Moody Blues

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars (The other side of the Screwdriver)"

The Moody Blues "Go Now".

Having a girlfriend who lives in Birmingham, England, when you live in Kent and are still at school, is a sure sign of desperation, I would have thought. There we go, then; in 1964, that was me. A very proud race are the "Birmingham-ites" and seemingly forever saddled with the tag, "Second City", any chance of straw-grasping at minor "things that might make you appear interesting" will be taken and made good if at all possible. Well, who can blame them? The Spencer Davis Group, for example, gave them good reason to be proud of their rock music heritage.

My 1965 girlfriend was the first person to make me aware of the existence of Stevie Winwood and his amazing band. She also played records by The Moody Blues, probably the biggest thing to hit The Bull Ring shopping centre since before it was built. Can you see where this is going? I have included here my tribute version of the hit Moody Blues record "Go Now", originally featuring Denny Lane, later to be terminally f**ked off by Sir Paul McCartney for daring to be maybe slightly too interesting (or something more complicated?) He must have been electrifying on stage because as far as I could tell from later encounters with the rest of that bunch, there wasn't much else going on.

Enter the happy soul, Pip Williams, a lovely guy at every level, who had been producing Status Quo since I had started guitar tech work for them. His management, David Walker, owner of Handle Artists, then of No.1 Derby Street, Mayfair, procured a negotiated deal for Pip to also produce The Moody Blues from about 1979/80 and because of my connection with Quo, I got the job of fixing for them too. It's not altogether a particularly happy story...

My first major blunder, as far as they were concerned, was not being an adoring fan. In fact, I wasn't a fan at any level at all, except that they were going to pay me to fix their guitars. Because I could not have picked out any of them in a room full of people (except for Justin Hayward, maybe), I committed several faux pas whilst in their pay. Similarly, I could not tell you what songs they had written, or recognise those songs as their work, even if I had heard them.

Except "Seesaw" - maybe - ish. More on that one in a minute...

My first professinal gaffe, upon meeting them was to not recognise any of them. My first encounter with the band was at West Hampstead Threshold Studios, previously known as Decca Studios and owned by Decca Records. The studio now belonged to The Moody Blues, hence the name (there was a record by them called "Threshold of a Dream" or similar, apparently). Probably the best known gaffe prior to mine to have originated from that place was via the lips of the infamous Dick Rowe: - "Go back to Liverpool, Mr. Epstein, guitar groups are on the way out and The Beatles have no future in show business". Dohh!! (again, more on that one later, too).

At Threshold, like in most other major studios in which I had worked, there was a workshop area provided for visiting technicians of various trades to perform service work on studio equipment and that was my temporary workspace. Every evening, food was brought in to order and hungry personnel would collect in the canteen to consume what they had ordered. Anything at all could be requested, obviously, given the multi million budget. On the first evening there, at supper, I asked the drummer, whom I had observed working on a backing track during the day, quite innocently, "How long have you been playing sessions for this lot?". He replied that he was a founder member. Gaffe number two.

Graeme Edge was the drummer but I didn't know him from Adam and had never heard of him before. Friends throughout the 60's and 70's had often played (and obviously enjoyed) Moody Blues tracks within my earshot and the band had sold millions of singles and albums. This latter fact (because they were loved by lots of people) definitely makes them "successful" and also, apparently, "right", in the same way that all rich and powerful people are always "right".

Something I discovered (for the first time in my life) during my spell of working for The Moody Blues, was that, even if you do know your job, in the presence of rich men, nothing you may say has any meaning or value. That is, of course, unless you are also very wealthy. "You don't get big houses by being wrong" (John Lodge - 1980).

Working among rock stars leads to some genuine eye-openers regarding human nature, some of which aren't immediately obvious. On the other hand, it hardly needs saying but there are severe disadvantages to having lots of money, fame and wealth. Privacy is among the first of major casualties. A false sense of security is another problem. When you are doing so well, you tend to think that everybody loves you and that nobody would want to "stitch you up" but human nature being what it is, standards can slip, dancing to the jingle of the cash register. Everybody who can sell you something will do so and at the same time, perhaps be a little over-keen to rake in a bit of extra profit. So one must beware...

Similarly, from the other side of the coin, in the rush to clinch the deal, the seller of services and goods may well drop their quality control guard temporarily, resulting in sub-standard goods going out of the door or over the counter. In my experience, the worst part of that is, "Friday afternoon reject planks" end up in the signature and cherished pile of stock, waiting to be assembled and waiting for some fool with too much money and the pages of his (yes, sorry but usually "his") guitar magazines stuck together with some kind of jizz.

Something had definitely gone seriously wrong with the quality control at the Alembic bass guitar factory the day they put together a custom bass guitar for John Lodge in 1980. It had beautiful fancy mother-of-pearl inlays spelling out his name along the fretboard. It had state-of-the-art active electronics and was an all-round beautiful thing to behold, made of exotic timbers all put together with exquisite joinery and finish. The tuning machines and other fitted hardware were all high quality and gold-plated but there was a problem.

No matter how one tried, by fifth fret equivalent pitch, harmonics or electronic tuner, it could not be played in tune. The strings could be tuned perfectly with respect to each other and the 12th fret harmonics all seemed to be spot-on but as soon as any other fretted note was played, chaos ensued; everything was very badly out of tune. John Lodge's reaction was "Oi paid two thoosand dollars for it - it ought to work!". Fair comment. Yes, it ought.

Guitars are sometimes made with what's called a "zero fret". That is, a fret that's positioned just in front of the top nut and does away with a difficult job which can otherwise demand a high degree of manual skill, that is, cutting accurate slots to the right depth and shape in the nut itself. If this zero fret system is utilized, only the sideways spacing needs to be accurate as the strings will all be at the correct height, resting on the "zero" fret.

If you've been following closely, you'll have guessed by now the source of the problem with John Lodge's bass. The manufacturers had designed the guitar for a zero fret but had then missed it off at the assembly stage. The spacing from the nut to the first fret was thus too much; I found this out by measuring from the 12th fret to the fifth, in the knowledge that this should equal the distance from the fifth fret to the nut. With the zero fret missing this was about four millimeters too far. Hence, chaos!

Replacing the zero fret cured the problem immediately, a job which I was able to perform there and then, on site, as I always at the time carried some odd bits of fretwire in my tool kit. Not exactly rocket science but essential knowledge.

John Lodge also had a high powered speedboat which he'd decided to name "Seesaw" and because he'd seen my artwork for the animation project on which I was working in conjunction with Handle Artists, thought I might like the honour of signwriting the name on to his boat for him. Although at the time I was an accomplished lettering artist, through my work at Letraset Ltd., in the mid to late 60's, the training I had received was mostly relevant to Silk Screen Process stencil cutting, a trade that was well and truly obsolete by the 1980s. Actual signwriting (with a brush) was something I only casually dabbled with but could do to a professional standard, so I accepted the commission.

John Lodge's house was a beautiful residence comfortably nestled in an exclusive corner of the stockbroker belt and when I turned up to do the job, the boat was parked on his front driveway. It was a blazing hot summer's day and the work went smoothly. Thus I was able to finish easily that afternoon, suitably refreshed with lemonade, supplied by John's wife. The boat looked good and the signwriting job was met with approval by the owner.

There's always a fly in the ointment, it seems. I never had kids (as far as I know) but I like to think that if I did, I'd be able to instil some sense of decency in them. But then maybe I am just a dreamer. A pair of giggling children approached me on the driveway with the greeting, "Are you working for my father?", with the kind of distain normally reserved for vermin. "Yes", I replied. "Would you like a sweet, mister?", came the loaded question. "Oh, yes, please" I said. The child held out a paper bag and beckoned me to approach across the driveway. After a few steps, I reached out to take the confection on offer, only to discover the bag to be empty. No comment.

Next Moody "up" was Ray Thomas, the flute player from the Welsh Valleys, another founder member. The "Three Chord Trick", the root and basic foundation of all composition in the music of Western civilization, is an essential bit of kit in the songwriter's toolkit. Without it, one doesn't have even the ABC of the full alphabet required to construct an intelligent matrix of harmonic progression - or, put simply, you ain't a songwriter. You can string random chords together that sound nice until the cows come home, but if you want to be able to draw upon even a crude and rational pallette of harmony around a melody, without resorting to banal and repetitive mantras, you need this structural building block.

From early in the 60's I had been using this simple set of compositional rules, which are based on the prime numbers seven and five. School friends and I quickly discovered the second set of chords, the relative minors, again based on a prime (three) and started between us to unravel popular tunes and disseminate their chord structures by ear. That's still the only intelligent way to start. To pretend that you can move on without that knowledge is completely delusional. Unfortunately in modern times many insist on not "learning their ABC" and so continue to berate us with their naively cyclical dronings thinking the world's ears are with them. Take note: - they aren't.

Anyway, long, long years before I ever met Ray "the flute" Thomas, I had been writing songs using both the rules as described and other further compositional sophistications. A time-served veteran of many rock bands and countless stages, capable of performing in any key on a number of different instruments and with a number of publishing and recording experiences behind me and pending, I was well aware of the three chord trick. I had been teaching it to pupils for well over 20 years.

It was not possible to get this across to Mr. Thomas. He insisted that he drag me off to the basement of Threshold, where he sat me down at the piano and there proceeded at great pains to explain to me how the three chord trick works. I wanted to get paid, so the last thing on my mind was irritating him (or his mates). So I had to sit through the lecture. Grin and bear it wasn't in it but I bore it for the sake of peace. What a plonker.

Next in line for dishing out the agony was Justin Hayward. I had by that time been buiding guitars since I was a school kid, been a professional technician for over eight years and was there by virtue of my recommendation within and across the industry / trade as an expert for the purpose of their guitar servicing requirements. This wasn't enough.

Maybe by then, I had crafted possibly 50 guitar necks by hand and serviced many hundreds of instruments. Justin needed some work doing to clean up some fretbuzz on some of his axes, including a hand built acoustic of fine quality. The work I needed to do involved fret filing and polishing, to take out wear (he had been playing it a lot; that was obvious), then restringing and adjusting the truss rod. Straightforward work which I'd done a thousand times before and had based my reputation and word-of mouth recommendation upon for years.

Adjusting a truss rod is, again, not rocket science but mainly common sense and unless the mechanism is very badly designed or broken, in fact it's a straightfarward simple operation. Damaging a guitar by performing this action would be difficult unless one was actually attempting to damage it. Nevertheless Justin Hayward was quite specific in his instructions to me in that "I want you to be really careful when you do that. You really do need two people to do that job properly and I always do it with my wife's help - she supports the body and I hold the neck tension while I adjust the rod".

Believe me, I was getting close to boiling at this point, what with the combined aggravation of gritting my teeth against the plain old in-your-face insults to my integrity from these twats. Did they want an expert or were they going to continually try to teach me my job? Teeth gritted, I stayed with it - I still wanted to be paid.

My then girlfriend had expressed a curiosity to see this bunch of has-beens in action, in their attempts to make a come-back, draped in their pot belly stretched, star spangled T-shirts (for after a couple of days' exposure to their huge egos, that was how I had described them to her). She followed me up to Threshold one day and was warmly welcomed, a little too warmly, she thought, in some cases. The libel laws dissuade me from filling in here further details of her encounter with Mr. Hayward, who was obviously, by all accounts, generally considered to be something of a heart-throb and quite used to being adored by all ladies everywhere.

Things were starting to wear thin in this working relationship and mutual respect was not exactly flourishing.

The keyboard player at the time with the band was a new member of the Moody Blues' line-up. There's not much to tell about Patrick Moraz from my point of view, except that he was a very accomplished player and thought I was a complete twat. In all of the time (several weeks) that I was involved with the Moodies, he was waiting somewhat impatiently to be paid by the band and frequently verbalised the point. To be in the room when this was going on was embarrassing but it was always in the air.

There endeth the lesson. I don't ever want to or have to return to that dreadfully awkward and subservient set of circumstances; I would rather poke myself in the eye with a pencil (and who knows? - maybe I have already)...

Alternative title: - "Guitars to The Stars" &"The other side of the Screwdriver"

Back to Home page... (or in case you missed them, listen to the tracks: - fretbuzz and Go Now)