The ELO member that Jeff Lynne “couldn’t work” with: “Two individual bosses in the band”
Most of ELO’s greatest moments all centre back around to whatever was in Jeff Lynne‘s head at the time.
The actual orchestral elements helped make them who they were half the time, but Lynne was the one plotting out what everything was going to be, and even without that magnificent voice, the whole thing would ring a little bit hollow if they got another singer to perform ‘Telephone Line’ or ‘Mr Blue Sky’. Lynne was the be-all and end-all, but that doesn’t always make for being the greatest collaborator.
Because looking at the greatest heights that ELO ever reached, a lot of it came from Lynne ordering around the rest of the band members in many respects. Each of them had their own individual personality, but when looking at the way that they worked together, a lot of it came down to the rest of the band trying to internalise Lynne’s ideas and then turning them into gold whenever they made A New World Record or Out of the Blue.
But it’s not like Lynne was some grand dictator when it came to the studio. No one with that much of an ego about their own ideas would have been able to work magic for the Traveling Wilburys, George Harrison, and Tom Petty, and whenever he was playing off of one of his friends, it was easy for Lynne to fill in the gaps that were missing rather than come in with a completely finished song.
That life would have been any other producer’s dream, but it did come at a cost when Lynne began working with Roy Wood. They had envisioned themselves as being the twin leaders of ELO when the band first started, and while ‘10538 Overture’ proved that each of them had the potential to make beautiful music together, it became abundantly clear to Lynne that a few of their outlandish ideas weren’t going to go the distance.
If anything, those tensions all stemmed from how Lynne and Wood approached their craft. Wood had helped get Lynne to join The Move, but even when they had a great foundation to work off of, Lynne could feel the wheels falling off for them as a touring entity when Wood tried to be the overachiever and switch between different orchestral instruments midway through every single set.
And while Wood had some grand ideas for what ELO could be, Lynne knew that his future as a musician would never come to pass if he kept working with him, saying, “Roy and I didn’t collaborate as well as we thought we would. We couldn’t work together. It was like having two individual bosses in the band. So he went off to do Wizzard, and I got to be the sole writer and producer of ELO. [We got better] About six months after Roy left.”
Although Wizzard was a much more adventurous band than what Lynne turned ELO into, it’s not hard to see why they needed to part ways, either. Wood had a few musical detours that he needed to get out of his system, but the kind of adventurous themes on his own records would have made for some of the strangest listening experiences if they were put next to tracks like ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’.
If anything, Lynne and Wood’s story is more of a classic case of two band members who simply grew too far apart from each other over time. They could both make fantastic music on their own, but there’s a fine line between a collaborator who will help fill in the gaps and the one who will start to drag you down after a while.
