The 1967 album Jeff Lynne called the most surprising: “A beautiful mix”
Half of what Jeff Lynne did in ELO was dictated by surprise.
He didn’t want to make the same kinds of pop songs that everyone else was making, and even if the change involved nothing but substituting in a new chord, it made all the difference when someone heard one of his tunes on the radio. And when you look at where Lynne was learning things from, every one of his favourite records were always about finding something that wasn’t exactly normal by pop chart standards.
He had a knack for what rock and roll was supposed to sound like with Chuck Berry, but The Beatles turned his entire head around when he began working on his own music. The Fab Four are practically the reason why he became a musician, and while a lot of what he was doing in The Move didn’t have to do with the traditional Beatlesque chords or anything, it was all done in service to him making the kind of songs that people would remember.
It wasn’t going to be easy for him to get a band with strings like that off the ground or anything, but it didn’t matter to him so long as the songs were intact. It all came down to the way that the melody fell whenever someone heard the tune out of context, and a lot of what Lynne did involved him trying to make the best with what he had every time he worked. But as much as rock and roll was his bread and butter, soul music wasn’t that far behind in his record collection, either.
The biggest names in Motown had been creating productions far beyond what anyone else could do, and it wouldn’t be long before other visionaries started to branch out in the soul world. Stevie Wonder was about to become one of the biggest stars in the world, but Lynne felt that it all came back to him listening to bands like The Marvelettes when he was first dissecting what pop music could sound like.
Every part of their records sounded pristine, and Lynne was shocked that he could turn a record like Sophisticated Soul on at any moment and hear pieces that he never knew were even there, saying, “It doesn’t take me back, listening to it these days; it just impresses me more. Like, wow! How did they do that? How did they get that sound then? What a beautiful mix. I’m always impressed by the balance of things. I’m blown away by the balance. How they did it, I don’t know.”
And when you look at the kind of people behind it, you can really hear why. Smokey Robinson, overseeing all of those harmonies, was bound to make them sound absolutely massive when Lynne first heard them, but the real muscle behind all of those songs comes down to what The Funk Brothers were known for doing on every track.
They were the house band at Motown for so long, and you could practically spend an entire day dissecting what James Jamerson was doing on bass. His knack for hearing hooks and hanging in the background was absolutely perfect, and hearing all of them working together made them sound like they had one communal mind every single time they walked into the studio and looked at the charts that they were playing.
So for someone like Lynne, this was a musical smorgasbord just as much as The Beatles were. He was looking to make some of the biggest splashes of his career sound just like this, and while he may have got there eventually, he knew that he could always give this record a spin if he needed some more inspiration.
