The Glorious, Glam-Rock Heartbreak of a Man Who Knows His Wild-Eyed Infatuation is a Total Disaster.
If there is one name that epitomizes the dramatic, chaotic, and utterly brilliant excess of British Glam Rock, it is Roy Wood. The mastermind behind The Move and co-founder of the legendary Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), Wood burst forth in 1972 with his new creation, Wizzard, a band less concerned with string quartets and more interested in a theatrical, joyous racket. Their debut album, the magnificent beast known as Wizzard Brew, released in the UK in May 1973, was a polarizing work of genius. It was an audacious, sprawling double LP of rock-and-roll maximalism, featuring extended, free-form jazz freak-outs sitting right next to perfect pop pastiches.
It is on this eccentric album that we find “Gotta Crush (About You),” a track that serves as a three-minute flash of pure, unadulterated 1950s rock-and-roll nostalgia, shot through with Wizzard’s signature anarchic energy. As an album track, “Gotta Crush (About You)” was not released as a standalone single in the UK, meaning it holds no chart position of its own. The album it belonged to, Wizzard Brew, was a modest success by Wizzard’s standards, peaking at No. 29 on the UK Albums Chart, overshadowed by the band’s massive, chart-topping singles of the era, such as “See My Baby Jive” and “Angel Fingers.”
Yet, this overlooked gem tells a richer, more human story than many of the grander, polished hits of the era. The song is a straightforward, gut-punch confession of desperate infatuation. It is a time-machine song, where Roy Wood—a lifelong fan of 1950s rock and doo-wop—fully adopts a swaggering, early rock idol persona, complete with a throaty, Elvis-esque vocal delivery. The narrator is utterly consumed by a young woman. She is beautiful, desirable, and, crucially, utterly unavailable or unsuitable. The drama lies in the raw honesty of the character’s struggle: he is trying to play it cool, to act like a slick rocker, but the overwhelming force of his feeling—his “crush”—renders him ridiculous and vulnerable. The lyrics are sparse, driving straight to the point of his obsession: “Got a crush, baby / Got a crush ’bout you / And I don’t know / What to do.”
The meaning of the track transcends its simple, vintage rock trappings. It’s a heartfelt ode to the glorious, ridiculous, and often painful experience of unrequited or impossible longing that every person of a certain age can recall with a nostalgic ache. The ‘crush’ isn’t just a fleeting teenage fancy; it’s the kind of intense, all-consuming desire that makes an otherwise rational adult feel like an awkward, stammering schoolboy again. It’s the realization that true passion, no matter how old you are, can strip away all pretense and leave you exposed.
For those of us who came of age with the shimmering absurdity of Glam Rock, this song is a potent memory jogger. It evokes the spirit of a time when music didn’t have to choose between genuine emotion and theatrical spectacle. It’s the sound of a perfectly constructed three-minute single, buried on an experimental rock behemoth, a glorious contradiction that perfectly captures the heart of Roy Wood’s genius. It’s the sound of a grown man—or at least a flamboyant rock star—admitting, in a blast of fuzzy, chaotic instrumentation and a powerful, almost desperate rock-and-roll beat, that when it comes to her, he’s utterly, hopelessly lost. It’s a beautifully honest glimpse beneath the makeup and glitter, proving that even the wildest Wizzard had a soft spot for the oldest heartbreak in the book.