Mike Pinder, a singer, songwriter and keyboard player who helped form the progressive-rock band the Moody Blues and was among the first and most prominent exponents of an early electronic instrument, the Mellotron, died April 24 at his home near Sacramento. He was 82.
His son Daniel Pinder confirmed the death but did not provide a specific cause. Mr. Pinder was the last surviving member of the original lineup of the Moody Blues.
During the height of the group’s popularity, which ranged from 1967 until a voluntary hiatus in 1974, the group sold more than 50 million records and helped meld rock and spoken word with orchestral music in a sequence of seven concept albums, imbued with an ecstatic mysticism and eager sense of discovery.
Such songs as “Ride My See-Saw” (1968), “Question” (1970), “The Story in Your Eyes” (1971) and “Isn’t Life Strange” (1973) were favorites on both AM and FM radio, with an audience that ranged from high school teeny-boppers to longtime hippies and many listeners in-between.
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Mr. Pinder’s own songs for the group included “The Best Way to Travel” (1968), “Have You Heard” (1969) and “Melancholy Man” (1970).
The group’s most famous single was undoubtedly “Nights in White Satin.” Initially released in November 1967 to modest success, it charted again in 1972, when it spent two weeks at No. 2 on the U.S. charts. Further reissues followed in 1979 and 2010.
“Nights in White Satin” was the final track on an album called “Days of Future Passed.” The group had been hired to record a demonstration sampler for the newly formed Deram Records, a subsidiary of Decca. Justin Hayward, the Moody Blues frontman and guitarist as well as the song’s composer, recalled that “stereo then was confined to classical music, and they wanted to demonstrate stereo could be as interesting for rock-and-roll as it was with classical.”
Instead of the mixture of rock-and-roll standards combined with Dvorak’s “New World Symphony” that the company seems to have had in mind, the Moody Blues played a suite they had been working on about a day in the life of typical Britishers, from morning to night.
The record executives complained about an album with so many slow and “undanceable” tracks, but “Nights in White Satin” became an immediate and inexhaustible radio hit, still playing all over the world.
Along with the London Festival Orchestra, a house ensemble for the Decca Company, the album also featured a curious new sound. Mr. Pinder had worked for the company that made Mellotrons in Birmingham, England, and suggested that the instrument would be helpful to the group.
Based on an earlier instrument called the Chamberlin that had been developed in the late 1940s, the Mellotron, introduced in 1963, was effectively a few dozen tape players combined in an awkward and heavy box.
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When one played a note or a chord on a standard keyboard, one would trigger six-feet-long tapes of prerecorded music that could play for eight seconds before running out. Theoretically, any kind of sound could have been recorded on these tapes, but most musicians used a standard mixture of flute, brass, violins and a choir.
“Fans call it the ‘heavenly atmosphere,’” Mr. Pinder said of the instrument’s sound, which sounded a little like an orchestra from another world. It became an enormously popular studio instrument — you can hear it in recordings by King Crimson, Yes, David Bowie (“Space Oddity”) and in the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever,” where the eerie “flutes” at the beginning of the song were actually played on the Mellotron by Paul McCartney.
Yet it was a deucedly awkward instrument to play and keep. The recorded tapes were easily thrown out of alignment and were subject to warping. Mr. Pinder understood the Mellotron as few others, yet there was one concert when his own instrument broke open, the tapes running out of the box onto the stage. He got the instrument back into working order within 20 minutes, while the light crew entertained the audience by projecting cartoons.
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In 1971, Mr. Pinder guested on John Lennon’s “Imagine” album on the songs “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier (I Don’t Wanna Die)” and “Jealous Guy,” playing tambourine rather than the Mellotron he had intended to play because he said the tapes in Lennon’s instrument looked like “a bowl of spaghetti.”
Michael Thomas Pinder was born in the suburb of Erdington, a suburb of Birmingham, on Dec. 27, 1941. His father drove an intercity bus, and his mother was a barmaid at a local pub. As a youth, he was fascinated with space and rocket ships — they later turned up in his songs — and peers gave him the nickname “Mickey the Moon Boy.”
The Moody Blues was founded in Birmingham in 1964 and produced a debut LP. Mostly devoted to cover versions of R&B hits, the album had almost nothing to do with the rest of the group’s output. Still, one single, the poppy “Go Now,” made the Top 10 in the United States in late 1964-early 1965. In the United Kingdom, it reached No. 1.
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A fallow period followed, during which the band could not seem to create a follow-up hit. Two original members, guitarist and lead vocalist Denny Laine and bassist Clint Warwick, left, but Mr. Pinder, drummer Graeme Edge and singer and flutist Ray Thomas stayed on, and they would soon be joined by the singer and bassist John Lodge and singer-songwriter Hayward.
After the release of “Seventh Sojourn” (it was actually the group’s eighth album) and the following sabbatical, Mr. Pinder found himself tiring of touring and playing.
“I had gotten sick of the way things were in England — the weather, the politics — and I desperately wanted to move to America,” he told the Orange County Register. “It seemed like a wonderful hope for the rest of the world. I especially liked California, with people inventing things in their garages.”
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He would spend the rest of his life living in America. He became a consultant to the Atari computer corporation (primarily working on music synthesis) and made a solo album, “The Promise” (1976). In 1978, he recorded his last album with the Moody Blues, “Octave.” After that, he lived quietly and concentrated on raising his family.
Mr. Pinder’s first marriage was to Donna Arkoff; they had a son, Daniel, before divorcing. He then married Taralee Grant, with whom he had two sons, Matt Pinder and Michael Lee Pinder. All three sons became musicians, and Mr. Pinder occasionally accompanied them. His wife and children survive, along with a sister and four grandchildren.
He made two albums for his own label, One Step — “Among the Stars” (1994) and “A Planet With One Mind” (1995). In the latter disc, he read seven different stories from around the world. In 2018, the Moody Blues were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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For the Moody Blues, Mr. Pinder played (in addition to the Mellotron) various forms of keyboards and percussion, autoharp, tamboura, cello and bass, as well as acoustic and electric guitars. He also acted as the group’s main musical arranger up to 1978.
Mr. Pinder left the Moody Blues just as the Mellotron was being replaced by digital computers and would henceforth be only one sound out of a vast multiplicity.
He continued to use Mellotron sounds on his recordings, but they were now generated by newer, less bulky and more reliable synthesizers. His colleague Rick Wakeman, who had lugged Mellotrons around throughout his career as a member of Yes, felt no such sentiment and is said to have burned two of the instruments in celebration.
