Afterglow
by Ira RobbinsPage 2 Continued ...
"If it had been up to Jeff and me," said Wood a decade later, "we'd have packed up the Move and formed ELO [right away]. Bev was unsure about the ELO idea to start with...and encouraged us to keep the Move together to finance it." While successfully maintaining the Move as a hit machine, Lynne, Wood, and Bevan spent much of 1971 in a London studio, painstakingly constructing the first Electric Light Orchestra album, an adventurous collision of pop,
rock, and baroque styles that had serious orchestral passages as well as Move-like vocal sections. Wood and Lynne divided the production, songwriting, guitar, bass, and lead vocal chores; Wood overdubbed recorders, cellos, bassoon, oboe, and clarinet. Session players Bill Hunt (French horn) and Steve Woolam (violin) also contributed.
Ironically, although "Look At Me Now," "Whisper In The Night," and parts of the old-fashioned "Mr. Radio" essentially sound like Move songs under layers of added instruments, the number that actually blazed the ELO trail was just that: a Move song at heart. "'10538 Overture' was the birth of ELO," says Wood. "It was going to be a Move number; Rick Price even played [bass] on it. I'd been scraping around on a cello in the hotel room and Rick and Bev had been complaining about the racket. When they'd gone home, Jeff listened to the track and I ended up putting on about ten cello tracks."
Upon its British release in December 1971, Electric Light Orchestra made a minor chart showing. In America, where it was issued the following year, a misunderstood phone message left for a United Artists Records executive calling to inquire about the name led to it being retitled No Answer, an erroneous moniker that appeared only on the Lp label.
Wood, Lynne, and Bevan set about recruiting musicians to make their ambitious side project a performing entity. While Wood somehow found time to record and release his first solo single in February '72, the trio managed to assemble a group for ELO's public un- veiling on April 16, 1972 at the Greyhound, a large pub in south London. Along with the central threesome, ELO's first live incarnation consisted of Bill Hunt, Richard Tandy (a bassist/keyboard player who had been in the Move several years earlier), ex-London Symphony Orchestra violinist Wilf Gibson, and two cellists, Hugh McDowell and Andy Craig.
The show was a fiasco. Rushed along by nervous management, the group was unprepared, and the gig wound up being a shambles marred by lengthy pauses while Wood switched instruments. The following month, as the Move breathed its last (hitting the British Top 10 with "California Man" and making a TV appearance on Top Of The Pops), ELO began a British tour. Thereafter, the Move effectively ceased to exist except on paper, and for one brief moment the Electric Light Orchestra became the trio's entire focus. "Cooling the Move is maybe like kicking a gift horse in the mouth," Wood said at the time. "On a recording basis, the Move is a profitable concern. But we have great confidence in the Orchestra."
Such faith was sorely tested. ELO's tentative first steps were a glorious rock 'n' roll failure, offering no hint of a band with a fabulous future. Despite the prodigious talents and ef- fort brought to bear on what was an eminently viable concept, the tour was a mess. "I couldn't really tell what some of those early performances were like," said Wood. "There was no proper way of amplifying the in- struments. We were buying contact mics and jamming them down the bridge of the cello, so we had to suffer with feedback and couldn't have the cellos as loud as we would have liked. The sound," he noted wryly "left a bit to be desired."
ELO finally saw a patch of blue in July, when "10538 Overture" was released as a single and began heading up the British charts. The group appeared on Top Of The Pops, casually disguising Wilt Gibson and a roadie in pig masks to pass as cellists. The next month, following a short Italian tour and a studio row with Lynne, Wood quit, taking McDowell and Hunt with him.
Wood later explained his departure from a group he had invested so much in launching. He told Trouscr Press magazine's Mike Davies, "There was no musical difference. The music was fine and I really enjoyed playing it. I left ELO partly because attention was being focused on me and not the band as a whole, and partly to save the friendship between Jeff and myself." To the Melody Maker he said, "It was decided that I should leave because I had a name and was more likely to succeed at anything else."
Lynne's recollection of that tumultuous era is of "too many cooks in the studio. Roy and I used to rush for the mixing console to see who could get his hands on it first. It got to be childish and silly. We both had so much output—loads of tunes—and there wasn't room for two of us."
While Wood began rehearsing his new group, Wizzard (which attempted to conceptually upstage ELO with saxes and cello), Lynne and Bevan set about rebuilding ELO. (Although nothing came of it, the Move was still considered a viable entity at this stage, with ex-ELOer Wood remaining in the lineup!) Richard Tandy stayed, switching exclusively to keyboards (including Moog synthesizer, a prominent fea- ture in the new band's sound), as did violinist Wilf Gibson. They were joined by bassist Michael De Albuquerque and cellists Mike Edwards and Colin Walker. The reconstituted ELO, with Lynne now firmly in charge as sole songwriter, vocalist, producer, guitarist, and leader, debuted at the Reading Festival on August 12, 1972, and quickly dived into recording a new album.
With the artistically open-minded '60s still a vivid ideal to many in 1972, "art rock" was a badge of anti-commercial honorapplied to almost any forward-thinking band operating outside the AM radio mainstream. Art rock thus was both the motivation and the explanation for the Electric Light Orchestra II (initially announced as The Lost Planet), a cohesive collection of five cuts, the shortest of which runs nearly seven minutes. Lynne now says he "thought you had to impress people with how long you made your tracks so that it isn't a pop song." While that thinking may have lent the album a certain grandiosity, the infusion of classically trained musicians led Lynne to compose expansive suites that didn't merely embroider rock numbers with strings, but contained intricate, multi-part structures, with evocative instrumental passages inserted amid the traditional choruses and verses.
ELO II may not have been pop, but it wasn't quite anything else, either. For all the ethereal beauty of "Mama," the ambitious execution of "In Old England Town (Boogie #2)," the jazzy swing and Rossini quotes of "From the Sun To The World (Boogie #1)," and the powerful anti-war passion of "Kuiama," the track that turned an exotic musical experiment into a hugely popular rock band was "Roll Over Beethoven."
The group had learned the song as an encore, making Chuck Berry's clever lyrical metaphor audibly literal with the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (and, for a while on stage, his Ninth as well). However vague the original concept for ELO, this number singlehandedly made abundantly clear how rock 'n' roll with a string section should sound. In Britain, where it was released as a single in January 1973, "Roll Over Beethoven" immediately became a top 10 hit; it reached #42 in the United States. But it had a major impact onFM radio, where it was embraced by the young people as an irreverent salvo in the generational battle against stuffy adult authority. From his Wizzard-ly vantage point, Roy Wood promptly made sport of his former cohorts, naming a jazzy B-side "Bend Over Beethoven." ELO began its first American tour in California in June 1973. (Setting a pattern that would last the decade, ELO - after a change of violinists that brought in Leeds Orchestra veteran Mik Kaminski—was back in the States for another visit in October.) A new type of pickup that worked well on acoustic instruments had solved most of the groups early audio problems. Thus liberated, the cellists danced around the stage with abandon, providing a lively, often ridiculous, visual counterpart to the music.
Released at year's end, and covered with a stylish Richard Avedon photograph of seven grown men exposing their bellybuttons, On The Third Day revealed a partial shift away from the complexities of ELO ZJ, as well as a new level of sonic excellence in Lynne's production. Using ADT (automatic double-track) to give his vocals a distinct character, and multi-tracking his band to make a few players sound, like an entire orchestra, Lynne established the ELO sound. While a lumbering rendition of Grieg's "In The Hall Of The Mountain King"—a turn-of-the-century composition whose dramatic, driving theme had already landed it in the repertoires of other British rock bands—upheld the group's classical responsibilities (and provided a concert introduction for "Great Balls Of Fire"), the album otherwise delivered string-and-synthesizer-laden pop songs and guitar-driven lockers. The discrete songs were linked to a degree, but could all stand alone, unlike the discernible segments of ELO II's suites.
Lynnes remarkable facility for catchy melodies and unforgettable hooks produced two British hit singles: the funky-going-on-disco "Showdown," complete with a cutting Lynne guitar solo and a false ending, and the manic rock of "Ma-Ma-Ma Belle." Elsewhere, Lynnes influences surfaced in the overtly Beatlesque "Bluebird Is Dead" and "Oh No Not Susan," the latters undeleted expletive apparently going unnoticed by radio censors.
Just prior to On The Third Day's release, cellist Colin Walker departed, and Hugh McDowell (who didn't play on the album but was pictured on its American cover) ended his year in Wizzard to rejoin ELO for a U.S. tour. To the studio-oriented Lynnes increasing discomfort, ELO spent much of 1974 On the road, consolidating growing success with a lengthy trek around Britain and several American tours. On May 12, an atrocious-sounding live album was recorded at a California show. The Night The Light Went On In Long Beach includes such ELO concert staples of the day as "Daybreaker," the Beatles' "Day Tripper," "10538 Overture," "Hall Of The Mountain King/Great Balls Of Fire," "Orange Blossom Special," "Roll Over Beethoven," and an extended version of "Showdown." For reasons that have never been clarified, the album was never released in America or Great Britain, appearing only in Germany, Australia, and South Africa. "It's terrible," says Lynne. "As much as I didn't particularly want to be on tour, I even more particularly didn't want to do a live album.
I like making records better than playing live. I like to play tight—I used to love playing in clubs and stuff. When it got to those big arenas, with 20,000 people and all the equipment, it became less fun for me. I like to get it right—or try to. When you're playing on tour you can't do that. It sounds different every night. There's too many people involved. You can't really get it spot-on. And the size of the place totally destroys the sound." In general, Lynne says, "It was not easy to play live. [Keyboardist] Richard Tandy had to cover for the cellos when they were running around the stage."
Straining against the group's intrinsic limitations, and wisely seizing on the economic opportunities success afforded him, Lynne took a giant step with the next album. "Eldorado was the turning point. I always wanted a bigger sound, so I used a 40-piece orchestra and wrote the songs for that." Making the record, framed with an overture and a finale and subtitled "A Symphony By The Electric Light Orchestra," was a big thrill, he says. "Hearing all these guys strike up with that big tune was amazing."
Lynne soon learned about the hazards of such an endeavor. "In those days it was terrible dealing with the classical session musicians," says Lynne. "They would just play what they had to and that's it." Members of England's Musicians Union were notorious clock watchers, and rules about overtime were scrupulously enforced. "We'd be coming to the end of a song and the clock would be going just over the minute and they'd just stop. Unless you booked them for another three hours to play this extra minute, they were gone. On 'Eldorado' you can hear the double bass players putting their basses away while we're still playing."
The incorporation of an actual orchestra (invariably arranged by Lynne, Tandy, and longtime collaborator/conductor Louis Clark) provided Lynne with a new artistic focus. His various stylistic strengths were con- solidated in Eldorado, a concept album of related songs smoothly united by instrumental and choral interludes. In the elegantly lush strains of "Can't Get It Out of My Head," the intricate electric power of "Boy Blue," the Dylanesque "Poor Boy (The Greenwood)," the driving paean to rock 'n' roll ironically entitled, "Illusions In G Major," and the majestic title track, Eldorado sketches the story of a Walter Mitty character who fantasizes about travels, travails, disillusionment, and paradise found in his dream world. Lynne summed it up in 1974. "It's about the eternal dreamer who wakes up, sees the stark reality of life and can't stand it."
Eldorado elevated ELO to a new plateau of fame in America, where the album reached #16, earning the group a gold record and a Top-10 single ("Can't Get It Out of My Head"). Except for the subsequent chart disappointment of "Boy Blue," ELO built success steadily, with a series of headlining tours that displayed yet another lineup. De Albuquerque was gone (despite the credits, Lynne played the bass on Eldorado) as was Mike Edwards, reportedly to become a mailman. The new faces belonged to singing bassist Kelly (ne Michael) Groucutt and ex-National Youth Orchestra cellist Melvyn Gale. (continued ...)
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