Moody Blues- Seventh Sojourn- Justin Hayward, John Lodge
Time, the true arbiter of art, has been most kind to the Moody Blues’ Seventh Sojourn over more than five decades since its November 1972 release, which cannot necessarily be said for all of the band’s releases up until then. When the subject of rock star excess and decadence is broached, the last band that could possibly come to mind would be Birmingham England’s Moody Blues. After all, singer/lead guitarist Justin Hayward, bass guitarist/ singer John Lodge, keyboardist Mike Pinder, the late flautist/singer Ray Thomas, and drummer Graeme Edge spent their first seven albums searching for Truth with a capital “T” through music, love, and Transcendental Meditation. Yet by the time their late 1972 album Seventh Sojourn became a worldwide #1 seller, the enormous success that had supplanted the Moody Blues’ abject poverty immediately prior to releasing 1967’s Days of Future Passed only five years earlier, had transformed their lives. But according to Justin Hayward, it wasn’t always for the better.
“I joined the band when I was nineteen,” confesses Hayward. “I did all of my growing up in the band. (By 24) I didn’t have any life (outside the Moody Blues). I didn’t exist as a person.”
John Lodge of the Moody Blues remembers vividly a powerful moment on what became the longest, highest-grossing concert tour to date in rock history in 1973-74. “We’d chartered our own Boeing 707 and hired a keyboard player to play (on the huge four-engine jet) in a disco floor…for just the five of us! We had our own butler. And I remember walking from the front of the 707 to the back restroom…past the organist playing, a bartender making drinks, past a sitting room with a fireplace, past two bedrooms. And when I was in the toilet I thought, ‘I’ve never been so lonely in my life! This is ridiculous. I don’t really want to be on this plane’ .”
Along with Jethro Tull’s #1 seller Thick As a Brick and Close to the Edge by YES, the third jewel in 1972’s triple crown of progressive rock, Seventh Sojourn, comes from the Moody Blues. Rock historians are quick to point out that, with the Beatles two years gone, the Rolling Stones , The Who, and Led Zeppelin were vying for the unofficial title of World’s Greatest Rock Band then. Yet it’s the Moody Blues who were equaled only by the Beatles in placing two albums in the Top Five sales chart simultaneously when Seventh Sojourn went to #1 in the U.S. in 1973, along with a grassroots radio revival of Days of Future Passed.
Moreover, the Moody Blues’ appeal was so worldwide that they embarked on the longest extended tour in history up to that time, revolutionizing the concert tour industry. However, the price of superstardom from such songs as “Isn’t Life Strange”,”Lost in a Lost World”,”For My Lady”,”New Horizons”, and “I’m Just a Singer in a Rock & Roll Band” turned out to be exceedingly high in karmic cost, as you will hear from the Blue Jays, Justin Hayward and John Lodge. –Redbeard</em
