Days of Future Passed
Days of Future Passed is the second studio album by English progressive rock band the Moody Blues, released on 17 November 1967, by Deram Records. It has been cited by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and others as one of the earliest albums of the progressive rock genre and one of rock music's first concept albums.
The album represents a significant creative turning point for the band. The album is their first with guitarist and singer Justin Hayward, who replaced Denny Laine, and bassist John Lodge, who replaced Clint Warwick. The album is also their first to feature longtime producer and collaborator Tony Clarke and the first to feature keyboardist Mike Pinder on Mellotron. These changes, combined with a shift away from R&B covers toward original compositions and a thematic concept, helped define the band's sound for the next several albums and earned the group new critical and commercial success. The album was recorded to showcase the stereo recording techniques of Decca Records' new imprint, Deram. The label had requested the group record covers of pop and classical music along with an orchestra. Instead, the album features original compositions expressing the day in a life of an everyday person, interspersed with orchestral interludes arranged and conducted by Peter Knight and performed by the London Festival Orchestra.
The album was a moderate success upon release, but steady FM radio airplay and the success of hit single "Nights in White Satin", led the album to become a top ten US hit by 1972. It has since been listed among the most important albums of 1967 by Rolling Stone.
Background
The Moody Blues had started out as a rhythm and blues band, and had achieved commercial success in late 1964/early 1965 with the UK No.1 and US Top 10 single "Go Now", but by late 1966, they had run into financial difficulties and personnel changes, and decided to change creative course. Guitarist/singer Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick left the group to pursue other interests, allowing John Lodge, former bandmate and friend of Ray Thomas, to join the group on bass. The band would find guitarist and singer Justin Hayward through Eric Burdon of the Animals, who had put out an advert for a new bandmember of his own. Thomas remembers, "He'd advertised in the local musical press and found somebody. I was having a drink with him in a club, and he said, 'I've got a load of replies in my office; if you want to go through them, you're more than welcome."The addition of Lodge and Hayward brought two additional songwriters into the group, allowing the band to pursue a new creative direction. New singer and guitarist Justin Hayward explains, "We were originally a rhythm-and-blues band, wearing blue suits and singing about people and problems in the Deep South. It was OK, but it was incongruous, getting us nowhere, and, in the end, we had no money, no nothing. When I came into the band as a songwriter in early 1966, Mike was the only one in the band who was writing, and the songs we were writing together were nothing like anything we were doing in our live act. And then, literally one day, we said we've got to do something entirely different. So we decided to write our own material and do only our own songs." New singer and bassist John Lodge continues, "We hadn't been to America. That was the amazing problem because, before we made Days of Future Passed, we were singing songs that originated in America and, having never been there, it seemed like a really strange thing to do – sing about a country or an environment I had no first-hand knowledge of. That's why we said, 'OK, let's write about English blues. Let's write about us.'"
One particular concert experience gave the band new resolve and drove the band to make a clean break with their past style. Justin Hayward remembers, "We were getting dwindling crowds and decreasing money. It all came to a head when we did a show in Stockton during March 1967. We were so bad, a fan accosted us afterwards and told us we were the worst band he'd ever seen, and we'd ruined the night for him and his wife who'd paid £12 for a night out and had seen the dreadful Moody Blues! On the way back in the van, Graeme – who was asleep lying over the equipment at the back – suddenly woke up and said quietly, 'That guy was right. We are rubbish!' It was the moment we ditched the R&B covers, got rid of our Moody Blues suits and decided to stand or fall by our own songs. What did we have to lose?" Hayward continues, "We had been playing music that wasn't suited to our characters. We were lower middle class English boys singing about life in the deep south of the USA and it wasn't honest. As soon as we began to express our own feelings and to create our own music our fortunes changed." "Our audience was suddenly different. People started liking us for the right reasons. There was an honesty about our playing that was completely apparent."
One prominent element of the group's new musical direction was the use of the Mellotron. Lodge remembers, "When we sort of got together in 1966, we were trying to find the right keyboard for Mike. We tried the piano and it wasn't really what we wanted in the sound. Then we tried a Hammond organ, a box organ, a Rhodes piano. We tried a Farfisa organ and that didn't work and then Mike said, 'You know, I used to work for a company called Mellotron and they invented this machine that sort of simulates strings.' So we went in search of one." The Mellotron is a keyboard instrument where each key plays a tape loop of a recording of another instrument, chorus or orchestra. Developed by the West Midlands company Streetly Electronics in the early 1960s, the instrument served as a precursor to sampling keyboards and synthesizers. Mike Pinder, a previous employee of Streetly, used his connections to purchase one of the instruments for the group. Lodge remembers, "There was a social club at one of the factories in Birmingham, called Dunlop – 'Fort Dunlop' they manufactured tyres – and, they had one of these Mellotrons that no one could play. So we went to see them. I think Mike and I went and spoke to them and we bought it from them. It had never been played. So, Mike set about finding out how to make it work." Pinder continues, "Les Bradley of Streetly electronics gave me a call and told me that he had found me a suitable instrument at the Dunlop tyre factory social club. I went to see it and I just had to have it. At three hundred pounds, instead of the usual three thousand pounds, the instrument was a steal." An October 1967 Sunday Mirror article gives the price of the band's Mellotron at £1,300, which was paid for by an air conditioning business millionaire, Derek McCormick.
Though the instrument could prove fickle in concert, Pinder's experience allowed him to overcome any challenges. He explains, "I knew how they were built. I knew how to put the Mellotron together and how to take it apart." Lodge continues, "It was basically tape loops on every note and after every 12 seconds, the notes stopped. So he had to find of way of playing other notes until the spring brought it back to playing mode again. It was all pretty complicated and Mike solved this. The Mellotron had two keyboards. One was for solo playing and the other had all rhythm sections. So, Mike took all the rhythm sections off and duplicated the solo parts, so he could use two sides of the Mellotron as an instrument. That was very clever." Edge remembers, "Mike figured out to add horns, strings, bagpipes and all that sort of stuff behind it and turn it into a more natural musical instrument." The instrument's ability to reproduce orchestral string sounds in the studio and in concert paired well with Ray Thomas' flute, which he had recently adopted in place of harmonica. He explains, "I had been playing flute, so it was an ideal marriage for the flute with the strings. We decided to really do it like a classical-rock fusion, I suppose you'd call it."
Hayward reflects on the overall impact of the Mellotron on the band's music: "Mike and the mellotron made my songs work. That's the simplest way I can put it. When he was playing piano it was difficult for me to try and find something that Moody Blues would be percussive on the piano and that would be interesting. And particularly because Mike had already played, you know, the greatest piano single ever, so that was going to be an impossible act to follow. But when he found the mellotron suddenly my songs worked, you know. When I played the other guys 'Nights in White Satin' they weren't that impressed until Mike went on the mellotron and then everyone was kind of interested.. Because it really started to hang together from the mellotron." Edge reflects on three distinct developments that drove the band's change in sound and creative development: "I think it was three different forces coming together. One was Tony Clarke, the producer. The other was the Mellotron, which Mike Pinder was playing. And the other was Justin Hayward joining the band, because he didn't come the rock 'n' roll route, he came the English folk route. So his feel for chord structure was just that little bit different."
Writing
In October 1966, the group relocated to Mouscron, Belgium to write new material and embark on a Belgian tour. Their shows typically consisted of two sets, the first consisting of rhythm and blues covers including "Go Now" and the second consisting of newly written original songs. Lodge says, "We loved playing together. It was really good. It was exciting when it was our own songs, we weren't playing a song someone had written for us. So every part of every song we'd invented ourselves. We wanted to play each part exactly right and new and like no one else had ever played that particular part to a song before. That was exciting about Days of Future Passed, creating something that no one else ever created before. That gave a great feeling." Lodge continues, "We went to a little village in Mouscron to start writing our own songs and we wrote a lot of songs before Days of Future Passed. But Days of Future Passed dictated its own album, really. When we knew what we wanted to do with Days of Future Passed, we dedicated the songwriting to exactly that album. And everything we did before was just left alone.Graeme Edge remembers, "We designed a stage show which was going to be '24 hours': daylight 12 and night 12, and we had "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights" and I think "Peak Hour" all written for that." Lodge continues, "Ultimately, it was agreed that the record would be a concept album tracking a day in the life of Everyman, with original songs relating to different parts of the day performed in chronological order, introduced and interspersed with orchestral music. Considering that all five members of the group wrote material for the album prior to the concept being established, it's remarkable how seamless the execution of it was." Pinder explains the desire for a cohesive theme, "I had always wanted to create something that was conceptual. I loved the works of Mantovani. I wanted to have our albums on people's shelves...albums that people would want to collect, and play in their entirety."
Keyboardist Mike Pinder wrote "Dawn Is a Feeling" and Hayward wrote "Nights in White Satin", which served as early bookends for the concept. Hayward explains, "Nights In White Satin" had been recorded quite a long time before it was for Days of Future Passed. "Nights In White Satin" and "Dawn Is A Feeling" were the two key songs that gave us the idea of the story of a day in the life of one guy, and that's what our stage show was about before Days of Future Passed was mentioned or thought about. So we had those two times of the day and the idea, then it was just a question of grubbing different times of the day to write about; it was quite frivolous, really... nothing really too serious. I just put my hand up for the afternoon. So I ended up with "Tuesday Afternoon", and Ray Thomas wrote "Twilight Time".
Mike Pinder's "Dawn is a Feeling" opens the concept with a sense of optimism. Its lyrics acknowledge the spirit of the ongoing Summer of Love and embrace the feeling that society was approaching a new sense of enlightenment, a new spirituality. Lodge remembers the song as a step in a new direction for the group, and for Pinder's songwriting: "I would think it was like an awakening for him as well. He wanted to be a creative writer. Mike wrote fabulous songs. There's something special about the morning. And I think that was the dawning of the Moody Blues, really."
The whimsical "Another Morning" was written by flautist Ray Thomas. Lodge remembers, "He sang me the song. Ray plays flute and harmonica. He doesn't play any chordal instruments. And so I remember him singing the song to me. And I remember getting the guitar out and playing it with him in the house. Ray has got this wonderful smiley attitude to life. It's a childlike look on life, which is really nice."
Bassist John Lodge remembers the inspiration for "Peak Hour": "I wrote "Peak Hour" in the back of a truck. We were coming back from a gig and the rhythm of the wheels on the tarmac were giving a very strong rhythm. I was pounding my foot on the floor and I said to Graeme, 'Could you keep this tempo up for about three minutes? I think I've written a song.'" He continues, "That's where I basically wrote it. I got the main part, the rock and roll part of it, from there. And worked out the bass part. But I really wanted to do something different in the song. That's why I broke it into a cathedral choir-type part in the middle. So it could build back up into a rock and roll song. One part of it would go up-tempo and then it stops and becomes really really quiet with the organ sounds and then it starts again rock and roll."
Hayward recalls writing "Tuesday Afternoon": "I was a little hung up with doing tempo changes in the middle of songs. If I got bored, in order to open up another door within the song, I wanted to just go to a different type of mood. In fact, "Tuesday Afternoon" was the first time we did that. I knew by then, by the time I had written "Tuesday Afternoon", that we were going to do this stage show that was based on a day in the life of one guy, even before we recorded the album. I already had "Nights in White Satin", and we were already starting to learn that and play it. But there was a gap in this story of the day, so I went down to my parents' house in the west country, and I had a dog called Tuesday at the time. Not that the dog is in the song, in any way. I smoked a little joint on the side of a field with a guitar, and that song just came out." He continues, "It was just about searching for some kind of enlightenment or some kind of religious or psychedelic experience in life. I didn't really mean it to be taken too seriously, but six months later, there it was: Our first single in America."
Lodge explains the theme of " Time to Get Away": "It's really about, if you can achieve something every day, it doesn't matter how small it is, it just gives you that energy to carry on and have an enjoyable life. Concerning "The Sun Set" and "Twilight Time", Lodge remembers, "We were trying to make sure that every song on the album had a different aspect. That was the most important thing. That every song on the album, no one could say, 'Oh, that sounds like that.'"
Hayward wrote "Nights in White Satin" about the changes between one relationship and another, using bedsheets as a metaphor. He remembers the inspiration: "I was the end of one big love affair and at the beginning of another. When you're just 20, as I was, that's quite important in your life. A girlfriend had given me white satin sheets... It was a lovely romantic gesture, and that's what I thought of it. I came home one night after a gig, and sat on the side of the bed, and a lot of these thoughts came out.
I do write letters never meaning to send. I find it a cathartic thing. If I have an issue with somebody or about something, I find it easier to write it down and get it out rather than turning it over in my mind. It's a series of random thoughts and ideas from a very stoned 20-year-old young man who was desperately sad for himself over one love affair, and desperately excited by the next." Hayward continues, "I came back from a gig one night and sat on the side of my bed. I was sharing a flat with Graeme at the time. It was very early, it was almost light. The verses of the songs just came out. I took it into the rehearsal room the next day and I played it to the rest of the group. I got to the end of it and everybody was like, 'Well, it's alright.' Mike Pinder said, 'Play it again.' I played it again and he played the Mellotron line and suddenly everybody was interested. He put that sort of orchestration to it and suddenly it worked."
The album opens with the Graeme Edge poem "Morning Glory" and concludes with his "Late Lament". Edge remembers, "I'd written both those pieces of verse because the 'Morning' section appeared rather empty when we first heard it. The latter part of the poem seemed a perfect end to the record. I'd originally written the words as lyrics for someone else to put some music to, but poetry has a rhythmic structure that makes it difficult to turn into a song, so Tony Clarke suggested recording it as a spoken word piece." In another interview, he elaborates further, "As musicians, we knew a lot about life after mid-day. But we hadn't seen that many mornings over the years. So we were a bit blank. And I set out to write a song that covered the mornings, "Morning Glory", and as it progressed, I also did an evening part of it, which became "Late Lament", but I was intending to write the lyrics to a song. I took it in and presented to the boys and said, 'Can anybody put any music to this?' They all read it and said, 'This is fantastic but there's way too many words, you just can't sing that. You have to have spaces where they can hold a vowel and sing instead of just talk.' I went 'Oh yeah, let's see, I can cut it down.' And Tony Clarke said 'No, no, no, that is fantastic. You read it and we'll put music behind it, some strings—make it into something,' which they did. And then they sort of sidled up to me and said, 'You know, it's great, but it's a bit better with Mike's voice.' Like I was going to get upset! I was absolutely thrilled to have something on the album."