Sep 272010
Sid and Marty Krofft couldn’t dream up this performance! We’ve got our share of Move and Roy Wood fans around here, myself included, but can anyone explain Wizzard? Must one be English to get what Wood was up to by this point? I don’t know if there’s any artist I love whose work past a certain point I love less than Roy Wood’s Wizzard recordings. Please explain. Show me the light, if even a faint glimmer.
For my money, you can just remove the colon from the subject line here and leave it as “Please Explain Wizzard.” I would add, for myself, “And the Whole Roy Wood Thing, Since He Is Incredibly Overrated and Not Really Terribly Interesting.” Which isn’t catchy but does sum up my views on the subject.
That YouTube screen grab alone sums up everything that is both great and terrifying about Roy Wood.
Was Wizzard just a means for Roy Wood to hide his boring retro-themed compositions in “ca-ray-zeeee” outfits? I ask that seriously.
Could be, hrrundi. There was a slew of really bad glam-retro stuff that we never knew about growing up in the US. If you’ve got an hour to regret losing in your life, start with a YouTube search of the not-always-terrible “Mud” and then check out the subpar glam-Sha-Na-Na bands that will appear in their wake. How did boring retro-themed UK pop get filtered through glam, anyhow? Maybe I can reach out to a certain Friend of the Hall for answers…
I think Wizzard, and this clip in particular, is just another one of those things that can best be explained by my “Roy Wood is an immortal, time-traveling caveman” theory. Little of what he did makes sense to our brains, but they surely make perfect sense to a super intelligent Cro Magnon Man who has lived through 35,000 years of musical evolution. Put in that context, all the splashing water percussion and the space samurai costumes in his career actually make sense.
If there had been a ’70s British equivalent of the ’60s TV Batman, Roy Wood would and Marc Bolan would have stolen the show. I can see at least five Batman supervillain gimmicks at play in this Wizzard clip alone.
Also, while I love Wood with The Move and like Boulders and some other post-ELO things, I think these kinds of clips to help make a case that Jeff Lynne was completely justified in pulling the ultimate Rock Mutiny during the Move->ELO transition.