Recorded in the late spring and summer of 1969 and released in October of that year, To Our Children's Children's Children marked the first release from the Moody Blues' own Threshold Records label -- essentially a finished work right down to the jacket design as delivered to Decca/London Records, without any of the fighting and negotiation that had been required to get their prior albums issued in the desired form. Mostly written and conceived on a long rest after extensive touring behind their prior album, the record ...
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Recorded in the late spring and summer of 1969 and released in October of that year, To Our Children's Children's Children marked the first release from the Moody Blues' own Threshold Records label -- essentially a finished work right down to the jacket design as delivered to Decca/London Records, without any of the fighting and negotiation that had been required to get their prior albums issued in the desired form. Mostly written and conceived on a long rest after extensive touring behind their prior album, the record showed the band pulling effectively in several directions at once, generating rich, powerful electronic/psychedelic pieces such as "Beyond" and "Higher and Higher," driving rock & roll -- John Lodge's bass was rapidly becoming their anchor and their most formidable rock instrument -- and lush, trippy psychedelic ballads ("Out and In," "Watching and Waiting"), plus one catchy, hook-laden psychedelic pop number ("Gypsy"), all of it somehow held together across two sides, the hard rock and the trippy sensibilities, the idealism and the hedonism all balanced in a kind of perfect harmony that gave the album something for almost every rock listener above the age of 13 to enjoy. Although there was never a hit single off of the album, it still reached number two in England and number 14 in America, demonstrating that the group was in a position to hold onto the audience it had developed over its previous three albums and even expand it slightly as a pure LP listenership, without the benefit of AM radio play to reach the most casual listeners. It took longer to get certified gold than their preceding or succeeding albums, but its sales were won via retail, one LP listener at a time (with a tiny boost from the relatively new field of FM radio), rather than wholesale from AM play of some catchy single or other, and that showed how big the group's actual fan base had become in just two years. Their next tour of the United States would find them booked into a festival alongside the likes of the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, Ten Years After, and the Band, all then among the elite of the rock world. Although To Our Children's Children's Children was remastered quite nicely in 1997 as part of the "Moody Blues Remasters" series, the 2006-released Deluxe Edition of To Our Children's Children's Children features the cleanest mix and mastering of the album ever heard. The first disc offers a dual-layer SACD/CD edition of the album, on which every one of the dozens of guitar parts and massed vocal parts can be heard in sharp relief, without any compromise in the total listening experience of each song. At the same time, hearing the album in this way, one goes get a close-up look at the corner into which the group had painted itself by relying on the recording studio's capabilities for overdubbing -- numbers like "Watching and Waiting" or "Eternity Road," with their subtleties revealed right down to the six or more guitars in evidence on the latter, come across as pure studio creations that would have been (and, indeed, were) impossible to re-create on-stage. Even "Watching and Waiting," the group's chosen single off of the album, proved impossible to do in concert, and only "Gypsy" ever found a place in their repertory (though in concerts from 2005, using technology available 30-some years later and an augmented lineup, it was possible for them to do "Higher and Higher" on-stage). The second disc, which runs even longer than the original album, opens with the original, unfaded master of "Gypsy," which is not only a generation up on any prior version of the song but offers it complete, without the cross fades needed for its inclusion on the album. "Candle of Life" and "Sun Is Still Shining" are also here. The main body of the CD, however, is given over to eight songs performed live by the group for the BBC's David Symonds Show on December 17, 1969. This is just about worth the price of admission by itself, as a live-in-the-studio...
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Add this copy of To Our Children's Children's Children to cart. $27.74, good condition, Sold by Goodwill of Silicon Valley rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from San Jose, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2006 by Universal International.
Add this copy of To Our Children's Children's Children to cart. $49.93, very good condition, Sold by Southern Maryland Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Waldorf, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2006 by INgrooves Fontana/Polydor.
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