A singer, songwriter and keyboard player, he performed on “Nights in White Satin” and other hits for the band.
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.
“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.
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. In 1971, Mr. Pinder guested on John Lennon’s “Imagine” album on the songs “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier ” 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.
“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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