Song of the Day 1/13: The Moody Blues, “Isn’t Life Strange”
Scanning one of those People We Lost in 2025 lists the other day, I realized I missed memorializing John Lodge, bassist for the Moody Blues, back when he died in October at age 82.
Lodge wasn’t an original member of the band. He joined along with guitarist Justin Hayward in 1966, after its first lineup fell apart with the departure of lead singer Denny Laine. In a band never known for hell-raising, Lodge was the most straight-laced member: When the Moodies, the mildest of rock’s ’60s drug experimenters, all took an acid trip together, Lodge, a lifelong Christian, abstained.
Being the hardest-rocking member of the Moody Blues is a sort of tallest-midget honor, but in a band where everyone wrote and the general vibe was New Age hippie-dippy, his songs like “Ride My See-Saw” and “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)” were often the hard-driving highlights of their string of hit albums from the late ’60s through the ’70s.
He had a milder side, too. “Isn’t Life Strange,” from the 1972 album “Seventh Sojourn,” is a good example. What sounds like an orchestra is Mike Pinder’s customized Mellotron, and the soaring chorus Lodge shares with Hayward put it on PopMatters’ list of 100 greatest prog rock songs. Though the Moodies were always an album band, this was one of their higher-charting singles – No. 13 in the UK, No. 29 in America.
Lodge’s death leaves Hayward the last living member of the band’s classic lineup. Flautist Ray Thomas died in 2018, keyboard player Mike Pinder in 2024 and drummer Graeme Edge in 2021. Here they are in 1968 lip-synching “Ride My See-Saw.”
Which Moodie wrote that awful poetry? You know–
“Breathe deep the gathering gloom, watchlights fade from every room
Bedsitter people sit back and lament, another day’s useless energy spent”
Graeme Edge. You did those drugs, you remember what it was like. Or maybe not.
I do.
But, when high, we still laughed at that ‘poetry’.
Laughed more, actually. After all, we were high.
It’s a fine line between clever and stupid.
When the white eagle of the North is flying overhead
The browns, reds and golds of autumn lie in the gutter, dead
Remember then, that summer birds with wings of fire flaying
Come to witness spring’s new hope, born of leaves decaying
As new life will come from death, love will come at leisure
Love of love, love of life and giving without measure
Gives in return a wondrous yearn of a promise almost seen
Live hand-in-hand and together we’ll stand on the threshold of a dream
We had this played at our wedding. I think that it confused some of the attendees! Especially the line about lying in the gutter, dead.