The artist that made Jeff Lynne move rock forward: “There was so much going on”
For most rock and roll fans, Jeff Lynne picked up where The Beatles left off in writing beautiful melodies. The whole point behind Electric Light Orchestra was about making the kind of records that the Fab Four could have been proud of, but it’s about more than creating a production that sounds like a rehash of songs like ‘I Am The Walrus’. It’s about having stronger melodies than anything else on the charts, and Lynne had been producing those since he was a teenager.
Before he took flight with ELO or began working in bands like The Move, his heart was set on fire listening to rock and roll. The Beatles were the obvious inspiration half the time, but there were also dramatic singers like Roy Orbison who were miles ahead of anything else in rock and roll. Chuck Berry definitely had his place in rock and roll history, but there was a heightened sense of drama that Lynne was drawn to.
Because if you listen to any of ELO’s greatest albums, nothing they did was meant to be a simple acoustic strum-along. A song like ‘Telephone Line’ could have worked beautifully in that respect, but the minute those strings come soaring in, it feels like the band is lifting off into the air half the time. That might have come from George Martin’s stellar arrangements, but it also came from Lynne’s experience listening to theatrical productions.
Rock and roll may have been the number-one priority, but Lynne felt that what Rodgers and Hammerstein did was beyond anything he could have imagined at the time, saying, “I try to make a certain type of music that encompasses chord changes that feel almost classical. Great songs by Richard Rodgers, for example. I could never understand them as a kid, because there was so much going on in terms of arrangements, but I wanted to be able to play some of those changes.”
And in terms of classical music, no song in the ELO oeuvre captures that better than ‘Rockaria’. The whole thing has the same driving rhythm you’d expect out of some of the greatest rock and roll songs from the 1960s, but when it breaks to that gorgeous vocal solo by Mary Thomas, it feels like the blending of rock and classical music that Berry had merely suggested on the song ‘Roll Over Beethoven’.
It’s not all about creating musical symphonies all the time, but Lynne’s attention to chords is what really sets him apart. Everyone from his generation was knee-deep in the blues, but looking through his catalogue, there are always a lot of opportunities where he takes different chords that are outside of the key of the song and makes them fit perfectly in the right tune.
Take ‘Livin’ Thing’ for example. It might be one of the band’s greatest songs, but there’s also a fair bit of strange moments in it, whether it’s when he hangs on those minor chords to keep the suspense before the chorus kicks in or when the whole tone of the song switches on a dime when he moves to Bb minor on the line ‘I’m taking a dive’.
While Lynne took a lot of those elements into his eventual work with people like Tom Petty and George Harrison, it was never about trying to write mindless pop tunes. He knew the only way for his songs to last was to put in that extra effort, and listening to Rodgers was far from the worst place to start.
