The song Jeff Lynne was nervous to play for Paul McCartney: “I didn’t want to mess it up”
Any other musician can only hope to have the kind of gig that Jeff Lynne did in his prime.
Not everyone has the opportunity to hang out with George Harrison and Tom Petty all the time or make musical symphonies, but it’s not that Lynne didn’t earn every single accolade that he received over the years. He was a genius in every sense of the word, but there were even a few times when Lynne had to admit that he completely outdid himself whenever he stepped behind the board.
Then again, making classics may as well have been another day at the office for him half the time. ELO was a damn hit factory back in the day, and if it weren’t for the fact that they couldn’t reproduce everything live, the band would have probably still been going if the live circuit were able to keep up with what they were doing. But even when he was in the studio, Lynne was his own unique animal.
No one would have had the guts or the temperament to work alongside someone like Brian Wilson and hold their own, but Lynne never saw the point in being starstruck. He could have easily found time to work with everyone in the Wilburys, and while he would be the first to say that no one even belongs in the same category as Roy Orbison whenever he sings, he could at least arrange everything behind him so that everything sounded perfect on tunes like ‘You Got It’.
But the real magic Lynne had always come from how much fun he could bring to a session. Harrison and Petty knew that he was a no-nonsense producer when it came to the music, but when writing songs, he was more than willing to fool around with whatever he was working on, whether it was adding that strange gap in the middle of Full Moon Fever or having Harrison add a wah pedal to his signature guitar sound on ‘This is Love’.
Lynne could have done no wrong by that point, but the idea of fooling around with some of The Beatles’ best songs was going to be no easy feat. He had worshipped everything that the band made for decades, and while the Anthology was a treat for the fans, Lynne was going to do everything he could to make sure that a song like ‘Free As A Bird’ sounded perfect. The demo that John Lennon made back in the 1970s seemed impossible to record, but Lynne took that spare demo and turned it into one of the greatest codas to any band’s career.
At first, Lynne didn’t even know if he could make everything work, but he still holds the record as one of the finest achievements he ever made, saying, “I did it at two or three in the morning because I didn’t want to mess it up and have them go, ‘Ha ha! You can’t do it!’ The next day Paul comes bounding out and says, ‘You’ve done it! Well done!’, and gave me a great big hug. It was the best thing that could ever happen.”
What’s even crazier is realising that being able to fuse the rest of the band’s material with Lennon’s demo was technically the “easy” part. All the tension from the Fabs’ final years together had seemed to fade after a while, but for someone that had grown up studying everything from Revolver to Abbey Road, it had to have been a trip checking the harmonies and making sure that PAUL F*CKING MCCARTNEY was in tune with the rest of the track.
The end result does sound like a final piece of Beatles magic, but Lynne knew that it was about much more than the stars aligning at just the right time. The chemistry they had was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, but the fact that ‘Free As A Bird’ could stand as a Beatles classic is really a testament to the amount of hours that he put in making sure that every single note sounded perfect.
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