping rhythm and angelic vocal counterpoint, Ray makes the case for Leary and the use of psychedelics to pave the way to enlightenment:

Along the coast you’ll hear them boast
About a light they say that shines so clear
So raise your glass, we’ll drink a toast
To the little man who sells you thrills along the pier
He’ll take you up, he’ll bring you down
He’ll plant your feet back firmly on the ground
He flies so high, he swoops so low
He knows exactly which way he’s gonna go
Timothy Leary, Timothy Leary

After a brief rhythmic transition in 3/4 time and a repetition of the transitional passage, the music winds down and slows to a near stop. Ray enters with warm sounds from the flute, introducing the extended instrumental break. The first segment involves a duet featuring various percussion instruments, acoustic guitar and sensuous swoops from the mellotron, the kind of music that might indeed encourage a listener to “turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.” The passage ends with a declining run on Justin’s acoustic guitar, and after a mini-pause, Ray returns with a warm, pastoral flute performance that traverses the soundscape. As Graeme and Mike re-enter to provide beat and background, Ray starts to explore the higher range of the flute with jazz-like flurries that make my heart go all a-tingle. Once again, Graeme takes charge and begins to intensify and pick up the beat as Mike raises the volume on his mellotron swoops. A quick attack on the drums cues the singers to enter the fray, their voices raised and enhanced by an echo effect that gives the impression of a full chorus. This exciting turn of events deserves a reprise, and once the singers have paid final homage to Mr. Leary, the band enters the fade, ending with the sound of a diving airplane, which might represent the post-acid-trip crash. All I can say after this piece of musical magic is “Whew!”

The experts are still debating the value of psychedelics in treating certain mental health conditions, but I think they should shut up and listen to a woman who knows her stuff. “If we rely on antidepressants for treatment, it can take several weeks before people experience amelioration of symptoms, if at all,” said Nora Volkow, MD, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “Psychedelics may offer the opportunity to get a very fast and lasting response, and with some conditions, this could be lifesaving.” Though I wasn’t searching for spiritual rebirth when I launched my one and only acid trip, I did learn that our perceptions of self and reality are quite fragile because they are largely based on assumptions created by one’s self-image to fit the story of ourselves that we want others to believe, so I can understand how psychedelics can be therapeutic for people with strong ego attachments (under the care of a licensed mental health professional, of course).

I also think we’d be much better off if the ego-driven male narcissists who run governments and businesses and bully their way through life without the slightest regard for other human beings would drop some acid and grow the fuck up. Not to mention any names, of course.

“House of Four Doors, Pt. 2” (Lodge): The only good thing about this delayed ending is that The House of Four Doors is closed forever. I think the Moodies would have been better off dropping Part Two, as placing it after “Legend of the Mind” ensured its demise before a single note could be played.

Side Two

“Voices in the Sky” (Hayward): Aah! That’s nice! The road to self-discovery opens with the gentle sounds of Ray’s flute and Justin’s voice, a combination I find utterly delightful and positively therapeutic. After a complete shutout on side one, Justin offers up three compositions on side two, all reflective pieces brimming with emotional impact. Sorry, Mr. Spock, but life is illogical, and the only way you know you’re on the road to self-discovery is if you feel it.

The composition is divided into three distinct groups: paired verses devoted to natural wonders, paired verses devoted to human activity and two renditions of the bridge containing the Eureka moment appearing after each set of paired verses.

Justin made a wise choice in choosing two of the most beautiful songbirds to represent the wonders of nature: the bluebird and the nightingale. His choice turned out to be quite prescient: “Researchers from Kings College London published a study in 2018 testing the effects of exposure to nature on mental health. Using an app to track people’s interactions with nature, they showed that birdsong (among other things) improved people’s mental well-being. Birdsong was not only relaxing, but made people more deliberate—it reduced what psychologists call impulsivity.” (Source: Gulo In Nature). Though Justin wishes he could understand the meaning embedded in the bluebird’s song offerings, he’s happy to take a moment and listen to the nightingale “harmonize the wind.”

The music shifts from pastoral to intense in the bridge as Justin wonders about the origins of his newfound interest in nature and finds the answers in the setting where life first emerged:

Just what is happening to me
I lie awake with the sound of the sea
Calling to me

The second set of verses is equally compelling, but for different reasons. In the age of the Generation Gap, Justin wants to hear the songs of the old and the young:

Old man, passing by
Tell me what you sing
Though your voice be faint
I am listening
Voices in the sky

Children with a skipping rope
Tell me what you sing
Play time is nearly gone
The bell’s about to ring
Voices in the sky

In short, he chooses to engage with the world instead of limiting his experience to a single social clique. Though the events he describes are hardly mind-blowing, I think that’s the point—as we go about our busy lives, we tend to pay scant attention to everyday experiences and miss out on the simple joys they can provide.

The beauty of this song always brings tears to my eyes, but today it evokes tears of sadness and anger as the fires engulfing Portugal, Spain and France have destroyed large swathes of the nightingale’s summer habitat, thanks in large part to the unenlightened deniers of global warming.

“The Best Way to Travel” (Pinder): I’ve always liked this song for its brief trips into the blues scale and its key-defying resolution: the verses are in D major, but the resolution chord is B, which resolves to the secondary key of E major, punctuated by the E-G-A-E closing guitar riff. In addition to that break from the norm, I also approve of the underlying message: “Hey, humans! You were blessed with brains and imagination, so why not use them for a change?” I would have appended the phrase, “you dumb fucks,” but that would be quite un-Moodie-ish.

And you can fly
High as a kite, if you want to
Faster than light, if you want to
Speeding through the universe
Thinking is the best way to travel

The basic arrangement in the verse segments is mid-tempo rock, combining muscular acoustic guitar (played by Pinder), electric guitar (Hayward) and emphatic bass and skip-beat drums from the rhythm section of Lodge and Edge. Pinder’s vocals are calm and steady, strengthened in the closing couplet with harmonies from Mr. Thomas. The centerpiece of the song is the magic created by the mellotron in concert with stereophonic sound. To explain this marriage of music and technology, I’ll turn things over to Franco Fabbri, who wrote about the goings-on in an essay entitled “Binaurality, Stereophony, and Popular Music in the 1960s and 1970s”:

The resulting feeling of immersion into the band’s sounding space is gradually (should I say “progressively”?) enhanced by innovations in the placing of imaginary sound sources, made possible by the availability of more tracks, more channels, and by pan-pots. “The Best Way to Travel”, on the Moody Blues album In Search of the Lost Chord, released in July 1968 (Deram 1968) is a showpiece for the (then) recently installed mixing desk at Decca Studios, with pan-pots on each channel. When listened to from a pair of loudspeaker sets, sounds move back and forth from left to right, and some (faster and shorter) even seem to travel around the room. With headphones, movements are clearer and deeper: when sounds go from left to right or vice-versa they seem to travel within the head, and rapidly circling sounds move all around it.

You may be tempted to dismiss the experience as “trippy hippie bullshit,” but I find the experience of pleasant sounds circling through my head rather enjoyable . . . though I have to reveal that my delight may stem from the incredibly harsh and irritating stereo cacophony of an MRI scan I had a few years back.

I also like the Sputnik sounds that accompany the closing verse, but that’s to be expected from a Trekkie.

“Visions of Paradise” (Hayward, Thomas): The combination of Justin’s marvelous voice and Ray’s sensitive flute is a match made in musical heaven, and the arrangement creates a sonic environment suitable for reflection. The opening passage features a warm, downward figure on the flute from C to E minor that turns out to be a bit of musical foreshadowing. The verses are unique in that the lovely melody is set to a single chord (C major), but though a sitar enters the soundscape about a third of the way through the song, Justin and Ray avoided the temptation to turn the piece into a drone song, employing the sitar to provide counterpoint arpeggios in sync with Justin’s acoustic guitar.

Continuing the theme of imagination, “Visions of Paradise” validates the fundamental truth that you’ll never go anywhere if you don’t have a clear idea of where you’re going. You have to envision paradise if you want to create paradise. The main obstacle to “Paradise on Earth” is that human beings cannot agree on what constitutes paradise and are unlikely to do so in the near or distant future, so your only option at present is to create your own version of Eden and maybe find others who share your vision.

The narrator’s visions are two-fold, with one involving the personal and the other the universal. The personal vision has already come true in the form of unconditional love between romantic partners:

The sounds in my mind just come to me
Come see, come see
And the call of her eyes makes waterfalls
Of me, of me
In the garden of her love I’ll stay awhile
To be, to be

Though relationships can go sour, this path to enlightenment represents his best shot. At this point, Ray repeats the downward run from C to E minor, where we will remain during the brief bridge. Here the narrator presents his universal vision . . . to which you might respond, “Good luck with that.”

Visions of paradise, cloudless skies I see
Rainbows on the hill, blue onyx on the sea

As it is more than highly unlikely that he will love long enough to experience a pristine earthly environment, you may ask, “Why waste your energy on something that ain’t gonna happen?” Because giving up guarantees that your vision will never come to fruition—and living in hope is better than living in misery. The best advice I’ve found when running up against a brick wall in my work at the EU came in the form of this sneak preview from On a Threshold of a Dream:

There you go man
Keep as cool as you can
Face piles of trials with smiles
It riles them to believe
That you perceive the web they weave
And keep on thinking free

A-fucking-men.

“The Actor” (Hayward): Sticking to the theme of relationship-as-refuge presented in “Visions of Paradise,” Justin’s romantic side is at its best in this wonderful love song enhanced by Pinder’s “orchestration.” What I enjoy most about Justin’s love songs is his penchant for placing the relationship in the larger context of daily life instead of presenting a series of trite love song clichés:

The sleeping hours take us far,
From traffic, telephones, and fear.
Put out your problems with the cat,
Escape until a bell you hear.

Our reasons are the same,
But there’s no one we can blame,
For there’s nowhere we need go,
And the only truth we know, comes so easily.

The sound I have heard in your hello,
Oh darling, you’re almost part of me.
Oh darling, you’re all I’ll ever see.

I hope I don’t have to answer the question, “What does a love song have to do with enlightenment?” but I will anyway. Forming a deep, lasting bond with another human being is the enlightenment experience par excellence. When two people fully commit to unconditional love for one another, they don’t need acid to banish the ego because they know that one will care for the other and vice versa.

“The Word” (Edge): The first ten lines of Graeme’s poem turn me off with all the scientific lingo about gamma, ultraviolet, infrared, and x-ray, terms I generally do not associate with the beauty Edge is trying to convey. Hence, I am relieved when he reaches the end and finally gets to the point: the search for the lost chord:

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 it a word, and the word is . . .

“Om” (Pinder, Thomas): The sacred word has many meanings and is employed in several Asian religions; for purposes of this analysis, the definition I found in a Harvard dissertation will work best: “OM serves as a sonic realization of the divine.” From a practical standpoint, its use in meditation serves to remove distractions and open the door to inner peace.

While I’m sure most rock critics of the day would have labeled the piece sacrilegious, only a few even bothered to mention it in their reviews, except in passing. I find the song rather calming and would firmly resist any accusations of pretentiousness. The basic arrangement has an earthy, rural feel with its light touches of flute, sitar and tabla, evoking images of pilgrims heading down dusty paths to the temple. Ray and Mike take turns singing the verse lines, and both of them sound cool, calm and collected. Other than a tempo change midstream and the powerful sound of voices raised in unison, there isn’t a whole lot of drama for the moribund to complain about. In my opinion, “Om” proves that the Moodies were serious about their interest in Eastern philosophy, making it the perfect closer for an album concerned with the search for enlightenment.

*****

Rolling Stone rarely let up on the Moodies; in the Rolling Stone Album Guide, they spewed this bit of vitriol: “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.”

I guess by “nonsense,” they meant “peace, love, and happiness.” Since we continue to live in a world filled with war, hate and misery, I would argue that the Moody Blues are more relevant than ever. In Search of the Lost Chord was one of many works of the era that suggested ways out of our never-ending troubles, and it ranks as one of the best. Revisiting their oeuvre has heightened my awareness of the value of their contributions.

In closing, allow me to make a suggestion. Our chances of surviving an endless period of war, hate, and misery are zero to none. We need to stop treating love, peace, and happiness as an old joke from the hippie era and accept the basic truth: the trinity of love, peace, and happiness is our only path to survival.

*****