Were the Moody Blues ever a true prog band?

Snow Dog wrote: ^Now that is a Prog band.

Edited by digdug - January 30 2013 at 13:08

Maybe it's because as big a band as Moodies were--non of their albums show up in top 100---guess the group is not too popular on this site (but then again neither does legendary prog album Tales from Topographic Oceans)

ProgMetaller2112 wrote: Prog_Traveller wrote: I love cute blonde girls who like prog who live in far away countries I'll probably never visit.  Are you talking about Sonia

Maybe.

Prog_Traveller wrote: I now have it opened for multiple votes but please don't vote more than twice.

Dean wrote: Hercules wrote: If you were alive and listening to music in the late 60s (and I was) you would know that the Moodies were one of the bands that defined the genre.   So - yes, uneqivocally. Absolutely.       You guys can't keep trying to re-write history just because it doesn't fit with your modern interpretations of what is and what isn't Prog Rock. You can't make stuff up either. What happened, happened; what was, was.

ole-the-first wrote: Were the Moody Blues ever a true prog band? Not really. King Crimson's innovation was distinguishing prog from psychedelic/pop roots, while 'Days of Future Passed' was generally a psychedelic album, but with complex symphonic arrangements (and their following albums were even closer to psychedelic pop). Thus The Moody Blues' early stuff falls straightly into proto-prog category.

lazland wrote: ole-the-first wrote: Were the Moody Blues ever a true prog band? Not really. King Crimson's innovation was distinguishing prog from psychedelic/pop roots, while 'Days of Future Passed' was generally a psychedelic album, but with complex symphonic arrangements (and their following albums were even closer to psychedelic pop). Thus The Moody Blues' early stuff falls straightly into proto-prog category. Sorry, you are utterly wrong. The Moodies were considered to be an archetypal prog rock band, simple as. They considered themselves to be very much so, and I fail to see the Crimson point really. Why do people insist on these categorisations which fly in the face of musical history?

Well, there are many ways to percept and interpret music. I believe that The Moody Blues were too psychedelic-influenced for being archetypical prog (whilst Crimson's influence was taken also from jazz, folk and modern classical music, and that fusion of everything with everything became a kind of attribute for almost all 70's prog bands). Though it's just my own opinion, I would always like to hear a different pointof view.

It only takes one idiot.

Slartibartfast wrote: Oh they can't possibly be prog if they don't have metal in the music.  I think you can pretty much predict where people will come down on this based on how much they like metal...

Without question, yes.  The fourth option makes what I consider a false assertion, that King Crimson is the beginning of Prog.  ItCotCK was certainly a milestone, but it existed, and continues to exist within a continuum of releases.  KC moved beyond what the Moodies had done earlier, but then the Moodies themselves moved beyond what they did earlier.  That is a characteristic of progression.  DoFP did things no one had done before, as did In Search of the Lost Chord.  Even if they became a mostly pop band later on, they were still a true prog band at one time, so the answer again has to be "yes."