Timeless flights

How many adventurous rock’n’roll bands forged in the late-’60s/early-’70s would have been left by the wayside—or relegated to languish in perpetual cutout-bin purgatory—had it not been for the wide-open programming M.O. of stereo-loving FM radio stations? The Moody Blues could very easily have been one of those sidelined, notched-cover footnotes, but they altered their gameplan when guitarist/vocalist Justin Hayward and bassist/vocalist John Lodge joined the fold a few years after the chart success of “Go Now” in 1964.¹

- MIKE METTLER

Lodge, who passed away at age 82 on October 10, 2025, was Hayward’s creative fulcrum. While heady Hayward-penned songs like “Nights in White Satin,” “Voices in the Sky,” and “Your Wildest Dreams” set a certain harmonic table, grittier Lodge compositions such as “Ride My See-Saw,” “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band),” and “Isn’t Life Strange” lent a melodic—and sometimes melancholic—counterpoint.

“Success to others was top-40 AM radio—two-and-a-half-minute songs—and we weren’t writing those,” Lodge told me during a phone interview I conducted in August 2023. “We thought, ‘Well, we won’t be invited back down that road—we can’t go down that road.’ We just wanted to make the music for ourselves. At the time, we found the excitement was in the recording of our own songs and in listening to a finished record. We thought, ‘What we’re doing for us is exactly right. Whether it’s successful or not—that’s in the lap of the gods.’ I’ve always been grateful to American FM radio for playing our albums in stereo, but to us, it was really just about the next recording or the next gig.”

Audiophiles either love or hate the album that really put the Moody Blues on the map—1967’s