Music is still a mystery to me and to many other neurologists and psychiatrists.... Music DOESN'T affect some people, at all.

Yet others of us, our lives revolve around music. Because it hits very deep places in our skulls. It's magic. It opens mystical doors.

Research shows a trend toward like 50% of the human population being affected deeply by music, and the other half have no clue.

I guess we all need a little mystery in our lives to make them interesting. Just traveling down this path, wondering what is around the next bend.

It's been so long, I've forgotten. It started for me with "The Voice," as I'm sure I've posted in prior iterations of this board. My parents despised rock and roll, but they played it in the cafeteria at college. It was too quiet to hear the words or anything, but one song always gave me a chill up my spine. It gave me that superlative feeling I'd felt in rare occasions previously, while searching for religious truth or seeing somebody committing a random act of kindness. It was so good, I figured it had to come from God. Well, I was a teenager and I had to be cool, so I thought I would find more success imitating the other teens instead of going on a religious journey, and all those visions and feelings of inspiration went away. Then, at college, things started coalescing to bring that feeling back in my life, and it motivated me to figure out which church I should join and all that. I remember while I was praying for guidance and direction, I saw what I swear was the cover of LDV in my mind; which I recognized when I saw it crawling through one of my friends' record collections several moons later.

So, my journey has been somewhat metaphysical. I did not think much of that song again until CKLW, across the pond in Canada, began playing "Blue World." It was THAT SOUND! That motivated me to figure out who these guys were that could trigger such feelings of inspiration merely with the sound of their music. It was problematic in the days before Internet. One had to dial the rheostat up and down to try to find the song. There was a bit of a problem, though. The beginning of "The Voice" sounded like a commercial, and so it took me forever to catch the beginning of that song. I eventually caught the name of the group, "The Moody Blues." I thought that was a dumb name for such a great act, but some shades of blue are totally captivating.

So, there was a lot of dialing up and down the rheostat. At some point, I became aware of the older Moodies songs. I may have liked them out of habit more than anything else, as I did not like them that much - "I'm Just a Singer," "Question," "Isn't Life Strange" - didn't cut it. My friends even made fun of them kind of - the riff in "IJAS" and the weird echo in "ILS." My friend Lxxxxxxx went on her mission and let me have her LDV album cos she wouldn't be able to listen whilst away. My friend Kxxx then had two LDV's and let me have one. So, my very first two albums ever were LDV's. Then, my friend C**** and I went to Cobo Hall, not having hung out since high school. We decided we would buy each other an album as a present. I got her an Oingo Boingo, and she got me TOSoL.

Then, there was that infamous Rock Line interview. It was a turning point. I was home from college for vacation or a weekend. I was feeling like an outcast again, a weirdo and outsider. My world in my brain that wanted to be good and please God and all that had isolated me from any kind of friendship. It was just me and my geeky friends from church. All the cool kids were bad. The thought occurred to me that being good was just a stage, and I was seriously contemplating I don't know what, maybe smoking or something. I heard that Justin and John of the Moodies were going to be on Rock Line, so I had to tune in. I needed to see them be disgusting like everybody else I'd heard on that show (except Phil Collins who called Rodney Dangerfield because nobody was calling in). I would hear them gross me out like everything else in the rock and roll industry, they would fall off their pedestal, and I would be justified in - maybe smoking or something.

Instead, J&J were polite and respectful and nice. Then, Justin started talking about stuff that I used to see/experience in my mind's eye when I was searching so hard for cosmic truth (God). Now, a word can define a thousand pictures, so the probability that he was describing the ephemeral place I used to go in the back of my mind, subconsciously, where everything was copacetic; is pretty thing. But his words worked. I decided then and there that if two of us could be weird like that, it was OK.

I spoke to a trusted lady my mom's age at church. I told her my problem. This rock star had saved me from making a stupid decision. I had the urge to thank him, but I was much too good to send fan mail, let alone to a rock star. But I wondered, in my naivete, if maybe he was having a hard time and would like to know there was another weirdo out here. It sounds so stupid now, but it was all so real then. The lady talked to her sons, one of whom said of the group, "They're mild," so she encouraged me to try to find a way to contact the band. I sent a letter to one address and then to another, but who knows where they went. Oh, how I wished they could be answered.

The little voice inside my head said to be calm. The answer would come to me. My brother was in radio, and I never knew he knew so much about my fascination with the group. But then, I started coming home from work (I was still living at my parents'.) and finding trade magazines on my bed opened to articles on the Moodies. One in particular was that interview where Justin said fans think they're cosmic gurus or something. Ouch. OK.

Before that, I recall there was a photo of Justin in the Detroit News. I had previously tried to see what the band looked like by crawling through rock and roll books in the bookstore. I thought I had found a photo, and the guys were all fat and wearing dirty denim kind of stuff. It was the wrong band, but that didn't make me like the music any less. Then, I saw that picture in the Detroit News and it was like love at first sight. I had never seen a more beautiful person. I kept going back to it. Finally, Mum, noticing something obsessive, said something like, "You can have that picture if you like." So, I cut out the article, and it remains in my old journal to this day, along with the articles from my brother.

My brother also bought me, through birthday and Christmas presents, probably the complete works of the Moodies. I used to want to put the albums up around the top of the wall, as the art was quite contemplatable and blue - much like Justin did at "Camelot," though I hadn't yet seen any photos of the baronial hall with the minstrels' gallery ... I ended up donating my collection to a radio station after I moved down here. WZLS played real vinyl and CD's. We took real requests. It was one of the last stations to do so, I believe, but the FCC kept changing its rules to let closet-operation investors boasting the ability to program three days in advance. A photo of me with Justin from the band's Christmas party scored me an interview with the Wall Street Journal when they covered the fight to keep radio real, but I digress.

It was awhile before I finally overcame my fears of getting a contact high and wore my mother down enough to consent to letting me go - that I saw my first concert. I sat on the grass with my friend Lxxxx at Pine Knob. I recall hitting Pontiac on the frontier of the concrete jungle. It was like a mighty transformation. Parsons' Project sang "Games People Play," and I have loved that song ever since. We then went on up to Clarkston, which became my adopted home town. I'm guessing it was something emotional that hit me that night. The next year, Lxxxx and I got good seats up frontish at Pine Knob. We saw them at the Masonic Temple, too; which was very haunting in a dreamy way.

Before I left Michigan, while living in Clarkston, I recall hearing Justin singing "IKYOTS." It was a make it or break it song on one of the big rock stations. Needless to say, I knew who it was from that feeling and couldn't wait to get through the construction on I-75 to cast my vote. The DJ was also a very big Justin fan. But after I moved here, I was in the car, driving home when "SIWL" came on the radio. This time, I pulled off on a dirt patch to hear the song through. I knew who it was and wanted to bask in that great feeling.

Well, I eventually moved down here and I've certainly put everybody to sleep. There are so many stories of friends helping me in serendipitous ways to help me get good tickets. Getting to shows is always an impossible combination of getting time off work, getting money together, getting a good ticket, and then getting to the other side of some last minute disaster. Many stories could be told about following promptings, making wrong turns, etc., etc.

Thanks for asking.

Thank you for joining and adding new life to the conversation. I'll try not to scare you away, but that's what I always say.

🙂 🙂 🙂

Bluejay said

Thank you too, Leslee. I am not a poster by nature, no social media... Rather I just read most of the time. But I might chime in from time to time. I had rather hoped more people would contribute their memories too. We are at quite a milestone and a momentous occasion here. A place we will never be again, all of us together.

Your conversations back and forth are always enjoyable to read, thought provoking and refreshingly honest. Its rather like sitting down at a table with two friends, sharing a cup of coffee and just listening in. Hope you don't mind.

So if I am quiet for the major part, please don't that you have scared me away. That's just my nature on here.

Have a really wonderful day.

They are indeed stimulating and tbought provoking to read. I myself don't have the time nor energy to devote as before to the forums. Personally I believe the forums have been abandoned largely because of intro to new format and ease of use of such social media as Facebook et al. Many were about 10 or so years ago latching onto the new groove in communicating with the latest means of blogging (I remember many moody loving folks enthusiastically embracing the then current offering of a way to get together online, and to me is a logical reason as to why participation naturally dropped so much here.

This format of discussing is not real time compared to the latest, and since all things have their time in the sun, the time for this, too, is almost up.

Those who drive the way technology goes is primarily the movers and shakers of it.

But I know your original intent here is to interplay individuals testimony to musical memoir.

I may be back in a little while to share before another 50 years have lapsed
😉