I got up in time to miss Liverpool’s draw with West Ham and probably be out of the title race, but watched Everton stay in the Premiership, well done lads. Of course, coming third is pretty good too, but in sport, there’s always this thing of you either win it or you lose it completely, just like everybody else did. It doesn’t matter if you could have won it or nearly won it, or should have won it, or deserved to win it, you lost it and that’s all. In music, there are no losers, just bad decisions and different tastes. Your favourite band can make an album worse than the last one, but you might not care, you might still like it and there are no consequences. A band you don’t like might make their best album, but you might not like it, and it doesn’t matter, I don’t think I’m going to be spending any time with the best Kanye West album, but I might enjoy the worst Tom Verlaine album, because there really is no scale, there is no worst, although with the Stones it’s tough, all that great work and all that dodgy work to follow.
The point is, it’s not a competition, for the purely creatives at least, it may be that for hit makers. I always wondered why McCartney or Dave Gilmour or The Stones feel like they have to compete? As if getting in a chart these days means anything at all. The time has finally come when younger people have not heard of Pink Floyd or The Beatles like young people in the seventies had never heard of Tommy Dorsey or Gil Evans. Older people don’t care if the Stones are in the charts, they just want decent records and younger people don’t care about them at all, it’s just grandad refusing to die. Haha.
Sadly and on a more serious note, Mike Pinder has died, he had suffered from dementia for many years, he was 82. He was important. This from Wikipedia:
Between 1962-3, Pinder worked for 18 months as an engineer at Streetly Electronics, in Streetly Birmingham, a factory manufacturing the first models of the Mellotron. In May 1964, Pinder left Streetly Electronics to co-found The Moody Blues.
This from my friend Nicklas Barker, guitarist, singer and composer from Swedish proggers Anekdoten. He is also a connoisseur of the Mellotron:
Very sad, imagine if he had not started working at the Mellotron factory and done something else before joining The Moody Blues and introducing the glorious Mellotron string sound to a wider audience through Nights in White Satin. What would have happened then? No King Crimson? He was also friends with John Lennon and introduced the Mellotron to him. No Strawberry Fields? Mike Pinder was the first, and the impact of his use of the Mellotron changed music history. He was also the greatest Mellotron player ever. Just listen to Out and In from To Our Children’s Children’s Children. He was the wizard of the astral orchestra.
Music today has been The Moody Blues – Days of Future Passed (1967) and To Our Children’s Children’s Children (1969). RIP Mike Pinder.