Fact #121187
When:
Short story:
Out Of The Blue by The Electric Light Orchestra, aka ELO, is awarded a platinum disc by the R.I.A.A. in the USA.Full article:
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA - OUT OF THE BLUE, researched and compiled by Johnny Black for Hi-Fi News, 2014
Music that was reviled by the critics in its day frequently proves to have lasting merit which only reveals itself in the fullness of time. ELO’s 1977 double-album Out Of The Blue, their seventh studio opus, is a perfect example.
With the lo-fi DIY punk ethic ruling the day, Sounds whined, "Why do ELO sell so many records?" Similarly, Melody Maker grumbled that, "the experimentation between orchestra and pop music has become somewhat watered down over the years."
So, given that the flavour of the day was the frantically thrashed three-minute, three-chord single, what inspired ELO founder Jeff Lynne to create a lavishly-produced, lushly-orchestrated double album?
The answer lay on the other side of the Atlantic. "The boss of United Artists asked me if I would do a double live album, because Peter Frampton had just had a huge hit with his [Frampton Comes Alive!]," Lynne has explained. "I said, 'Oh, I wish you’d said studio album. I’d have done that, but I don’t want to do a live album.' Later on he came back to me and said, 'OK, you’re on. Studio album!' It was terrific that I got the freedom to do it."
In the spring of 1977, Lynne rented a chalet in the village of Bassin, overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, giving himself a month to write the necessary songs. "I was there for two weeks and didn’t come up with anything," he remembers, "but finally they started coming."
ELO drummer Bev Bevan has recalled how, "He suddenly began to produce song after song at an incredible rate. 'There’s going to be no problem', he told me on the phone. 'I’ve started writing at last and I can’t seem to stop.'"
One of the first to emerge was Mr Blue Sky. "It had been cloudy and misty and horrible, you couldn’t see where you were, and then one day the sun came out and the mist disappeared. It was fantastic, these giant mountains appeared everywhere. So I wrote Mr Blue Sky – very literal!"
A week later, Lynne brought the other members of the band out to Switzerland, by which time, says Bevan, "He had every song for that album on tape. As usual, he had done it with a piano, guitar and by humming the tune."
By May 22, 1977, when they started recording at Musicland Studios in the Arabella House Hotel complex in Munich, Lynne had the makings of a clutch of pop classics - Turn To Stone, Sweet Talkin’ Woman, Wild West Hero and the aforementioned Mr. Blue Sky among them - plus prog-rock epics The Whale and Concerto For A Rainy Day.
The sessions lasted three months, during which Musicland’s house engineer Reinhold Mack found Lynne’s personality hard to get to grips with. "Every morning, his attitude would be cold, as if I'd never met him before - walking straight past me without even saying hello, whereas at night, after about 12 pints of beer, he'd be sitting on my lap, kissing me good night."
Mack also found Lynne’s working method difficult to comprehend. "He'd leave the engineering completely to me and ask things like, 'Can you get a big piano sound?' After I tried my best to do that, he'd then say, 'OK, that's really good. Now can you screw it up?' 'What's the point of doing this?' I'd ask. 'I could have screwed it up in the first place.'"
Bevan, however, asserts that Lynne was, in fact, very methodical. "We always build up an album in the same way," he states. "Drums and bass first, Then piano, followed by rhythm guitar. Electronic keyboards would come next, finishing with guitar solos." Only once the instrumental tracks were complete would Lynne write and sing lyrics.
Indeed, Lynne has admitted that he has to "chain myself to the desk when it comes to writing words" and his lyrics can change dramatically as a song progresses. Living Thing, on the previous album A New World Record, famously began life as a rumination on the grim after-effects of food poisoning. "I shouldn’t tell you that," he declares. "You’ll never be able to listen to it the same again. The song has been interpreted in so many different ways. People think it’s about abortion, suicide, saving the whale, I’ve heard all kinds of things. I wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s about a bad paella on a Spanish holiday."
Despite his idiosyncratic methods, Lynne produced end-results for Out Of The Blue that are generally hard to fault.
The album opens with Turn To Stone, a beautifully-textured track with a beat which prefigures early techno, a quirky Moog bass played by Lynne, and a vocal melody in which each line is answered by tight multi-part harmonies. It became the first of four major hit singles to be drawn from the album.
The second single was the aforementioned Mr. Blue Sky, a song so Beatlesque that it’s easy to hear why John Lennon once hailed ELO as the "Sons of the Beatles".
Understandably, Lynne remains particularly proud of Mr. Blue Sky. "It captured what my vision of ELO was all about. All the bits that come in and out, the backing vocals, the cellos sliding, all the little naughty bits, the sound effects, everything is exactly what I imagined ELO to be."
Particularly distinctive was the track’s inclusion of voices rendered electronic via the era’s hottest new musical toy, the Vocoder 2000. "The factory that had just built the prototype was in Stuttgart, only an hour from Munich," Lynne has explained. "So we sent the girlfriends off to pick it up. There was no manual, it was that new. We spent the whole day just getting it to do something, but once we got it going it was beautiful. It’s still the best Vocoder I’ve heard. That was a treat, you always want to innovate and get ahead with technology."
Because the song is located at the end of Side 3 of the album, the Vocoder voice at the end sings, "Please turn me over".
Lynne has also revealed that the album’s epic 19 minute Concerto For A Rainy Day grew naturally out of Mr. Blue Sky. "I loved the second side of Abbey Road and I thought I wouldn’t mind trying a suite like that. Because it was a double album I had so much room to work with. It was quite complex to make."
The album’s third hit single was Sweet Talkin’ Woman of which Lynne has recalled, "It was a song called Dead End Street. I'd done all the words and everything, finished it. And I came down the next day in the studio and I went, 'I hate that. Let's rub all the vocals off.' And he (Reinhold Mack) did. And I'd been sitting up in the hotel, which is above the studio, working at night just trying to think of a new tune and new words, which I did. And tried it the next day and there they worked. So, it was a good job I did, but it also meant changing the arrangement slightly. So a lot of pairs of scissors were used that day."
The album swoons to a close with the filmic grandeur of its fourth hit single, Wild West Hero, a tongue-in-cheek cowboy pastiche on which Melvyn Gale, normally the band's cellist, provided distinctive piano stylings.
To a certain extent, Out Of The Blue’s runaway commercial success became something of a millstone round Lynne’s neck. "There was no way of following that, but there were contracts to fulfil, so I was forced to do things I didn’t want to do, just because of signing bits of paper when you don’t know what you’re doing: 'Sign that?' 'Oh yeah, of course, thank you'. You can have 50 quid and all the brown ale you can drink. You don’t realise what you’re getting into. So it turned out I had to do another 93 albums for ELO!"
Whatever Lynne’s misgivings, with four massive hit singles and some of Lynne’s most memorable production work, Out Of The Blue is arguably the ultimate Electric Light Orchestra album, even if some of its more experimental material, notably ambient/orchestral eco-hymn The Whale, still induces the screaming ab-dabs in critics.
PRODUCTION NOTES
Musicland Studios, birthplace of Out Of The Blue, was established in the late 60s by disco-synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder in the basement of Arabella House, a 21-storey mixed commercial development in Munich. Situated several miles from the town centre, this grim edifice was surrounded by bleak building sites, towering cranes and industrial wasteland. It was, in the words of Brian May of Queen, a place where people frequently "used to go nuts and commit suicide by jumping off the top."
Nevertheless, it was a favourite studio of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and The Stones to name only a few. Jeff Lynne too found it conducive to creativity, and recorded several albums there with house engineer Reinhold Mack.
While working on Out Of The Blue, Mack was using Westlake monitors and the latest Harrison console, a boon because, "You could pretty much do anything at the push of a couple of buttons. It had a very clean recording sound. You'd go from the preamp over the monitor port onto the tape machine, and that was it; a really short and clean signal path."
Part-way through the sessions, Mack suggested recording the 54-piece string section on the huge sound stage at Munich's Bavaria Film studio but, "it was a complete disaster. I could not get the right sound." Undeterred, he crammed the strings into Musicland. "There was also a 32-piece choir," he recalls. "It had to perform in the lobby while some of the orchestra musicians played their instruments lined up against the walls. The place was mobbed, and in those circumstances the sound we got on tracks like Mr Blue Sky was pretty good.”
Drummer Bev Bevan has also revealed that one ELO technique involved double tracking all of his drum parts, playing the second track while listening to the first on headphones. "The concentration hurts. If I’m a split second out at any time the whole thing has to be repeated, but Mack gets a drum sound that I like, big, heavy and powerful."
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Music that was reviled by the critics in its day frequently proves to have lasting merit which only reveals itself in the fullness of time. ELO’s 1977 double-album Out Of The Blue, their seventh studio opus, is a perfect example.
With the lo-fi DIY punk ethic ruling the day, Sounds whined, "Why do ELO sell so many records?" Similarly, Melody Maker grumbled that, "the experimentation between orchestra and pop music has become somewhat watered down over the years."
So, given that the flavour of the day was the frantically thrashed three-minute, three-chord single, what inspired ELO founder Jeff Lynne to create a lavishly-produced, lushly-orchestrated double album?
The answer lay on the other side of the Atlantic. "The boss of United Artists asked me if I would do a double live album, because Peter Frampton had just had a huge hit with his [Frampton Comes Alive!]," Lynne has explained. "I said, 'Oh, I wish you’d said studio album. I’d have done that, but I don’t want to do a live album.' Later on he came back to me and said, 'OK, you’re on. Studio album!' It was terrific that I got the freedom to do it."
In the spring of 1977, Lynne rented a chalet in the village of Bassin, overlooking Lake Geneva in Switzerland, giving himself a month to write the necessary songs. "I was there for two weeks and didn’t come up with anything," he remembers, "but finally they started coming."
ELO drummer Bev Bevan has recalled how, "He suddenly began to produce song after song at an incredible rate. 'There’s going to be no problem', he told me on the phone. 'I’ve started writing at last and I can’t seem to stop.'"
One of the first to emerge was Mr Blue Sky. "It had been cloudy and misty and horrible, you couldn’t see where you were, and then one day the sun came out and the mist disappeared. It was fantastic, these giant mountains appeared everywhere. So I wrote Mr Blue Sky – very literal!"
A week later, Lynne brought the other members of the band out to Switzerland, by which time, says Bevan, "He had every song for that album on tape. As usual, he had done it with a piano, guitar and by humming the tune."
By May 22, 1977, when they started recording at Musicland Studios in the Arabella House Hotel complex in Munich, Lynne had the makings of a clutch of pop classics - Turn To Stone, Sweet Talkin’ Woman, Wild West Hero and the aforementioned Mr. Blue Sky among them - plus prog-rock epics The Whale and Concerto For A Rainy Day.
The sessions lasted three months, during which Musicland’s house engineer Reinhold Mack found Lynne’s personality hard to get to grips with. "Every morning, his attitude would be cold, as if I'd never met him before - walking straight past me without even saying hello, whereas at night, after about 12 pints of beer, he'd be sitting on my lap, kissing me good night."
Mack also found Lynne’s working method difficult to comprehend. "He'd leave the engineering completely to me and ask things like, 'Can you get a big piano sound?' After I tried my best to do that, he'd then say, 'OK, that's really good. Now can you screw it up?' 'What's the point of doing this?' I'd ask. 'I could have screwed it up in the first place.'"
Bevan, however, asserts that Lynne was, in fact, very methodical. "We always build up an album in the same way," he states. "Drums and bass first, Then piano, followed by rhythm guitar. Electronic keyboards would come next, finishing with guitar solos." Only once the instrumental tracks were complete would Lynne write and sing lyrics.
Indeed, Lynne has admitted that he has to "chain myself to the desk when it comes to writing words" and his lyrics can change dramatically as a song progresses. Living Thing, on the previous album A New World Record, famously began life as a rumination on the grim after-effects of food poisoning. "I shouldn’t tell you that," he declares. "You’ll never be able to listen to it the same again. The song has been interpreted in so many different ways. People think it’s about abortion, suicide, saving the whale, I’ve heard all kinds of things. I wouldn’t want anyone to think it’s about a bad paella on a Spanish holiday."
Despite his idiosyncratic methods, Lynne produced end-results for Out Of The Blue that are generally hard to fault.
The album opens with Turn To Stone, a beautifully-textured track with a beat which prefigures early techno, a quirky Moog bass played by Lynne, and a vocal melody in which each line is answered by tight multi-part harmonies. It became the first of four major hit singles to be drawn from the album.
The second single was the aforementioned Mr. Blue Sky, a song so Beatlesque that it’s easy to hear why John Lennon once hailed ELO as the "Sons of the Beatles".
Understandably, Lynne remains particularly proud of Mr. Blue Sky. "It captured what my vision of ELO was all about. All the bits that come in and out, the backing vocals, the cellos sliding, all the little naughty bits, the sound effects, everything is exactly what I imagined ELO to be."
Particularly distinctive was the track’s inclusion of voices rendered electronic via the era’s hottest new musical toy, the Vocoder 2000. "The factory that had just built the prototype was in Stuttgart, only an hour from Munich," Lynne has explained. "So we sent the girlfriends off to pick it up. There was no manual, it was that new. We spent the whole day just getting it to do something, but once we got it going it was beautiful. It’s still the best Vocoder I’ve heard. That was a treat, you always want to innovate and get ahead with technology."
Because the song is located at the end of Side 3 of the album, the Vocoder voice at the end sings, "Please turn me over".
Lynne has also revealed that the album’s epic 19 minute Concerto For A Rainy Day grew naturally out of Mr. Blue Sky. "I loved the second side of Abbey Road and I thought I wouldn’t mind trying a suite like that. Because it was a double album I had so much room to work with. It was quite complex to make."
The album’s third hit single was Sweet Talkin’ Woman of which Lynne has recalled, "It was a song called Dead End Street. I'd done all the words and everything, finished it. And I came down the next day in the studio and I went, 'I hate that. Let's rub all the vocals off.' And he (Reinhold Mack) did. And I'd been sitting up in the hotel, which is above the studio, working at night just trying to think of a new tune and new words, which I did. And tried it the next day and there they worked. So, it was a good job I did, but it also meant changing the arrangement slightly. So a lot of pairs of scissors were used that day."
The album swoons to a close with the filmic grandeur of its fourth hit single, Wild West Hero, a tongue-in-cheek cowboy pastiche on which Melvyn Gale, normally the band's cellist, provided distinctive piano stylings.
To a certain extent, Out Of The Blue’s runaway commercial success became something of a millstone round Lynne’s neck. "There was no way of following that, but there were contracts to fulfil, so I was forced to do things I didn’t want to do, just because of signing bits of paper when you don’t know what you’re doing: 'Sign that?' 'Oh yeah, of course, thank you'. You can have 50 quid and all the brown ale you can drink. You don’t realise what you’re getting into. So it turned out I had to do another 93 albums for ELO!"
Whatever Lynne’s misgivings, with four massive hit singles and some of Lynne’s most memorable production work, Out Of The Blue is arguably the ultimate Electric Light Orchestra album, even if some of its more experimental material, notably ambient/orchestral eco-hymn The Whale, still induces the screaming ab-dabs in critics.
PRODUCTION NOTES
Musicland Studios, birthplace of Out Of The Blue, was established in the late 60s by disco-synth pioneer Giorgio Moroder in the basement of Arabella House, a 21-storey mixed commercial development in Munich. Situated several miles from the town centre, this grim edifice was surrounded by bleak building sites, towering cranes and industrial wasteland. It was, in the words of Brian May of Queen, a place where people frequently "used to go nuts and commit suicide by jumping off the top."
Nevertheless, it was a favourite studio of Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and The Stones to name only a few. Jeff Lynne too found it conducive to creativity, and recorded several albums there with house engineer Reinhold Mack.
While working on Out Of The Blue, Mack was using Westlake monitors and the latest Harrison console, a boon because, "You could pretty much do anything at the push of a couple of buttons. It had a very clean recording sound. You'd go from the preamp over the monitor port onto the tape machine, and that was it; a really short and clean signal path."
Part-way through the sessions, Mack suggested recording the 54-piece string section on the huge sound stage at Munich's Bavaria Film studio but, "it was a complete disaster. I could not get the right sound." Undeterred, he crammed the strings into Musicland. "There was also a 32-piece choir," he recalls. "It had to perform in the lobby while some of the orchestra musicians played their instruments lined up against the walls. The place was mobbed, and in those circumstances the sound we got on tracks like Mr Blue Sky was pretty good.”
Drummer Bev Bevan has also revealed that one ELO technique involved double tracking all of his drum parts, playing the second track while listening to the first on headphones. "The concentration hurts. If I’m a split second out at any time the whole thing has to be repeated, but Mack gets a drum sound that I like, big, heavy and powerful."