Nostalgia Bulletin
Driving to work this morning, I was listening to Out of the Blue by the ELO, just because it's been on my mind since the weekend. I've been thinking of recording a version of "Sweet Talkin' Woman" as a kind of warm-up exercise when my home studio is finished.
Strip away the lush production, the novelty string section, vocoder, and all the rest of it, Jeff Lynne was a pretty good songwriter, for straight-ahead, nothing-fancy, rock-pop songs. I always liked "Sweet Talkin' Woman" and "Sweet is the Night", "Telephone Line" (from an earlier record), and so on.
Back in 1977, when Out of the Blue was released, I was, ooh, 14 years old, and ELO (then as now) were the most resolutely un-hip band in the world. You might as well have liked Elton John or the Brotherhood of Man, far as my contemps were concerned. It was wall-to-wall punk rock and I was for a time a lone spokesman for music of the distant past (which back when was a mere 10 years or so, but seemed further). But there was something about ELO that appealed to me, their output was always packed full of musical references cued to my tastes, and they were good fun. And from Birmingham, which doesn't happen every day. They were even my first proper gig. You'd rather it was Jonathan Richman or Spring Bobsteen, but you can't have everything.
The musical references, appropriately, all these years later, seem to point to music that was in the ELO's future. It's hard not to imagine that Fleetwood Mac's Tusk experiment wasn't informed by "Jungle", or that the whole of Karl Wallinger's World Party wasn't somehow influenced by Lynne.
I don't rate Jeff Lynne as a producer, not really. His work with the Wilburys and Tom Petty was frequently the worst thing about listening to those records, and, Jeff, did you have to use the Vocoder quite so much? Listening closely to tracks on Out of the Blue, there's a patched-together spliced feel to a lot of the songs, as if they were trying to out-do 10cc in terms of studio wizardry, without quite pulling it off. And the acoustic guitars, sheesh, all have that terrible Ovation piezo sound. They were in a studio, for god's sake, and could have stuck a mic in front of a proper guitar.
The really interesting thing about Out of the Blue is that most of the instruments and effects they used then (Mini-Moog, ARP 2600, Odyssey, Wurlitzer E.P. 200, Mellotron, Hohner Clavinet, Vocoder [unfortunately], Eventide Harmonizer, flanger, space echo etc) are all available as software plug-ins for various recording packages. The ELO equipment list reads like a gear-freak's wet dream, and yet for a relatively* modest outlay, you could have all of it, in software, and remake Out of the Blue, if you were a crazy person.
*A couple of thousand pounds, as opposed to, "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" for the original hardware.
Strip away the lush production, the novelty string section, vocoder, and all the rest of it, Jeff Lynne was a pretty good songwriter, for straight-ahead, nothing-fancy, rock-pop songs. I always liked "Sweet Talkin' Woman" and "Sweet is the Night", "Telephone Line" (from an earlier record), and so on.
Back in 1977, when Out of the Blue was released, I was, ooh, 14 years old, and ELO (then as now) were the most resolutely un-hip band in the world. You might as well have liked Elton John or the Brotherhood of Man, far as my contemps were concerned. It was wall-to-wall punk rock and I was for a time a lone spokesman for music of the distant past (which back when was a mere 10 years or so, but seemed further). But there was something about ELO that appealed to me, their output was always packed full of musical references cued to my tastes, and they were good fun. And from Birmingham, which doesn't happen every day. They were even my first proper gig. You'd rather it was Jonathan Richman or Spring Bobsteen, but you can't have everything.
The musical references, appropriately, all these years later, seem to point to music that was in the ELO's future. It's hard not to imagine that Fleetwood Mac's Tusk experiment wasn't informed by "Jungle", or that the whole of Karl Wallinger's World Party wasn't somehow influenced by Lynne.
I don't rate Jeff Lynne as a producer, not really. His work with the Wilburys and Tom Petty was frequently the worst thing about listening to those records, and, Jeff, did you have to use the Vocoder quite so much? Listening closely to tracks on Out of the Blue, there's a patched-together spliced feel to a lot of the songs, as if they were trying to out-do 10cc in terms of studio wizardry, without quite pulling it off. And the acoustic guitars, sheesh, all have that terrible Ovation piezo sound. They were in a studio, for god's sake, and could have stuck a mic in front of a proper guitar.
The really interesting thing about Out of the Blue is that most of the instruments and effects they used then (Mini-Moog, ARP 2600, Odyssey, Wurlitzer E.P. 200, Mellotron, Hohner Clavinet, Vocoder [unfortunately], Eventide Harmonizer, flanger, space echo etc) are all available as software plug-ins for various recording packages. The ELO equipment list reads like a gear-freak's wet dream, and yet for a relatively* modest outlay, you could have all of it, in software, and remake Out of the Blue, if you were a crazy person.
*A couple of thousand pounds, as opposed to, "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" for the original hardware.
posted by Anonymous at
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
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