One advantage of giving up your flashy rock ‘n’ roll persona is that you’re never too old to pull it off.
Fronting a band known as the Electric Light Orchestra Saturday night at the Inglewood Hunger Forum, Jeff Lynne, 76, looked as he had for the past half-century. Wearing dark trousers and jacket, unkempt hair and beard, eyes hidden behind aviator sunglasses, he sang exquisitely sculpted melodies in his still charming voice.
There was nothing in the 90-minute concert to suggest that Lynne couldn’t keep doing this for years if she wanted to. But there was also nothing to suggest that he had any desire to continue.
In fact, despite his continued vibe, Lynne announced last March that his current tour would be the last for the group, these days called Jeff Lynne’s ELO. ELO’s return to the stage after 20 years is being billed as a grand farewell to ELO’s upcoming gig at London’s Hyde Park next summer.
Why did you hang up? No doubt age has something to do with it. Elton John was also 76 when he wrapped up his long Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour. At the start of the Eagles’ recent farewell tour, Don Henley did the same. As you know, they are continuing to expand at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
Then, when I visited Lynn’s home in Beverly Hills in 2015, she told me that she had hated traveling since she was a child. “I wake up at 9, eat a terrible hot dog for breakfast at the airport, and then take three flights to my destination,” he said. “As soon as I could stop, I said, ‘That’s it.’”
What was more likely at Saturday’s show, the second of two in Inglewood, was that Lynne realized she didn’t need rock star praise on the road. Standing center stage while ELO’s musical director introduced the band’s dozen or more members, Lynne looked truly uncomfortable when the man finally learned her name and was once again showered with rapturous applause from the crowd.
Jeff Lynne joins more than a dozen players on the forum.
(Timothy Norris/Hunger Forum)
The funny thing about Lynne’s almost radically low-key presence is how raw his music is. As a singles act in the 70s, ELO was up there with Elton, ABBA and Paul McCartney’s Wings. The band’s Top 40 hits — “Evil Woman,” “Strange Magic,” “Livin’ Thing,” “Turn to Stone,” “Mr. Blue Sky,” and “Shine a Little Love” — each rock and classical music. each has its own distinct flavor, although it ties into Lynne’s stated goal of mixing things up.
On Spotify, many of the band’s tracks have hundreds of millions of streams. In fact, ELO has more monthly listeners on that platform than Tom Petty, George Harrison or Roy Orbison. These are three of four rock legends that Lynne teamed up with to form the Traveling Wilburys in the late ’80s. (Bob Dylan, the fifth member of the supergroup, has more monthly listeners.) And one can detect echoes of ELO’s broad yet highly detailed approach in the work of a generation of indie rock studio obsessives like Tame Impala, Phoenix, and Vampire Weekend. You can.
That doesn’t mean that someone very similar to ELO has arrived. At the Forum, where the band performed beneath a giant prop spaceship, Lynne and her accompanists were somehow refreshing, flashy, funky and biting all at the same time. Often, as on the braggadocious “Don’t Bring Me Down,” you wondered how a riff you’d heard so many times could still leave so much energy behind.
Lynne didn’t say anything all evening. It is only worth noting that this may be the last concert he plays in his adopted hometown. That night he led the band through the pop-psychedelic twists and turns of “Mr.” Blue Sky,” he said, bowed, and walked slowly down the stage, living a life that seemed like little about him would change.
