Jeff Lynne on hanging out with George Harrison: “You can do whatever you like”
Jeff Lynne was ready to call it a day in the mid-1980s. For more than a decade, Lynne had carved out his place as the leader of the Electric Light Orchestra. However, Lynne wanted to spend more time in the studio and behind the mixing desk, becoming unsatisfied with his role as frontman and rock star.
“I decided to pack it in in 1986,” Lynne told Rolling Stone. “About six months later, George Harrison got in touch with me to ask me to work on his new album. A few days after he met me, he said, ‘Let’s go on holiday. I’m going to Australia for a while.’ He took me to the Grand Prix in Adelaide, which was amazing.”
Harrison was able to pull Lynne out of semi-retirement with an offer he couldn’t refuse: producing Harrison’s first solo album in half a decade. Harrison himself had decided that he wasn’t happy with the music industry in the early 1980s, taking a five-year rest period between 1982’s Gone Troppo and 1987’s Cloud Nine. When the two decided to return to music, Harrison had a Beatles-referencing track that piqued Lynne’s interest.
“It felt like an adventure since I used to just bang out tunes in my little studio,” Lynne recalled. “It was now on an international scale. George came up with the words for ‘When I Was Fab’. It was magical for me since it was supposed to sound like a Beatles song, even though we didn’t exactly use Beatles sounds. The album was a tremendous success and sold about 5 million copies. I was just so touched he wanted to work with me.”
“When you hang out with George Harrison, you can do whatever you like,” Lynne added. “On the strength of that, that’s how the Traveling Wilburys came to me. One night while we were recording, he said, ‘We should form a group.’ I said, ‘Who should we have in it?'”
“He said, ‘Bob Dylan.’ I’m going, ‘Bloody hell.’ I never expected that answer. And then I said, ‘Can we have Roy Orbison?’ He said, ‘Great, I love Roy.’ And we both loved Tom,” Lynne added. “Everyone we asked joined immediately, so that was a great thing.”
“We never played any concerts, though George had some whack ideas about how we’d do this tour,” Lynne concluded. “His first idea was that we’d rent an aircraft carrier, and then we’d just fly to different ports and let everyone climb onto the aircraft carrier and have a listen to us. The next idea was we’d do it on a train. We’d pull into a station and drop a stage and play for the people that came to see us at the station. But we never got around to either of them. Everyone else had their own tours.”
