Roy Wood is known to the general public primarily for two things. The first is constantly getting confused with Ron Wood, the great lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones and the Faces. The second is being known as the guy whose musical vision was too overstuffed even for Electric Light Orchestra.
Wood founded the psych-rock British Invasion band the Move, which later folded into the Electric Light Orchestra. The Move was best known in the U.S. for the minor hit “Do Ya” (which was later covered and turned into a massive hit by a Wood-less E.L.O.), but Wood had the idea to take their art-pop style in another direction—adding orchestral arrangements to their pop songs using horns, woodwinds, and strings. Wood started E.L.O. with Move guitarist/future mega-producer/Traveling Wilbury Jeff Lynne and the other members of the Move while bringing in two new members: a violinist and a French horn player. The band recorded their eponymous debut (released as No Answer in the U.S.) and enjoyed a top ten U.K. hit with “10538 Overture.” By the time of the album’s release, the band had added two cellists and set out to recreate the sound on stage with a tour. However, when the band failed to immediately gel in concerts and the Wood/Lynne partnership began turning sour, Wood left the group, taking two of the players with him to form the octet he dubbed Wizzard.
Wizzard was not a huge departure from E.L.O.—it came off more like E.L.O.’s darker twin, what with Roy Wood’s face covered in pre-KISS war paint with multi-colored beard and hair, not to mention the insane “Top of the Pops” appearances which included band members and friends clad in various costumes wielding custard pies as they roller skated around the stage. However, Wood was not as concerned with melding the sound of the Beatles with classic music composers as his former partner Lynne; Wood was far more interested in nearly single handedly recreating Phil Spector’s “wall of sound”—the moniker ascribed to the ornate, echo-laden sound Spector originally made famous with recordings such as “Be My Baby” and “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)” for girl groups like the Ronettes and the Crystals.
This became obvious with two of Wizzard’s early singles; the number one U.K. hit “See My Baby Jive” and the less successful follow-up “Angel Fingers.” In addition to being perfect clones of Spector’s sound, they were also written in the style of the earliest rock n’ roll hits, and could easily be mistaken for such.
It’s not far from the pumped-up oldies work that would be done a couple of years later by fellow Spectorhead John Lennon on Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats. The sound is so lush with all kinds of pianos, strings, back up doo-wop vocalists, all kinds of percussion, and saxophones galore, it’s a wonder it sounds like anything other than a barrage of noise. The fact that there’s not just order among this chaos but an actual beautiful song is impressive in and of itself. The songs were expensive (it was rumored that “Angel Fingers” cost as much as the entire Band on the Run album) with Wood playing many of the instruments himself, but it’s clear every penny made it to the records.
Despite a smash hit Christmas single (“I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”), Wizzard would disband in 1975 after only two albums, but Wood soldiered on, following his eccentric interests in jazz improvisation and early rock n’ roll to varying degrees of success as a solo artist and producer—although he can rest easy knowing he’s never been the butt of a “Simpsons” joke:
Homer: Lisa, who’s your favorite Traveling Wilbury? Is it Jeff Lynne?
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