The 1973 song Jeff Lynne said was better than the original: “Our version is much heavier”
Jeff Lynne could only hope to emulate most of his heroes whenever he made one of his records.
Even though ELO got way too much flak back in the day for sounding a bit too much like The Beatles, it’s not like Lynne was going to turn around and say that he wanted nothing to do with the Fab Four whenever he made one of his records. He was proud to wear his influences on his sleeve, but he did admit that there were a few times when he outshone the songs that he was pulling from whenever he made a record.
That said, there were more than a few times where Lynne felt he missed the mark in some respects as well. He didn’t really want to go too far back in ELO’s catalogue whenever looking back on his old work, and even though they were one of the greatest live acts that the world had ever seen with the gigantic spaceship that they included on tour, there was never a time where Lynne felt completely satisfied when he didn’t hear the sounds that he heard in his head when he performed.
There was a lot more fun to be had whenever he got to the studio, but even if the baroque pop stylings of their first albums had their place, it wasn’t until On the Third Day that Lynne felt that he had a good idea of what he wanted to do. Is that because John Lennon famously liked ‘Showdown’ from this record? Maybe, but it was about more than getting a thumbs-up from a Beatle whenever Lynne made his tunes.
The biggest names in rock and roll were already getting bigger and better than ever before, and without Roy Wood to fight him on decisions, Lynne had the idea of getting anywhere close to some of his contemporaries. He wasn’t going to make Jimmy Page riffs by any stretch, but he could at least try to get anywhere near the sounds of an actual orchestra whenever making some of his arrangements.
It would be a while before he actually managed to create a symphony of his own on tunes like ‘Mr Blue Sky’, but even after pulling from the classical period, Lynne felt that he managed to take ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ further than anyone else, saying, “We send up some classical things, but when I listened to Greig’s In The Hall Of The Mountain King by the London Symphony Orchestra… Well, their’s is very pleasant, but I think our version is much heavier … but we play that riff with more power. And we’re not so much using classical music as the instruments it’s played on.”
And while it’s not easy to compete with some of the greatest classical compositions in the world, Lynne’s version of the piece is a lot more interesting than what a modern orchestra would be with it. Bringing in heavy guitars was the perfect texture for what they had been doing, and while the strings don’t let up for a second, it makes sense to play around with the tempo every now and again as well.
It’s not like there were any rules surrounding the tune, either. It was in the public domain at this point, and even if Lynne had another idea that would have got him laughed out of the room in any classical orchestra, he knew how to arrange music in a way that made rock audiences appreciate the kind of typical orchestrations that they wouldn’t have given a second glance to at the record store.
There were a lot more symphonies to come from Lynne over the years, but the fact that ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ was something he could pull off said a lot more about the kind of artist that he wanted to be. He may have had a Beatles fixation, but he was determined to make the kinds of records that went places that no one else had gone before in the same way his idols had done.
