Justin Hayward was bewitching at the Garde
Moody Blues guitar legend summoned a gateway to the past
As a Saturday full moon rode the autumn night, inside the stately old Garde Arts Center believed by many to be haunted, Moody Blues hitmaker Justin Hayward cast a signficant spell of beautiful, intertwining musical memories.
The spectral metaphors are intentional.
After all, Hayward, who turns 73 today, told a modest but devoted Garde audience that he’s felt the presence of a ghost for most of his life. That ghost is Hayward himself — the Ghost of Justin Past, Dickens might have said.
“Interviewers always ask,” Hayward explained, “what I was thinking or remember about writing ‘Nights in White Satin’ or ‘Tuesday Afternoon’ or whatever. I think a lot of us have to contemplate the ghosts of ourselves. Well, my ghost is here tonight.”
With that cue, a roadie carted out a life-size cardboard likeness of a 1967-era Hayward from a point in time when the Moodies were transitioning into one of the biggest bands in the world. It was a very funny moment, further heightened when Hayward made an observation about proper English sartorial customs regarding shoes.
In truth, Hayward doesn’t look or sound that much different than the youthful Hayward of a half-century ago. He’s tall, was elegantly dressed in black, and demonstrated the gentle, polite demeanor and dry wit Moodies fans have appreciated for years. His persona perfectly reflects his songs, which are melancholic, thoughtful, acutely evocative — both lyrically and structurally — and, while often focused on romantic love or relationships, can also ponder social, political or philosophical topics.
To the veteran fan’s ear, of course, all Moody Blues songs — Hayward’s as well as those by John Lodge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Graeme Edge (his bandmates in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame act) — are associated with a lush, orchestral sound. Their fusion of hyper-melodic pop and fourpart vocal harmonies with album-long conceptual themes and arrangements helped give birth to progressive rock and are as instantly identifiable as THEIRS as any band out there.
To see Hayward present a cross-section of his part of this history in a strippeddown setting on his “All the Way” tour was revealing, riveting, and fresh. He played six- or 12-string acoustic guitar the entire set — no electric — and was accompanied by an intuitive and now-veteran solo band comprising guitarist Mike Dawes, keyboardist/vocalist Julie Ragins, and flutist/ vocalist Karmen Gould.
The acoustic nature captured what it must have been like when Hayward wrote the songs — before the Moodies applied their distinctive and transformative magic. Obviously, the core melodies and structures were there, but it was astonishing how simple but clever flourishes from Gould, Ragins and Dawes provided just the right about of memory-twitching context and yet preserved the intimate original blueprints Hayward wanted to convey. His voice has held up well and, when he couldn’t hit or sustain a particular note, he subtly altered the melody or Ragins smoothly stepped in.
It was a masterful set list with the requisite hits — “Nights” and “Tuesday,” “Question,” “I Know You’re Out There Somewhere,” “The Story in Your Eyes,” “Your Wildest Dreams” — and a rich cross-section of essential Moodies’ album tracks — “Lovely to See You,” “The Actor,” “Dawning is the Day,” “Are You Sitting Comfortably,” “Voices in the Sky,” and “Haunted” (which, sadly in context, is not about a ghost).
They also opened the evening with “Who Are You Now” from Hayward’s “Blue Jays” collaboration with Lodge, and of course included the best Justin Hayward Song Not Actually Written By Justin Hayward: “Forever Autumn” from Jeff Wayne’s “War of the Worlds” soundtrack.
One of the evening’s highlights was — perhaps surprisingly to those who hadn’t heard it before and were utterly transfixed by it — a relatively recent song, “The Western
In truth, Hayward doesn’t look or sound that much different than the youthful Hayward of a half-century ago. He’s tall, was elegantly dressed in black, and demonstrated the gentle, polite demeanor and dry wit Moodies fans have appreciated for years.
Sky” from Hayward’s 2016 “Spirits of the Western Sky” solo recording. It’s as beautiful as anything he’s ever written. He introduced the tune with a wistful story about growing up in Swindon in western England and sharing a bedroom with his older brother. It came with a window that looked out on consistently gorgeous sunsets. Those views, Hayward said, came to represent all their hopes and possibilities for the future and what might be out there in the wide world.
It’s also important to note the deceptively simple backdrop, which was a stage-wide landscape of a seashore with a towering castle over looking a rocky beach and, in the distance, a small island with lighthouse. Dead center was a setting — or rising? — sun amidst an array of melting crayon hues. Simple enough, right?
But the lighting throughout the set — with different colored spots subtly highlighting various sections of the seascape at different times — was eerily magical and became an effective, vivid tool through which the mood of each song was further etched in our brains.
In the end, two weeks before Halloween, we didn’t need a Ouija board or a clairvoyant to summon our own ghosts Saturday night. A batch of songs from one of the most gifted composers in rock history, presented with passion and skill and a fond awareness of the brittle nature of time and memory, were all we needed to soar back into our own histories.