The Move - California Man - Non-Album Tracks(1971-1973)

This is the third and last of stray tracks albums from the Move. However, I have even more albums of the Move performing for the BBC, and I plan on posting those soon.

For some reason, I don't have any stray tracks from 1970. By the time the music here starts in 1971, the band had changed drastically since the last stray tracks album I posted. The band's main lead singer Carl Wayne had left the group, and future ELO star Jeff Lynne had joined. The band was jointly led by Lynne and Roy Wood, who had been with the band from the beginning and still wrote most of the songs.

This album is fairly short by usual album standards, at only 34 minutes. But what it lacks in length in makes up in quality. The Move's last studio album, "Message from the Country," came out in early 1971, but they released four non-album singles after that, and all four A-sides are great.

It's strange to me that the band didn't put out an album to go with those singles, because this collection shows they had enough songs for it. But that probably had something to do with the band's strange transformation into Electric Light Orchestra, better known as ELO. In fact, the two bands are really just one band, with a name change. I guess by 1972, Lynne and Wood felt the Move name carried certain musical baggage and expectations, and they wanted to make a new start. So all three remaining band members at the time (the two of them plus Bev Bevan) began calling themselves ELO. Two more musicians were brought in to help record their last singles, Richard Tandy and Bill Hunt, and they wound up joining ELO too. Funnily enough, at one point in 1972, these five people promoted a Move song with a TV performance, and then promoted an ELO song for the exact same show on the same day, just calling themselves a different band name for that song!

ELO was supposed to be a joint project between Lynne and Wood, just like the last days of the Move. But after just one album as ELO, Wood left to pursue a solo career. It's hard to say what exactly is the Move and what is ELO. I've included an early version of "10538 Overture" from 1971, back when they were known as the Move, but that song went on to be a minor hit for ELO.

By the way, if you know the hit songs from ELO but you're not that familiar with the Move, you may wonder about the inclusion of the song "Do Ya" here. That originally was the last single by the Move, in 1972. But it totally flopped despite being a great song, not making the charts at all in Britain and barely scraping the bottom of the charts in the US. Lynne wrote it, so he revived it in 1976 with ELO and had a hit with it in many countries.

This album is 34 minutes long.

01 Tonight (Move)
02 Don't Mess Me Up [Acappella Version] (Move)
03 Chinatown (Move)
04 Down on the Bay (Move)
05 10538 Overture [Early Version] (Move)
06 The Words of Aaron [Acoustic Version] (Move)
07 California Man (Move)
08 Do Ya (Move)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15266764/TMve_1971-1972_CalifrniaMn_atse.zip.html

The album cover is based on the cover of the "California Man" single. However, that one had a rather bland black and white photo in the middle. I replaced it with a color photo showing the three last members of the Move in 1971.