Nights In White Satin by The Moody Blues

Another memory from <God, I can't believe it...> over 50 years ago <sigh> Am I REALLY THAT old? It's amazing what memories a song can bring back. I can't remember what I had for breakfast just a few hours ago, but a song from over 50 years ago can bring back a memory so vivid and clear that it could have just happened.

1969, one hell of a year...Graduated high school, scared stiff over the "draft", gained a "Love", enlisted in the Navy and had no idea of what to expect, went to a high school prom - that dress REALLY accented her bu...bre..."womanly" features, began a career that lasted almost 50 years...and lost a "love". 

Nights In White Satin by The Moody Blues, one of the few "popular" songs that made it into my "country music" era. The video above, consists of clips of Paris and the famous monuments there, and the band singing the song from a staircase to in front of what appears to be a statue and a patterned room. The video has over 63 million views since its upload in 2006.

Justin Hayward started writing the song after he was dumped by a girlfriend. Remembering a gift a different girlfriend had given him he eventually wrote a song that became a multi million-selling, era-defining classic.

First released in November 1967, Nights In White Satin was a masterpiece that bridged pop and symphonic music, with a lyric ripped directly from Hayward’s personal life – it finds him caught between ecstasy and despair, between the end of one love affair while embarking on a new one.

“There was a lot of emotion that went into the song,” Hayward affirms. “I was nineteen or twenty at the time, living in a two-room flat in Bayswater with Graeme [Edge, Moody Blues drummer] and our girlfriends. I came back from a gig one night, around four or five in the morning, when the birds were just twittering, I sat on the side of the bed and wrote a couple of verses. The only people writing in the Moodies then were [keyboard player] Mike Pinder and myself. He’d been working on a song called Dawn Is A Feeling, which I’d heard him fiddling around with, and I knew the other guys were expecting something from me at rehearsal the next day.”

Searching for some kind of metaphor for his emotional turmoil, Hayward remembered the recent gift he’d been given. “Another girlfriend, who was neither the one that had just dumped me or the one that I was then going with, had given me some white satin sheets. They just happened to be in my suitcase and I was trying them out in this place that Graeme and I lived in. They were very romantic-looking, but totally impractical.”

Shaped by producer Tony Clarke and arranger/conductor Peter Knight, Nights In White Satin became a sumptuous epic in the studio. It formed the centerpiece of the Moodies’ second album, Days Of Future Passed, a dawn-to-darkness song cycle that made full use of the Mellotron’s ability to simulate an orchestra. Topped off by a spoken-word poem, Late Lament, Hayward’s song clocked in at nearly seven and a half minutes. Nights was duly edited down as a single, although not everyone at Deram, Decca’s new subsidiary label, was convinced of its worth.

The song continues to enjoy a prolonged afterlife. South Carolina’s Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach has unveiled the Nights In White Satin: The Trip - theme park, a sensory experience based on Hayward’s tune, with on-board audio, digital effects and psychedelic imagery.

So, what's MY memory of a ROCK song invading my era of country and western music? Like it's writer, I felt as though I had been "dumped" by my then girlfriend. I remember I was in the Navy, just out of bootcamp and just entered Electronic Technician "A" school at Great lakes, Ill. On a weekend liberty I went to my girlfriend's apartment in Chicago. When I left I kinda felt as if I had just gotten dumped. On the train ride back to Great Lakes I remember hearing the song and the "low and slow" "Oh I love you oh how I love you." Kinda had me down for a while.

The down feeling didn't last long, in a few months when I graduated, I was sent to California...I learned what "I wish they all could be California girls" meant (I later married one). The Moody Blues and hometown girls were quickly forgotten. It's good that when you are young you can just "push the past aside" and start over again. When you get older, it's harder to just "push stuff aside" and start over. Our character might say "forget it - move on" but our emotions, that only strengthen over the years, say "not yet, give it one more try, maybe something can be worked out". ... It's those strengthened emotions that let us smile and shake hands with one of those things that didn't go exactly the way we wanted it to. How we handle memories adds to those qualities that define our character. 

Now when I hear Nights in White Satan, I get nostalgic and remember home - new Lenox Ill., high school, the draft, a girl. Memories remind me that life changes, instead of being sad over lost loves, things that I did wrong or things I should have done or not done, I'm happy that I had an opportunity to just live and add strength to my emotions and build the qualities distinctive to the Pogi Americano.