Review: 'Bronco Bullfrog' Vinyl Reissue

Lest you worry Bronco Bullfrog's unabashedly retro melange of Beatle-esque harmonizing, Beck-esque feedbacking, and Moon-esque drum-pummeling is a bit too calculatedly retro, dig into chief songwriter Andy Morten's way with words. Even Townshend would have stayed his pen before scribbling anything as grungy as "I can smell the shit baking in the sun," and Petey certainly wouldn't have had the expectation-scrambling audacity to sneak it into a genuinely sweet and nostalgic ode to summertime that would make Brian Wilson weep. 

Review: Jason Crest's 'A Place in the Sun'

Jason Crest (a band, not a guy) made some singles smothered in psychedelic phasing, wah-wahing, and Mellotron and got some decent exposure opening for the likes of The Who and The Moody Blues, but they just never cracked it. A few of their single sides, such as "Turquoise Tandem Cycle", the heavily Moodies-influenced "A Place in the Sun", and the audio horror movie "Black Mass", made it onto installments of the Rubble and British Psychedelic Trip series, but Jason Crest is definitely one of the more obscure British psych groups of the sixties. That's too bad because their songs are mostly appealingly poppy (well, maybe not "Black Mass"), their productions are imaginative, and well, any record that features the Mellotron owns my heart. 

Guerssen's new Jason Crest compilation A Place in the Sun mixes demos with studio recordings since the group's mere five singles do not provide enough material to fill an LP--and since notator David Wells assures us that the "Waterloo Road" / "Education" single stinks, both of those proper recordings are omitted (honestly, I don't know what the problem is. "Waterloo Road" is a bit corny but not egregiously so, and "Education" is a peppy, bluesy number better than a good deal of the tracks that made the cut). That leaves A Place in the Sun as a somewhat uneasy shuffle of buffed recordings and lo-fi ones. Some of the tracks are inessential. As I've already implied, "Black Mass" is interesting but pretty grating, and a by-numbers cover of (Here We Go 'Round the) Lemon Tree" won't make anyone forget The Move's superior original. However, tracks such as "Turquoise Tandem Cycle", "Two by the Sea", "A Place in the Sun", and "Good Life" should scratch my fellow British freaks psych itching for something relatively obscure to discover.

Review: The Fox's 'For Fox Sake'

Had the breaks been a little better, The Fox might now be spoken of in the same breath as Small Faces, The Creation, The Move, The Action, Traffic, and the other mod and/or psych bands they resemble. Alas, the Brighton quintet only made one album, because as frontman Steve Brayne relates in the liner notes of a vinyl reissue of the For Fox Sake LP, their management “poached” Black Sabbath and decided to put all of its eggs in that gloomy basket. Timing might have something to do with The Fox’s failure since their mid-sixties sound was so out of step the times when they released their one and only LP in 1970.

That The Fox is all but forgotten is a drag, but there’s nothing draggy about For Fox Sake. For lovers of the brand of fresh-faced British rock that the rains of Sabbath and Zeppelin washed away, this album is a revelation. Almost every song is a gem, inviting comparison to the works of more famous artists but offering enough originality to make it essential in its own right. You’d be hard pressed to find a song by a white band that used reggae off beats earlier than “As She Walks Away”, which also resembles Larks’ Tongue-era King Crimson three years ahead of schedule. Had Hendrix experimented with circus music, he may have been able to lay claim to the sound of the epic “Madame Magical”, but since he didn’t, he can’t. Most other tracks don’t strive for such uniqueness, but so who cares when For Fox Sake supplies the best Action (“Secondhand Love”), Creation (“Lovely Day”), and Small Faces (“Man in a Fast Car”) songs of 1970? Only the inchoate jam “Goodtime Music” is not up to snuff.

Sommor Records’ vinyl reissue of For Fox Sake affords this project some belated attention. The very cool album cover art is nicely reproduced. Sound is a bit flat and distorted, though that’s may be more a consequence of the album’s original lo-fi production than the digital mastering. The LP-sized booklet with Brayne’s notes and several band photos is a nice bonus. But great songs by a great band that almost nobody has heard are all the incentive necessary to hunt down For Fox Sake.

Review: 'FAB GEAR: The British Beat Explosion and Its Aftershocks: 1963-1967'

It’s no obscure morsel of trivia that British pop was the palest, flimsiest imitation of its American equivalent before The Beatles. When the Fabs turned the ignition switch on the sixties, a flood of new moppy popsters got signed. The best of them—The Kinks, the Stones, The Hollies, you know the rest— would have long and rich careers, but most weren’t fit to pass out cups of water in that league. The worst were throwbacks like Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, Ray Singer, Bobby Rio and the Revelles, Migil 5, The Wackers, and The Chapters, who make Billy J. Kramer sound like Mick Jagger. Some of the ones that actually knew Chuck Berry existed were at least capable of making a nice noise: Carter-Lewis & The Southerners, Le Group 5, The Bo Street Runners, The Wild Oats, The Epics, The Clique, Grant Tracy, etc. (ironically, however, The Rockin’ Berries apparently never actually listened to the rocker they named themselves after). Artists who might have competed with the major names had the breaks been easier are pretty rare, The Action being one such group.

An expansion of Pye’s Beat, Beat, Beat compilation series, Cherry Red’s FAB GEAR: The British Beat Explosion and Its Aftershocks: 1963-1967 is a hefty six-disc set that collects some of the bad, some of the great, and a whole lot of the in-between. This makes for an inconsistent and rarely revelatory listen, but fans of this tuneful era will find the mass of it great fun, and on occasion, educational. There are pre-stardom tracks from David Bowie (though, at this point, even this stuff is getting pretty familiar), Arthur Brown, The Moody Blues, Klaus Voorman, members of Deep Purple, The Move’s Carl Wayne, Mike D’Abo, Steve Howe, and Lemmy. A small smattering of familiar songs by The Kinks (a silhouette of whom adorns the cover), Chad and Jeremy, The Searchers, and Marmalade are like buoys that keep the listener oriented in a sea of obscurities, as do covers of several beloved Beatles, Kinks, and Chuck Berry songs, though titles such as “Hurdy Gurdy Man”, “I Go to Sleep”, “Where Have All the Good Times Gone”, and “Think It Over” are not covers of the classics you think they are.

Review: 'Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best of The Move'

Esoteric Recordings’ deluxe editions of The Move’s entire pre-Harvest catalogue comprised the grooviest reissue campaign of 2016. Early in 2017, the label is wrapping up that campaign with Magnetic Waves of Sound: The Best of The Move.

This kind of move is generally useful for less-committed fans but redundant for the more devoted who already picked up the deluxe discs of the proper albums. However, Esoteric is making this particular Best Of well worth your dollars and pounds for a couple of reasons. First of all, the CD includes several Harvest sides that were shut out of the deluxe editions: “Ella James”, “Tonight”, “China Town”, “California Man”, and “Do Ya”—Move essentials all. Secondly, there is the addition of a region-free DVD containing an hour of wild and beautifully presented Move movies that really clinches the deal.

The disc includes a promo film for “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” and extracts from the Beat Beat Beat (totally live; totally exciting), Top of the Pops (live vocals with enthusiastically mimed instruments), and Beat Club (aside from two live performances from 1970, completely canned but loaded with chroma-key fun) TV programs. Then there’s the crop’s cream: The Move’s full and full-color ten-song set caught on the BBC’s Colour Me Pop in early 1969. I’ve had a bootleg of this appearance in my collection for many years, and I’m very happy to replace that smudgy old Rorschach test with Esoteric’s vibrant and crisp new images. Despite the lack of an audience to egg on the band, The Move manages to deliver their total energy across an almost completely live set (canned renditions of “Beautiful Daughter”, “Wild Tiger Woman”, and “Something” are the odd  exceptions). There are some boffo covers too, a couple of which air out the band’s love of The Byrds.

I’m not sure if Esoteric considers this DVD to essentially be bonus material to that 21-track Best of set, but speaking as someone who acquired all those deluxe editions last year, I rate it as the main attraction of this colorful, crazed collection of patented-Move power pop and poppy prog.

Review: 'Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967'

The psychedelic scene of the sixties has been well covered over innumerable compilations. Most deal in fairly broad strokes, perhaps covering a particular region (usually the UK or U.S.) or strain (maybe the garage rock of Nuggets or twee pop of Ripples Vol. III) in the general zone of 1966 through 1969. As its title blares, Cherry Red’s Let’s Go Down and Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1967 gets more specific.

Review: Reissues of The Move's 'Something Else" and 'Looking On'

On 45, The Move always bashed like The Who, harmonized like The Belmonts, and laid on the sugar like the Keebler Elves. On longer playing vinyl, they were much harder to pin down. Their eponymous first album was basically like a cluster of those wonderfully sweet and heavy singles stitched together with some wacky cover choices. Shazam was very different indeed with its humorous heavy metal and prog rock pastiches and almost total absence of bubblegum. In between those two albums, The Move issued a live EP that further flaunted their eclectic taste in covers. For any one who couldn’t suss where the band was coming from, Something Else from The Move helped make sense of all of The Move’s seemingly unpredictable movements. After all, they were a band that thought nothing odd about mixing covers of songs by trad. rockers Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis, LA psychedelicists The Byrds and Love, and prog rockers Spooky Tooth on the same disc. Despite the disparate material, The Move never played favorites, smashing out each number with the same brutality and professionalism.

As the Something Else from The Move EP helped bridge two dissimilar albums, Looking On followed Shazam with similar logic. It shed even more of The Move’s early sweetness than Shazam had while honing that record’s  ideas with long songs that never sounded like a particularly merry Dr. Frankenstein had stitched them together, as “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited” and “Fields of People” certainly had. Thus The Move ended up with some of their most cohesive epics, particularly the magnificently mind-warping “What?” and the intricately structured psych/jazz/raga fusion “Open Up Said the World at the Door”, both courtesy of new co-band leader Jeff Lynne. Roy Wood’s three concise songs— “Turkish Tram Conductor Blues”, “When Alice Comes Back to the Farm”, and “Brontosaurus”— are some of the most playful examples of early British metal. Critics sometimes shrug off Looking On, but it’s the first Move album that doesn't sound like it was created accidentally and it has the distinction of being their first record of entirely original material.

Last month, Esoteric Records expanded and reissued Move and Shazam. This month, Something Else and Looking On receive similar treatment. Actually, Something Else had basically already received this treatment back in 2008 when stereo remixes of the original EP supplemented with seven other live tracks constituted disc three of Salvo’s Anthology 1966-1972. Not only were there more killer covers (a hard-driving cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher” stuns), but also a couple of classic Move originals: “Flowers in the Rain” and “Fire Brigade”. For those who did not spring for that four-disc set, Esoteric’s single-disc reissue of Something Else is ideal, including everything on the anthology’s third disc and the original EP’s five mono mixes. “Looking On” spills over onto a second disc. Like last month’s expanded reissues, BBC sessions dominate the bonus material, though there is less in the way of funky cover versions (the only one here is two takes of a Zeppelinized version of The Beatles’ “She’s a Woman”). There’s also the great B-side “Lightnin’ Never Strikes Twice in the Same Place” in both standard studio and more harmonious BBC incarnations, and a BBC recording of a very good Beatle-esque Lynne original called “Falling Forever”.

Review: Deluxe Reissues of The Move's 'Move' and 'Shazam'

The original British bands tended to follow in the footsteps of either The Beatles or the Stones. The Beatles led the parade of sweet pop harmonizers, such as The Hollies and The Searchers. The Stones led the gang of thuggish R&B shouters, such as The Animals and The Pretty Things. Arriving later on the scene, The Move seemed to follow The Who with their eccentric blend of weird song topics performed with cute melodies and bashing beats. They even picked up on The Who’s violent stage act, taking it to absurd extremes by smashing TVs and junked cars with sledgehammers while dressed as gangsters. The Move were hardly poseurs, though, and with brilliant songwriter Roy Wood steering the ship, The Move moved beyond the terrific Who-like singles of their early career to more progressive forms that had all the humor and cheekiness critics complained were missing from those Yes albums.

The Move’s first album was basically a riff on their zany early singles with some great (Eddie Cochran’s “Weekend”) and not-so-great (“Zing Went the Strings of My Heart”) covers filling it out. Released after some delay, Move must have sounded a bit out of step with the mid-1968 rock scene and its move away from psychedelia toward Dylan and The Band’s more rustic country-rock. Today it sounds like one of the year’s freshest albums.  Perhaps “John Wesley Harding” and “All Along the Watchtower” were more “artful,” but they sure weren’t as fun as “(Here We Go Round) The Lemon Tree” and “Flowers in the Rain”. Come to think of it, those Dylan songs may not have even been as artful as “Cherry Blossom Clinic”.

That track became even artier when The Move recut it for their second LP. Shazam is one of prog’s wackiest records. It throws a big custard pie in the face of charges that progressive rock is nothing but po-faced mathematics. The revamped and expanded “Cherry Blossom Clinic” takes bizarre detours, turning familiar Bach, Dukas, and Tchaikovsky tunes into cartoon confetti. Singer Carl Wayne takes breaks to chat with passersby throughout the record. The Move makes heavy metal hay with pop (Frankie Laine’s “Don’t Make My Baby Blue”) and folk (Tom Paxton’s “The Last Thing on My Mind”) standards King Crimson would not have touched with a twenty-foot Frippertronics stick.

Move and Shazam are both terrific albums, but The Move was always at its most comfy making singles, so deluxe editions of these LPs are necessary to tell the whole story. Salvo Records did that in 2007 with a terrific double-disc edition of Move and an expanded single disc one of Shazam. Nine years later, Esoteric is expanding those expansions even more expansively with a triple-disc Move and a double-disc Shazam.

There is not a dramatic difference between the sound on Salvo’s discs and Esoteric’s new remasters, which utilize the same analogue tapes the 2007 editions did. That still means they sound very good, and the extensive bonus material makes an upgrade well worthwhile. Like the Salvo discs, Esoteric’s include contemporary singles, and it’s a fabulous crop with such essential Movements as “Night of Fear”, “I Can Hear the Grass Grow”, “Blackberry Way”, and “Curly”. Salvo made one big blunder in that department by only including a new stereo remix of “Wild Tiger Woman” on Shazam, but Esoteric corrects that by including the original mono single mix along with the stereo variation. Move includes the 1968 mono and 2007 stereo mixes of all the album’s tracks save a cover of Moby Grape’s “Hey Grandma”, and unlike Esoteric’s jumbled “New Movements” presentation, it plays out in the same running order as the original album. It also includes exclusive alternate mixes of “Disturbance” and “Fire Brigade”, which features prominent piano, and a whole disc of BBC sessions. Most valuable is a selection of eight folky and modish originals and soul covers cut in the studio or for radio almost a year before their first single was issued. Five are making their debut on this set.

Shazam contains such exclusive material as the abridged single edit of “Hello Susie”, the full-length version of “Omnibus”, an alternate mix of “Beautiful Daughter”, and the backing track of an acoustic-based rocker called “Second Class (She’s Too Good for Me)”. There’s also another disc of ferocious BBC sessions. The Move’s eclectic taste in covers of songs made famous by Neil Diamond, Jackie Wilson, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Little Anthony and the Imperials, Dion, etc. reflects their own gonzo fusion of sugary pop, hard rock, cabaret, and doo-wop. Oddly, it lacks the Italian language version of “A Certain Something” previously issued on The Best of The Move, but only Italian fans and the craziest completists should have a legitimate beef about that one flaw.

Review: 'The Move Live at the Fillmore 1969'

The Move were one the great singles bands of the mid-‘60s. They didn’t even get around to releasing their first L.P. until their 45s had already been chart staples for some seventeen months. By the time the sweet and refreshing Move appeared in April 1968, the self-consciously serious San Francisco scene had stimulated a vogue for epic, meandering jams. The Move had already been feeling a bit old hat, having taken so long to produce their first long-playing statement. When they finally made their way to San Fran the following year, they feared compact confections like “Blackberry Way” and “Curly” would make them seem hopelessly unhip. For a two-night stint opening for Little Richard and Joe Cocker at the legendary Fillmore West, they jettisoned all but three of Roy Wood’s wonderful originals, and those songs were given lengthy, winding makeovers. “Hello Susie”, a bubblegummy hit for Amen Corner, gained Led Zeppelin weight, “Cherry Blossom Clinic” acquired passages from Tchaikovsky and Dukas, and “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” careened into quotes from “Born to Be Wild” and a speedy Bev Bevan drum solo. Amazingly, the new “bigger is better” Move worked, largely because they tended to insert fully-developed new parts into their pop songs instead of endlessly wanking away on chord progressions like The Grateful Dead. A smart clutch of tunes from artists such as The Byrds, Nazz, and Tom Paxton filled out the rest of their set.

Vocalist Carl Wayne was particularly delighted with his band’s work at the Fillmore. He held onto tapes of the shows for his own enjoyment, though he felt the recordings were too ragged to warrant official release. Fortunately, studio technology has improved to the point where Rob Keyloch of Church Walk Studio was able to give the recordings an acceptable polishing. Forty-odd years after The Move’s milestone Fillmore shows, these tapes are finally getting a proper CD release.

Despite Keyloch’s admirable efforts, The Move Live at the Fillmore 1969 is still pretty rough. The sound is tinny and the vocals are mixed too loud. But this double-disc set is an important document for Move fans. We hear them working out daring ideas for their next album in front of an audience. They made the right choices when getting into the studio to cut 'Shazam', losing the bits that don’t quite work (Wood dragged the electric sitar solo on “Fields of People” to an interminable nine minutes on stage) and retaining the brilliant ones (this live rendition of “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited” is nearly identical to the spectacular version on 'Shazam'). As a bonus track, Bev Bevan gives a fascinating and often hilarious account of The Move’s American tour in a brand-new interview. His tales about bassist Rick Price's unintentional acid trip and Little Richard's throne are not to be missed.

March 10, 2010: Feed Your Baby Acid: 14 Psychedelic Songs Aimed at Kids

A rather odd off-shoot of all the chemical experimentation going down in the mid-‘60s pop scene found groups embracing their new found, pin-pupiled “innocence” and brewing up psychedelic kiddie tunes. Like Captain Kangaroo after a hit of Orange Sunshine, The Beatles, The Stones, Pink Floyd, and just about anyone who was anyone leaped onto the trippy toddler choo choo. In his book 33 1/3: The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, Andy Miller describes this short-lived genre as the “something far-out in the nursery strand of British psychedelia.” The dominant influences were, indeed, English eccentrics like Lewis Carroll and, to a much lesser extent, Kenneth Graham and nonsense guru Edward Lear. As was the case with most things British and trippy, The Beatles led the way with…

1. “Yellow Submarine” by The Beatles (1966)

July 27, 2009: The Nuggets Record Buying Guide: The Move

It’s hard to imagine anyone with more than a passing interest in the pyrotechnic pop of the Who or the Creation not being utterly inspired to delve into The Move discography, especially after being introduced to them via “I Can Hear the Grass Grow” and “Fire Brigade” on Nuggets II. These two tracks are fine representations of the Move’s cartoony humor, keening harmonies, heavy bottom, and utter Britishness. Bandleader Roy Wood is as notable for his eccentric songwriting and alluringly metallic voice and guitar tone as he is for his great big mustache (he also wrote, produced, and sang on the utterly Move-esque "Dance Round the Maypole" by fellow Nuggets band the Acid Gallery). Chief vocalist Carl Wayne is one of the most classically fine British rock singers, with a strong, clean vibrato. Drummer Bev Bevan rolls the toms like Keith Moon on a short leash.

Like many acts on the Nuggets compilations, the Move were essentially a singles band, and the initial run of 45’s they released between debuting in early ’67 with the psychotic two-header “Night of Fear”/“Disturbance” and putting out their first album in March of 1968 is as delectably tuneful and wildly fierce as the work the Who and the Creation released during the same period. A couple of these singles (“Flowers in the Rain” and “Fire Brigade”), along with their B-sides (“[Here We Go Round] The Lemon Tree” and “Walk Upon the Water”) made the grade on the Move’s eponymous first record. On its own, The Move is not the group’s strongest album: their cover of Moby Grape’s “Hey Grandma” is well-done but unnecessary, and their cover of the Coasters’ “Zing Went the Strings of My Heart”, poorly sung by Bevan, is awful. He does a more respectable job vocalizing on a peppy rendition of Eddie Cochran’s “Weekend”, but three is a lot of covers for an album released long after originals had become the “serious rock” standard. Of course, there is little evidence that the Move were serious about anything, what with their car and television-destroying stage antics.

Although it is a bit thin, you will want to pick up the first Move album eventually (especially in its double-disc incarnation on Salvo Records, which collects all of the group’s essential early singles), but the band’s best album from start to finish is their final one.



By the time the Move got around to cutting Message from the Country in 1971, they were quite a different group than the one that recorded The Move. Acid-enthusiast and bassist Christopher “Ace” Kefford had exited as far back as 1968, leaving bass duties to rhythm-guitarist Trevor Burton, who followed Kefford out the door the following year. That same year, Carl Wayne moved on (pun!) to start a solo career. Enter Jeff Lynne, who split songwriting, singing, producing, and guitaring duties with Wood on Message from the Country.

Although it’s short on hits, Message from the Country found the Move perfecting their numerous musical pursuits and compiling them into a collection that felt eclectic rather than merely random, as The Move did. “Ella James” and “Until Your Moma’s Gone” are examples of the heavy rock they started pursuing in the late ‘60s, but the album feels more like a return to the pithy singles of the band’s mid-‘60s hey day, which is a relief after the long-winded epics that dominated Shazam and Looking On (both 1970). “No Time” is the group’s most ethereal ballad. “It Wasn’t My Idea to Dance” is a killer fusion of hard rock and Moroccan arabesques (Jimmy Page and Robert Plant must have been listening). “The Minister” is a delirious rocker with a creepy-crawly riff. Bevan even makes nice use of his goofy basso profundo on the ‘50s R&R parody “Don’t Mess Me Up” and the Johnny Cash parody “Ben Crawley Steel Company”. Meanwhile, the title track and “The Words of Aaron” hint at what Wood and Lynne were planning to deliver with their soon-to-be-born Electric Light Orchestra, although ELO would rarely produce anything as tough and terse as these two tracks.

After Message from the Country, those who like their Move short and sharp will want to back up to ’68, grab the debut album, and stop there. More adventurous listeners should continue to Shazam, a demanding album for sure, but one that most definitely pays off with repeated listens. Aside from the stomping standard “Hello Susie” and the pretty throw-back “Beautiful Daughter”, everything on Shazam cracks the six-minute mark. The sudden shift in approach raises the question of whether this was an artistic choice or a consequence of dwindling material. The fact that the album includes a lengthy remake of “Cherry Blossom Clinic” from The Move might suggest the latter, but “Cherry Blossom Clinic Revisited” actually improves on the early version with a fuller, more powerful production, more assured playing, and funny instrumental run-throughs of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, Dukas’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, and Tchaikovsky’s “Chinese Dance”. The nearly 11-minute “Fields of People” (“there’s no such thing as a weed”!) is a hilarious flower-power spoof that ends in a lengthy raga. “Don’t Make My Baby Blue” is the group’s most convincing slab of heavy-metal and “The Last Thing on My Mind” is another strangely beautiful ballad. Looking On is a far less essential collection of marathon-length tracks, although “What?” is excellent later-day psych and “Turkish Tram Conductor Blues”, “When Alice Comes Back from the Farm”, and “Brontosaurus” are all good pieces of heavy blues rock. Definitely not the place to get moving (pun!), though.