The 1988 song Jeff Lynne called the most unbelievable: “Stupendous”
There are hardly any musicians who can claim to have as many ‘pinch me’ moments as Jeff Lynne has had throughout his career.
He was already one of the biggest names in music once ELO made it big, but getting the chance to produce The Beatles and become a member of one of the biggest rock and roll supergroups of all time probably didn’t hurt either when he reached his evergreen phase. Everything that he was working on practically turned to gold, but there were definitely a few projects that seemed too good to be true when he first sat behind the mixing board.
Then again, not everything that he made was exactly perfect, either. Half the reason why ELO didn’t end up working out was because of how much he didn’t enjoy working on some of the live cuts, and you can definitely hear him getting more and more frustrated when he eventually decided to leave the band behind altogether. He didn’t want to spend his life making lacklustre live performances, and if he could turn the studio into his home, nothing was going to stop him from making as much music as he could.
But not every one of his idols was exactly easy to manage. Brian Wilson would have been the creative golden ticket for any other rock and roll star, but you definitely tell when Lynne wasn’t having the best time next to Wilson. The Beach Boys’ legend was already going through some rough patches in their personal lives, and no matter how easy the songs seemed to come, there was no way that Lynne was going to feel completely at home with Dr Landy in the same room as them.
All of it might have been a learning curve before joining The Traveling Wilburys, but Lynne felt that he had hit the jackpot working with Roy Orbison. Every single member of the supergroup looked up to Orbison whenever he sang, but while he didn’t get that much time behind the microphone on the band’s debut record, Lynne was going to make sure that everyone remembered Orbison’s voice when they heard Mystery Girl.
No one knew the album was going to be Orbison’s final record, put out while he was alive, but he gave absolutely everything he had to those final performances. ‘You Got It’ is still one of the greatest late-career triumphs of Orbison’s generation, but in Lynne’s mind, his voice never sounded more perfect than hearing him sing along to the song ‘A Love So Beautiful’ for the first time.
What’s even crazier is Lynne capturing Orbison doing the entire song in one take, saying, “He went in and did this most unbelievable performance in one take. I think we dropped in one word a bit afterwards, but it was absolutely stupendous. So I said to the engineer, ‘Are you getting this down or what, on tape?’” The Wilburys were still only a thought at this point, but any of them would have been proud to have this song on one of their albums.
Orbison is in rare form on the track, and with George Harrison on acoustic guitar, the whole thing feels like a Wilburys track in everything but name. All that we needed was a few token bass thumps from Tom Petty and Bob Dylan twisting a few lyrics around, and it would be perfect, but Orbison didn’t really need to have his fellow legends standing next to him for this song to hit as hard as it did.
A musical giant was still walking the Earth on this song, and even if he wasn’t long for this world, his supergroup bandmates were happy to at least be there to witness his final bow. No one knew that these good times weren’t going to last that long, but that’s what made them all the sweeter to look back on.
