As The Moody Blues travelled across America during the late 1960s, they often encountered young men the same age as them at airports and bus stations, on their way home from Vietnam. These encounters inspired Justin Hayward to write “Question”, the single the band released in April 1970. While “Question” wasn’t an obvious candidate for a hit – subject matter aside, it lacked the richly orchestrated sound that The Moody Blues were known for since 1967’s “Nights In White Satin” – the single climbed to No 2, giving them their biggest chart success since “Go Now”.
As The Moody Blues travelled across America during the late 1960s, they often encountered young men the same age as them at airports and bus stations, on their way home from Vietnam. These encounters inspired Justin Hayward to write “Question”, the single the band released in April 1970. While “Question” wasn’t an obvious candidate for a hit – subject matter aside, it lacked the richly orchestrated sound that The Moody Blues were known for since 1967’s “Nights In White Satin” – the single climbed to No 2, giving them their biggest chart success since “Go Now”.
Later that year, “Question” was at the heart of the Moodies’ set at the Isle Of Wight Festival, helping to charm a febrile audience. “I had no thoughts about a single when I wrote it, because a five-minute song with two tempo changes is not usually single material,” says Hayward.
The Moodies had a warmer, calmer sound than many of their peers, but were no less tuned in to the beats of the counterculture. They dropped acid in 1967 and never looked back, writing songs like “Fly Me High” and “The Best Way To Travel” about their experiences. Ray Thomas’s tribute to Timothy Leary, “Legend Of A Mind” was met with the approval by the doctor himself – in 1969, he even joined the band on stage at a free concert in Los Angeles. Musically, they were imaginative and unpredictable, fusing Hayward’s melodic impulses with Mike Pinder’s creative use of Mellotron to forge a uniquely identifiable sound. The Moody Blues are nothing less than the forgotten heroes of psychedelia.
While “Question” was a product of this questing environment, it also reflected the band’s desire to write songs that were easier to recreate on stage. Built around Justin Hayward’s 12-string guitar, “Question” toned down the band’s backing vocals and limited the Mellotron to a couple of vibrant flourishes. More prominent now was Pinder’s energetic tambourine, which kept pace with Graeme Edge’s epic drum fills and John Lodge’s expressive basslines. The Moodies were able to recreate this harder sound on stage across Europe – but especially America, where the band found their biggest fans. “I don’t know why we got on better in America than we did at home,” ponders John Lodge. “Maybe it was about respect.”
JUSTIN HAYWARD, VOCALS/GUITAR: It was a Friday night and I was in my two-room flat in Barnes. We had a session the next day at Decca and I knew the guys expected me to have something to work on. I had two songs that were half-finished, so I put the second slower song into an open tuning and bluffed it out.
JOHN LODGE, BASS: “Question” was all based on Justin’s 12-string acoustic guitar and a bass riff. It signalled the start of our journey into live music. We were finding it harder to play a lot of our songs live. In Search Of The Lost Chord wasn’t really an album to be played, it was one to be listened to. But we were spending a lot of time in the States and we saw that the American bands were live acts first and foremost. That was a huge impetus for us.
PETER JACKSON, TOUR MANAGER: The problem was that they couldn’t reproduce their albums on stage. They were so good live, but it was very difficult. One big change came when they played Fillmore East and the Mellotron packed up. This guy came over and offered to help. He introduced himself as Les Paul. He’d never seen one before and he was fascinated. We took it to his place in New Jersey and when he brought it back he had introduced stereo heads and all sorts of things that allowed them to play the more complicated orchestral parts.
HAYWARD: To write “Question”, I used a Gibson 12-string with a great sound but dreadful intonation, which made it very hard to do chord changes and progressions because I couldn’t get it in tune. I put this big 12-string in Open C. Not every guitar can take the tension of an Open C tuning, but this one could.
JACKSON: I was at most recording sessions, moving equipment and bringing cups of tea from the canteen. They’d sit in the corner of the studio together and all work together on each other’s material.
HAYWARD: When I played it to the band, Mike instantly knew what sound he wanted to add to the Mellotron when it came to the overdubs. Mike played tambourine and then we had John on the bass.
LODGE: I don’t know whether it is Ray Thomas or Mike who is credited, but it was usually Mike on tambourine. We’d usually record a basic track with acoustic guitar and bass while Mike would keep time with tambourine – almost like a click track. If the basic track had the right feel, you knew you had it right and the tambourine kept it moving.
HAYWARD: Graeme [Edge] played sixteenths on the hi-hat. Graeme’s so good on this song. He could do that tempo. Graeme’s kit always sounded great. He would never top the best drummer poll, but the sound of his kit was as good as anybody. When I first heard the Isle Of Wight mix, I thought, ‘Thank God Graeme sounded so good,’ because his drums were on every single mic.
LODGE: Graeme had a totally different style, without an offbeat. The other person who did that was Keith Moon, but he played much more aggressively. It was like he was singing the song in his head as he played.
JACKSON: In the studio it was often just me and the band, with Tony Clarke and Derek Varnals. They really trusted Tony and Derek.
DEREK VARNALS, ENGINEER: Tony Clarke was one of the best producers you could work with. He was so musical and he worked on the studio floor with the boys. Performance is always the hardest thing to get.
LODGE: The B-side was a song I wrote called “Candle Of Life”, which had been on the To Our Children’s Children’s Children album. It was a different sound, but it had the same sort of vibe as “Question”, with this calmness at the core. “Candle Of Life” became like a theme song at American universities.
HAYWARD: When I put the two songs together for “Question”, I had to do a bit of rewriting for the lyrics. The slow part was a love song to somebody, while the fast part came from our time in America. We were on the college circuit and we knew American musicians who were in fear of being drafted. It’s hard to imagine what it must have felt like to get that letter saying you were being drafted. Nobody should have that to look forward to when they are 20.
LODGE: When we were flying around America we’d see all these young guys being flown home from Vietnam. We were on tour with a rock’n’roll band and they were fighting in a jungle. It was a bizarre feeling and it really influenced us.
HAYWARD: John and I had joined the band in 1966 and we all went through that psychedelic thing together. When John and I joined we became the band the other three wanted to be in. But it was difficult at first as people knew us from “Go Now”. For the first few months we had to do two live sessions – one of the old R&B stuff and another 45 minutes of new material starting with “Fly Me High”, the first song I recorded with the band.
LODGE: It was tough because people expected “Go Now”. Crowds were really dismal. But then the college and university sector opened up, and we found our audience.
HAYWARD: I took acid after Christmas 1966 and joined every movement I could. I was often at UFO and Graeme and I got into transcendental meditation. We’d walk with our girlfriends across Hyde Park from our place on Bayswater Road to Eaton Square to do our TM teaching in a house that George Harrison bought.
JACKSON: We were all into it, the psychedelic thing. We had some very strange bills. We played with light shows and cartoons, we played with Traffic and Pink Floyd. It was a very happy scene. We all dressed the same.
HAYWARD: “Legend Of A Mind” was written by Ray about Timothy Leary. It was recorded during the Days Of Future Passed sessions but we put it on the …Lost Chord album. Those records were hitting FM radio in 1969 and Tim Leary heard it. I think when Ray wrote it, it was a bit tongue-in-cheek but Leary didn’t mind, he was a mischievous Irishman. He came to see us when we did a free concert in Los Angeles with Jefferson Airplane.
JACKSON: Our gear was delayed by customs, so we had to cancel our concert at the Forum. We agreed to play a free concert in Los Angeles’ Elysian Park with Jefferson Airplane on the back of a truck. Leary played tambourine with them.
LODGE: It was fantastic, so freeform, just a band on stage and an audience. We found this camaraderie with the bands in America – Jefferson Airplane, Canned Heat and later the Eagles. We were told that Charles Manson’s girls were there, although that might have been an earlier concert. We were in America a lot around that period and we met so many people, we didn’t know who everybody was.
JACKSON: The Airplane were chucking cookies laced with hash into the crowd. After the show we had the option of going to Leary’s ranch or going to this commune run by a friend of the Beach Boys called Charles Manson. Most of the band went to Leary’s ranch.
HAYWARD: I went to Tim’s ranch for a couple of days. I don’t remember taking acid, it was more of a head trip about freedom. This was a time when the world thought young people had the answer to everything.
LODGE: Tim invited me to his ranch. I said, “Tim I’d like to come but I want to go to Disneyland…”
JACKSON: Me and John went to Disneyland. Well, why not? We had to hide our long hair under caps as you weren’t allowed in otherwise.
LODGE: We had a fantastic time. Disney or Leary – both total fantasy but one was probably less harmful than the other.
JACKSON: People ask why we didn’t play Woodstock. The band had agreed to play and were on some posters, but they’d had some bad experiences at festivals in Europe.
LODGE: It was the height of peace, love and good vibes but there was this antagonistic element. We’d played a festival in France the year before Woodstock with 300,000 people and it was chaotic, there was no proper security and we went off after three songs. Backstage there were all these people who had been injured. We didn’t want to be part of that. When it came to Woodstock, I think we had a No 1 in France and decided to play a show there instead.
JACKSON: The band had a meeting and decided not to do Woodstock because they thought it would be another demonstration. But we did do the Isle Of Wight in 1970. I look at the pictures of all those people and it still blows me away.
HAYWARD: When we played Isle Of Wight in 1970 it was another of those festival disasters. The fences were torn down and I remember seeing Joni Mitchell on the Saturday and somebody jumped onstage and grabbed her mic and it hit her in the mouth. It was all very nervy. We were playing on the Sunday and we came on around teatime as the sun was going down and for some reason the crowd of 450,000 were able to relax and everything straightened out.
LODGE: Whenever we did festivals we told promoters we wanted to go on at dusk. Our music was perfect for calming the audience down. “Question” was a fantastic song to play because you had two types of song in it – the ballad part and the rock’n’roll part. That went over well with the crowd. It was like the waves on the beach going in and out. It plateaued – you could see it in the audience, they’d come down from the fast bit and find a more even keel.
HAYWARD: The song had come out in April, a long time before the rest of the album. The big frustration for us was that it clearly had resonance with young people but it was up against “Back Home” by the England World Cup Squad, which was being promoted by the BBC, who compiled the chart.
JACKSON: It was an unexpected hit because it is a very complicated song. “Question” was a bigger hit than “Nights In White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon”, and nobody would imagine that now. “Back Home” kept it from No 1? Oh my God. The strange music tastes of Britain.
LODGE: The official chart on the BBC made “Back Home” No 1 and we were No 2. But the NME and everybody else gave us No 1. I didn’t mind. I like football.
HAYWARD: We did a nice recording of it on the Lulu show and we re-recorded it in the late 1980s with an orchestra, but the best recording is probably one that Elliot Davis arranged when we did Days Of Future Passed live in 2017 in Vancouver.
LODGE: “Question” signalled the start of our journey into making music we could play live.
JACKSON: I worked for lots of other bands after them, including the Eagles and Eric Clapton, and it took me a long time to get over not hearing the Moody Blues from the back of the stage any more. They were a fabulous live band.
HAYWARD: I still play it on tour. It’s immediately identifiable – as soon as I start strumming, the crowd start to cheer.
