Mike Pinder, the last surviving founding member of the Moody Blues, whose innovative use of the Mellotron – a forerunner of the sampler – helped establish the band as pioneers of progressive rock, died today. Wednesday at his home in the Sacramento area. He was 82 years old.
His son Dan confirmed the death. He said his father had difficulty breathing and had been in hospice care for several days.
The Moody Blues were formed in 1964, with a lineup that included Mr. Pinder played keyboards, Denny Laine played guitar, Graeme Edge played drums, Ray Thomas played flute and Clint Warwick played bass. Group “Go now!”, by Mr. Laine sang, which rose to number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Mr. Laine and Mr. Warwick left after the release of the band’s first album, “The Magnificent Moodies” (1965), and were replaced by Justin Hayward and John Lodge. The change in personnel set the stage for a change in direction: from R&B-tinged rock to the psychedelic orchestral sound that the Moody Blues embodied so vividly on their breakthrough 1967 album, “Days of Future Passed”.
Mr. Pinder used to do testing work at the Mellotron factory in Birmingham, England, before Moody Blues was founded. Playing the company’s Mark II model for the first time was “my first ‘man on the moon’ event,” he told British music website Brumbeat.
So he understood the musical possibilities of using the Mellotron, an electromechanical keyboard that uses tape loops to simulate the sounds and rhythms of an orchestra, in “Days of Future Passed” and beyond. .
“With ‘Tron, I was able to develop the melodies and countermelody of Moody Blues songs,’” Mr. Pinder told Rolling Stone in 2018 for an oral history of “Nights in White Satin,” the album’s signature song written and sung by Mr. Hayward. “When you become an orchestra, I think you become an arranger by default. I can create backdrops and scenery for the tunes the guys are writing.”
After Mr. Pinder’s death, Mr. Hayward wrote on Facebook: “Mike is a natural musician who can play any style of music with warmth and love. His re-imagining and rebuilding of the Mellotron (literally) gave us our original, identifiable sound.”
Mr. Pinder said that he introduced the Mellotron to John Lennon. It was played by Paul McCartney on The Beatles’ 1967 single “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
“Days of Future Passed” also features a baritone recitation by Mr. Pinder in “Late Lament”, the mystical coda (written by Mr. Edge) to “Nights in White Satin”. Mr. Pinder was lying “in a state of meditation,” he said in the oral history, when he recited the famous opening poem, “Breathe deeply the gathering gloom/Watch the lights fade from every room .”
Michael Thomas Pinder was born on 27 December 1941 in Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham, and grew up in nearby Kingstanding. His father, Bertram, was a bus driver, and his mother, Gladys (Lay) Pinder, was a waitress.
Michael had no formal training and began playing piano and guitar at a young age. He was in the British Army, where he was performing with a band when he first heard The Beatles.
“When I heard ‘Love Me Do,’ it was like, ‘Okay, that’s what I’ve been waiting for.’” he told the website Classic Bands in an undated interview. “I was waiting for that signal because the music scene in England up until then was quite poor.”
When they formed in 1964, the Moody Blues were known as M&B 5, using the initials of the brewery that owned the clubs and dance halls where they performed. The name was a ploy to get money from the brewery to fund the band. It doesn’t work. So, Mr. Pinder told Classic Bands, he was inspired to create the name Moody Blues by attaching “the mood that influenced the changes of the music” and the fact that the band’s repertoire at the time it was mainly rhythm and blues.
Mr. Pinder remained with the Moody Blues until 1978, providing vocals and contributing songs and continuing to use the Mellotron on albums such as “In Search of the Lost Chord” (1968) and “On the Threshold of a Dream” (1969). He switched to another electromechanical keyboard, the Chamberlin, for “Seventh Sojourn” (1972) and a synthesizer for “Octave” (1978)..
By that time, he had released a solo album, “The Promise,” in 1976. He spent many years in the field, some of that time consulting on composing music for computers for Atari, a video game manufacturer, before recording their second album. , “Among the Stars,” in 1995. He also recorded two children’s albums, “Planet With One Mind” (1995) and “A People With One Heart” (1996), in which he narrated stories, accompanied by his musical arrangements. .
“We wanted stories that had a lot of meaning,” he told The San Francisco Examiner in 1997, referring to the search for the right picture books that he pursued with his wife, Taralee (Grant) Pinder. “We have read hundreds of books. We went through a lot of books like ‘The rabbit went down to the mouse’s house to drink a cup of tea’. But we’re looking for books like ‘The Rabbit Went Down to the Mouse’s House and Discussed Zen in Making Tea.'”
In addition to his wife and son Daniel, from his marriage to Donna Arkoff, which ended in divorce, Mr. Pinder is survived by two other sons, Michael and Matthew, from his second marriage; four grandchildren; and a sister, Monica Hackett.
After the Moody Blues were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 – nearly 30 years after they first qualified – Mr. Pinder wrote about the ceremony on his website.
“All the bands brought their children and grandchildren with them and it was magical,” he wrote. He added: “Many MB fans asked why I didn’t speak at the induction ceremony, but by the time Moodies took the stage, we were five hours into the ceremony. The oldest of the inductees arrived the latest.”
