How George Harrison inspired Jeff Lynne while writing an ELO classic
Since their emergence in the early 1960s, The Beatles have amassed one of the largest fanbases of any musical artist in history. Sadly, we can’t determine who the band’s biggest fan is, but Jeff Lynne would be a safe bet for the top ten. Before his rise to fame with Electric Light Orchestra, Lynne would cover The Beatles during formative gigs with his schoolboy bands. As you can imagine, he had to pinch himself when he first met the foursome in the late ’60s.
The seismic moment in question occurred at Abbey Road Studios, where Lynne was recording his first-ever album. As the ‘Evil Woman’ singer revealed in a documentary interview, his engineer ran into the room to say, “Anybody wanna go down to Abbey Road [Studios] and watch The Beatles recording?”
“Can’t you see we’re busy?'” Lynne remembered joking in response. Like shit off a shovel, Lynne and his entourage crept into “this palace of recording”. He remembered the “surreal” moment as “a dream – hanging out in all this wonderment.”
While Lynne got “chucked out” after a couple of minutes, the memory stuck with him through the years. “It was the biggest thrill ever because I got to see something I never dreamed possible,” he said. The experience clearly energised Lynne to raise his own expectations, and within a couple of years, he began to ruffle the charts as the frontman of ELO.
After cutting his productional teeth with ELO, Lynne began to branch out, with an ambition of rivalling George Martin in the field. The biggest turning point in that side of his career arrived when George Harrison asked him to co-produce his eleventh solo studio album, Cloud Nine. The 1986 release included the hit single ‘Got My Mind Set on You’ and, following a five-year hiatus, was something of a comeback album for the former Beatle.
Lynne adored The Beatles holistically, but the stratospheric ELO hit ‘Livin’ Thing’ seemed to presage his kinship with Harrison. While writing the song for his 1976 album A New Record, Lynne leant on the former Beatle’s innovative guitar work as a source of inspiration.
Speaking to Goldmine in 2013, Lynne noted that Harrison’s previous work with The Beatles inspired an augmented chord that underpins the song’s structure. “George [Harrison] used a lot of those chords, too,” he said. Adding, “It makes it more of a special song because it’s got a weird chord in it, and nobody knows how to play it.”
Without the augmented chord, ‘Livin’ Thing’ would have been a “run-of-the-mill” song with a predictable chord progression. “The chorus would have been C, A minor, F and G instead of C, A minor, D minor, G augmented and back to the C,” Lynne revealed. “That G augmented chord adds a little bit of tension and uplift to the song.”
Although he was predominantly a lead guitarist, Harrison had a knack for coming up with his own chord variants that gave some of The Beatles’ songs a nuanced tone. Most famously, his single strummed chord at the opening of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ kept Beatlemaniac guitarists busy for several decades.
Thankfully, the speculation reached Harrison before it was too late. During an online discussion in February 2001, just nine months before his death, Harrison identified the mystery chord as an Fadd9. “It is F with a G on top, but you’ll have to ask Paul about the bass note to get the proper story,” the guitarist said.
Watch the music video for Jeff Lynne’s 1976 power pop hit below and see if you can make out the augmented G chord.
