The 1960s singer that Jeff Lynne immediately fell in love with: “They were so good to play”
It’s usually difficult for anyone like Jeff Lynne to stay inspired over the years.
Even though every single artist usually has more than enough gas in the tank for a few records, there comes a time when even the most prolific songwriters in the world wonder if they really have anything left to say. It’s never easy to keep that flame going forever, but Lynne could always count on his record collection to bring him back to life when he got the itch to make a new classic pop song or orchestral masterpiece.
And no, Lynne’s collection was not just every single Beatles album, either. The ongoing joke of ELO being the second version of The Beatles does check out, considering how much of the production sounds like the Fab Four, but when you look through the other pieces of Lynne’s work, he had a much more sophisticated taste than any rock and roller would realise. And that all started with some of the classical geniuses.
A lot of the best ELO songs sound like the perfect marriage of The Rolling Stones and Beethoven most of the time, but Lynne wanted something a little bit more than a bunch of string sections over his tunes. He wanted the chance to make something new, and that normally involved stepping outside of the British Invasion.
The Beatles and The Stones were always a great start, but Lynne preferred to go to the source every single time he made a new record. He would have been nowhere without the likes of Roy Orbison and Del Shannon showing him the way forward when he was a kid, but there was also a healthy amount of R&B throughout his record collection if you really listen to the kinds of vocal leaps he was doing.
He wasn’t giving Stevie Wonder a run for his money or anything, but Don Covay and the Goodtimers were what really opened up his mind to what rock and roll could sound like. It didn’t have to be the same bluesy structure every time someone played, and when you listen to the way that Covay sings, it’s no wonder that Lynne ended up finding so much to love in every single one of his tunes.
Lynne might have graduated to more sophisticated music by the time of ELO, but even back when putting together his first bands, Covay was the songwriter that he took to straight away, saying, “I love this album. We used to play these tunes in The Idle Race; about two or three songs off that album. For about a year we did them and they were so good to play. That big, rough R&B sound.” He was no Steve Winwood or anything, but if you look at how Lynne shaped his voice, it does have a bit of R&B flair in there.
Take a tune like ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’, for instance. The song isn’t the most complicated thing in the world, but whereas the last few records of his were concerned with making some of the most grandiose music of his career, this is the kind of structure you would have expected out of an old-school R&B joint long before Motown even existed, especially with the ‘NO-NO-NO-NO-NO’ refrain in between the verses.
And since Lynne had time to pay tribute to Covay when recording ‘Mercy Mercy’ years later, it’s not like he was ever embarrassed to wear those influences on his sleeve. He wanted the chance to sample a little bit of everything, and if he could pull off producing The Beatles, why couldn’t he try his hand at making a tune that sounded more soulful than your average rock and roll tune?
