Days of Future Passed (The Moody Blues, 1967)

While technically not the "first" Moody Blues album, Days of Future Passed would set the tone for the band until their breakup in 1973. Prior to this album, the band had already gone through a "soft" breakup with the departure of Denny Laine in 1966, coupled with the general instability of the bass position. Indeed, even the first recordings with Justin Hayward and John Lodge tacked pretty hard to the "old" style of R&B-influenced British Invasion. However at the same time, Hayward was imprinting his own more expansive writing style, and Mike Pinder was changing his style to match by incorporating the unwieldy mellotron in lieu (or on top) of piano, creating an ethereal, slightly warped atmosphere of chamber music and psych rock.

Meanwhile, financially, the group was a shambles, and contracted with Decca (under their new Deram imprint) to create a new rendition of Dvorak's New World Symphony. That plan lasted about a few seconds after the ink dried and the band was in the studio. In fact, the band and the London Festival Orchestra never performed together. The whole rock-meets-classical thing was a little ill-defined in 1967, with approaches varying from "Classical Gas" to Love Sculpture's "Sabre Dance" and more grandiose experiments like Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra and Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother Suite" still a few years away. The Moody Blues allowed the orchestra to provide the glue between songs, that, if left apart, actually don't sound very much alike. Those songs, however, provided the blueprint for the next batch of albums, exhibiting the songwriting skills and moods (no pun intended) of all five band members. Graeme Edge provides the poetry, recited by Pinder, who delivers two "spiritual" tracks. Hayward wrote the two big hits (one of which, "Nights in White Satin", would chart three times over twelve years), and Lodge began his pattern of writing a gloomy song and a rocker. Also two-faced was Ray Thomas, with a playful number and a dark song, something he would do on almost every album that followed.

Oddly, one of the seminal Moodies' tracks, "Legend of a Mind" was probably recorded close to these sessions, but didn't really fit anywhere. However, with the band realizing an orchestra was rapidly becoming superfluous as they handled more of the instrumentation themselves (plus the mellotron effectively acting as a pocket ensemble), they moved this to their next album, making it the crushing masterpiece of their second album, the psych classic In Search of the Lost Chord.

Days of Future Passed was one of the first albums I every owned, so I've always had a special place for it, even though I don't get back to it all that often. How many kids in 1991 were calling this their first album?