Another in my series of British rock groups who never made it in America is the Move, again hugely influential yet largely unknown except to a select few. These were tough guys from Birmingham, the same industrial wasteland that would later spawn Black Sabbath, and there will be a connection. And like the Pretty Things and the Small Faces, the comparison that most immediately comes to mind is the Who, though this time through the live act, which included the Move's own version of auto-destruction. Musically, they were their own animal and pointed the way towards progressive rock while having a significant impact on the 1970s and beyond.
The Move were five local Birmingham all stars who got together to form a new band and move to London, trying for the big time. There were three key players; singer Carl Wayne, guitarist and songwriter Roy Wood, and drummer Bev Bevan. They signed to Tony Secunda's management, and Tony immediately went for a big image, dressing them as gangsters from the 1930s and having them destroy television sets, cars, and effigies of the British prime minister during their stage act. Fortunately, Roy Wood started writing songs that could compete with the heavy posing.
The band hit right at the being of psychedelia and Roy milked it for all it was worth, despite never doing drugs. He said that it was a bottle of whiskey that was the inspiration for songs like 'Night of Fear' and 'I Can Hear the Grass Grow'. The sound was full of vocal harmonies and a very heavy bottom, already a popular feature in bands like the Kinks and the Who. But now it was all huge bass and thumbing toms, and Roy created quite complex pop songs, three minute mini-symphonies.
They were a huge hit in Britain right away, due as much to the constant press for various scandals, such as a single with nude pictures of politicians that was taken to court in a libel suit. But the singles of 1967 were uniformly excellent, if not always the best productions. Sometimes the complicated layered sound had a muddy mix, but the material was relentlessly upbeat and so well crafted that the quality shone through. Like the Beatles and other bands of the era, there was a great effort on the part of Roy Wood to make every song sound different and a progression from the one before.
The Move was also a big hit on the Continent; they spent their first two years playing Europe at a dizzying rate. The BBC loved them as well, and the sessions that are available shows that they retained their Birmingham cover band repertoire, playing the Beach Boys Byrds, and other California bands very well. There was even a live extended play single in early 1968, mostly other people's songs, which was a little strange considering the quality of Roy Wood's material. 1968 was the year of their greatest success, with songs such as 'Fire Brigade', 'Blackberry Way', and 'Curly' dominating the British charts.
There was a problem with the group, which was a case of too many guys trying to be the lead singer. Carl Wayne had to fight to get any singing time, as everyone but the drummer got a chance to vocalize on nearly every song. The revolving singers made the group seem like an old-fashioned show band more than an underground phenomenon, helping them have a very professional presentation but keeping them from seeming hip. Eventually, the extra guitarist and bass player quit over front time, and a more subdued bass player, Rick Price, joined.
1968 saw the band move more towards a more pop sound as well. 'Fire Brigade' is almost a straight ahead rocker, similar to 'Lady Madonna' and ;Jumping Jack Flash', a return to roots music. 'Blackberry Way' is one of the best Beatles-sounding songs ever produced by a contemporary British band. 'Curly' gave Carl Wayne a chance to sound more like Engelbert Humperdinck than a rocker, a problem that would rear its head in 1969.
That year saw the band try a tour of America, something that the Pretty Things and Small Faces both failed to do during the 1960s. It was funded by Jimi Hendrix, of all people, who had toured with the band (with Pink Floyd on the bill as well!) in late 1967. Jimi had even used a couple of the members of the group as backup singers on the 'Axis; Bold as Love' album. It was very underfunded, and the band had to travel by van from the east coast to California with very little time or very many gigs in between. They finished the tour, and there is an excellent recorded from the Fillmore gigs, but it didn't help them crack the market.
They tried their first coherent album in 1969, 'Shazam', a mixture of hard rock ('Hello Susie'), psychedelia, and progressive rock ('Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited', a personal favorite). It's a curious album, with snippets of conversation with people on the street as well as long jamming sections, but I like it. Carl Wayne, wanting to become more of an all-around entertainer than the guy who wielded a real axe while smashing things up on stage, left soon after. He had a long career on the BBC on television and a radio host.
Needing a replacement to augment the three remaining members (Wood, Bevan and Price), they went to Jeff Lynne, who had played in another Birmingham band called the Idle Race. That band had sounded exactly like the Move and scored a couple of minor hits. Jeff was happy to make the move, mostly playing lead guitar and singing harmony in the beginning. He only contributed one song to the next album, 'Looking In', but he and Roy were very compatible and started cooing up some real schemes, such as the Electric Light Orchestra.
While still releasing a steady stream of excellent singles in 1970, the band made a shift from being a live touring band to being a studio entity exclusively. The recordings became even more complex, if that seemed possible, and Roy Wood started playing an astounding number of instruments such as oboe and cello on songs. 'Do Ya' and 'California Man', among others, kept them in the charts, but Wood and Lynne started to see the Move as outdated and wanted to do a fully functional version of a rock band with a string section, taking the late Beatles music even further while touring with it.
The first Electric Light Orchestra is a Move album in everything but name only and was a success, but Roy Wood opted out of any further involvement, a curious phenomenon. In fact, Roy Wood's post-Move career is bizarre by American standards; he went back to 50s rock & roll while where more makeup than Emmitt Kelly. Eventually, Roy became something of a hermit and could only occasionally be coaxed back out in public. His songwriting in the Move was among the best of the entire 1966 to 1972 era and deserves to be heard and remembered.
Jeff Lynne, along with Bev Bevan, took the Electric Light Orchestra to massive worldwide success, even starring in the 1980 movie 'Xanadu' with Olivia Newton-John and Gene Kelly. Jeff had many chart toppers all over the world and took ELO right into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame. Probably his greatest achievement was producing the last two Beatle songs, 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love', besides providing production duties for George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Tom Petty.
Bev Bevan wound up touring with Black Sabbath in 1983, a last minute replacement for Bill Ward, who was having drug issues and didn't want the temptations of the road. This was the Ian Gillian version of the band, and the addition of Bevan set off a firestorm of criticism. Metal heads seemed to have forgotten that the Move had been from the same group of musicians that also spawned Sabbath as well as John Bonham of Led Zeppelin; all specialized in a bass-heavy sound that morphed into heavy metal. From the evidence of the radio broadcasts of that version of Sabbath, Bev had no trouble playing the drum parts.
The Move is somewhat forgotten, overshadowed by the titanic legacy of ELO. Bu that later band, sounding so Beatle-ish, could not have existed had it not been for the Move. And the legacy goes way beyond that; the Move, perhaps more than some of the more quoted groups such as Procul Harum or the Nice, paved the way for progressive rock with their tightly structured singles full of classical references, tempo changes, and multi-layered harmonies. Roy Wood created the template, and Jeff Lynne came along later to perfect the formula, turning it into pop gold. But the Move was there first, and deserve to be remembered as one of the great 1960s British bands.
The one American band that were deeply influenced by the Move were Cheap Trick, who over the years have covered a number of Roy Wood songs and even had him as a guest at concerts. That's nice and well deserved, but Roy Wood created a huge body of work in many different styles during his time in the Move and it was uniformly excellent. He is the bridge between psychedelia and progressive rock, but he never worked in a straight line. And he constantly surrounded himself with an excellent band, with his ideas spawning massive success in the 1970s and 1980s, even if he didn't want to participate.
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