I know many fans rate the first seven albums as their best work. When Mike Pinder left the group the Moody's lost his voice, the mellotron, and his spiritual writing. They were still a force when Pinder was replaced with former" Yes" keyboarder Patrick Moraz. Let's here your opinions of the music before and after Mike Pinder...
The core seven are great! The 80s albums up to and including The Other Side Of Life are good pop albums, but not nearly as engaging for me. None of their later albums do anything for me. Octave has some nice moments and is the missing link between the core 7 and their 80s pop albums.
yeah, I believe there were a couple Pinder songs on Octave." Had to fall in love" was one of best songs their on Octave but was written by JH...
It's easy to make a generalization, but it's a lot more than that. Recall that mike was with the group past the big 7. He was on Ovtave which, while a fine album, was nowhere as good as the following Long Distance Voyager. So while as a general rule, the Mike albums were better, that wasn't always the case and the difference in general is more attributable to musical trends than the presence or absence of Mike.
Really like the core 7 albums. Have come to enjoy Octave. But... My favorite Moodies album is Long Distance Voyager, and it’s not even close. The songs are tuneful, without being lightweight. The production is clear and uncluttered. And the band obviously had something to prove. The addition of Patrick Moraz obviously reenergized all involved. A well deserved number one album in the US. In retrospect, while disappointing at the time, The Present was a fairly strong follow up. After this burst, The Moody Blues pretty much became Justin & John searching for a hit. Strange Times was a partial return to form.
I love the first 6 albums with Pinder. Not very big on Seventh Sojourn and even less on Octave, though ... I am a Moraz fan in general, and did like LDV and The Present pretty well, but not as much as those first 6!
That was another "couldn't begin with him, couldn't continue with him" situation. While "Long Distance Voyager" was a fine release, Pinder's absence was immediately felt and became jarring over time.
When the Group lost Mike Pinder they lost the spiritual, cosmic, transcendental guidance that became the theme of the core 7...not to mention the melotron
The sleeve notes on the Octave remaster go into this in great detail. Basically, he was never really bothered about getting back together and quit half way through making the album. He's on the cover but subsequent publicity shots for the album seem to have airbrushed him out.
I always feel that Octave is five solo artists using the Moodies' name rather than any sort of band effort. Once Mike leaves there's a definite shift and it really becomes the Justin and John show. Long Distance Voyager and The Present are both terrific albums but then it all goes a bit pop-eighties and I lose interest.
Yeah... September Snow is an underappreciated end of career return to form. Too bad they couldn't have done more like that at the end.
I'm a Pinder fan but Moraz was brilliant on Long Distance Voyager and The Present. Shame on the Moodies for marginalizing his contributions and trying to rewrite history.
While I would generally agree that the albums with him, as a whole, are stronger than those without, I agree with the sentiment above that the difference has far more to do with evolving musical trends and the musical tastes of all the main writers, rather than the presence or absence of Mike alone. I find LDV and The Present to be even stronger than several "core 7 " albums, though what follows, especially after Sur La Mer, was just terrrible, IMHO. But I don't think Mike's presence would have saved them, for two main reasons. First, his own solo album was no better than any of the later MB albums, and in some ways worse. It's not as if he would have been writing mellotron-drenched epics throughout the '80s and '90s. Second, look how little impact Ray had on the group from The Other Side of Life onward--some albums had no tracks by him at all (and none had more than one or two), and he was basically only there to trot out his old tracks in concert, which may have been what would have happened to Mike as well. Like Ray, Mike seemed to have lost interest/inspiration, and the kind of cosmic material he was best at had become very unfashionable by the mid-seventies (again, even his solo album has only one track even remotely in that vein).
Excellent assessment. However, Pinders mellotron and Harward's haunting voice would sound great a 100 years from now. I know their music had to change with the times but it's not only their loss but our loss. A collaboration of the two would have been nice but the other Blue Jay, John Lodge would have felt slighted. Something happened along the way we and may never know what may have derailed a reunion. Mike was there for The RRHOF . However there was no speech and no playing songs at the short reunion...Gees, even Frye and Henly buried the hatchet at their induction, all be it was in the back of Don Felder's head...
