Mike Pinder of the Moody Blues: a musical appreciation

If anyone ever changed the world with sheer sonorities, it was he

Mike Pinder’s passing on April 25, at 82, seems little-noticed, considering that his was the defining sound for a band that rose steadily to the top of the rock-music world by the early 1970s.  But I can’t let it go unremarked, because the sounds he invented and with which he enrobed his bandmates’ songs allured so many people, even changed them, and stay with them to this day.  Let’s take some moments to appreciate what he did, how and why.

(Caveat: if you clink the links to hear the songs, what you’ll hear are the diluted mp3 versions typical of Spotify, YouTube and the like, which I think are also sped up and raised in pitch—a crime worse than broadcasting Joe Rogan.  Afraid you may have to invest in vinyl to hear them as they were meant to be heard.  Room speakers too if possible please, instead of buds.)

Most of us have heard him, without necessarily knowing who he was or what he was playing, through his haunting accompaniment to the vocal melody of “Nights in White Satin.”  It’s an unidentifiable sound, a doleful banshee, nasal and penetrating.  It’s at once emotive and impassive.  As it moves down the scale, it becomes less nasal and more woody, like a muted but straining cello.  But what the heck is it?  Someone had brought a new instrument into the world, made of old instruments.

For those who don’t know, the Mellotron was the most direct of analog synthesizers.  It played tapes of instruments or sound effects — one set of tapes per instrument, one note per tape.  Each key pressed a tape-playing head, and out came the instrument’s recorded sound for the desired note.  88 or so tapes, rollers, playing heads and springs.  You can imagine how easily the tapes went off their rollers and snarled each other.  A firm called Streetly Electronics invented the beast in the 1950s (as its dated name suggests) for theatrical use, to replace pit orchestras and sound-effects crews for small productions.

So it’s supposed to sound exactly like familiar instruments, and sometimes it does.  But something often happens in the process to make them sound different, unfamiliar.  The trumpet sound takes on a double-reed quality, reminiscent of some kind of bagpipe.  The strings lose their ultrasonic squeak (which I’ve always found grating) and become mellower, richer and throatier.  The timbre within each instrument changes a bit from note to note, since the original tapes recorded each note separately, and this gives the Mellotron a semblance of breathing in and out.  It can be made to sound bleating, groaning, wounded.  A moody instrument indeed.

Mike Pinder was the pianist for the original R&B incarnation of the Moody Blues, a Birmingham outfit.  They strove in the Hamburg circuit in the early 60s alongside, among many others, the Quarrymen / Silver Beatles / Beatles, with whom they hung out.  In the mid-60s when the band’s gigs slackened, Pinder moonlighted as a technician at Streetly Electronics and encountered their ungainly creation.  He somehow saw, or heard, its potential, and set about installing features to combine and bend sounds, and to make the thing sturdy enough for transport and touring, plus staying in tune when playing with a band.  (Since the Mellotron’s AC motor would slow and lower the output pitch whenever someone put additional load on the local grid, like a toaster, Pinder installed a transformer and DC motor to keep the speed and pitch steady.)  In the band’s down days, he could never have afforded to buy this contraption.  But, legend has it, he discovered a disused one in the workers’ recreation room of a Dunlop factory, and since no one there knew how to play or fix it, he offered to take it off their hands for 20 pounds.  The rest, as they say…

Pinder coaxed a seeming infinity of sonorities out of the machine.  Only rarely was it a recognizable single sound, like the oboe that introduces the main theme of “The Voyage.”  Most often it was combinations that seemed to meld into entirely new sounds, not of any known instrument, yet still organic, evoking the voice of some unknown creature or natural susurration.  It bewitched Pinder, and he set out to spread the enchantment.  His ear for the strange, the evocative, in sonorities transformed the band’s music.

It's thus the eternal paradox of the Mellotron that a device that set out to reproduce as precisely as possible the familiar sounds of familiar instruments ended up, in Pinder’s hands, making sounds that had never been heard before, and that apparently can’t be made any other way.  And yet were beautiful.

How beautiful?  Some Pinder at his best: the gentle flourish that follows Justin Hayward’s vocal lines in the latter’s great “New Horizons,” or the heaving crescendi in Hayward’s “You Can Never Go Home.”

It wasn’t just the sonorities, which others would soon imitate, that distinguished his Mellotron playing; it was also dynamics.  While others would just press the keys and bask in the instrument’s tapestry of sound, Pinder was always moving in and out with the dynamics—easing off, adding some weight, fading again, leaning in again.  It was the same restlessness you hear in Beethoven, and even more than the beat it kept the songs in forward motion.

Great though his Mellotron playing was, it wasn’t his only strength.  His whispery baritone gave his vocals, at their best, a gentle power with swaying rhythm (“Have You Heard,” “Melancholy Man”), also able to crank it up for more pounding pieces (“Simple Game”).  It has to be said that he struggled to maintain the same vocal qualities in live performance, overdoing it a bit on the drama (and occasional problems with pitch).  Period films of live performances seem to show that the Mellotron was a demanding tool which left little attention to devote to vocals—much more so than for example a piano.

The piano never made it on tour; yet his playing on the albums also makes its mark.  Nobody would have accused Pinder of being particularly fleet-fingered; but his piano, when the song demanded it, had a percussive, propulsive quality that brought the band’s dense soundscape to a point.  In the final jam-fugue-fadeout of Hayward’s “The Story in your Eyes” — maybe the greatest three-minute song we’ll ever hear — Pinder starts with a rumbling canter in the bass range, testing the footholds before scrambling up the octave, a sort of dark boogie-woogie; then a higher-pitch, rapid-fire, insistently questioning four-note that drives the song into its fadeout while Hayward’s fuzzed-out guitar plays a searing scimitar.  In the bridge of John Lodge’s hyperdrive “I’m Just a Singer,” Pinder shifts from the martial brass sounds he used for the main theme to the plaintive string sound, and pierces it with tattooed chords on the piano, the two coming together for the exclamatory four-note cadenza that twice brings the song to a crashing halt before it resumes its gallop to its natural ending.

Pinder’s songwriting was mixed but always high-minded.  His “How Is It We Are Here” (on A Question of Balance, 1970, the album on which the Moody Blues shifted focus from inner worlds to the outer world) seems to be one of the first rock songs to invoke environmental concerns: “Men’s mighty mine machines, digging in the ground; Stealing rare minerals where they can be found; Concrete caves with iron doors bury it again; While the starving frightened world fills the sea with grain…”  “Melancholy Man” from the same album (and as carefree as the title suggests) may be his best, with end-times imagery, a three-chord minimalism, gelid Moog-synthesizer sounds, and a haunting lilt to the husky vocals.  “My Song,” which culminates their next and most ambitious album Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, gets mixed reviews, some finding it too self-referential, too Weltschmerz.  (I tend to think if you can’t do Weltschmerz in music, what’s the point.)  But its middle interlude—of distant Mellotron, flute, haltingly strummed classical guitar, and Lodge’s unearthly falsetto—has an eerie beauty never heard elsewhere in rock.  And I like how the band started their next and in a sense final album, Seventh Sojourn, with another Pinder song in much the same vein.  It’s as if they were saying yes, we really meant it.  “Love can change the world; Love can change your life; Do what makes you happy; Do what you know is right; And love—with all your might—before it’s too late.”

The Beatles connection endured, with initial Moodies frontman Denny Laine ending up as Paul McCartney’s lead guitarist in Wing, and Pinder telling John Lennon in 1967 that he really must try this Mellotron thing (which Lennon promptly did in “Strawberry Fields Forever,” whose flute intro is via the Mellotron).  There’s an amusing story in which Lennon wanted Pinder to play on some tracks for the Imagine album in 1971 ("I Don't Wanna Be A Soldier (I Don't Wanna Die)" and "Jealous Guy"), but upon arriving at the studio Pinder found Lennon’s Mellotron to be a hopeless mess—the tapes were "a bowl of spaghetti.”  The tight recording schedule left Pinder no time to fix it, so he grabbed a tambourine, as the least bad option to stay in the session.

Sonority—the timbre or quality of a sound—is at the heart of musicmaking.  We crave beautiful sounds.  Consider how much trouble to which classical music goes to produce them: an orchestra of a hundred highly-trained performers playing exquisitely crafted instruments.  Yet sonority features little in musical discussions.  Maybe classical critics take it for granted.  And rock criticism in the Moody Blues’ day seemed to ignore it; maybe early rock critics thought it too precious for their political-revolutionary and class-struggle pretensions.  Rock wasn’t supposed to be about love of beauty.  But the music-listening public decided otherwise: great though Hayward’s songs and soaring, plaintive vocals were, I have no doubt that it was fascination and love for Pinder’s haunting sonorities that took the band, improbably and for a while, to the top of the charts.

His genius, alas, was not so robust to time and place.  His 1977 solo album The Promise (a few years after the band’s break-up at the peak of success) turns out to be mostly happy-clappy, a precursor to ‘Christian rock.’  His intense brand of spirituality, so effective when part of the Moody Blues mix, did not play well on its own.  He kept the Mellotron in the closet for the band’s barely-adequate 1978 reunion album, Octave, opting to try different synthesizer sounds, with some success but far less distinction.  His releases in the 1990s, which were barely marketed, seem to be saxophonish pop.  He sometimes displayed a prickly personality, onstage if he thought the rock-concert audience wasn’t taking the music seriously enough, and in interviews recalling internal frictions.  His gaze could be unnerving, with a hint of the fanatic.  His Mellotron music seems to betoken a great soul, but he probably would have been the first to admit that he fell short of that.

But if you want to appreciate, say, Willie Mays or Bob Gibson, watch film of them in their prime, not their decrepit last seasons or comeback attempts.  Pinder’s golden age is material enough.  When he realized what he had with the Mellotron, he clearly set out to change the world.  It’s hard to know whether he did; but at his best and for a good while, he gave us sounds both of this world and not; a kind of alternative reality, part dream, part ideal.