The one musician Jeff Lynne knew couldn’t get any better: “Such a lovely guy”
The entire journey that Jeff Lynne has gone on throughout his career would have been like a fantasy for any other casual rock and roll fan.
Anyone else would have done anything to be able to rub elbows with the rest of the Traveling Wilburys or be behind the board with a reunited version of The Beatles, but the reason why Lynne was always there was because he knew what his favourite music should sound like. He needed to get the best out of everything he did, but sometimes it didn’t take long when he had true legends next to him.
That’s not to say that everything came easy for Lynne, either. He knew that there was going to be a lot of work put into every single record that ELO ever made, and if he wanted his music to last, he would have to go the extra mile to get the sounds that he heard in his head. When you set the bar that high, you can’t be surprised when the rest of the stage shows aren’t able to do justice to what you can do in the studio.
Lynne had outgrown the stadium rock circuit relatively quickly, and when he was listening to the playback on George Harrison’s solo record Cloud Nine, he felt right at home. That was where he felt most comfortable every single time he made a record, but that was only the tip of the iceberg when it came to working with musicians who knew what they wanted to hear out of themselves.
The reason why Harrison loved working with Lynne was because of his track record, and if he was going to have a group with Lynne in it, he wanted to get the best of the best in there as well. The Traveling Wilburys were the kind of idea that no one else could have dreamed up other than Harrison, but as much as Lynne was starstruck working with a Beatle, being a one-man audience to Roy Orbison on his solo record was the real dream come true.
Orbison was the gold standard for what a rock and roll singer was supposed to be, and Lynne knew that he couldn’t go wrong when working on Mystery Girl. He already knew that Orbison was one of the greatest singers that he had ever heard, and as long as he could let everyone else in the world know what an exceptional talent he was, he would have done his job perfectly behind the scenes.
He had already worked magic for Del Shannon, but working with Orbison was the kind of job Lynne wouldn’t have traded for the world, saying, “Roy Orbison was unbelievable, my all-time favourite. See, I’ve been a producer as well as making my own records, and to work with Roy Orbison on ‘You Got It’, to produce it and write the song, was fantastic. I couldn’t ever wish for anything more fun than that. And he was such a lovely guy.”
And a lot of that comes down to the fact that Orbison was a nice person underneath it all. He had already been through his fair share of turmoil while at the top, but when looking through some of his final days, he seemed to be genuinely happy that people thought enough of him to remind the next generation of the kind of vocalist that he always was on tunes like ‘You Got It’ and ‘Not Alone Any More’.
He hadn’t completely run out of gas yet, and while a heart attack took him from this world way too soon, Orbison’s memory will always be a part of Lynne’s life. No one else could sing like he could, and the kind of fun that they had together in the studio was the kind of thing that no one was ever going to see again.
