Moody Blues became experts at playing it straight
If you ever get the chance to talk with the Moody Blues’ Graeme Edge, I highly recommend it. He is what we journalists call “a character.”
The Englishman once joked, “We never experimented with drugs, we were experts.”
It’s no surprise he munched a hallucinogenic plant called Morning Glory/Convolvulus to help him write the opening poem of the band’s signature album, “Days of Future Passed.”
“It was a bit like psilocybin. It was a little trippy,” he says of the hallucinogen.
So I asked him if it’s true what some scholars have argued – that drugs help with creativity but only to a point, and then drugs destroy creativity.
“Absolutely,” says Edge, whose band performs Saturday at the Palms. “A number of times … we’d be a little happy in the studio, and we’d record something and go, ‘Yeah, oh man!’ And then we’d rush in the next day and play it, and it would be rubbish – absolute rubbish!”
Drugs gave him ambition – “the feelings and the thoughts in your head, and the sounds in your mind” – but you need to be straight to record those ambitions, he says.
If you record music while high, your mind freezes up, and your techniques and abilities fall away, he says. So, drugged recordings don’t reflect what a musician wants to convey, and the resulting music is not very good, usually, he says.
Now, at age 71, Edge thinks drugs should be legalized, at least as a means to curb illegal drug cartels.
“Prohibition made Al Capone. Illegal drugs are making these cartels,” he says.
“That’s only common sense. And the only trouble with common sense is it ain’t very common!”
But on a personal level, Edge is off drugs.
“Of course, I’ve curtailed it now, because it’s a good idea to. I’ve stopped all the other (stuff), as well. I don’t drink anymore.”
The reason he dropped drugs and booze: He doesn’t want to do anything that interferes with his playing onstage, because music is “the drug of my life.”
“That’s what I’m totally addicted for, is playing for people. I can’t get by without that,” he says.
He and his Moody Blues band mates are getting along quite well.
“We never really got along badly. We tended to get on our own thing a lot and ignore each other, sort of.
“The fact we can still walk onstage and perform for people and enjoy it is really the biggest blessing you can have, so we’re all very happy now.”
Edge is also promoting his new book of lyrics and poetry called “The Written Works of Graeme Edge.”
He wrote it because someone else wanted the Moody Blues to pen a kiss-and-tell book, and he was opposed to that.
“We ain’t gonna do that. It’s sleazy isn’t it?”
Just because other bands write kiss-and-tells doesn’t mean the Moody Blues have to, he says.
“If everybody pees on the street corner, it doesn’t mean to say you’ve gotta, does it?”
Edge writes anecdotes in his book, but they’re more a reflection of his life than band mates.
“I don’t mind telling on myself. That’s my decision. But I’m not going to tell on anybody else.”
The band is booked to tour through August 2013 and plans to be on the road fairly continuously for the next 2½ years.
That’s a far cry from another super band of their era, the Rolling Stones.
“They’re very clever, the Stones. They only go out every six years, so they can do the stadiums. People say to us, ‘You should come off the road for four years, and you could do the bigger (venues).’
“I go, ‘No, what would I do with myself for four years?!’ And then you’d be all rusty and creaky. We probably play to the same number of people. It just takes us 30 more gigs!
“There are only two things that will stop us: That’s the Grim Reaper or people not showing up to watch us.”
Doug Elfman’s column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Email him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.
