CONCERT: The Moody Blues at the Performing Arts Center

Crafting one of the early collaborations of rock and orchestration albums, The Moody Blues continued to capture a mixture of spiritual psychedelic and opulent sounds. Go hear them tomorrow, Wednesday, May 18th in the lush acoustics of the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center. Show starts at 7:30pm.

Although they’re best known today for their lush, lyrically and musically profound psychedelic-era albums, the Moody Blues started out as one of the better R&B-based combos of the British Invasion. Their 1967 album Days of Future Passed mix of rock and classical sounds was new, and at first puzzled the record company, which didn’t know how to market it, but eventually the record was issued, first in England and later in America. It became a hit in England, propelled up the charts by the single “Nights in White Satin” (authored and sung by Hayward), which made the Top 20 in the U.K.; in America, the chosen single was another Hayward song, “Tuesday Afternoon.” All of it hooked directly into the aftermath of the Summer of Love, and the LP was — totally accidentally — timed perfectly to fall into the hands of listeners who were looking for an orchestral/psychedelic recording to follow works such as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.