Days of Future Passed

The Moody Blues

Universal

By Gene Sculatti

Ain't it funny how time slips away? For, what, 30 years now and 40 years after its release, the Moodies and this album and "Nights in White Satin" have been reliable joke stuff, a cultural-hipness litmus slip: We can all agree how pretentious those mellotrons and florid recitations are, right?

Maybe. But in reevaluating the work (the album is the first in Universal's reissue of the band's Deram Records catalog), we might keep two things in mind: context and our own after-market prejudices. It's easy to forget how fast the world turned in 1968. Pop music R&D was full of ideas, sending all sorts of fresh products to the shelves weekly: Cheap Thrills, Astral Weeks, Bookends, Beggar's Banquet, Electric Ladyland, White Light/White Heat, Dock of the Bay, Friends and 20/20 and Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle, John Wesley Harding, Music from Big Pink, the debuts of Creedence, Blood, Sweat & Tears, James Taylor, Steve Miller and Quicksilver, A Saucerful of Secrets.

Stakes were high, ambitions soaring. Surely there'd never been an LP that likened the day's progress to the ages of man, scoring its ruminations to harmonic pop tunes separated by surging symphonic washes. So it fell to Justin Hayward, Mike Pinder and pals and the London Festival Orchestra to try. And you know what? Days of Future Passed sounds just fine. Sure, lines like "I'm looking at myself/ Reflections of my mind" and some of the flutes'n'butterflies arranging is campy, but DOFP is also evocative of an age when even the most overreaching or undercooked concept might find traction. That uncorrupted optimism packs a lot of appeal, especially these days when hopefulness seems a minority position.

The hits are here: the alternately swooning and upswept "Tuesday Afternoon" (a Top 30 single and FM favorite in '68) and the rich melancholia of "Nights in White Satin" (not issued as a single until 1972, it spent two weeks at No. 2 on Billboard's Hot 100). But so are "Morning" and "Evening: Time to Get Away," two Brit-harmony gems with strong Hollies/Ivy League leanings, and "Peak Hour," which picks up every art-rock stitch between Tomorrow's "My White Bicycle" and early Yes. The verse melody on Pinder's "The Evening" ("Take a look out there/ Planets everywhere") uncannily resembles that of "Iron Man," and the orchestra's album-opener, "The Day Begins," sounds like Gordon Jenkins warming up for a Sinatra date in Capitol's Studio A.

Days of Future Passed is of its time. Aren't we all? Its time and mine intersected that summer of '68, on hot, dry Napa Valley afternoons when I'd visit my longtime pal Lee. Both of us had just graduated from college, me headed for grad school, him facing a call from everyone's favorite uncle because he'd gotten an even lower draft lottery number than me. His response: throw on this album, puff some stuff and get out his paints. By the time I got there, pre-sunset shadows had crept across the valley and pastel abstractions of blues, pale greens and pinks had stretched across the canvas (Lee's work always reminded me of more accomplished versions of this album's cover, with the same dreamy intensity and color sense). You could hear "Tuesday Afternoon" coming through the screen door in the cooling day.

Good times, those, and they're the first thoughts that came to mind when I put this album on. Lee's gone now (natural causes, not 'Nam) and much missed. The summer pot paintings probably wound up as landfill decades ago, and I haven't been back to the valley in years. But Days of Future Passed is still here. If you need it to be, it's a vivid remembrance of things past. And a reminder of how pleasurable time spent with music can be--anytime, anywhere.