Your song named after a day of the week song of the day is “Tuesday Afternoon” by the Moody Blues. It was included on the band’s classic 1967 album, Days of Future Passed and released as a single in May of 1968. The single peaked at #24 on the Billboard Hot 100, while the album rose all the way to #3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
The Moody Blues have been described as a “symphonic rock” band, and I suppose that’s apt. Others toss them into the prog rock bucket; I disagree with that, as they lacked some of the musical histrionics for histrionics’ sake that defined some other prog rock bands of the day, such as Yes or Rush. The Moody Blues were always a little more pop-oriented, their songs more melodic, their arrangements more lush, as with this one.
Days of Future Passed was a concept album before there really were concept albums, the said concept being a chronicle of a typical day. On the album, “Tuesday Afternoon” was part of a longer track titled “Afternoon,” with the moniker “Forever Afternoon (Tuesday?).” Justin Hayward, the band’s guitarist and vocalist on this particular track, said he wrote the tune on a Tuesday afternoon in Lypiatt Park in western England, “with guitar and joint in hand.” It kind of sounds like that.
About the Blues’ designation as a “symphonic rock” band. In lieu of expensive real string players (which they did use for bridging tracks on the album), the band used—on this and other tunes—a device called a Mellotron. It kind of functioned like a digital sampling synthesizer before there were synthesizers. It was loaded up with lots of individual swatches of magnetic tape, each containing a short analog recording of an instrument or group of instruments at a specific pitch. You press a key on the keyboard and the corresponding tape loads up and plays, thus giving you the sound of a very slow and cumbersome orchestra. You’ve probably heard the Mellotron on tunes from a bunch of prog rockers in the ’60s, who used it to fill out their sound; it was also heavily featured on the classic Beatles’ track, “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
The Moody Blues continued to have success for several decades. They were more of an album band than a singles one, although they did have a fair number of hit singles, including “Go Now” (#10 in 1964), “Question” (#21 in 1970), “The Story in Your Eyes” (#23 in 1971), “Nights in White Satin” (#2 in 1972), “I’m Just a Singer (In a Rock and Roll Band)” (#12 in 1973), “Gemini Dream” and “The Voice” (#12 and #15 respectively in 1981), and my personal favorite, “Your Wildest Dreams” (#9 in 1986). That’s a pretty good run, all things considered.
The band, in one form or another, continued on for a few decades longer, releasing their last album (December) in 2003 and performing live until 2018, the year they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Of the group’s original members, bassist Clint Warwick passed away in 2004, vocalist Ray Thomas passed away in 2018, and drummer Graeme Edge passed away in 2021. Keyboardist Mike Pinder, guitarist Denny Laine, bassist John Lodge, and guitarist Justin Hayward are still with us.
