Tuesday Afternoon: The Day Begins
(This post contains affiliate links.)
I’ll be honest, starting at the literal beginning feels sort of like starting with a whimper instead of a bang.
Days of Future Passed was released in November of 1967, and if you know absolutely anything at all about the Moody Blues, you already know about Days. It was a brilliant bamboozle. Five young, broke guys, tasked with making a stereo demo album of Dvorák’s New World Symphony, convinced their collaborator, conductor Peter Knight, to not only record their own music instead, but to get the entire orchestra to riff off of it. Almost 60 years later, you’d still be hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t heard Nights in White Satin at least once.
But the nighttime doesn’t come for a good while yet. We’re not even quite at dawn. The Day Begins is an overture. In fact, it’s mostly just the London Festival Orchestra (which is, in itself, a fictitious entity. They didn’t actually exist in their own right.) But you do get your first taste of that poetry. That poetry. You know what I’m talking about. That “Just the poem at the end of Nights in White Satin” poetry. Courtesy of drummer Graeme Edge and recorded by Mike Pinder.
Because I am insatiable when it comes to amassing information that is useful only to me, I can tell you that Graeme wrote all the poetry on the Moodies’ albums, mostly because he was ungovernable when it came to putting things to a meter. I can also tell you that Justin Hayward was quoted in an interview once saying that Mike recorded all his vocals lying on the floor in a pitch black room. This might be my favorite piece of information because, since Mike left the band in 1978, he wasn’t the easiest person for me to figure out. This was the missing piece for me, the one that sort of added the flavor of human weirdness that I hadn’t quite been able to get a handle on before that point.
For now, let’s let the dawn creep in. It’s lyrical, it’s ostentatious, it’s the (acknowledged) beginning of something that ended up lasting over 50 years.
…And because we can do semantics all night long, yes, I know that this isn’t the *actual* beginning of the *actual* Moody Blues. I do own Go Now. But it is a functional beginning of sorts. The moment when they decided to hang up everything they had done before, and make some magic instead.
If you are interested in purchasing a physical copy of Days for yourself, you can do so here.
