Ray Thomas – Spotify

We listened to “Days Of Future Passed” on the drive to college. It was one of, if not the only, albums my father could tolerate, a man who was a huge music fan who never cottoned to rock and roll.

It was not like today, when hip-hop bears little resemblance to what came before, other than the borrowing of a riff, although that era is past, we all grew up with classical music and show tunes and had a soft spot in our heart for them.

And speaking of that soft spot, I don’t think the Moody Blues could make it today. Because they filled a niche that no longer exists. One wherein you sat in your bedroom alone, disconnected from a world that was oftentimes unsatisfying, and basked in this mellifluous sound. Now everybody’s networked and connected, no one is really that out there, and if you are, you’re put down, whereas that was our link back then, we were alienated outsiders, now everybody wants to be an insider and even nerds are trumpeted, but not back then.

We all knew “Go Now,” the Denny Laine-sung song that flew up the chart that still works today.

We’ve already said goodbye

Sounds so quaint now, but it wasn’t back then, then it was dark and meaningful, like life. The truth is people haven’t changed, despite protestations by so-called winners and social networking preeners, people have no clue, they’re feeling it out as they go along, faking it until they make it. And this experimentation and ethos used to be embodied in music, which is why rock became so big, but Reagan legitimized greed and MTV made everybody a visual star and…

It was never quite the same again.

There was no London Festival Orchestra, just a made-up name, but that does not mean people did not embrace “Days Of Future Passed,” it featured two instant smashes, even though it took years for “Nights In White Satin” to become ubiquitous, but I always preferred “Tuesday Afternoon,” speaking of haunting, this is why I lay on my bed and listened to music incessantly, the sound was rich, a magic carpet that carried you away to a better place, if people could make this music I wanted to get on board.

And on that album, two songs were written and sung by Ray Thomas, “Another Morning” and “Twilight Time.” “Another Time” was straight out of “Peter and the Wolf,” we knew this sound, now it was filtered into a new generation. My father would sit in the front seat as the sound emanated from the Norelco cassette deck, the one in my hand, not in the dash, and nod his head and sing along, what more could you ask for, that was nearly the entire extent of our father/son bonding.

And Thomas’s “Twilight Time” represented the magic hour well, it was after the brightness of the day.

But the next Moodys album I purchased was “On The Threshold Of A Dream.”

After breaking through the Moody Blues went on their own hejira, in their own direction, there were opuses with no singles and you either were a member of the club or you were not, and in that era if you didn’t buy the albums you were not, you just heard about them via clued-in friends.

“On The Threshold Of A Dream” had a gatefold cover and a lyric sheet and I’d lie on the floor and listen and read and the track I liked most was “Send Me No Wine,” and “Never Comes The Day” almost as much, but the song that creeped me out, that affected me the most, was “Dear Diary.” This was before blogs, when people still did that, write in diaries. And the track was melancholy and weird and all together different from the rest of the record. I had to know more, that’s when I read about Ray Thomas, with his moustache and flute, was he really in this band? Yes, he was, FROM THE VERY BEGINNING!

And there was an almost equally bizarre song on the second side by Thomas, “Lazy Day.” This music was made in a vacuum, sans influences, it cared not a whit whether you were involved or not, you could open the door and enter its universe or not.

But if you did…

And just before I went to college for the very first time, the Moodys released their breakthrough LP, “A Question Of Balance.” In retrospect, it was the weakest of the Hayward/Lodge era to that point, but the title cut was a radio smash, finally. But its best song was a Thomas composition, “And The Tide Rushes In.” He was a master of this meaningful mood, this was less strange than his compositions on “On The Threshold Of A Dream,” but still maintained that mood.

You keep looking for someone
To tell your troubles to

Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? So simple, yet so right.

And now I was in college, ensconced on the third floor of Hepburn Hall, all boys, just before the advent of coed dorms. And during winter term, right now, January of ’71, I made friends with the stoner crowd, when that was people who imbibed instead of talked slowly and were out of it, and we’d meet every evening in Dave McCormick’s room on the second floor and…

Dave had the missing albums, “In Search of the Lost Chord’ and “To Our Children’s Children’s Children.”

In retrospect, it’s all about “In Search of the Lost Chord.” It had little traction upon its release in ’68, but it was a whole concept that once hooked you were completely engrossed by. Ultimately, John Lodge’s “Ride My See-Saw” gained ubiquity, upon which Thomas contributed vocals, all members of the group but the drummer, Graeme Edge, did, but the key cut on the entire LP was something entitled “Legend of a Mind.”

Timothy Leary’s dead
No, no, he’s outside looking in

Now you’ve got to picture it. We’re a group of teenagers sitting in an overheated room in sub-freezing weather high on dope with the zilch dripping down and this six and a half minute opus was the soundtrack. The threshold to acceptance was barely there, and once you were enraptured you were taken away via the movements, singing “Timothy Leary,” drifting along with the music when dope was still used mostly to aid your understanding and appreciation of the music. This is one of those cuts I think the younger generation would cotton to if they just heard it. It makes no reference to the top forty, it’s in its own world, and when it hits the instrumental and surfs the zeitgeist you’re flying above the earth, twisting and turning along with it, back when music wasn’t in your face but in your pocket, a magical elixir that could change your life, no wonder we all followed it into this business.

Thomas also had another winner on “In Search of the Lost Chord,” fans all know “Dr. Livingstone, I Presume.”

We’re all looking for someone

Now everybody tells us they have the answers, but back then the musicians did not, which drew us ever closer to them. They understood the game better than we did, we were jumping through the hoops of school, they’d jettisoned the system for an alternative world, the idea of selling out to the corporation was anathema, after all…

I’ve still not found what I’m looking for

“To Our Children’s Children’s Children” is a forgotten masterpiece, incredibly solid, sans hits, but you can play it from beginning to end without lifting the needle and when you do it’s a revelation. I love “Candle Of Life,” it’s probably my favorite on the LP, no one does this anymore, meaningful without being sappy, especially a song that’s not a single.

Something you can’t hide
Says you’re lonely

And we were. There was no Tinder, no dating apps, we went out to bars and clubs and were ignored, all we had to get us through were our records.

But the song that I think of when I think of “To Our Children’s Children’s Children” is Thomas’s “Eternity Road.”

Traveling eternity road
What will you find there
Carrying your heavy load
Searching to find a piece of mind

We were searching, that was what the sixties and seventies were all about. Today life is too harsh, people play it safe, otherwise you can’t make it.

Thomas also wrote and sang “Floating” on “To Our Children’s Children’s Children,” another solid track on a solid album.

Ultimately, Thomas wrote and sang “Our Guessing Game” and “Nice To Be Here” on 71’s “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” but the bloom was off the rose, they were completely serviceable, the latter better than that, but now it wasn’t so much about the albums but the hits, and Justin Hayward had one in “The Story In Your Eyes,” it eclipsed the rest of the record.

And “Seventh Sojourn” continued this paradigm. There was a modest hit, “Isn’t Life Strange” and an even bigger one, “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band),” which the Moody Blues really were not, they were their own paradigm, and not exactly filler, but nothing as magical as what had come before. Thomas’s “For My Lady” was one of the strongest tracks on the LP, but I can’t say that I played it incessantly.

And then I stopped, just as they did. They realized it was over, the well had run dry, and the band broke up and didn’t reunite until ’78 with “Octave.” I was done, but I still listened to the old records, they were burned into my brain.

And now Ray Thomas is dead.

Pinder left the band long ago.

Thomas stopped touring around the millennium. And Hayward and Lodge needed the name to continue, so they did, along with Edge, and there’s a band plying the boards but somehow the magic’s been lost, if only the Moody Blues had all died in a plane crash, they’d be legendary today, living kills your career. Look at John Sebastian, who’s also lost his voice, when are we gonna acknowledge the greatness of his work?

But the Moodys not only had a long run, but they started their own genre, which I’m hesitant to label, “symphonic rock,” “art rock,” “classical rock”? Who cares, but they were not limited by trends, they went their own way, and won.

And Thomas was and is overshadowed by the giants Hayward and Lodge became. The dignified guy who played the flute… But in hindsight, he was an integral member of the Moody Blues, and provided leavening no other member could, his compositions were not only for royalties, they added flavor.

But now he’s gone.

But he was 76. That seems young today, when people regularly live into their nineties. But not everybody. Forget those who die via misadventure, the Big C is always lurking, the older you live the greater the odds something’s gonna get you.

And it got Ray Thomas, mere months before the Moodys’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But that institution does not matter, it’s the music that does. But having said that, so many undeserving acts got inducted before they did, thank god this wrong has been righted.

You see when you break the mold people don’t like it. What category do you put the band in? You can’t see Ray Thomas destroying hotel rooms. There was little personal mystery, few shenanigans, only music.

But that was enough.

I’m not sure if the Moody Blues will ever have a renaissance, they really haven’t even gotten their victory lap, but if you were a fan, and they were legion, the band holds a special place in your heart, there was no competition, they set your mind free, took you on an adventure, AND IT ALL SOUNDED SO GOOD!

Ray Thomas was not a footnote.

The Moody Blues were not an also-ran.

They were part of the fabric when music drove the culture and ruled the world.

And in the eyes and ears of those who were there…

THEY STILL DO!

THE HUFFPO SPOTIFY STORY

Are you getting this in your inbox? Some nobody named Blake Morgan who insists Spotify is screwing musicians wrote a letter that was posted on the HuffPo and then taken down and this screed is now being tossed around online like it’s the Ten Commandments, or at least the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Morgan’s complaint is that Spotify doesn’t know what its business is, he seems to become completely unaware that distribution is a business unto itself, very profitable in fact, and believes that Spotify doesn’t pay fealty to the music it traffics in and the streaming service is dying and is going to go to the government for help. And the reason you’re reading nothing more about this is not because the truth is being squelched, but no one in power has time to waste swatting irrelevant ignoramuses down.

Just because you have an opinion does not mean it’s entitled to be amplified.

Yes, Spotify loses money. But a lot of cash has been reinvested in expansion. Ever hear of an internet company? And talk to the recording industry, Spotify single-handedly turned around their fortunes. Bitching about Spotify is like bitching about cellphones. Bring back landlines, think of all those handset manufacturers whose business was eviscerated!

But I’m not gonna waste my time going any further, all I’ll say is it’s the unsuccessful and uninformed who get up in arms about this stuff, because they’re not busy making money on their careers.

And there’s plenty of money in Spotify, I point you to the Manatt graphic on compensation, read it and get up-to-date on royalties. And speaking of up-to-date, the below graphic is from 2016, streaming royalties are only going up as more people subscribe, Spotify just hit 70 million.

U.S. Music Streaming Royalties Explained

As for being a cheerleader for Spotify… Who wouldn’t be? CD stores? It’s growing the revenue pot. Its value has increased to nearly $20 billion. Is Lucian Grainge complaining…

OF COURSE NOT!

WIXEN

The $1.6 billion lawsuit.

There was a January 1, 2018 deadline in proposed legislation saying if you didn’t sue by then, you forfeited the right to compensation. THAT’S why Wixen filed suit, he wants to keep his options open.

This is not going to hurt Spotify’s stock price. The sky is not falling. This is mostly a database issue, or the lack of one. Something that affects the business at large, that no one wants to pay for but everyone bitches does not exist.

JIMMY IOVINE

He’s already toast. He’s already been marginalized at Apple. Who cares if he says he’s gonna stay, and whether he does. He’s a marketing guy at a tech company.

As for his statement that the music industry cannot depend upon technology to solve its problems… Wait a second, the CD brought in beaucoup bucks, Napster killed revenue and streaming built it back up. Jimmy’s MAIN complaint is Apple’s market share is not increasing fast enough and he’s not getting enough of the cash. It’d be like Best Buy bitching about Amazon. Spotify has a free, ad-supported tier. Apple does not. That’s Apple’s CHOICE! Spotify wants a free tier because it eviscerates piracy and causes paid conversion, Apple is sans this tool, and now it wants to level the playing field in its favor, huh? As for exclusives… They’re not good for the industry, which is why they’ve been killed. Jimmy wants to make Apple a bigger service by providing that which Spotify does not. It’d be kinda like Microsoft saying it should be able to eclipse Google by including search results in Bing! that Mountain View does not have. Huh? Apple was caught flat-footed with machine learning playlists, i.e. Discover. Everything Jimmy thought was gonna work was old school and didn’t, Beats 1 radio, hand-curated playlists… Didn’t he read Brad Stone’s Amazon book “The Everything Store”? Book sales went UP when they used algorithms instead of people for recommendations, the data is better. And the bubble suggestions held over from the original Beats service… How quaint and unusable. A worse Pandora. Spotify builds features, Apple bitches. This is Jimmy’s paradigm, he’s positively old school, he thinks business is conducted on the telephone and you claw and implore your way to success. Today you never talk and you lead with data. Which is why the streaming services kill radio. They go with what is reacting, what’s real, they cut out the middleman, it’s how hip-hop became so big. And if you want to be that big you should embrace these tools too, drive fans to streaming, get paid. And if no one is listening, you won’t, get paid that is. Everybody starts equal. But not everybody wins.

AMAZON/VOICE

No one is talking about this. How you can get so much music for free with Prime on your Echo, how you can get an Echo subscription for $3.99. Voice-activation is here. It’s better for music than most other products. Once again, music leads. Get an Echo Show, get Amazon Music, watch the lyrics stream by as you listen. You’ll be sold.

Then again, you’ll have to use it.

Some things never change. If you want to have an opinion, you’ve got to adopt, early.

And at this point Apple Music has been vastly improved. But the problem is it’s still worse than Spotify, hell, Amazon’s mobile interface is even better. The iPod had a better interface, better speed and a better box. You can be late to market only if you’re a great leap forward. As the iPhone was re Palm and the BlackBerry. Apple Music is a me-too product because Apple stopped innovating and was blindsided by Spotify. As for its voice-activated speaker… Too expensive and too late. And when was the last time people were concerned about sound, didn’t Apple lead with the lame white earbuds? Expensive comes first, cheap comes later. If you’re lucky, cheap comes first, that’s what tech has taught us. Google is nearly giving away their Home product and Apple wants us to overpay for essentially the same thing?

I don’t think so.

Pick It Up – Spotify

Pick It Up – YouTube

“What Makes You Country” is so generic, so formulaic, that you wince.

And then you play it a couple of times and you cannot stop listening, you’ll stay up late at night just to let it play. That’s what happened to me long after midnight. I wanted to finish the Wolff book, but I could not stop playing this LP, songs were revealing themselves to me left and right and I was getting deeper and deeper going down the rabbit hole feeling good, and ain’t that what it’s all about?

Generic like Boston. But with fewer innovations and better songs. That’s right, Boston ushered in corporate rock, it’s just that a few of those tracks were so damn good you couldn’t take the record off the turntable, although they could not follow it up. Whereas Luke Bryan keeps chugging along and although I think “Kill The Lights” was a comedown from “Crash My Party,” “What Makes You Country” is right up there, although, as stated above, I didn’t feel this way at first.

You see your heroes disappoint you. Like Keith Urban, a stellar guitarist who peaked with 2009’s “Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy Thing” and failed with its follow-up, “Defying Gravity,” and has pulled back from the precipice, is testing limits no more, just recording pabulum which I don’t even think he believes in.

But Luke Bryan was never shooting that high. It was kinda modern good ole boy rock and roll filtered through country, but he knew it was about changes and melody and his voice works and…

I’m a fan.

That’s right, we’ve got three music businesses.

One, the people who don’t care a whit. Who are completely ignored. The ones who’ve got no idea who Drake is, never mind Post Malone or Lil Yachty. They detached, they believe there’s nothing for them, and they might put a Pandora station on in the background, but really they don’t care. It’s kinda like Snapchat. A lot of hoopla, not that many users. Do we need another social network? The media says yes, until it turned and trashed the service. It’s a game they play, they build you up to tear you down but it doesn’t reflect the user’s experience. We fall in love and it takes a lot to break the bond.

Like mine with Luke Bryan.

Two, the people who consume. They follow the hits and go to the show.

Three, the hipsters, who believe whatever you listen to sucks and insist you must like their music, which is outside and referential and oftentimes features bad vocalists, ensuring it will never go mainstream, which is exactly what they want.

Is it okay to be in camp two?

I oftentimes am. And you should see my inbox! If it’s popular, they hate it! They know better. They e-mail me their favorites. And I laugh, because this just demonstrates how out of touch they are. Sure, be a fan, but don’t you know you’re in your own backwater, that this ain’t the twentieth century no more, and there’s a plethora of product and no cohesion and you’re a party of one?

But online everybody gets a voice and there’s so much noise that you end up with group one above, the people who completely tune it out. Think about it, who wants all that noise in your head?

So I’m thinking about this modern country. How it’s not really country at all. That’s right haters, you’re right, so what? If you added a twang it wouldn’t be so big. But it does represent different values from hip-hop. Hip-hop is reacting, country is uniting. And that’s so weird, because I’m an alienated boy, but when you get universal emotions right, I cave, because I’m human, and at the core I want to connect.

So the advantage of being a big star is you get the best songs, whether it be in country or pop. The idea of doing it yourself, the singer-songwriter, is at a low ebb. Now it’s about a team. And if you want to make bank, you hook up with a star, to get paid, you want them to cover your song. Which is why Carrie Underwood is a nitwit but ends up with so many hits. She’s as bland as bland can be personally, paper-thin, but those songs!

Same deal with Luke Bryan. Although he cowrites a bunch of them. Who knows where his participation begins or ends, and a lot of the songs are not that personal, to his ultimate detriment, but when he rings true, like on “Pick It Up”…

“What Makes You Country,” the title track, is like a Bon Jovi cut, like “Let It Rock” from “Slippery When Wet,” although the guitars aren’t as turned up in the chorus. And if Bon Jovi can get into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame…

And “Light It Up” is already a hit.

“Most People Are Good” shoots so low, panders so much, that the only way you can enjoy it is by ignoring the lyrics, and then it works, because the changes and vocal delivery are so damn good.

And then you get stuff like “Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset,” which aims so low but feels so good, what a conundrum. But the hooks are solid, as are the changes, and you hear it three times and you can’t get the damn chorus out of your head.

Shooting even lower is “Drinking Again.” This is music for the mindless.

But then there’s stuff that shoots a bit higher, like “Like You Say You Do,” and you begin to wonder whether you’re being too critical, Luke’s selling this stuff, unlike too much modern pop, there are changes in the verse, you can see yourself driving down the highway with the window down and your hair blowing in the wind and nodding your head and singing along.

And a trifle like “Driving This Thing” gets under your skin, your resistance is fading, listening is just too enjoyable.

Even the closing, everyman, wisdom-laden “Win Life” which you hate in principle you love, because of the vibe and changes and the loping groove. I mean underneath it all we’re similar, people, just trying to get through, music is supposed to soothe, make it easier, and this does.

But the piece-de-resistance is buried deep into the album at #13, “Pick It Up.”

It’s the cut no one talks about, that you find by accident, but on the very first time through your ears perk up and realize this is the song on the album.

It’s the sound of the instruments in the intro, in the race to the sonic bottom we underestimate these tweaks that used to make hit records back in the hi-fi era, but some engineer gets these sounds just right, they’re so inviting. And then…

I put a fishing rod by your bed, right next to a Bible

DON’T TUNE OUT! I don’t care if you believe, just as you don’t tell me to. Whatever gets you through. But let’s keep religion out of politics.

I leaned a guitar in the corner of your room with some Milsap on vinyl

Back when people used to play, all the country acts do, they’re the ones keeping Gibson in business.

And sure, Eric Church sang about vinyl records earlier, but isn’t it funny that the supposed outsiders are up on the trends more than the insiders in hip-hop and pop?

I figured the best thing I could do was put a thing or two
That it wouldn’t hurt to have in your way, on your path

Influences. We want to give the next generation inspiration.

Hoping you might pick it up one day
And you might learn a couple pretty cool things that I love to do

He wants to show him who he is. Guys don’t know how to communicate, he’s trying to demonstrate his identity via these gestures.

Then you can take it and spin it and fit it to you

Funny, this is the opposite of the elite paradigm, where kids are born to bank, to be winners in the footsteps of their fathers, taking no risk, doing no exploring, just being what they’re expected to be, and that’s just plain sad, never mind a wasted life.

I don’t know what you’re gonna be
But I hope you smile when you think of me
‘Cause I helped make you
But I didn’t ever try to make you pick it up
You just pick it up, pick it up

My father never asked me what I was taking in college, didn’t care about my grades, same deal in law school, as long as I was passing, doing my job, he let me be who I wanted to be.

Not like my friends from my generation. They’re micromanaging the careers of their kids, even calling the college. You’ve got to let people fail, you’ve got to let people be who they want to be, or they’re hobbled and ultimately resentful. That’s the crazy thing about life, you can influence people but you can’t control them, they’ve got to find out for themselves.

But there are a few other influences baked in:

Early to rise, heading to work, open a door for a stranger
Yes sir, yes ma’am, red dirt on my hands
Showing you the best way I can

He’s teaching through example, how to behave as a gentleman in this life.

Dancing and kissing your momma in the kitchen
Treatin’ her like a princess
Hoping you might pick it up one day

This is how we’re gonna solve the #MeToo problem. Present fathers acting reasonably passing wisdom and behavior down.

And now Luke Bryan’s gonna be a judge on “American Idol.” What a waste. Now he’s gonna be everybody’s when the key to longevity is just to be somebody’s, it’s always best to stay one mark away from the center, so your audience can bond to you.

And that show will fail anyway, because it’s not about singing but drama, and sans Simon Cowell, it’s toast. Not that anybody involved seems to know this.

But they know how to write songs in Nashville. It’s a factory, an assembly line. But they make BMWs on an assembly line. Then again, that’s business, not art. And if I want to be honest, Luke Bryan’s “What Makes You Country” is more business than art, but there’s a satisfaction in getting behind the wheel of a Toyota or Honda and knowing everything just works.

“What Makes You Country” just works.

Well done.

Actually, I’m still thinking about next week’s podcast, which we recorded yesterday, with…

Tony Hawk.

He was so affable, professional and erudite! He did the promos better than I did, having had so much media experience. And one of the things he said was that haters don’t bother him, he’s been hated since day one, he was forever the runt, even though he’s now 6’4″. As for being accused of selling out, Tony said HIS STUFF WAS FINALLY SELLING! Once he gained media notoriety, people were buying his Birdhouse boards, all he had in place was finally working, but the critics came out in force. Funny how that works, they want what you’ve got. And they’ve got no idea of the dues you’ve paid.

You see skateboarding was cyclical. It would rise up, and crash. Kinda like the history of EDM. They always exist, but they’ve got peaks. And after being number one Tony had to sell his house and was eating ramen trying to get his business together. They don’t tell you about that, the dues they pay.

But that’s next week.

This week is the continuation of my conversation with John Boyle, which kicked off this endeavor. I rant and rave on many subjects and Boyle barely gets a word in edgewise, but if you’re interested in what I have to say, it’s all there, in passionate diatribe, let the slings and arrows begin!

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