Jeff Lynne's ELO
Electric Light Orchestra is one of few bands who can make up an entire set list from songs that are not just hits but have also been embedded into our collective unconscious. The slick, funky and bittersweet “Evil Woman,” bashed out hurriedly after the rest of 1975’s Face the Music was finished, has soundtracked many a stroll down the cereal aisle in the ensuing years. The electrically effervescent “Mr. Blue Sky,” penned after a literal parting of clouds put an end to weeks of writer’s block, has been a morning shower staple practically since Out of the Blue was released in 1977. “Showdown,” a song from 1973’s On the Third Day that John Lennon particularly enjoyed, had a second life in the ’90s on the soundtrack to Kingpin, which in turn inspired its use in a Michelob commercial that aired during the Super Bowl in 2022.
Despite their familiarity, these songs haven’t become sonic wallpaper; just try not to sing along when you hear one. The U.K. band’s iconography, a blend of neon jukeboxes and flying saucers, is appropriate for its rich palette of gritty rock, unbeatable pop hooks and layers of symphonic sophistication. The group has dissolved and re-formed a few times since its inception in 1970, most recently in the 2010s under the moniker Jeff Lynne’s ELO; this is the iteration of the band led by the puffball-coiffed co-founder and lead singer. A pair of friends who caught the Bridgestone Arena stop on their 2019 tour described it as a musical home-run derby, with Lynne and band launching classics over the outfield wall to explosions of applause. I had a tinge of regret for not buying tickets; luckily, there’s one more opportunity to see the group, when their Over and Out farewell tour of North America comes to the ’Stone on Friday.
Native Brit Lynne grew up a working-class kid in Birmingham — the same industrial town that birthed metal godfathers Black Sabbath — and got his start as a musician with what was essentially a broken toy. “I don’t read music or anything,” Lynne said in a 1986 radio interview for Westwood One’s Startrack Profile. “I just got a guitar — it was a plastic one, the first one I had, off a friend of mine who’d had it since he was a little kid. I learned a few tunes on one string, up and down the neck. It only had one string on it.”
Jeff Lynne's ELO
As a teen in the early ’60s, Lynne frequented youth dance clubs where a local rock act called The Nightriders played. Their lead guitarist Roy Wood left to focus on his new project The Move, and Lynne was drafted in. Quickly, the rookie proved himself to be something special, and the band changed its name to The Idle Race and reorganized themselves around his work. Their eponymous second album from 1966, produced and mostly written by Lynne at age 21, was a psychedelic pop masterpiece that earned comparisons to The Beatles. However, high praise from critics and fellow artists (including Marc Bolan and the Fab Four themselves) couldn’t turn it into a hit.
Eventually, Wood asked Lynne to join him and drummer Bev Bevan in The Move. As they made that band’s final two albums, another progressive sound that was clearly its own thing began to emerge, and thus was born the always lush, never languid rock ’n’ pop of ELO. Between 1971 and 1986, they released 11 studio albums. Though they never scored a No. 1 on Billboard’s main singles chart, they were a consistent presence in the Top 40, both in the U.K. and the U.S., for the better part of 15 years.
In his next act, Lynne stepped out of the spotlight and spread his wings as a producer and sometime side player. In 1987, he produced George Harrison’s Cloud Nine, which put the Quiet Beatle back on the pop charts. Then came legendary supergroup The Traveling Wilburys, a kind of Americana archetype made up of Lynne, Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison. Simultaneously, Lynne helped Orbison make a major comeback in 1988 and produced Mystery Girl, which was released in 1989 shortly after Orbison’s death; Petty’s five-times-platinum solo LP and rock ’n’ roll touchstone Full Moon Fever came a few months later.
As the list goes on, it’s clear that Lynne, his cohorts and his grand vision have shaped multiple generations of pop music, for fans and fellow musicians worldwide. (If you like Cheap Trick, The Flaming Lips, Daft Punk or The Lemon Twigs, Lynne is one person you can thank.) If all pop geniuses have to eventually transition from active participant to past master, there’s little better of a legacy to leave behind.
