The album Jeff Lynne thought was impossible to play
Every artist tends to have those few songs that defeat them whenever they walk into the studio. They may have all of the ideas in their head to make a perfect song, but as soon as they finish everything and put every ounce of themselves into the final product, it’s enough for some people to have PTSD trying to do the whole thing over again onstage. And while Jeff Lynne always had a touchy relationship with playing live during ELO’s prime, he realised he needed to face the facts regarding doing justice to some of his tunes.
Then again, it’s easy to cut him a break when looking at the ensemble of musicians that he fit onto every album. The whole process of making an album billed as an orchestra means getting a lot of session musicians into the mix, and it’s not exactly the most sustainable lifestyle trying to organise that many people on a stage and have the checks from every night split between an entire crowd of people.
But Lynne never saw playing live as the most important part of his sound. He knew that he was following the lead of what The Beatles had done before him, and that often meant trying to make songs that weren’t exactly friendly to the live stage. If the Fab Four could still sell records and be one of the biggest groups in the world without going onstage, what was stopping Lynne from doing the same?
Before he had even hit on songs like ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and crammed an entire Broadway production into one song, he was already flirting with strange studio techniques. ‘Kuiama’ from the band’s second album was bound to be a nightmare to put together, but by the end of an album like Eldorado, Lynne had something that worked as a complete package, had some standout singles, and made them a household name. It’s too bad Lynne had no intention of it reaching an audience.
Despite ‘Can’t Get It Out Of My Head’ being one of the biggest of their career at that point, Lynne figured that playing the whole thing would have never been an option, saying, “The fourth album suddenly went gold in America, that was the one with all the big strings on. It was a pretty ambitious thing – Eldorado, it was called – and it was almost impossible to play on stage, so what happened was, for intros and stuff, to pretend there was a big sound I used tapes, like Beethoven’s 5th, and then it would just be the group again.”
That’s hardly Lynne’s fault, though. The cornerstone piece of every song was about getting the strings on everything, so unless he was in the position of someone as big as Michael Jackson during his prime, money was always going to be an issue when it came to getting everyone to work together for one track, let alone an entire show.
From a logistic standpoint, the whole thing would have also been an audio engineer’s nightmare whenever they came to town. The mentality behind making a great monitor mix is knowing where every instrument is, and when an orchestra is playing in a stadium instead of a theatre, it’s easy for everything to turn to mush once it tries reaching for the nosebleed seats.
Still, Lynne wasn’t going to sacrifice his craft to try to match what could be done onstage. He was already working well ahead of what other people were doing, and it wasn’t up to him to dumb himself down for the masses. The rest of the music world would either catch up to him, or they would have to deal with the mad genius working diligently in the studio.
