The song far too fast for Jeff Lynne to play: “It took me four days”
Rock and roll never got to its place in history by playing everything slow and easy. The entire point of listening to people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard in their time was that it sounded like a bolt of lightning when they played compared to the easy listening schlock that people were being drip-fed every single time the radio came on. Then again, Jeff Lynne was always more eclectic than most, and he never saw the problem in a great song as long as it had a good melody behind it.
Because listening to most of ELO’s material, Lynne was simply looking to make the best music that he could as long as he could whistle it when he was finished writing it. Sometimes it would come off like one of the greatest rock and roll tunes of all time, like ‘Rockaria’, and sometimes the ballad approach would work just as well when working on something like ‘Telephone Line’.
Even when he was working for some of his favourite bands, the melodic ballad was typically what dominated any session. He may have been the one singing ‘Rattled’ in the Traveling Wilburys, but he knew to always give Roy Orbison something like ‘Not Alone Anymore’ or give The Beatles the kind of peaceful send-off by making sure ‘Free As A Bird’ sounded absolutely pristine.
But for someone who had been knee deep in the retro sounds of rock and roll, it wasn’t long before Lynne started to dig a little deeper. He already knew the mechanics that came with orchestrating the right kind of rock and roll tune, so it was a no-brainer for him to move even further back and see what the world of jazz standards had to offer on the album Long Wave.
By 2012, though, making a standards album wasn’t all that out of the blue. Rod Stewart had been doing it for years, and since Paul McCartney was about to release albums like Kisses on the Bottom, it was as good a time as any for Lynne to see if he could do justice to the kind of records his mom would have been proud of. But he was in for an education when tackling the song ‘Beyond the Sea’.
Whereas most people know the song for being a breezy slice of jazzy pop, Lynne remembered the whole thing being too much for him to keep up with, saying, “That song was a throwback in its day, as it sounded like 1940, but it was 1960. My thing has always been to make things sound older than they are. I used old microphone positions and fat analogue equipment. That song was quite a challenge because it is so fast it is ridiculous. It took me four days to learn just the bass part.”
And compared to the rest of the songs from around that time, ‘Beyond the Sea’ isn’t for the faint of heart to learn. ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ might have a greater hold on fans’ hearts to this day, but for anyone in the know, getting the bassline alone down on this tune is no easy feat, especially since the walking bassline is going on underneath some abnormal chord changes for a genre normally known for taking bits and pieces from jazz.
While the result isn’t exactly going to thrill people in the same way that they were thrilled hearing ‘Evil Woman’ for the first time, Lynne still does a serviceable job making sure that every piece of the musical puzzle sounds perfect. He is already one of the finest musicians ever lived, but anyone thinking Lynne could whip a tune into shape from inside the studio needs to get their ears checked.
