Listening to The Moody Blues: On The Threshold Of A Dream, Part 1
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- Опубликовано: 9 окт 2023
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Part one of On The Threshold Of A Dream by The Moody Blues
All rights and music: The Moody Blues, Decca Music Group
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The world is 4 billion years old & I fortunate to have lived at the same time as the Moody Blues
The Moodies were pioneers of prog rock, symphonic rock, etc. An awesome group whose music holds up well.
It's 1973, I'm in my room at college. I have this album on and my Sony headphones in place and I'm enjoying the journey and grooving out.
THE WHITE EAGLE OF THE NORTH... God, I love this album
I think To our Children's children.... is my favorite.
The amount of great albums released in '69 is off the charts. This is def one of them. "Never Comes the Day" is Justin Hayward as his very best.
Probably my favorite album of theirs. Played it constantly back in the day. Still have my original copy.
Great commentary. Love The Moody Blues and Jim Newstead. I was released in 1969 as well. 🤣♥🎼🎹🎸🥁🎤🔔🎶💍
My FAVOURITE album from 73..❤ I was 13 and already an established prog rock kid, 🤣 I had no option 😳 I'm from Liverpool, my older sisters used to go to the Cavern to watch them, and my older brother had his own band 😂 so I grew up with a P.A. system in a very small room in a very small house. I'm deaf now 😂
This LP and "voyage "from Mike Pinder makes love thé moodies and thé MELLOTRON !
7:41 Moody Blues are always upbeat and yet tell a tale that draws you in.
Mike pinder worked at Streetly electronics where they built the mellotron which features in all early moody albums. They were one of a few prog rock bands in the late 60's to influence many later prog bands in the early 70's.
An album that loomed huge for me. Many late nights with this on. Love the Moodies....
Thank you, Will!
I’ve been afraid I would have to use my yearly membership album pick to have Jim continue the Magnificent Seven journey. Maybe I’ll luck out and others will jump in so I can ask for my favorite, #6 of the Magnificent Seven: Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, for my next pick.
Jim, thank you for focusing on the album art. IMO, the album art is an essential part of the Moody Blues albums.
Thanks for this album! Mike Pinder's material was always the standout for me and his Have You Heard "suite" ending side 2 still enthralls me after all these years.
My Moody Blues journey began in used record shops. Picked up one album and then searched for the rest in my Moody Blues phase.
First exposure to the Moody Blues for me, My older brother brought the LP home. I was 15 years old I think. Up to then I had only heard Folk and Country since that was what my father was listening to. Needless to say, this expanded my tastes in music. He left that year to go into the Airforce and I inherited the LP. Still have it. The cover doesn't look as pristine as the one you showed but I cherish it and the memories sitting in the bedroom listening to something so totally new that I didn't really "get it" but knew I needed to keep listening. My first mind expanding music experience. He came back but he never got the album back. :)
Mike Pinder talent incomparable
one of my fav albums of all time , means a lot to me this one
Couldn't agree more with your end comments Jim! When I first heard this in 1970 at the age of 16 I was blown away! Got my dad interested in the Moodies- he would lie on the carpet with headphones on.
I just love threshold. it's one of the best prog albums ever made, and my favorite MB record by a long shot. a true masterpiece! ~ ❤
#11 thumbs up here.
I love the Moody Blues some of the most beautiful music in the world.
One of their best. Possibly the best recorded of the conical seven LP's. The Moodies, The Band & Steely Dan got me thru the horrors of High School.
The first Moody Blues album I heard. It set me on the path of obtaining all of their albums and becoming a real fan. Along with Sgt Peppers, it was my intro to prog (art) rock,
This being "photo-prog" as it were, the formula of long, multipart songs hadn't yet been developed. Instead the Moodies wrote short songs that ran together in a gapless album side.
Much like Supper's Ready...
Nice mention of The Coral!
The seven albums after their debut are all amazing. I want to rank those 7 albums some day but it's going to be very difficult. This might be near the bottom of the rankings but it is still a superb album.
If anything, thank you 🇬🇧 for giving this 🇺🇸 such amazing music ever since i was a child of this music.
Fabulous band!
Fantastic album!
The album after this is their best imho. When they reached the 70's they refined their sound.
The Moody Blues often felt torn between the urge to do experimental studio production and the urge to do accessible songs that they could easily play live.
The Moody Blues like The Beatles, The Kinks, Elton John aren't simply 'rock', they do various genres. This probably annoyed rock critics who wanted to pigeon hole them. The album A Question of Balance continues in the same vein. There's atmosphere to The Moody Blues always, you can tell its them even if they take various influences.
I listen to the Moody Blues albums , which as enjoyable a listen they are always jog my memory towards the Procol Harum albums of the same era.... Shine on brightly for me is one of the very first prog albums , and today still as cool as..... The epic ' In held twas in I ' deserves some serious ear time. If you've not 'done' this album Jim you could do a heck of a lot worse.😍
There's a 2010 ish band which has an unerring ear for 60s 70s era rock.
They've done great covers of the Moodies and American band Love from LA.
But consider starting with Chemistry Set "Come Kiss Me, Vibrate and Smile" easily found here on RUclips.
This is a great album, loved these guys back in the day. My older sisters had eclectic tastes…Moody Blues/Black Sabbath/ The Carpenters…go figure. I grew up listening to all sorts.
This ( and really all the 70s releases by MB) were essential listening and on heavy rotation for me from age 8 through 12..
It’s crazy eh? I’m only just hearing it all for the first time!
This is good! You can tell the band has heard Sgt. Pepper... Very nice! :)
Oh, Jim…
Keep in mind album #4 of the Magnificent Seven also came out in 1969. Threshold came out in April. To Our Children’s Children’s Children came out in November. I think maybe #4 may cause you to reassess the Moody Blues in 1969.
But, that’s why doing the journey of the Magnificent Seven albums in order is essential when first listening to them. The band’s own journey, as well as the journey they take the listener on throughout the catalog, is amazing.
I have recently got into the Moody Blues. I didn't want to listen to them originally thinking they were a bit of a pop band, but wow, they are great! You can still pick up original albums for a couple of pounds too.
The 2nd side is the better side. Wizards and spaciness. Side one had some cornball tunes often attributable to those who have moved on...Ray and Graeme, probably the least progressive in their ingestibles. The final words of Dear Diary are:
"Somebody exploded an H-bomb today/But it wasn't anybody I knew."
They were showing how numb "respectable society" had become.
I'm very pleased you're onto Album 3 of the Magnificent 7 Jim. It's interesting to hear your take on an album 54 years old, and I get much of what you say. It is very different when one has been listening to said album for 54 years and it has become engrained into the psyche of the listener!! Everyone's tastes are different of course, and I have always found this side possibly the least fantastic of the 14 sides, but Side 2 is very strong and 'Are you sitting comfortably' is a personal favourite. Great stuff!!!
Listen to the outro/fadeout of “Dear Diary”. The speaker says, “Somebody exploded an H-Bomb (nuclear) today, but it wasn’t anybody I knew”
First off, I think your comments on this album are spot on. The Moody Blues were basically my entry into Progressive Rock. Then, I read an album review of Nursery Cryme by the band Genesis in which the reviewer said Genesis were like the Moody Blues with teeth. That sounded interesting to me and I bought it along with the then new Foxtrot. Later, I bought an album by Van Der Graff Generator, Pawn Hearts, based on its cover being by the same artist as those great Genesis albums. I thought it was fantastic (if you haven’t reviewed it you should, Lemmings remains one of my all time favorite songs) and a guy I knew noticed Robert Fripp was a guest guitarist on the album and told me he played for a band called King Crimson, so I sought them out. I’m afraid I left the Moodies behind. Only occasionally listen to them now, mostly for nostalgia sake.
Ok watched it now…
Yeah, Tony Clarke was to the Moodies what George Martin was to the Beatles. If they wanted a studio effect or advice on arrangements or whatever, Tony was the man, and apparently it eventually led him to the brink of a nervous breakdown, and he stopped working with them after the Octave lp in 1978.
As i already said, side 2 is much more expansive, ambitious and meatier than side 1. That in turn led onto their next album, To Our Childrens Childrens Children (who by now are probably all Grandparents! 😳). That lp is my fave. The production is even more cavernous, the concept is even more grand (space travel, inspired by the moon landings), and the songs are all brilliant. After that, they supposedly scaled back the grandiosity (though you’d be hard pushed to notice), but that’s for another listen.
For the Moodies, the songs and the writing were more important than the instrumental virtuosity, though obviously Pinder’s work with the Tron was pioneering, and Hayward’s guitar is vastly underrated imho. So in some areas they were very influential, in others not, but as you mention, there were so many groups back then that threw new ingredients into the pot in that nascent proggy period.
I think you did Traffic’s Low Spark lp. Track back to their first 3 albums, Mr Fantasy, Traffic and John Barleycorn Must Die (ignore Last Exit which was a rag bag of stuff released in a period when they had split so Winwood could form Blind Faith with Clapton)
Also, you MUST check out Family! Specifically their first 2 lps, Music in a Dolls House and Family Entertainment. If the Moodies had a semi-castrated Joe Cocker as lead singer then that’s a small part of how Family sounded. Amazing band who should have been huge, but they got on the wrong side of US promoter Bill Graham so never made it over there.
Then there’s Spooky Tooth! Not one, but two absolutely gutbucket vocalists. There first two lps were staggeringly good!
Then Argent! Listen to Ring of Hands from 1971. One of the best albums of that year.
Then there’s Rare Bird…Curved Air…High Tide…Barclay James Harvest…Pete Brown and Piblokto…Van Der Graaf Generator…Egg…Soft Machine…and i haven’t mentioned any of the great Continental European bands.
This isn’t even the tip of the iceberg! 👍
7:36 gives me BTO guitar vibes slightly, cheers and good morning Jim
Good evening Jim,
They were at their peak when I was still in primary school. I only knew their biggest hit, Nights in white satin, back then.
I like that song but I avoided Moody Blues like the plague in my teenage years. I now know a few more songs, mainly because I heard those on the yearly top 1000 of all time in the Netherlands.
Very sixties music.
I like the first song.
2nd song: don’t really like it. 🥱
3rd song. Same.
Last song: same.
I like the Byrds, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, to name a few bands from the mid-sixties with this genre of music, a lot more than the Moody Blues. Much more energetic music than this.
I like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, King Crimson of course even more.
I think you will find the Moody Blues didn't do a whiter shade of pale.
@@davidlane2737 😂 I’m getting old. I’ll correct it, thanks.
I know what you mean , just enjoy the music 🎵
The Moody Blues had four or five core albums.
IMO this album treads water between the excellent two that preceded and followed it. It's got some great songs on it, but it's also got a few that feel like leftovers (the last two on side 1, especially). But the whole "The Voyage"/"The Dream" suite is one of the proggiest things the band ever did. So you can think of it as the Moodies' "Beatles For Sale" album. 😁 I think one of the main objectives with this one was to record songs they could actually pull off live, which Lost Chord and DoFP were sort of difficult to do.
I was given this album by a teacher in school, who'd picked me as a mentorship project. She gave me this, their album "To our children's children's children" and two KISS albums, Rock and Roll Over and Love Gun (it was the summer of 79, so I'd have been 13, at the time).
This album had a strong effect on me, the second MB did nothing for me, I found it un-listenable.
I was the perfect age to appreciate the Grunt Rock of the KISS albums, lol!
Haven’t watched yet so have no idea about your opinion of it.
This was the first album i ever bought that had a track on it which my mum liked 😳 (Lovely to See You).
Mind you, i didn’t let that put me off. As i’m sure others have already commented, side 1 is pretty lightweight compared with their previous lp. John Lodge’s songs here make Ride My See Saw seem like Wagner’s Ring Cycle by comparison. So Deep Within You was another Pinder song that The Four Tops gave a good kicking to. Ray Thomas does what Ray Thomas did…But! Side 2 is far meatier!
Are You Sitting Comfortably is gorgeous and mystical, while the Have You Heard suite is Pinder’s finest 8 or 9 minutes on record…I think…😁
You make a perceptive observation that the Moodies sound "coreographed", "polite" and they hold back and don't "go wild" like more modern performers would. They keep a certain reserve. Doubtless part of their culture, the times they lived in and their upbringing.
But there's one more factor that we remarked on back in the day. Listening to the Moodies was pleasant ... still pleasant if you'd had a beer ... certainly pleasant if you'd smoked a doobie. But importantly, if you dropped a tab and were "psychically vulnerable" you could trust the Moodies. They might express sadness but they wouldn't angrily blame others or point fingers. They wouldn't be self-absorbed ... for example, one song from 7th Sojourn is "You and Me". Never "Me and You". They would not evoke chaos.
You were safe in their hands because they were mindful of the (potential) state-of-mind of their target audience.
Rubbish.
It may have been seven.
the mighty Moody Blues were brought together by Divine Intervention!
This is a wonderful album. In fact, it was my first introduction to rock, when I was, 5 or 6.
Agree with your assessment. The Moodies are good without being great, enjoyable without provoking obsession, post-psychedelic proto-prog without being prog, clever enough to get a 2/2 though a first is beyond them, nearly but not quite. (I've used that phrase before and I'll probably use it again.) I know that some fans really do rate them but only occasionally do they get me punching the air. Having said that, plenty more good albums to explore, Jim. Keep it up.
Sorry but they are great, good?? What an insult!!! This isn't their best album, but is part of the 7 core albums from 67-72,as good as any band who at the time did not produce 7 albums running of this quality!their 'proper' prog album "To our children's children's children" is a better bet to listen to to be honest, then "seventh sojourn" from 1972👍😊
Just remember a handfull of good albums. Not sllwsys delivering good quality
Cover better than music
Modern music is all production. No talent at all from the artists.