posted by Max Conroy: 

For my birthday this year, I’m getting a subscription to Mojo from my girlfriend.  She’s in grad. school so she promised a modest gift.  A subscription to Mojo isn’t that modest at $9.50 per issue; this one may have been more expensive due to the CD pertaining to the Stones-theme of this month’s issue.  I’m about to illustrate why this magazine is the coolest gift ever to a person who will practically sniff the print to find out about a cool band they haven’t ever heard of.  I’m also about to illustrate obsessive-compulsive behavior.

I clutched the magazine in my greedy hands on the morning celebrating my twenty-eighth year on this earth and began flipping pages, doing some recon…Piper at the Gates of Dawn reissue, expensive…Keith Richards interview, sweet…Def Leppard, blah…Stevie Nicks, puke.  I stopped on a photo of a fleshy, bearded man with his face painted.  He looked like he could be King Diamond’s psychedelic uncle.  My girlfriend asked who the freak was.  After reading a bit, I learned that it was Roy Wood, founding member of The Move and ELO.  Never heard of him.  I liked ELO as a casual guilty pleasure and had heard of The Move mostly through reference to other groups like Hendrix and Pink Floyd, seeing them basically on old concert posters sharing the bill with these titans.  I read the single page interview with some interest, gathering that The Move’s albums are acclaimed, he was only in ELO briefly, formed a group named Wizzard after leaving the latter band, and is bitter about ELO continuing without him and The Move touring now under that name, also without him.  The impetus of the interview is the reissue of the first two Move albums and a solo album of his from ‘73 (recorded in ‘69).  I soon forgot about what I’d read and tried my hardest to erase it for good that night with plenty of free booze supplied by some gracious friends. 

The next day I found myself in the best local record shop, perhaps the best in the state, wandering aimlessly.  I’d found a record-size Goat’s Head Soup poster picturing a severed goat’s head floating in a bubbling cauldron for $3, which I knew my girlfriend would never ever allow my to hang anywhere.  The record store in my home town had this same picture hanging up near it’s cash register for years and it used to perplex me when I was much younger…I couldn’t understand the concept of Goat’s Head Soup.  I kept browsing to find something else to buy with the morbid picture so as not to seem weird and noticed that the record that they were playing was good.  I found a record to buy, but I wasn’t entirely sure about it.  The record they were playing kept getting better and better.  I wanted that record, but pride kept me from asking who it was.  Then it hit me, this could be The Move, obviously English, right era.  I walked by the counter and overheard one of the geeks explaining to a young co-worker that Roy Wood was the founding member and that they were really great, one of the other geeks was singing to the record while sorting new merchandise.  I made a bee line to the M’s and found a Move record, a cheap English compilation that would have to do.  Can you walk up to the counter and demand to buy what they’re playing?  I took the record home and was surprised by how good it sounded, but not surprised that I had to put the picture of the goat’s head in with the album and filed away, seldom to be seen.  I also attempted to find their first two albums online, which proved to be a pain in the ass: there were only a few people out there that had them and they had several hundred people in line waiting do download. 

Back at the record store a few days later, looking for something totally unrelated to Roy Wood, an ingenious thought occurred to me, maybe they restocked the record after spinning it.  Sure as shit.  Shazam!  $9. Ok.

Stay tuned for a review of this gem…for now, listen to Move:

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