Doo-be-doo-doo-wop, doo-wah, doo-lang: Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra harnessed every conceivable type of melody, lyrically sensible and otherwise, on Friday at a packed United Center. Performing the first of a two-night stand on its Over and Out farewell tour, the group filled the arena with symphonic songs and airy choruses that begged to be shouted, embraced and, most of all, remembered. Less a rock show and more a prepared recital, it reflected — for better or worse — the technical perfectionism of the bandleader.
Fronted by the singer-guitarist Lynne, the group’s last remaining permanent member, ELO offered a mix of professionalism and competency that should serve as a model for nostalgia-based legacy concerts. It wasted not a second of its 90-minute length on blather or time-stalling breaks. Each of the dozen support musicians seemed to cheerfully embrace their supplemental roles and appeared to understand the reason they were there: to celebrate Lynne’s place in popular music.
A man of few words, Lynne acted with a gracious modesty atypical for someone with his resume. When fans erupted in an extended ovation, his first and only inclination was to move to the next song. Wearing a jacket and scarf, his tinted glasses parked underneath a tousled mat of curly hair, the 76-year-old looked the same as he has since the Reagan era. His limited movements suggested otherwise. He primarily stood in front of a microphone for the duration and relied on his mates to incite the audience to stand or clap.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, the British native made no attempt to force several subpar new songs down the crowd’s throat. Lynne knew what people wanted to hear, and delivered the classics. Simple as that. With the exception of the rollicking and scene-setting “One More Time,” the most recent tune ELO played stemmed from 1980. Then again, even in its heyday, ELO never conformed to contemporary tastes. The band’s ambitious structures, chamber-string flourishes and contagious hooks created an aural fantasia that crossed genre boundaries and paired with futuristic imagery.
The odd sight of a background singer Melanie Lewis-McDonald belting out an operatic aria as the rest of the band lit into a peppy, early rock ‘n’ roll arrangement on “Rockaria!” encapsulated its instrumental strengths, lasting appeal and delightful eccentricities. ELO blended classical, choral and pop in sophisticated songs that on paper shouldn’t have worked but whose disparate pieces fell together as if they always belonged.
With a piano, keyboards, multiple guitars, three string instrumentalists and an array of voices at its disposal — not to mention advanced technology that can close any potential gaps or hide flaws — the collective constructed walls of sound that impressed as much for the traits they possessed (smoothness, lushness, richness) as for what they lacked (density, awkwardness, overcompensation).
Still, the absence of any trace of spontaneity, or inclusion of any unscripted solos, indicated that critical parts of the traditional live experience went missing. Ditto organic warmth and charisma. However rehearsed, the buttoned-up ELO capably and accurately replicated fare steeped in imaginative realities and atmospheric grandeur. What transpired closely mirrored what you can hear on record.
ELO’s allegedly final jaunt brings full circle the up-and-down history of a group that sold tens of millions of records in the ’70s before suffering a precipitous decline the following decade. It didn’t help that by the mid-’80s, Lynne grew more interested in production duties than the ensemble he co-founded. Soon after disbanding ELO, he co-helmed George Harrison’s commercially successful “Cloud Nine” comeback LP and found himself at the center of the Traveling Wilburys supergroup with Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison.
As Lynne doubled down in the studio, ELO branding got complicated. In 1989, he granted co-founder Bev Bevan the rights to forge ahead under the banner of “ELO Part II” as part of an agreement in which each held a 50% share of the original name. When Bevan quit the second iteration of the group near the turn of the century, he sold Lynne his half of the ELO moniker. The leftover faction of ELO Part II became The Orchestra, and Lynne, whose oversight on an ELO anthology jump-started his renewed interest in the band, began plotting a return.
The 2001 release of the first ELO studio album (“Zoom”) in 15 years marked a false start. Poor ticket sales forced Lynne and company to cancel a scheduled tour. Save for a couple of minor one-off performances, ELO would not return on a grand scale until 2014 — billed then as Jeff Lynne’s ELO. An acclaimed appearance at the 2015 Grammy Awards that brought Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to their feet and inspired Paul McCartney to dance signaled ELO’s time had finally arrived again. A subsequent 2018 trek marked the first of its kind for ELO in America in more than three decades.
Owing to tradition, Friday’s event featured the group’s signature flying saucer, both in the outline of a sizable ovular lighting rig behind the bi-level stage and in many of the animated graphics projected onscreen. Circumventing the globe, crashed in the desert, sailing through an asteroid field: The space-bound contraption — a cross between an electronic Simon game, the front of a jukebox and a multi-colored Frisbee — screamed the 1970s as much as cursive ELO script printed on T-shirts.
The whimsical visuals extended to a spinning 45 RPM single, glowing amplifier tubes, enchanted forests, high-tech subways and pulsing disco balls. They complemented streaming lasers and a host of associated illumination that underscored not only the first two-thirds of the band’s name, but conveyed the brightness and feel-good spirit inherent in a majority of the material.
Lynne reached back to his roots with British band The Move (a rendition of the proto-glam “Do Ya”) as well as his earliest days with ELO (the prog-leaning “10538 Overture,” the band’s first single). Though slightly deeper, his understated voice retained its expressive cool-soul qualities and subtle English accent. Lynne occasionally managed to pull falsetto notes out of his back pocket yet largely relied on others in the ensemble to cover the high ranges, substitute on certain verses and craft the stacked harmonies that sent favorites like the dramatic “Steppin’ Out,” wave-swept “Livin’ Thing” and gliding “Evil Woman” into the stratosphere.
1 of 5
Expand
Donavan Hepburn ensured everything that went up eventually came down. Flashing smiles and striking an animated presence behind his kit, the drummer commanded rhythms and provided a sturdy, dynamic foundation for anthems and ballads alike. It would’ve been great to watch Hepburn freelance on a handful of cuts or frequently mash with the authority he demonstrated on the explosive coda of “Turn to Stone” and cymbal-crash punctuation of “Do Ya.”
Nonetheless, Hepburn proved invaluable in helping ELO maintain a vise-grip tightness over the grooves, and bestowed “All over the World” and “Last Train to London” with snappy beats that took the songs out of old discos and placed them in modern clubs. Along with the dance-friendly “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” and “Don’t Bring Me Down,” both complete with modulated vocals, they revealed ELO’s major influence on later cutting-edge electronic, psychedelic and art-rock artists.
Long considered by certain critics and rock purists as the antithesis of cool, and someone whose albums would have certainly been targets for incineration at the Disco Demolition at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in 1979, Lynne is going out in style as a fashionable experimentalist. Strange magic, indeed.
Bob Gendron is a freelance critic.
Setlist from the United Center Sept. 27:
“One More Time”
“Evil Woman”
“Do Ya” (The Move cover)
“Showdown”
“Believe Me Now”
“Steppin’ Out”
“Last Train to London”
“Rockaria!”
“10538 Overture”
“Strange Magic”
“Sweet Talkin’ Woman”
“Can’t Get It Out of My Head”
“Fire on High”
“Livin’ Thing”
“Telephone Line”
“All over the World”
“Turn to Stone”
“Shine a Little Love”
“Don’t Bring Me Down”
Encore
“Mr. Blue Sky”