Moody Blues – Ride My See Saw

The tape hiss is the first thing I imagine, that soft halo around a control-room light late in 1968, before a count-in sends the band charging forward. The Moody Blues had already torn up their earlier beat-group image and rebuilt themselves as dreamers with a rock backbone, fusing poetry and electricity. On “Ride My See-Saw,” they chose to start not with a sighing ballad but with a sprint—opening, in practical terms, the “proper” song portion of In Search of the Lost Chord after the brief spoken prologue “Departure.” It’s one of those moments when a band announces a chapter change without needing to say so out loud.

Context matters. In 1967, Days of Future Passed gave The Moody Blues their symphonic reputation, but it came with a caveat: outside orchestral elements helped color that breakthrough. By 1968, the group wanted self-sufficiency. In Search of the Lost Chord was released on Deram Records and produced by Tony Clarke, the figure who shepherded their classic run, but this time the textures were largely homegrown—up from the rhythm section, out through Justin Hayward’s chiming lines, and into the air via Mike Pinder’s Mellotron. “Ride My See-Saw,” written by bassist John Lodge, draws a thick underlining beneath that pivot. It is a manifesto in four minutes: sharp, propulsive, and suspicious of any institution that confuses busyness with learning.

The arrangement attacks in stages. First the riff—lean, insistent, slightly serrated—announces itself like a rotating sign seen from the window of a fast car. Lodge’s bass doesn’t merely support; it thrusts, pushing the beat with a rubber-band spring that gives the groove both lift and bite. Graeme Edge’s drumming is clean and forward, with a crisp hi-hat that glints like light on chrome. Over that foundation, Hayward’s guitar drives the melody in tight formation, clipping its consonants and releasing them with a bright, forward midrange. There’s little mud here. The frequencies lock together, making the chorus feel like a runway acceleration rather than a gear change.

Then the Mellotron arrives—not as syrup, but as architecture. Pinder’s tape-based keyboard breathes in swells that stand the hairs at your wrist upright. It mimics strings without pretending to be them; there’s a granular grain to the attack that some players hide, but The Moody Blues made integral. You can practically hear the mechanical throat clearing just before a chord blooms. That tactility suits the lyric’s subject: movement, learning, the friction between institutional education and lived understanding. This piece of music abhors stasis.

Vocally, the band deploys their signature blend without tipping into haze. Their harmonies are not a chorus of angels; they are a set of voices with human edges, stacked with intention. The phrasing lands on downbeats like a footstep finding the exact stair. When the refrain cycles back, it does so with a sense of kinetic inevitability. The words may question, but the music insists: keep moving, keep thinking, keep questioning the ride.

There’s a practical, almost physical genius to the production. Clarke and the group favor clarity over excess reverb, so each strike has a short tail and a defined place. The rhythm guitar sits slightly left of center, as if you could lean toward it and feel the cabinet bark at you. The Mellotron occupies a haloed space above, and Ray Thomas’s contributions—often flute elsewhere on the album—here feel tucked in, letting the engine run unimpeded. The stereo field is purposeful, not a gimmick. Play it on good speakers and the track unfolds like a well-drawn plan.

Thematically, “Ride My See-Saw” is about the strange bargain of modernity—how we’re taught to accumulate facts but not necessarily to integrate them. The title image is perfect: a children’s contraption dependent on balance and reciprocity, turned into a metaphor for swings between certainty and doubt. The band had always trafficked in ideas, but here they do it with a rocker’s impatience. If Days of Future Passed asked you to contemplate, In Search of the Lost Chord often asks you to act, or at least to interrogate the stories you’ve been told.

I keep coming back to the sensation of speed. Not chaos—speed. The band accelerates without losing articulation. It’s partly the pocket: a slightly urgent tempo that invites head-nods rather than moshes. It’s also the discipline of the parts. There’s no clutter. Even when the Mellotron blooms, it leaves holes for the drums to punch through, and the bass refuses to blur. If you’ve ever driven down an evening highway with reflections flickering on the windshield, you’ll recognize the pacing.

One of the vignettes I carry with this song is a memory of a college library basement: fluorescent lights, dust motes, the thud of textbooks on a rolling cart. I’d slipped on a pair of studio headphones and suddenly the basement’s institutional blankness collided with the song’s demand to think for myself. The irony wasn’t lost on me. In that moment, the band’s late-sixties critique felt startlingly contemporary. The see-saw still moves, even if the fulcrum has shifted from lecture halls to timelines and feeds.

Another vignette: a friend’s cramped apartment, cheap amp in the corner, and a battered six-string with action so high it fought every chord. He tried to teach me the main figure; I failed gloriously, but what stuck was the muscle memory of that first interval jump, the way your hand has to trust the distance. The efficacy of the song’s riff is its physicality. It does not ask you to admire; it demands that you join, even if your hands stumble.

And then a third: a long overnight bus after a gig, fellow passengers asleep, the road stitching a seam through darkness. I played the track on a modest player, and even without premium audio the edges stayed sharp. Part of that is the midrange-forward mix of late-sixties rock, but part is composition. You can roll high end off, and the bones remain.

At a career level, this track consolidates a turning point. 1968 was a year of upheaval; the band’s choice to craft an album dense with self-played textures reads as both aesthetic and philosophical. They were no longer the group who needed an outside orchestra to articulate grandeur. They had Pinder’s machines, Thomas’s melodic instincts, Hayward’s melodic gifts, Lodge’s structural savvy, and Edge’s sense of timing. Under Tony Clarke’s steady ear, they shaped a sonic identity that would carry them through A Question of Balance and beyond. “Ride My See-Saw” isn’t their most famous single, but it’s arguably one of their most essential statements of intent.

Listen to the room within the track. It’s not cavernous; it’s tight enough that you can sense microphone proximity. The snare has a square shoulder. The cymbals withdraw quickly, leaving space rather than a spill. When the band punches into the chorus, the Mellotron raises the ceiling by a foot. The illusion is of a modest studio made larger by confidence, not by echo.

The interplay between guitar and Mellotron is especially telling. Hayward’s tone here lives somewhere between chime and bite, with enough sustain to smear the edges of the riff without losing contour. The keyboard’s strings—tape-sourced and proudly so—supply a tensile canopy that translates skepticism into sound. There’s a reason many sources note the group’s influence on later symphonic-rock and art-pop bands: they made the uncanny feel normal, and they did it with parts you could diagram.

You can hear, too, why the song worked as a single. It’s immediate. It reportedly made chart appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, the kind of performance that keeps a band in the conversation even when their ambitions exceed the singles market. The B-side in some territories was “A Simple Game,” a Mike Pinder composition—a pairing that reveals the group’s range from riff-forward mover to contemplative interior.

The lyric’s target remains relevant. The see-saw between knowledge and wisdom, between input and integration, feels sharper in an age of constant pings. The Moody Blues didn’t resolve that tension; they animated it. The band’s harmonies carry hints of exhortation without sermonizing. You can take the song as critique, as pep talk, or as a document of relief: a reminder that momentum is not the same as meaning, but it can be a route toward it when matched with attention.

“Ride My See-Saw” also underlines how the group could balance muscularity with color. Compared to some of their luxuriant ballads, this is flint and steel. Yet even here, color bleeds through: a Mellotron swell that briefly resembles woodwinds; a backing-vocal stack that flashes daylight; a drum fill that loosens its shoulders before the final chorus. In a different band’s hands, the track might have been simply a barnburner. In The Moody Blues’ hands, it becomes a small theatre where philosophy shares the stage with foot-tapping release.

Despite the song’s lack of a prominent piano role, the band’s arrangement sensibility shows a keyboardist’s sense of voicing: lines interlock rather than collide. It’s one reason the track ages well. Many recordings from this era collapse into mush on modern systems, but this one presents as legible. You sense how the engineers carved lanes so that nothing has to shout to be heard. When you upgrade to better home audio, the separation sharpens; when you reduce it to a phone speaker, the essential angles remain.

The album framing brings the meaning home. In Search of the Lost Chord chases transcendence—through poetry, meditation, myth, and playful whimsy. That a song about riding the machinery of education opens the gate is a delightful paradox. The transcendence they seek isn’t escapism; it’s a clearer way of being present. The see-saw is only fun if both riders cooperate; knowledge only becomes wisdom when it enters circulation with experience.

As you revisit the track, try two passes: one to ride the riff, and another to attend to the subtleties of the backing vocals and Mellotron swells. The first pass will raise your pulse; the second deepens your respect. If you’re a player, sit with the right-hand figure on a keyboard and feel how the intervals want to pull forward. If you’re a strummer, the down-stroke pattern puts your wrist on a conveyor belt; resist the urge to over-strum. The song asks for drive, not bluster.

“Sometimes the fastest songs reveal the slowest truths.”

The Moody Blues remain a peculiar case in the rock canon: too philosophical for some, too direct for others. “Ride My See-Saw” proves they could be a rock band first and a think tank second, or perhaps both at once. It’s an early statement that their mystical leanings would not cost them their punch. Tony Clarke’s production strikes the balance—unfussy, energetic, attentive without being precious. And as a listening experience, it rewards both volume and focus.

A final note about relevance. In an era of “content,” the distinction between learning and processing can blur. This track reminds me to ask better questions about the inputs I accept and the outputs I celebrate. It doesn’t wag a finger; it holds up a mirror while the drums keep time. That’s a trick as old as the see-saw itself.

If you’ve been away from The Moody Blues for a while, this is a perfect re-entry point. Spin it, feel the push, and enjoy the view from the midpoint where momentum and reflection meet. The ride is still worth taking, and the ground still rises to meet you.

Listening tip: if you’re using a music streaming subscription, queue the track right after “Departure” to feel the album’s intended launch. And if you’re chasing the tactile bloom of the Mellotron’s tape strings, a modest volume lift will show you how those harmonics unspool without becoming harsh. For an even more revealing experience, consider listening through studio headphones once to catch the way the harmonies sit just behind the riff, then play it aloud to let the drums work the room.

Listening Recommendations

1. The Moody Blues – “Question” (1970): Similar philosophical urgency, but with acoustic strum and orchestral lift that explodes into a searching refrain.

2. The Zombies – “Time of the Season” (1968): Late-sixties clarity and groove with call-and-response vocals and organ textures that prize space over clutter.

3. Status Quo – “Pictures of Matchstick Men” (1968): Psychedelic riff-craft with a hypnotic pattern that spirals upward, echoing the era’s fascination with texture.

4. Procol Harum – “Quite Rightly So” (1968): Grand organ and gritty drive; a meeting point of baroque color and rock insistence.

5. Traffic – “Paper Sun” (1967): Percussive movement and modal color that turn social observation into a rolling, sun-dappled trip.

6. The Move – “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” (1967): Buzzing energy and stacked vocals, a kinetic cousin in the British psych-rock family tree.

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