Is Days of Future Passed really the first progressive rock album? I'm actually not sure, which maybe makes this album's place as the first album review in a series about the history of prog rock seem a little strange. In fact, there are a number of albums that predate Days of Future Passed that could in equal fairness be called the first real progressive rock album: The Doors, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Procol Harum—all these albums show bits of prog DNA beginning to emerge out of the flurry of mid-'60s psychedelic rock. And honestly, none of them (including Days) sound purely prog either. There's an entirely reasonable argument to be made that in 1967, prog still didn't exist and that I should have included all these albums in my previous post about the roots of the genre. And believe me, I thought about starting somewhere later—maybe 1969 with In the Court of the Crimson King—at a point where prog would arrive a bit less embryonically.
But it always had to be 1967, because that, for some reason, is the year when all of psychedelia's children arrived. To mix metaphors for a second, let's imagine that the British (and occasionally American) rock scene—now largely white and urban-based, having unceremoniously shrugged off the vital black and rural innovators from the earlier decade—in '65 and '66 is a primordial pool filled with a variety of organisms that, while distinct, all stay within that same pool. Well, '67 is when the first creatures venture out of that pool on new-found legs and discover that they can run in almost any direction they please. And do they run. In 1967, a proliferation of rock sub-genres exploded onto the recording industry, including (just to name a few) noise rock, space rock, avant-garde rock, jazz rock, symphonic rock, art rock, and (you guessed it) progressive rock. Not all of these sub-genres emerged from the pool fully formed (in fact, if you weren't a sub-genre included on the Velvet Underground's debut, you probably had at least a year or two to go), but '67 is crucial in that it saw the first notable releases by bands that would soon identify themselves exclusively with one of those sub-genres. Before '67, you had renaissance dabblers like the Beatles; after '67, you have specialists.
Which brings us to the Moody Blues and Days of Future Passed. Of all the possible other contenders for this post that I listed way back in the first paragraph, the Doors and the Beatles are genre dabblers, flitting from style to style without much emphasis on a single aesthetic. And neither of the two remaining—Procol Harum (by Procol Harum) and Piper at the Gates of Dawn (by Pink Floyd)—sound nearly as close to what would soon become prog as the Moody Blues are in Days of Future Passed, Procol Harum being still too close to conventional pop and the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd still very much in a purely psychedelic vein.
And so we have Days of Future Passed, which is actually the Moody Blues' second album but the first one with the classic Moodies lineup and the first one really worth caring about[1].
The first thing you'll probably want to know is that it's a concept album, which already checks off one of those prog boxes. This is definitely an album, not a collection of songs, and each side of the record is a continuous suite of music[2] that all links together over a central idea. That idea? The passage of one day. Not like in Ulysses or Do the Right Thing or anything with characters; no, this album is about simply the physical process of the sun rising in the morning and moving across the sky until it sets in the evening, which is only a little bit more thrilling than I just made it sound[3].
Look, I've been calling what I'm about to do here a "review," so I might as well start with the evaluation: the central premise to Days of Future Passed is kind of dumb—well, "dumb" might not be the right word to use, since there's nothing especially unintelligent about it; the folks in the Moody Blues at least execute it accurately, naming each track, appropriately, after the corresponding time of day: "The Day Begins" is the first track, then "Dawn," then "The Morning," "Lunch Break"[4], etc. until the record ends with "The Night." It's all pretty literal and on-the-nose, and it's not helped by the often thudding lyrics (sample: "When the sun goes down/And the clouds all frown/Night has begun for the sunset").
So lyrically, the album's not winning any prizes. Well, mostly not. I should qualify and say that at exactly two points, this album's concept pays off nicely. Those points are actually what yielded the album's two singles: the "Afternoon" and "Night" tracks, subtitled respectively "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)"[5] and "Nights in White Satin," where, for the only two times on the album, the lyrics break from observation of the day cycle to discuss the singer's feelings. And it's actually quite moving in both cases, especially in "Nights in White Satin," where the sight of the earth plunged into darkness seems to arouse an acute sense of longing and even regret in the singer, causing him to cry, "I love you" in a way that seems both romantic and a little bit desperate. It's sad and sweepingly grand, and it ends the album on one of the unequivocal high points of '60s prog rock. "Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?)" isn't quite as great, but it's still an interesting bit of introspection linked to the post-lunch hours, with melancholy refrains linked by a bouncy bridge evoking the Beatles' "A Day in the Life."
"A Day in the Life" is actually a useful touchstone for this album overall, since musically, Days of Future Passed shares quite a lot with the Beatles' song, as far as sonic ambitions go. After its structure as a concept album, probably the second most important thing to note about this record is that it's a fusion of the classical symphony with psychedelic rock (there's another prog check-off). Like "A Day in the Life" (only about 36 minutes longer), Days of Future Passed alternates between traditional rock instrumentation (guitars, drums, Mellotron[6], etc.) and a full-blown orchestra.
I mentioned back in my "Before Prog" post that progressive rock tends to appropriate classical music more in the abstract rather than its literal instruments, but oh boy, that is not true at all of Days of Future Passed. You would be forgiven for thinking, upon listening to the first few minutes of the album, that you'd accidentally turned on a classical music record instead of one of the most influential rock LPs of all time. It takes nearly six minutes of symphonic overture before anything resembling rock music pops up, and the rest of the album runs about half-and-half between rock/pop songs and lengthy instrumental orchestra passages linking the songs together into a suite. The results here with the music are a lot more successful than the lyrics are. With the exception of the plodding "The Sun Set," every one of the proper songs is good-to-great musically (my favorite non-single track being the psych-rock gem "Peak Hour"), and the orchestra between the songs gives the album a fleet-footed feel of coherence that works even when the actual music of the orchestration is a bit thin. In fact, to get critical again, the orchestra segments aren't really good for much more than gluing the album together (although as glue, they're great). Ideally, in an experiment like this, the orchestration would have been just as compelling as the rock music, but that's not the case here. Except in the admittedly exciting overture at the beginning, the orchestral music sounds less like a symphony and more like a middling movie score from the '50s, which is a shame since that middling score comprises nearly half the album.
The other problem is that except for one case that I'll talk about in a second, the orchestration and rock arrangements are mixed entirely separately—when the rock song ends, the orchestra begins and vice-versa. This makes the album's music feel more like a genre relay than a true fusion of styles, and that relay often feels a little stilted. The exception is, again, "Nights in White Satin," which is the only place on the album where the orchestra and rock instrumentation coexist. The results are stunning, the orchestra strings weaving around Graeme Edge's somber drumming and Justin Hayward's mournful vocals in a way that feels truly epic. The whole song justifies the whole orchestra-rock concept.
Days of Future Passed is definitely a transition album, both for the prog genre as a whole and for Moody Blues specifically, and like most transition album, it's a bit rocky. Later bands and records would prove much more adept at creating music of this scope; the following year alone would see the Moodies ditching the orchestra for a more Mellotron-heavy sound that both streamlined and improved upon a lot of the sonic ideas here[7]. Still, there's something undeniably exciting about the ambition of this album. It's the sound of a band realizing just how spacious a rock LP could be, which is both cool in the abstract and legitimately compelling when that muscle-flexing stumbles across something truly powerful like "Nights in White Satin." It's maybe not the true beginning of prog, but it's a major step there. And as steps go, it's not a wholly bad one.
But what do y'all think? Do you love this album? Hate it? Something in between? Let me know! I'd love to hear your comments.
Until 1968!
1] Their debut album, The Magnificent Moodies, is a mostly dull collection of R&B covers interspersed with a handful of mostly dull R&B originals. It's rightfully forgotten.
2] In fact, if you listen to the album on CD (which is what I did), it's continuous music for the entire 42 minute runtime, not having to pause to flip the record or anything.
3] In all fairness, though, had rock music actually produced an interesting idea for a concept album at this point? I mean, the whole premise for Sgt. Pepper is pretty much, "Everyone knows this band is called the Beatles, but what this album presupposes is... what if it wasn't?"
4] Lunch is the only meal mentioned explicitly on the album, which is maybe more disturbing to me than it should be.
5] Which became just "Tuesday Afternoon" as a single. A wise choice, I'd say.
6] At the time, the Mellotron wasn't considered a "traditional" instrument, but largely thanks to how intently the members of the Moody Blues evangelized on its behalf (Moodies keyboardist Mike Pinder reportedly introduced the instrument to the Beatles), it soon became a standard part of the lineup, at least among the artsier, stranger corners of rock (e.g. prog).
7] Starting with their next album, In Search of the Lost Chord, the Moody Blues would also begin to incorporate one signature influence on their sound that's missing here: Eastern mysticism as filtered through lots and lots of LSD.
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