By Something Else Reviews
It's true, as Randy Newman once impishly sang, they were six fine English boys who knew each other in Birmingham. After that, things got tricky for the Electric Light Orchestra. Despite an impressive string of 1970s hits, they became an easy target. People knocked the strings. The Beatlemania. Jeff Lynne's spaceman fro. We won't even get into ELO Part II.
Newman, in this dead-on parody of their orchestral bombast called “The Story of a Rock and Roll Band" from 1979's Born Again, winked his way through a few of the group's more memorable earworms: “I love their 'Mr. Blue Sky.' Almost my favorite is 'Turn to Stone,'" Newman adds, “and how 'bout 'Telephone Line?' I love that ELO."
Once we stopped laughing, though, there was something to admit. Thing is, we do too. No, really:
“DO YA'" (A NEW WORLD RECORD, 1976)
By S. Victor Aaron
The last single by Jeff Lynne's prior band The Move and the only one to chart in the U.S. (No. 93 on the Hot 100) ends up being the seventh charted single for the group spun off from The Move, the Electric Light Orchestra. This time, it reached No. 24 in April of 1977.
ELO had never rocked harder. At least, not on radio. With its violin/cello players and even a full orchestra supplementing the normal four piece rock band, it managed to become uniquely ELO. So yeah, a new, symphonic coda was added, but the crunch of the original carried over intact.
By this time, Lynne had achieved complete mastery of the delicate balance between rock and orchestral arrangements, and even the heavy presence of strings didn't do anything to take away from the song's raw, cocksure bent, with Lynne growling and boasting to his target for affections about all the things he's seen “but never seen nuttin' like you."
Interestingly, it was Todd Rundgren who was the first to cover this song (Utopia's 1975 release Another Live) before Lynne revisited his own tune for ELO. Rundgren was the guy who took a near-hit ("Hello It's Me") for his former band (The Nazz) and later made it into a major hit for himself. Lynne would soon follow the same strategy with “Do Ya,'" and got the same results.
“MR. BLUE SKY" (OUT OF THE BLUE, 1977)
By Nick DeRiso
John Lennon once called ELO the “son of the Beatles." It's unclear whether he meant that as praise or put down. Either way, their DNA is all over this one. In fact, for a band often accused of being nothing more than an obvious Fab Four pastiche, “Mr. Blue Sky" was the Electric Light Orchestra's pastich-iest of them all. You have an invariable, thudding bass line straight out of “Hello Goodbye"; an anvil-banging rhythm from Abbey Road; verses trailing along to the same two notes, like “I Am The Walrus"; then a calling card-eccentric construction of sudden shifts, from the dizzying harmonic interplay to a winking, buoyant guitar. The background vocalists, at one point, even pant along in a direct reference to “A Day in the Life."
To me, though, “Mr. Blue Sky" suffers most from its proximity. The Beatles, circa the mid-1970s, were still a looming presence in the rearview. Some, like the big-spending Lorne Michaels of SNL (and, well, me—minus the million-dollar guarantee to appear on my late-night comedy show) were holding out hopes for a reunion.
Long past the expiration date for such conceits, Jeff Lynne's loving-care studiocraft can now rightly be called canny homage. You'll find more than mimicry at work, as ELO so perfectly incorporates the decade's signature rock-band devices—things that have moved into the collective consciousness, but once had a pretty-cool-back-then verve: There's the very contemporaneous spaceship cover imagery, of course, but also the song's vocoded treatment of its title and a positively tornadic combination of chorus and strings. Longtime drummer Bev Bevan was credited in the liner notes with “fire extinguisher" on this track. Too, in keeping with the grandiose prog-pedantry of the day, “Mr. Blue Sky" is the final song in a four-piece “Concerto for a Rainy Day" on side three of the original two-LP edition of Out of the Blue. (The stormy weather effects included on the opening segment “Standin' in the Rain" were reportedly recorded by Lynne outside the chalet where he composed the album. Dude!)
“Mr. Blue Sky" would become the third Top 40 single (after “Turn to Stone" and “Sweet Talkin' Woman") to emerge from Out of the Blue, going to 35 in the U.S. and 6 in Britain. The truth is, it's absolutely stuffed with details, both cribbed and otherwise—a much braver attempt at tribute than ELO is often given credit for. The truth is, they took the Beatles' own late-period tendency toward symphonic pomposity, and made it their own.
“FIRE ON HIGH" (FACE THE MUSIC, 1975)
By Mark Saleski
It seems like I have to do a lot of admitting in these Something Else! collaborations. An artist is suggested and I dive right in, all excited to revisit the music—only to discover that my collection contains none of their records. Worse, I do have an album, but it's a greatest-hits thing. (This goes against my long-standing distaste for best-of records, which rip the songs out of their original context. OK, so I'm a nerd. Whatever.)
This time around, I'm happy to report that I do own more than ELO's Greatest Hits. But here's the sad admission: I'm almost positive that my first experience with ELO came not from the spectacular Eldorado or its follow up Face The Music, but from the CBS sports magazine show CBS Sports Spectacular. For a few years in the 1970s (76-78), the show's theme song was an edit of “Fire On High."
Being the pre-Internet era, I didn't even know that it was ELO. That moment came a few years later when some kid from my dorm played me Face The Music. I love those kind of surprises. Honestly though, I didn't really need to associate such a cool song with things like the World's Strongest Man competition.
And yes, it is a cool song, full of weird orchestration, violently strummed guitar, fusion-esque violin, and even (in the full version) a backwards masked message. Don't worry, it's kid safe. Plus, it was done to annoy some Fundamentalist Christians. Extra RockAndRollPoints
It's true, as Randy Newman once impishly sang, they were six fine English boys who knew each other in Birmingham. After that, things got tricky for the Electric Light Orchestra. Despite an impressive string of 1970s hits, they became an easy target. People knocked the strings. The Beatlemania. Jeff Lynne's spaceman fro. We won't even get into ELO Part II.
Newman, in this dead-on parody of their orchestral bombast called “The Story of a Rock and Roll Band" from 1979's Born Again, winked his way through a few of the group's more memorable earworms: “I love their 'Mr. Blue Sky.' Almost my favorite is 'Turn to Stone,'" Newman adds, “and how 'bout 'Telephone Line?' I love that ELO."
Once we stopped laughing, though, there was something to admit. Thing is, we do too. No, really:
“DO YA'" (A NEW WORLD RECORD, 1976)
By S. Victor Aaron
The last single by Jeff Lynne's prior band The Move and the only one to chart in the U.S. (No. 93 on the Hot 100) ends up being the seventh charted single for the group spun off from The Move, the Electric Light Orchestra. This time, it reached No. 24 in April of 1977.
ELO had never rocked harder. At least, not on radio. With its violin/cello players and even a full orchestra supplementing the normal four piece rock band, it managed to become uniquely ELO. So yeah, a new, symphonic coda was added, but the crunch of the original carried over intact.
By this time, Lynne had achieved complete mastery of the delicate balance between rock and orchestral arrangements, and even the heavy presence of strings didn't do anything to take away from the song's raw, cocksure bent, with Lynne growling and boasting to his target for affections about all the things he's seen “but never seen nuttin' like you."
Interestingly, it was Todd Rundgren who was the first to cover this song (Utopia's 1975 release Another Live) before Lynne revisited his own tune for ELO. Rundgren was the guy who took a near-hit ("Hello It's Me") for his former band (The Nazz) and later made it into a major hit for himself. Lynne would soon follow the same strategy with “Do Ya,'" and got the same results.
“MR. BLUE SKY" (OUT OF THE BLUE, 1977)
By Nick DeRiso
John Lennon once called ELO the “son of the Beatles." It's unclear whether he meant that as praise or put down. Either way, their DNA is all over this one. In fact, for a band often accused of being nothing more than an obvious Fab Four pastiche, “Mr. Blue Sky" was the Electric Light Orchestra's pastich-iest of them all. You have an invariable, thudding bass line straight out of “Hello Goodbye"; an anvil-banging rhythm from Abbey Road; verses trailing along to the same two notes, like “I Am The Walrus"; then a calling card-eccentric construction of sudden shifts, from the dizzying harmonic interplay to a winking, buoyant guitar. The background vocalists, at one point, even pant along in a direct reference to “A Day in the Life."
To me, though, “Mr. Blue Sky" suffers most from its proximity. The Beatles, circa the mid-1970s, were still a looming presence in the rearview. Some, like the big-spending Lorne Michaels of SNL (and, well, me—minus the million-dollar guarantee to appear on my late-night comedy show) were holding out hopes for a reunion.
Long past the expiration date for such conceits, Jeff Lynne's loving-care studiocraft can now rightly be called canny homage. You'll find more than mimicry at work, as ELO so perfectly incorporates the decade's signature rock-band devices—things that have moved into the collective consciousness, but once had a pretty-cool-back-then verve: There's the very contemporaneous spaceship cover imagery, of course, but also the song's vocoded treatment of its title and a positively tornadic combination of chorus and strings. Longtime drummer Bev Bevan was credited in the liner notes with “fire extinguisher" on this track. Too, in keeping with the grandiose prog-pedantry of the day, “Mr. Blue Sky" is the final song in a four-piece “Concerto for a Rainy Day" on side three of the original two-LP edition of Out of the Blue. (The stormy weather effects included on the opening segment “Standin' in the Rain" were reportedly recorded by Lynne outside the chalet where he composed the album. Dude!)
“Mr. Blue Sky" would become the third Top 40 single (after “Turn to Stone" and “Sweet Talkin' Woman") to emerge from Out of the Blue, going to 35 in the U.S. and 6 in Britain. The truth is, it's absolutely stuffed with details, both cribbed and otherwise—a much braver attempt at tribute than ELO is often given credit for. The truth is, they took the Beatles' own late-period tendency toward symphonic pomposity, and made it their own.
“FIRE ON HIGH" (FACE THE MUSIC, 1975)
By Mark Saleski
It seems like I have to do a lot of admitting in these Something Else! collaborations. An artist is suggested and I dive right in, all excited to revisit the music—only to discover that my collection contains none of their records. Worse, I do have an album, but it's a greatest-hits thing. (This goes against my long-standing distaste for best-of records, which rip the songs out of their original context. OK, so I'm a nerd. Whatever.)
This time around, I'm happy to report that I do own more than ELO's Greatest Hits. But here's the sad admission: I'm almost positive that my first experience with ELO came not from the spectacular Eldorado or its follow up Face The Music, but from the CBS sports magazine show CBS Sports Spectacular. For a few years in the 1970s (76-78), the show's theme song was an edit of “Fire On High."
Being the pre-Internet era, I didn't even know that it was ELO. That moment came a few years later when some kid from my dorm played me Face The Music. I love those kind of surprises. Honestly though, I didn't really need to associate such a cool song with things like the World's Strongest Man competition.
And yes, it is a cool song, full of weird orchestration, violently strummed guitar, fusion-esque violin, and even (in the full version) a backwards masked message. Don't worry, it's kid safe. Plus, it was done to annoy some Fundamentalist Christians. Extra RockAndRollPoints
