I was never an ardent Moody Blues fan. I like “Stop” a lot, but that was recorded before their mushy spacey trippy phase (’67 to ’70). But two days ago while driving (what else?) I happened to listen to “Legend of a Mind”, the “Timothy Leary‘s dead” song, and portions of it got to me. Portions, not the whole. It’s such a crusty psychedelic timepiece thing — I can’t imagine any self-respecting Millennial or Zoomer not turning it off. But some of it seeped in.
GoodyVibe61 (posted on on 4.21.21): “So many of the British rock royalty started out with blues or rhythm-and-blues groups. They all seem to have a before-and-after story. The early editions of the Moody Blues and Pink Floyd were heavily blues-influenced. And groups such as the Yardbirds and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers can claim just about every British rock god as being one of their early members. I was amused to discover when I looked up the writers of ‘Stop’ that it was blues-rock legend Eric Burdon that passed on Justin Hayward‘s demos to the MB. And we shouldn’t forget where Denny Laine ended up — Wings!”
Posted on 4.21.21: My vocabulary isn’t sophisticated enough to describe the alternating tempos, sudden slowdowns and shifting rhythms in “Stop” (’66), a standout single from the Moody Blues and cowritten by Denny Laine and Justin Hayward. (Or was it Laine and Mike Pinder?)
The song reportedly reached #98 in the Billboard charts during April 1966 after getting lots of airplay on NYC AM rock radio (WABC, WNEW), and then kind of slipped away.
Relatively unknown to even hardcore MB fans — i.e., the ones who only know them from the ’67 to early ’70s period of Days of Future Passed (“Nights in White Satin”, Tuesday Afternoon”), In Search of the Lost Chord and On the Threshold of a Dream.
I know that a lot of breakthroughs happened in ’66, and this, in its own small way, was one of them.