It’s never an easy decision for any musician to decide to call it a day with a specific band. Most people spend their entire livelihoods trying to get their passion projects off the ground, and even if they have a lot of time and money invested in everything, it gets to be a bit monotonous when you realise that everything you worked for is something that you no longer want to do. And while Jeff Lynne would have been more than happy to make symphonies with ELO, he knew that there was a lot more out there than arranging what different pieces of an orchestra could do.
Because if there was one thing that everyone knew about ELO, it’s that they weren’t exactly subtle when it came to their music. Some of their biggest hits were based around a massive backing track behind them, and while that might have made for a massive stereo image, it wasn’t always the best thing to do whenever Lynne decided to take the band out on the road.
There were a lot of drawbacks to them trying to make the same magic on the road, and with the technology they had at the time, it would have been impossible. After all, Lynne’s greatest inspiration was The Beatles, and since they used most of their second career as an excuse to be studio lab rats, he knew that he was better suited to peddle away behind the board than try to figure out the budgeting costs of getting every single cello onstage or worry about the number of people that need to travel with him.
By the time Lynne started working as a producer, though, some of his pieces felt like the kind of records he always wanted to make. Outside of getting to work with a real Beatle, rubbing elbows with a production genius like Brian Wilson may as well have been any producer’s dream, almost studying Wilson to see the kind of music that could come out of him even by accident.
But out of every band coming out of the 1980s, Petty always had his eye on Lynne. He had already been inspired to get a crunchier guitar sound thanks to tracks like ‘Do Ya’, and when he decided to work on his own for the first time, Full Moon Fever became the brainchild of he and Lynne bouncing ideas off each other. Then again, the lack of any classical instruments gave Lynne a new path for his production.
Since everything was kept fairly sparse, Lynne remembered the joy of getting to work with Petty, outshining what ELO was becoming, saying, “Were [Tom] and George looking for that panoramic ELO sound? Well, it wasn’t always that panoramic a sound. I was gradually quietening that sound down that ELO had done and there were less strings. In ELO, it used to be a case of, ‘Oooh! String day tomorrow!’ and then by about the tenth album, it became ‘Oh, fucking hell! It’s string day tomorrow.’ I’d had enough of them. I grew tired of the strings.”
And going into the 1990s, you can see the band take a back seat to Lynne’s work most of the time. Every now and again, he would make something like Time, but there’s a good chance no one would have found time to devote to their own project when they were helping everyone from Tom Petty to The Beatles craft their latest masterpieces.
Then again, Lynne’s later records with ELO in the 2010s did do a good job of reminding everyone of what made the band such a gigantic sonic force back in their prime. He may have been proud of the versatility that he put into his other projects, but when you haven’t gone back to those old stomping grounds in a while, it makes everything feel euphoric when you start reliving those glory days.