One advantage of giving up a flashy rock 'n' roll persona is that you're never too old to pull it off.
Fronting a version of the band once known as Electric Light Orchestra on Saturday night at Inglewood's Kia Forum, Jeff Lynne, 76, looked (and practically sounded) like he has for the past half-century: dark pants and jacket, fuzzy hair and beard, eyes hidden behind a pair of aviator glasses as he sang his finely sculpted melodies in a still enchanting voice.
Nothing in the 90-minute concert suggested that Lynne couldn't keep doing this for years if she wanted to, although nothing about it suggested she had any desire to continue either.
In fact, despite the durability of their vibe, Lynne announced last March that their current tour will be the last for the group announced these days as Jeff Lynne's ELO; A concert scheduled for next summer in London's Hyde Park, where ELO returned to the stage in 2014 after a couple of decades away, is announced as their great farewell.
Why hang it? Age certainly has something to do with it: Elton John was also 76 when he concluded his long Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour; so was Don Henley at the beginning of the Eagles' latest farewell excursion, you know, the one they keep extending at Sphere in Las Vegas.
On the other hand, when I visited Lynne at her Beverly Hills home in 2015, she told me that she hated touring even when she was younger. “You wake up at 9 o'clock, have a horrible hot dog for breakfast at the airport, and then take three flights to get to your destination,” he said. “As soon as I could stop, I said, 'That's it.'”
What seemed more likely during Saturday's show, the second of two in Inglewood, is that Lynne simply realized that she has no use for the rock star adulation she can get while on tour. Standing center stage as ELO's musical director introduced the more than a dozen band members, Lynne looked genuinely uncomfortable when the boy finally mentioned her name and found herself bathed, once again, in enthusiastic applause. from the crowd.
Jeff Lynne was joined by more than a dozen players on the Forum.
(Timothy Norris / Kia Forum)
What's curious about Lynne's almost radically understated presence is how incredibly vivid her music is. As a singles group in the '70s, ELO was up there with Elton, ABBA and Paul McCartney's Wings; the band's string of Top 40 hits: “Evil Woman,” “Strange Magic,” “Livin' Thing,” “Turn to Stone,” “Mr. Blue Sky,” “Shine a Little Love” – delivered one delight after another, each connected to Lynne's stated goal of combining rock and classical music, but each with its own distinctive flavor: a little more folky, a little more disk, a little harder. edgy, a little more R&B.
On Spotify, many of the band's tracks have hundreds of millions of streams; ELO, in fact, has more monthly listeners on that platform than Tom Petty, George Harrison or Roy Orbison, three of the four rock legends with whom Lynne teamed up in the late '80s to form the Traveling Wilburys. (Bob Dylan, the supergroup's fifth member, has the most monthly listeners.) And you can detect echoes of ELO's expansive yet ultra-detailed approach in the work of a generation of indie-rock studio obsessives like Tame Impala, Phoenix and Vampire Weekend.
Which is not to say that someone who looks quite similar to ELO has appeared. At the Forum, where the band performed beneath a giant spaceship, Lynne and her companions were somehow fresh, exuberant, funky and biting all at the same time; Often, like on the swaggering “Don't Bring Me Down,” you wondered how a riff you've heard so many times could have so much energy.
Lynne said almost nothing during the course of the evening; is noteworthy only because this concert may end up being the last one he performs in his adopted hometown. At the end of the night, he led the band through the pop-psychedelic twists of “Mr. Blue Sky,” then bowed before slowly walking offstage into a life in which little about him seems likely to change.
