The ELO shows that Jeff Lynne wanted to forget about: “I didn’t like the way we sounded”
Considering how many songs Jeff Lynne has made, there’s a good chance that he could have retired before the 1980s had even ended.
He was already one of the biggest stars in the world during the days of ELO, and right after retiring the band for a few years, he was just about ready for one of the greatest second acts of anyone’s career when he started working with some of the greatest musicians that the world had ever heard. Anyone else would have been bending over backwards to work with the kind of people that Lynne was proud to call friends, but that didn’t mean that he was particularly proud of everything he did.
Then again, how the hell are you going to have a problem with your career when you’re a member of the Traveling Wilburys? I don’t see how anyone could feasibly consider any of their records to be a failure if it led to you working with The Beatles on some of their final masterpieces, but Lynne’s issues had nothing to do with his friends; it was about what his band was getting up to.
He had already been around the world trying to make things work with Roy Wood, but not every one of their songs was exactly easy to pull off. The entire concept of having an actual orchestra up onstage was a little bit daunting, but when you look at their track record, it’s not like Lynne was ever phoning it in. But that might have been one of the biggest problems if those tours were the best that he could do.
Anyone else would have had fond memories from their salad days, but for Lynne, all he could think of was the many hours that he put into giving performances that were never going to hold a candle to the record, saying, “I would hate to be back in that era, really. I don’t have many fond memories of that era at all, because I didn’t like the way we sounded. We’re all still great pals, but the rest of it I could completely do without. I loved all of those gold and platinum albums, but I wouldn’t want to have to get them again.”
But even if that kind of work became fun when working with his famous friends, having to recreate all of those songs live would have been impossible if he had tried doing it back in the 1970s. ‘Mr Blue Sky’ is one of the greatest musical extravaganzas this side of The Beatles, so having to put that much effort into making a live version of that kind of song would have never worked, especially with trying to make all of those string sections work perfectly.
Which probably explains why his time in the Traveling Wilburys was more joyous than anything else. There was no question that the band were going to remain a ‘studio only’ group for the rest of their career, and even if Lynne could pop up and play one of their songs every now and again, it was great for him to watch all of those classic songs take shape from behind the glass rather than in front of a stage monitor.
That’s not to say that he ever wanted to completely retire from the road. His performances during his second go-around as Jeff Lynne’s ELO still had their fair share of surprises, and when looking through the biggest places that he played, it would have been a shame if he never got to see that massive rocketship crashland at Wembley Stadium and have everyone light up the minute that they heard the opening sounds of ‘Telephone Line’.
There were plenty more avenues for Lynne to go down as a solo artist and as a producer, and while he could deliver the goods whenever he played live, he was practically put on this Earth to make music from the comfort of a producer’s chair. He was forever a nerd for all of those little details in a pop song, and once you’ve created the perfect version of a tune, why try to make it sound worse coming out of a loudspeaker?
