Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Indeed. Songs like Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” “Withering Tree,” “Heaven Is in Your Mind,” “Smiling Phases,” and “(Roamin’ Thru the Gloamin’ With) Forty Thousand Headmen” were cinematic rock tunes (with blues, soul, and folk twists) engineered by the legendary Eddie Kramer (Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin), which were undoubtedly informed by Sgt. Pepper’s.

  “Mainly thanks to the Beatles, albums and experimental studio production were seen as being the cutting edge of music: as a more mature and autonomous medium for serious work,” says drummer Chris Cutler (Henry Cow, Art Bears).

  “Lennon and McCartney are like Adam and Eve, and the rest of us have been begot by them,” says Dennis DeYoung. “What is it that we did that ... [the Beatles] didn’t do? I may have missed it, but I think they pretty much did everything. The rest of us figured out what scraps we could get onto our own plates after that.”

  PIPERS AT THE GATES OF ABBEY ROAD

  “The Beatles were around the studios when we were making The Piper at the Gates of Dawn at Abbey Road,” says early Pink Floyd and Syd Barrett comanager Peter Jenner. “The Beatles were down in studio three and we were in studio two. They were making Sgt. Pepper’s. Rumor had it that both Lennon and McCartney, or one of them, were at the Roundhouse gig [Floyd played], and I dare say that they heard stuff wafting out of our studio and we heard stuff wafting out of their studio. Then we were summoned in to hear a bit of a remix session.

  “We went in like schoolboys to visit our so-called idols,” continues Jenner. “George Martin and George Harrison were both there, and Lennon was working away on something, fussing on ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!’ I think.”

  It’s impossible to know who was feeding what to whom—music and experimentation were simply in the air. Syd Barrett’s altogether eerie, childlike, paranoid, nineteenth-century children’s literature—inspired imagery, crawling with tiny people (as in a Richard Dadd painting), dominated songs such as “Astronomy Domine,” “Lucifer Sam,” “The Gnome,” “Interstellar Overdrive,” “Matilda Mother,” and “Take Up Thy Stethoscope and Walk” on The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, which roamed corners of the mind—a mind in the prestages of disintegration and fragmentation—that not even the Beatles would enter or inspect.

  The music of the period, like the nineteenth-century literature that a generation of Brits were brought up on, was a psychedelic experience in and of itself. “Lewis Carroll and . . . Edward Lear were big influences on our generation,” says Jenner. “Our parents turned us on to those books because it had an impact on their childhood. Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll had a very important impact on British culture. There’s something else for you to write about: Without Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, would we have gotten Monty Python?”

  What is creepy and perhaps disturbing is the thought that Barrett wasn’t self-conscious about his music. Meaning, it’s difficult to know for sure whether what we’re hearing offers a small window into Barrett’s psychosis or is merely the product of a playful mind.

  “Syd was really singing a kind of blues, wasn’t he?” asks Anthony Stern, filmmaker and friend to Barrett in life. “The music possessed an inherent moan. And, yet, ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ is not something that comes from suffering. It’s something that was coming from wild abandonment and a love of life that pulses with the rhythm of nature or outer space.”

  Barrett’s mind radiated scenarios most of the free world hadn’t even imagined. Floyd was compelled to match these lyrical visuals with auditory colors. Barrett was probing inner space, and he and his bandmates in Floyd were attempting to reveal the results of this examination through swatches of sonic texture, the use of panning techniques to offer a panoramic “view” of the music, oddly arranged vocal noises, and strange guitar feedback and string plucks.

  “When you find you can’t do something technically perfect, you’re almost forced, out of self-esteem and self pride, to go into something abstract,” says Stern. “When you can’t paint like Rembrandt or draw like Picasso, you tend to go happily into abstraction, and you can amaze people.”

  THE MOODY BLUES

  “The record we liked most and were inspired by was an American record by a group called Cosmic Sounds, which is called The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, on Elektra, when everything you bought on Elektra was really good,” says the Moody Blues’ Justin Hayward. (Paul Beaver was the creative force behind the Zodiac project and employed the Moog for this 1967 release.) “We were playing some songs from Days of Future Passed onstage much earlier in 1967, and we recorded a few, including ‘Nights in White Satin,’ for the BBC some considerable time before our Deram [a subsidiary of Decca] recording. Although we had the idea of writing songs representing parts of the day before the release of The Zodiac, I would still say that this record influenced the way we recorded Days.”

  Songs such as “Nights in White Satin” and “Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)” were written in accordance with the band’s “a day in the life” stage theme. “During this transition period, we played two sets, because we did our old songs in the first set and the Days songs in the second,” says Hayward.

  Days of Future Passed is a landmark recording, marked by one of the first prominent attempts at fusing true symphonic music with rock. “That idea, actually, was Decca’s,” says Hayward. “We were just lucky to be able to have an opportunity to record. Decca wanted a demonstration record to try to help sell their stereo systems, and we didn’t have a recording contract, so they approached us because we owed them money and they wanted to recoup on sessions they had paid for that had done nothing. So we got a lousy deal. But we got to record our own stuff. Peter Knight, [conductor with the London Festival Orchestra], took some of our themes, and it was very much a stereo context. Unbeknownst to them and us, it coincided with the rise of stereo radio, and the stuff was perfect for it.”

  “We were all planning and working toward this morning-and-afternoon concept, and someone from the label came along with Dvofiák’s New World Symphony,” says drummer Graeme Edge. “We just said, ‘Well, we don’t know.’ In fact, we had recorded a couple of the songs we had written for the BBC, just live onstage, to put out on the radio, because the musicians’ union had restricted needle time on the air so they needed pop music that was recorded live.... I remember that was the first time we had heard ‘Nights in White Satin’ recorded. The version we were doing then was nothing like the one we wound up with.”

  The Moodys’ symphonic approach was a new direction for the band, a far cry from the blue-eyed R&B the band had been recording in the mid-1960s.

  The Moodys had even backed legendary Chicago blues artist Sonny Boy Williamson II when the harp player/singer came through Britain. (He used to call the band “Muddy Boots.”) “We were playing blues all the time, and that’s why ‘Blues’ is in the title [of the band],” says Edge, who was a member of Gerry Levene and the Avengers prior to joining the R&B Preachers, forerunner to the Moodys. “But we suddenly started to feel a little phony, because we’d never seen a field of cotton, let alone picked cotton out of one. We weren’t quite sure what a smokestack was—you know, ‘Smokestack Lightnin’.’”

  If the Moodys hadn’t changed their musical direction, they might have wound up being an interesting footnote in the record books. “I suppose people in life always look for watershed moments, and I suppose the watershed for the Moody Blues was that we became part of the progressive rock avalanche,” says bassist/vocalist John Lodge. “At the time we thought we were writing and recording our very own personal music with no regard for anyone else. We are always looking for new avenues to explore, I think.”

  Thanks to the production skills of producer Tony Clarke, Days of Future Passed was the first in a long line of Moody records that used cross-fading, a technique through which one skillfully blends a song into another, giving the sensation that the album is one continuous piece of music.

  This “cinematic feel,” as Clarke dubs it, produced by the cross-fading technique
, was the perfect method by which to capture the feel of the band’s stage show in the late 1960s.

  “[Clarke] was a huge influence for two reasons,” says Edge. “He was as young and enthusiastic as we were. Don’t forget, he started off as a house producer for Decca, and he was the only one who was young like us. We could have been stuck with some real traditional guys, shall we call them? Part of his influence was the fact that he was open to hearing our ideas. He would say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we’ll give it a try.”’

  The rising swells of woodwind flourishes and sweeping string passages coupled with Edge’s sometimes trippy/sometimes deep spoken-word poetry, studio experimentation, the layered vocal harmonies, Hayward’s ability to smoothly inject emotion into his vocal delivery, Ray Thomas’s breathy flute playing, sonic elements entering the stereo image at interesting points in the mix, and the use of the Mellotron create a lush (often Romantic) musical palette that would become (less the orchestral instruments) a Moody Blues hallmark across records from 1967 through 1972 such as In Search of the Lost Chord, To Our Children’s Children’s Children, On the Threshold of a Dream, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, A Question of Balance, and Seventh Sojourn.

  Hayward concedes that it was the Mellotron that perhaps added the most depth and dimension to the band’s music. In some ways Hayward and the Moodys were lost without the Mellotron. “I had no idea how to open ‘Forever Afternoon,’” says Hayward. “The Mellotron came to the rescue. Tony Clarke really loved it too, and it gave us that dimension that freed us in a way from the restrictions of thinking about counterpoint to the guitar or some sort of balance to the guitar sound and drums. I love that instrument with a passion.”

  Days of Future Passed was a success (reaching number twenty-seven on the British charts in early 1968). “Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)” was a Top 20 British hit, while “Nights in White Satin” was a Top 20 British hit (and reentered both the U.S. and British charts in 1972 in the Top 10). For the next five years, the Moodys, before disappearing for a few years (only to launch a tremendous comeback in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Octave and Long Distance Voyager) would rack up hit after hit while perfecting their cross-fade/suite approach to writing and recording.

  “I wish I could say there was some master plan about the Moodys,” says Hayward, “but it was sort of a series of blundering coincidences and accidents that kept us going, really, through the first ten years of the band.”

  The Moody Blues’ 1967 symphonic rock offering, Days of Future Passed.

  SWITCHED ON ...

  As music was expanding, so were the tools to make that music. The imaginations of musicians grew (either organically or by some other means), and technology met the challenges of catering to creative and groundbreaking artists in the mid- and late 1960s and early 1970s.

  With roots in 1950s sci-fi sound effects, the work of Louis and Bebe Barron as heard in the film Forbidden Planet, and electronic experimentation in avant-garde composition (though organized attempts had been made to synthesize electronic noise as early as the nineteenth century), the emerging synthesizer field turned the keyboard into a lead instrument. An entire commercial industry grew around the concepts realized by trailblazers and geniuses such as Don Buchla and, most famously, Robert Moog, on opposite ends of the country.

  “Bob Moog rejected the idea of a polyphonic keyboard, because he said it was like an organ,” explains Tom Rhea, an associate professor in the Department of Electronic Production and Design at Berklee College of Music, who worked at Moog in the 1970s. “The fact that it was modular and monophonic was critical, and that was a certain amount of novelty in and of itself. It forced keyboard players to rethink their art and craft, because keyboard players had been notorious, of course, for being the person in the band who comps and fills. They were not the sexy guy with the guitar at the front of the band. They were stationary and a lot of things like that. Then the monophonic expression came, and that meant the keyboardist started headlining bands.”

  By harnessing basic sound waveforms to produce sound effects via ring modulator and oscillator circuitry—later on the actual representations or approximations of instruments—and bending pitch in the same way an organic or acoustic instrument can, synthesizers were a viable new development for musicians. One could be a synthesizer player but not necessarily a piano player.

  Church organist and electronic experimenter Paul Beaver (who was using the theremin, among other devices, for film scores) and session guitarist Bernie Krause bought an early Moog synth and became sales reps for Moog “because nobody else could teach and play the instrument,” remembers Krause. “Interesting story: I was playing guitar, just kind of eking out an existence. I had read about an early model of the Moog, a test model of the synth that was used on a commercial for American Express, which was done with seven seconds of music, and the guy supposedly got paid very well. I was asking, ‘Why am I working in the studio with a guitar, making sixty dollars an hour, when I could make serious money playing a few notes on the synthesizer?’”

  At first Beaver and Krause met with resistance from the industry toward the Moog synthesizer. Most people didn’t understand its applications let alone its implications. Some did, of course, but they were few and far between.

  “Paul Beaver went around for a year in 1966 with a synthesizer showing various people what it could do,” says Krause. “We couldn’t even get anyone to allow us to do a demo with the synthesizer then. What led to our success was really a conspiracy of events. We set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, with the last three hundred bucks that we had to our name. While record label guys—Jac Holzman, Clive Davis, [and] Mo Austin and Joe Smith at Warner Brothers and Reprise—were vying to get artists signed to their label, these artists, in turn, saw a booth at the festival away from all of that, and we sold about ten or fifteen synthesizers. So we had gone from nothing to having sold these for which we got a commission. These were fifteen thousand dollars a pop. The problem was that the artists were so stoned that they couldn’t play them. Not only would we get the commission for the synthesizers, but later on we would get commission for dates. So we went from doing nothing to working eighty hours a week in the studio in London and New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco.”

  Carol Kaye, veteran session bassist with an enviable list of credits (from the Beach Boys to Jerry Goldsmith) remembers seeing Beaver use the synthesizer on dates in the 1960s.

  “It was unusual to use a synthesizer on recordings,” remembers Kaye. “Paul’s using the synthesizer was remarkable and an omen of the future, though none of us thought that at that time; it was just ‘something new.’ Studios were big on trying ‘new’ things for a while, then discarding those ideas for newer ideas. But after a few years, I realized just how groundbreaking Paul’s work was at the time.”

  With releases such as Ragnarok Electronic Funk, In a Wild Sanctuary and Gandharva, featuring saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and guitarist Mike Bloomfield (among others) and recorded in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Beaver & Krause used the synthesizers in an assortment of musical settings, from slight funk rock to gospel to all-out sonic experimentation.

  Wendy Carlos (formerly Walter Carlos) had worked with electronics pioneer Robert Moog on developing the Moog synthesizer. With producer Rachel Elkind-Tourre, Carlos recorded the groundbreaking 1968’s Switched-On Bach, which showed the world what a Moog synthesizer could do. There were others, of course. Dick Hyman, for instance, with his Moog: The Electric Eclectics of . . . record, as well as the musical team Beaver & Krause, not to mention the Doors, the Monkees, and, of course, the Beatles, who used the Moog on Abbey Road.

  “George Harrison bought one, but he could never figure out what the fuck he was doing,” says Krause. “If it hadn’t been for George Martin, the Beatles producer, who I also sold the synthesizer to and spent time [teaching it to him], it probably wouldn’t have seen the light of day either. I worked with Harrison, but I didn’t wo
rk with the Beatles. Martin was really the one who understood it and performed on it. He was doing electronic tape music at the BBC, back in the mid- and late 1950s, long before he met the Beatles.”

  Later, when the portable (somewhat affordable) Minimoog, with pitch and modulation wheels, was unveiled in 1971, keyboardists everywhere had access to amazing sounds, opening up a whole new chapter in music (and music retailing) that wouldn’t be challenged until Yamaha released its DX-7 in the early 1980s with manufacturers’ presets. (ARP designed their own portable, compact synth, the Odyssey line, based on the ARP 2600.) While this was great for a mass market, that thrill of discovering and customizing sounds, all the research and development a musician undertakes—something the early progressive rock synthesizer users did well—was virtually lost.

  “The Minimoog and the modular Moog and ARP and whoever was doing voltage-controlled equipment where you rolled your own sound, that was a radical move,” says Moog vet Tom Rhea. “Monophony was a radical move. The DX-7 represented a move toward the center. It was a regression, in a way. The Minimoog was away from the mainstream. It was in keeping with the natural flow of technology.

  “The thing about the Moog is that it brought to mind instrumental music but not a particular instrument,” Rhea continues. “It was like an unknown instrument. That’s why it was new. Progressive rock and the synthesizer were made for each other because it required a certain amount of cerebral approach to things to even get into synthesizers.”

  Michael Ochs Archives/ Getty Images)

  PINK FLOYD