Moody Mood
In the summer of 1970, I was visiting lovely Camp Drum in Watertown, NY, courtesy of the US Army Reserve. We had two weeks of annual training, highlighted by racing 2 1/2 ton trucks up the thruway and back (they had a dual-range automatic shift, so anyone could drive them). The rest of the time was spent doing typically useless army things, including a field outing involving camping in the woods. Well, the first night up we met a corps of doctors from Connecticut and struck up a pleasant acquaintance. They suggested we show up at the next sick call; we did, and they kindly certified a dozen or so of us as suffering from severe allergies and therefore restricted from field ops. Hoohah!!
Our CO, whose own reviews were impacted by his unit's field performance, was not amused and, frustrated by his inability to override the MDs, restricted us all to barracks, which was fine from our pov - Camp Drum wasn't exactly a resort and the barracks was as good a place to pass time as any other. I don't remember the device's identity, but one of the guys had brought along a portable record player and a bunch of records; the hit of the barracks was the Moody Blues' To Our Children's Children's Children.
The Moodys were a great headphone band and did their best work in the studio. Their production involved layers of early synthesizers (mellotrons?), lots of timbres, and various sound effects. They wove this together into naively pretentious tracts on the nature of reality in a kind of anticipatory New Age framework. It was psychedelia without the edge, a series of highly romantic hallucinations framed by album covers that were often full-size (front and back making a continuous picture). Their first 7 albums are a guilty pleasure, and I've still got the vinyl.
That said, I never replaced them when CD's came along. Don't know why, exactly, but I just didn't get to it. OTOH, recently while strolling the racks, something triggered a moody mood and I picked up The Best of the Moody Blues, which I've been listening to this afternoon. On headphones! The music is more an exercise in nostalgia for me at this point than anything else, although some of the songs hold up even without their context (their albums really were capital-c Concepts, intended to be played from end to end, although they did release some successful singles). The album also has the pre-conceptual Go Now, a good piece of British Invasion pop that holds up well. Too much filler from their later stuff, though (post Seventh Sojourn), and I doubt I'll be giving it much play. Maybe I should pick up In Search of the Lost Chord...
Our CO, whose own reviews were impacted by his unit's field performance, was not amused and, frustrated by his inability to override the MDs, restricted us all to barracks, which was fine from our pov - Camp Drum wasn't exactly a resort and the barracks was as good a place to pass time as any other. I don't remember the device's identity, but one of the guys had brought along a portable record player and a bunch of records; the hit of the barracks was the Moody Blues' To Our Children's Children's Children.
The Moodys were a great headphone band and did their best work in the studio. Their production involved layers of early synthesizers (mellotrons?), lots of timbres, and various sound effects. They wove this together into naively pretentious tracts on the nature of reality in a kind of anticipatory New Age framework. It was psychedelia without the edge, a series of highly romantic hallucinations framed by album covers that were often full-size (front and back making a continuous picture). Their first 7 albums are a guilty pleasure, and I've still got the vinyl.
That said, I never replaced them when CD's came along. Don't know why, exactly, but I just didn't get to it. OTOH, recently while strolling the racks, something triggered a moody mood and I picked up The Best of the Moody Blues, which I've been listening to this afternoon. On headphones! The music is more an exercise in nostalgia for me at this point than anything else, although some of the songs hold up even without their context (their albums really were capital-c Concepts, intended to be played from end to end, although they did release some successful singles). The album also has the pre-conceptual Go Now, a good piece of British Invasion pop that holds up well. Too much filler from their later stuff, though (post Seventh Sojourn), and I doubt I'll be giving it much play. Maybe I should pick up In Search of the Lost Chord...
posted by DJStan at 2:03 PM
2 Comments:
Um . . . I'd put this in the wrong place. Distracted maybe by Patti Labelle doing a killer "Alphabet Song" on Sesame Street.
Looooove the Moody Blues. Maybe more for nostalgia than anything. I usually listened through headphones.
One of my uncles, through a fellow Marine in the late sixties, became acquainted with PDQ Bach. I guess some of what you learn in Basic is worthwhile.
I learned three things in Basic that I incorporated into my rules to live by:
(1) All stupid jobs/tasks are equal; no stupid job/task is any stupider than any other.
(2) When you have time off, leave the work area. If you stick around, you're available - time off or not.
(3) If you see something that you think you might need at some future undefined time, take it. Don't wait until you need it, because it may not be around then.
That's about it. Oh, I also learned to enjoy mass jogging and chanting; we'd do two miles every day before breakfast - the chants were more vulgar than gregorian, but the rhythmic breathing required could bring on a pretty good semi-trance state. And strangely enough, I developed a liking for a life regulated by music. Bugles aren't exactly monastery bells, but I actually found a simple sort of pleasure in the day's set of calls.
Not that I continued jogging and chanting when I got back - or bought a bugle call alarm clock (I'll bet someone makes them, too).
Post a Comment
<< Home