Page 4 - TheGoldBug1972-73

Sound from Surrey by Rich Gould The Moody Blues is perhaps one of the most cohesive and creative groups to be found on the rock music scene today. In their case, cohesion is' not accidental. Each member of the band, in fact., authors two or more cuts on each album. As Ray Thomas notes, "There is nobody on a superstar kick at all. If I come up with a song everybody else :~d~f~f::r~i~l~~~n~;~~~.,I~~r~f~n i~o~~t~ together ...It's gone way past a friendship thing." The Moody Blues is composed of five musicians from the English Midlands. Graeme Edge, Justin Hayward, John Lodge, Mike Pinder _and Ray, Thomas came together as an offshoot of t.he 'Mit- chell and Butlers Band' in 1964.Their second single, a number called 'Go Now' won them a great deal of attention but immediately afterwards the scene moved elsewhere and the band fell into obscurity again: Late in 1967, after the timely financial in- tervention of Derek McCormick, the Moodies reasserted themselves with their "Days of Future Past." Not only did this album remove them from the so-called Mersey- Beat, but it also synthesized elements of a classical orchestra with those of a contemporary rock band in a marriage with the London Festival Orchestra. I believe this was the first attempt ever to do something of that nature. "Nights in White Satin" and "Forever Afternoon even arbitrary. The songs all fit together both (Tuesday")" present something of what has come conceptually and chronologically. By following a to be known as soft rock. Glancing back, Justin progression of events in everyman's day, they - Hayward mentions, " 'Tuesday Afternoon' - on a effectively extended a specific theme beyond a beautiful day, trees like Tolkien's Ents who take single song to encompass the entire opus. hours just saying hello. 'Nights in White Satin'-. "In Search of the Lost Chord" .followed m.issa, about an audience in Glastonbury, a flat in with an appropriate amount of new acreage Ba_yswater and. the ecstasy of an hour of love." plowed. This album was well received in both I'Days--of Future Past" displayed a degree of England and on the Continent whilea number of intergral unity to an hitherto unrealized extent. heads were turned in America as well. It is this Nothing about this work seems trite or contrived or album which most fully develops the 'Moody Blues From Russia, with Lust by Jim Sollers Living up to her name, she embodies the fairy-tale Most American college students have probably ideal of the October Revolution, fighting oppresston character dreamed up by a secret beard of Zap, Amertca's grossest magazine. Comix .everywhere, irrespecti ve of who is oppressed by itself PPP -- "Progressive Political POl,no',ca"hy.'. cognoscenti nod sagely at the mention of Wonder whom, or how. she imports Canadian Mounties to Sadecky met this group while lecturing . Warthog or Trashman. Some might even help defend wartime Stalingrad: stops a Soviet plot capital of the Ukraine. The Ukraine has remember Jane Fonda's film of the French assassinate U.S. leaders with hired Taranese happy about being dominated by Russia, Spacegirl, Barbarella. one of the first future- adhunt.ers; leads an army of Abominable not surprising that PPP has cells of fantasy underground strips. But not too many nowmen against Chinese invaders in Tibet. As can other far-flung places like Tbilisi, Alma Alta. people have heard yet of the latest figure to loom on E guessed, the stories are laden with violence and Membership is usually students and.dj,;affec[o'tli , ;'Iaced with erotic imagery. " ~~~~~:Jfa~~~~r~~r~~::~~~;~~z~;~~~~rb~~~: Exploits of an all-round heroine like Octobriana workers ("if you don't fulfil the camel out of a most unlikely place: Soviet Russia. don't square with one's usual concept of puritanical suspected of subversion If , Russian underground writing usually comes to communist prose. And, indeed, the Soviet Union is cessfuL.you're under suspicion the West as "samizdat" ("self-published") -- officially the most moral country on earth. Since it is careerist.") The group's chief pre?c~,~pacli?n. carbon-copied manuscripts of dissent, circulated theoretically the perfect society, any suggestion besides its alcoholic parties (always privately by otherwise reputable Soviet Writers. that things are amiss, especially sexually, is strictest precautiqnsi ; was production Most of these are closely-reasoned critiques of the subversion. Everyone lives by "the highest com- samizdat magazine, Mtsyry. Soviet system. But Petr Sadecky, a young Czech art munist morality." Propaganda portrays sex -- even It was here that Octobriana was "born." instructor, claims that. Russia seethes with a vast as manifested by modern dances and short skirts __ members, under the collective penna me mass mass of violent and erotic underground fic- as the insidious rot of Western decadence. "researched" her "past." A prime' heaping was a her adventures tion. His allegedly smuggled photographic record To guard against "lurking class enemies," the of these works was published last year in England KGB (secret police) ferrets out thousands of cases details. To Westerners, these and this year in the U.S. as Octobriana and the of "moral and political degeneracy." Once man tedious, buttoa Soviet reader, unable to Russian Underground (Harper & Row, paper- was charged with possessing pornographic pictures of the outside world or travel beyond the bound, $5.95). that turned out to be lithographs of paintings by every colorful tidbit assumedly has the Octobriana is a bogglesome blend of Far Eastern Rubens and Titian. Even if fhey had been mild cortisone injection .. barbarism and Western sex appeal, Her out- pinups, he would have faced from 3 to B years in a Thus, the writing is a hotbed of standing features include immortality and the "corrective labor colony." metaphor, mixed with potshots ability to time-travel. Her past is clothed in With such an outwardly repressive environment, bureaucracy. Octobrlana exults in her mystery, while the rest of her is lightly it could be expected that self-expression, when it a mutant walrus "with the pride of a camouflaged in a microbra, gunbelt and stiletto- carne, would be concentrated - and closely guard- announcing he has mined a ton more coal while the monster's heeled boots, a red star blazoned on her forehead. ~. According to Sadecky, Octobriana was a Party plan decrees;" There are swarms "red like the 'dragon orchids' of the _ of the Amazon." images, amply assisted by the writing ..... " ............... _ / . view of Octobriana, bosom heaving, is ;:::p::: ":'~:'"..;.";..:!!;"'::::;';:~" "In her wildest fantasies, she had not sight that confronts her.") And there is, for munist readers, the lure of other forbidden pausing exhaustedly after riding a wild yak doom, Octobriana sighs, "My Kingdom Coke!" Even the story titles are verbal "The Atomic Suns of Chairman Mao," or ' Monster from the Land Where the Rainbow are heavy samples. The drawings t.hemselves compare enough with many adventure strips in the days before the "Russian Invasion, Czech, was able to smuggle into Russia 'Western pop art for PPP to examine. .tobriana drawings' draftsmanship is " continued <;>nnext