My Vinyl Collection: The Moody Blues, In Search of the Lost Chord

The second acquisition in my new old vinyl collection arrived last week. It's "In Search of the Lost Chord" by The Moody Blues. There are several factors that made this my second choice to add to my new collection: I like the album, the cover art is great, and I have a lot of personal history with it. 

In Search of the Lost Chord by The Moody Blues. 

I'd heard most of the songs on this album on AOR radio long before the bus trip where it became a permanent part of my adolescent experience, but being a concept album, In Search of the Lost Chord really needs to be heard in its entirety a few times to sink in. And it's an easy experience. It can be done over any mellow-inducing substance. My favorite has always been a cup of tea. A rainy afternoon is usually best, but I suspect other weather conditions would be equally effective. 

When Jenny saw I had bought this album, she played the opening and the kids stopped what they were doing and said "That's scary." It's very unusual for anything to divert their attention from their screens. Trust me, the civil defense sirens have accidentally been sounded here, and they didn't look up, so to get their attention you know something has to be unusual. After that opening the album goes right into the most famous song on the album, and the only true single, "Ride My See Saw." Maybe "Voices In the Sky" was released as a single, not sure, but after "Ride My See Saw" the album goes into the sequence of concept songs about searching for the lost chord. I remember from my reading this is from a poem where a musician strikes the perfect note and angels sing and the heavens open, but he is never able to replicate that note and is driven mad by the experience of trying. 

My mother's musical tastes ran towards British Invasion bands and pop like Abba, and my father listened to country and roots bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival. The Moody Blues is a band that doesn't fit into any of those categories, so when I heard it on a long bus right headed towards a cross country meet in central Illinois, it was my first experience hearing most of these songs. My friend Royal had the cassette tape, and since we were senior members of the team nobody had the juice to complain that this was completely non-motivational running music. Can you imagine a school bus full of athletes in 2014 headed towards a sporting event while listening to Moody Blues "In Search of the Lost Chord." That in itself made my introduction to the album a very unique experience, but it was the music. I just dug it. And I misremembered. This event occurred two years earlier than I thought, and the reason we were allowed to play such an unusual album isn't that we were older, it was that the meet was a fresh-soph meet, and none of the older guys were there to shout it down, which no doubt they would have. Maybe even a few of us were just in the back of the bus listening softly, but no matter, this was something that didn't happen very often, if ever. 

What fifteen year old can't identify with the themes of searching for truth, meaning, and identity? 

I ran badly that day. Again. It was cold and rainy, of course, and I probably didn't even eat anything before I got on the bus. I didn't learn until nearly thirty years later the valves and vessels in my heart resembled the St. Louis cloverleaf, and I wasn't getting enough blood to vital areas to be competitive in an endurance sport. I'd like to run those competitions again with my new heart. That will never happen, but I have the keen memory of that bus trip, and the guys I was friends with then. They'd probably be surprised that moment in time had such a lasting impact on me. Maybe not. 

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My Vinyl Collection: Devo, Freedom of Choice

Well, I've finally taken the plunge and started collecting vinyl records. At least a few vinyl records. Most likely there's less than 100 albums in the world I'm even interested in owning, again. Hell, I don't even have a turntable right now. I think as I acquire albums I'll post a little bit about why I bought that album and maybe what it meant to me when I bought it the first time as a teenager, and now as a middle-aged man. My first acquisition was The Monster Club soundtrack. I've already written rather extensively about that, so here's the first album I decided to buy for the second time...

Devo's Freedom of Choice LP is the first piece in my vinyl album collection.

One of the very first vinyl albums I remember buying with my own money is Devo's Freedom of Choice. As a younger kid I spent most of my birthday money on Kiss albums, so this is probably the first serious album I ever bought, although most people seemed to think of Devo as little more than a novelty band and a one hit wonder. To me that never seemed to be true. I just got it from the beginning. Even at 12 I knew this was some serious shit to be dealt with. I probably got almost none of the lasting significance of what this band was about back then, I just dug it more than I had previously dug anything else. I couldn't have told you what albums they had done before this one, but I was hooked. Oh No, It's Devo only solidified my affection for the band. 

We rarely watched Saturday Night Live in our house because my father was off work and if he wasn't dragging us off somewhere to drink beer and work on cars, he just didn't like the show very much, but on Friday night there was a comedy show called Fridays, and that one we did watch. I remember seeing Devo perform "Gates Of Steel" and "Girl U Want" before the album ever came out, so "Whip It" wasn't even the first song I heard from this album. Fridays developed a reputation for showcasing a lot of the alternative and new wave music of that era, bands that weren't established enough for SNL. It was just the more cutting edge show, and skits like "Diner Of the Living Dead" were proof of that. 

Where did I buy Freedom of Choice? At the Ben Franklin store in Byron, Illinois. Same place I bought most of my albums. I believe albums generally cost $8.99 then, so I don't feel too badly about paying roughly twice that much for the album 25 years later. The owner and his family lived across the street from us, and for 25 years I've wanted to unburden the guilt and confess we nicked AC/DC's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap album from his store the night of my 12th birthday party. Sorry.  We played it 27 times  that night, and that's not even possible. We always had a pretty high end setup in our house, with expensive Kenwood and Pioneer products, so it's likely unless I invest in some expensive gear that I'll never hear this album the same way I did when I first heard it. 

I'm hoping to save enough money this month to buy an original energy dome, but that seems a little extravagant. I'll probably pass this year and wait until they come around again next Halloween. It makes me happy to have this album again facing outward from the shelf into the room like a monument to the enduring power of geekdom. 

August 10, 2026 update:

In our family we had a communal record collection that seemed to begin when the family did. My parents bought records, my brothers and I added our own as we got older, but nobody thought much about whose album was whose. They all went into the same collection. Those records were simply part of the household, and consequently part of my childhood.

When my mother died, we lost access to that record collection. Strangely, I didn't think very much about the records themselves at the time. Records disappear pretty easily when a household disappears. Years later, though, vinyl came back, and I started thinking about those albums again. Not just the music, but the objects themselves—the covers I had stared at, the labels I recognized instantly, the records somebody brought home and put into the family collection forty or fifty years ago.

I had said I would never buy vinyl records again. Eventually I started buying back some of the albums that had meant the most to me. That's really what these posts were about. I wasn't trying to assemble the world's greatest record collection. In some way I was trying to reconstruct ours.

Of course, I eventually realized that's impossible. I can buy another copy of Freedom of Choice, Jailbreak, Abraxas or In Search of the Lost Chord. It can be the same pressing, have the same cover and make exactly the same sounds. But it can never be that copy. It isn't the record my uncle brought over on the weekend or the one my brothers and I put back on the shelf. It wasn't sitting in our house when I was seven or twelve or fifteen years old.

Those records are gone. These are replacements. I suppose collecting them again was my way of discovering that there's a difference.

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