·I know this site is in danger of beginning to look like an obituary column but I’ve been thinking about John Lodge, the Moody Blues bass player who died yesterday at the age of 82 and I wanted to share a story he once told me.
When I interviewed him a few years back he suggested that he might owe his success as a musician, at least in part, to a particularly narrow-minded school music teacher.
It seems this stubborn and blinkered schoolmaster disapproved of John’s teenage love of rock n roll so much that he banned him from music classes citing the fact that he didn’t know the date of Beethoven’s birth as a reason for his expulsion..
John was so incensed by the injustice and stupidity of this punishment that it made him all the more determined to chase his dreams and he set about practising the guitar whenever he could.
He had even tried to strike a compromise with the teacher. “I said that if he could teach me how to play A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On, then I’d find out when Beethoven was born. I thought it was a fair deal. I really wanted to know how A Whole Lot of Shakin’ worked. It sounds silly now but it was crucial to me.”
The grumpy teacher was having none of it and John found himself doing extra woodwork, a subject that by his own admission he was spectacularly bad at. “It was a disaster,”he told me. “I made an ashtray once and nearly chiselled my finger off.” Fortunately for the future of the then still unthought of Moody Blues, John’s fingers survived the ordeal. The rest, as they say, is history.
Not that fame or fortune came easily. By the time we spoke he was a multi millionaire rock star in his 60s but, as he pointed out, the Moodies really had to pay their dues before reaping any financiakl rewards.
“Even after our first big albums, Days of Future Past and In Search of the Lost Chord, were successful we were still travelling together in an old transit van. We had it fitted it out with airplane seats. That was our concession to luxury. It was so much more comfortable than sitting on the equipment.
Lodge told me that his original ambition for life after school was to become a car designer although he admits that he probably wouldn’t have been very good at it.
“I’ve loved cars for as long as I can remember and always rather fancied designing them. Then I found rock ‘n’ roll so I thought the best thing to do was to make a few pounds and try and buy a carofmyb own. He did too. Lodge’s pride joy back then was a beaten up old Austin A30. It cost a fiver. “Perfect!” he says.