in
the da capo book of rock & roll writing (originally
the penguin book of rock & roll writing), there's a story by jonh ingham entitled "tripping down blackberry way," about a fictitious so-cal teenager (one _len_ zeppelin, haw haw haw) who becomes obsessed with a band he's never heard (in this case,
the move) after reading about 'em in '60s rock mags (specifically, in nik cohn's column). i'm here to tell you: i was that kid, in the same way i was the obnoxious muso-wannabe rekkid store clerk jack black played in
high fidelity. maybe even more so. as a weird, asocial middle schooler, i was bookish, alienated, and rock-obsessed, and when i stumbled on a paperback copy of cohn's
rock from the beginning, it changed my life. i shit you not, jim.
cohn was the brit who went on to write the
new york magazine story on which
saturday night fever was based, but forgive him, for when he was 22 and figured the whole thing was over, he sat down and wrote the entahr history of rock from his own highly opinionated perspective in a single long weekend of manic inspiration. it's still one of my favorite reads, and it's where i first got wind of the move, a brit band that never meant a whole lot here in the states, which made them _just my meat_. (i'll admit it: i was one of _those_ ppl, who didn't dig the beatles and later led zep 'cos they were _too popular_.) like slade and t. rex a little later, they had a long string of hits in the u.k.: "night of fear," "i can hear the grass grow," "flowers in the rain," "fire brigade," "blackberry way," "curly," "brontosaurus." on this side of the pond, though, they were considered "underground." cultic, even.
anyway, back to cohn. the best rock scribes can make you wanna hear music you know you don't like (in my case, greil marcus writing about the band -- y'know, bob dylan's old backup band? robbie robertson? a buncha canadians with beards? ahhh, fuggedabadit -- has that effect), and cohn was up there among 'em: one persuasive mofo, he was. dig his scrawl on the move: "they stood in a straight line, four-part harmony, and they were natural rockers; they wore capone gangster suits, and they looked mean as hell. eternal brummers, dour and monosyllabic...
ace kefford, a guitarist [actually bassist, to be technical], was the singing skull itself, his flesh eaten away, his jaws clamping endlessly on gum, his face set rigid in infinite boredom." so, i thought, where do i sign up? you could say my interest was piqued.
when i finally heard 'em, they didn't sound anything like what i expected, but i still dug 'em. (same thing happened when i got
the who sell out; while it hardly matched the word-picture cohn had painted inside my head, it sounded good, forever conjuring images of a fictive english summer. i only had to wait a little while until
live at leeds showed up, delivering all the noise and outrage he'd promised in the pages of the
new york times, of all places.) the move were poppier than cohn's description (which focused on _image_ and their early penchant for publicity stunts) might have led you to believe, and roy wood's songwriting was downright _quirky_. (one colossal irony: a lot of their lyrics had a recurring theme of mental illness, and ace kefford, the singing skull, apparently wound up spending 30 yrs wrestling with those demons after freaking his way right out of the move following a tour with hendrix in '68.)
now "brum" is what the locals call birmingham, an industrial town in the english midlands which is approximately the brit equivalent to detroit and the birthplace of the move. a heavy town, thatun -- home of john bonham, black sabbath, cozy powell, and lots more like that, but all of the move cats had been playing in old-fashioned (even in 1966) beat groups, and they wanted to do something hipper. unlike most of their brit contemporaries, who drew their inspiration from blues and r&b, the move's influences were an amalgam of '50s rockers (elvis, eddie cochran, and jerry lee lewis) and contemporary american west coast bands (love, the byrds, the beach boys, moby grape). in the fullness of time, wood and his latter-day co-conspirator jeff lynne (whom he recruited from a lower-division birmingham psych band called the idle race) got obsessed with chasing the beatles, specifically the claustrophobic sound of "strawberry fields forever," "i am the walrus" and the
white album.
besides wood's songwriting, what the move had going for them from the git-go was their vocalismo -- five, count 'em, five lead singers that could harmonize in a style that was beach boys-influenced but distinctively british -- and a killer bass sound that was really the only "heavy" thing about 'em. it's funny, too, 'cos they employed a string of bassplayers over the yrs; musta been more a function of wood's musical vision than of any one particular cat's instrumental prowess, starting with the herky-jerky descending line that's the centerpiece of crash-and-thump psych masterpiece "i can hear the grass grow" (which i played the shee-ot out ouf on the secondhand 45 i got from the store where i usedta work as a high schooler). on the move's pop hits, wood employed basslines like music hall trombones in the manner of the kinks. later, bass become a sinister undercurrent in move music, evoking '30s cartoon soundtracks in
shazam's "cherry blossom clinic revisited" and culminating in the clanking rickenbacker that underpins the move's finest hour, the
message from the country alb. on that rekkid, whoever's playing bass (wood? lynne?) contributes low-end countermelodies with the inventiveness and sheer musicality of john entwistle (or matt hembree), effectively serving as a lead instrument.
all of this rhapsodizing is occasioned by the re-release, on the 40th anniversary of the move's formation, of
message from the country, widely held (at least by me and the guy who wrote the liner notes to this reish) to be their very finest work evah, ironically so because it was recorded as a contract-filling stopgap while wood 'n' lynne were hatching the, um, electric light orchestra. but hey, some of my favorite rekkids (the rationals' 1970 alb, the zombies'
odessey and oracle) were produced under zackley such circumstances.
by this time (1971), the move had ceased touring and were pretty effectively committed to folding the tent as soon as some legal/publishing _issues_ surrounding lynne could be resolved. in the meantime, they passed their days fucking around in the studio, experimenting, and generally having a high old time. that spirit (not unlike the beatles on
let it be minus the acrimony and with a lot more overdubs) informs the music on
message from the country and raises it head 'n' shoulders above their previous two elpees, the much-touted
shazam! (wherein 'riginal frontguy carl wayne's affinity for lounge-smarm vocalismo -- over there, they call it _cabaret_ -- bumps heads with wood's desire to improvise at great length on a variety of axes -- not just electric gtr, but nylon-string, banjo, even sitar -- to a degree that might tax a non-lysergically-enhanced listener's attention span a tad) and the merely godawful
looking on (which features not-so-great material and the muddy production sound that's marred all of wood's post-move studio endeavors).
so, whaddaya get for yr entertainment dollar? merely scintillating songwriting 'n' imaginative arrangements; well-executed late-period beatles pastiches; bone-crushing rockers; touches of mock-classicism; humorous stabs at '50s rockaroll, c&w, and music hall; and, as bonus tracks, their last handful of contract-fulfilling singles, all of which i bought with great relish as a 15-yr-old snotnose and played until the grooves were as worn as those on my slade 45s. a couple of 'em hark back to the sound of the move's pop-chart-topping heyday, while one was subsequently covered by cheap trick (now appearing at a county fair near you on the "how-the-mighty-have-fallen" tour), and another was re-recorded to considerably greater stateside effect by e.l.o.
listening to this music today almost makes me unashamed to have been such an annoying elitist asshole at such an early age. _almost_.
(on the move's website, there are interviews that
carl wayne did with his ex-movemates
kefford and
trevor burton for the bbc, a coupla yrs before he checked out from late-diagnosed cancer in 2004. i always say that all musicians' stories are the same, but my favorite ones are about ppl growing up together through music. reading these ints, it's readily apparent the regard and friendship that existed between these men, even many yrs after they ceased to be in the same band, and in spite of my snide dismissal of wayne's singing above, i couldn't help but feel, um, moved.)
ADDENDUM: unfortunately, the move's official website doesn't keep online any old content that doesn't relate to whatever current re-release they're plugging, and so carl's ints with ace and trevor have gone to the widowmaker. pity.
