The original vision for the Electric Light Orchestra was rather coarsely telegraphed by their name: a merger of pop, rock, and classical music that yielded some pretty embarrassing early moments (including the Beethoven/Berry mash-up of 'Roll Over Beethoven', not included here) and some pretty great ones (rock + opera aria = 'Rockaria!', included). Of course, Lynne's bold mixing of the disco and the rock seems almost accidental in retrospect- books tell me that disco didn't peak until the mid-seventies, while the self-titled first ELO album hit stores in 1971, so the chronology doesn't quite match up. New- ave compilations have somewhat dissuaded me of that notion, but the field of what is now classic rock most assuredly remained a genre that surely treated the influx of disco's dance beats and string arrangements as straight heresy, and it was against this backdrop that ELO made its heroic stand. ELO existed at a point in music history where I was brought up to imagine the armies of rock and disco locked in a mortal battle like the Cubs and Cardinals, wherein the two flavors were mutually exclusive to apartheid-like extremes thanks to fun things like racism and homophobia and fear of keyboards. However, a number of elements appear to be aligned against any sort of serious, non-kitschy ELO revival: 1) That absurd (yet appropriate!) name, 2) The incredibly Muppetish appearance of frontman Jeff Lynne, and 3) The group's all too easily parodied and carbon-dated sound, with its liberal use of falsetto and classical strings.īut the things that so firmly attach ELO to a particular time in music history (the 1970s) are also the things that make them so uniquely great. Blue Sky' all of a sudden became mandatory accompaniment for Charlie Kaufman-scripted films. Electric Light Orchestra is one of those ubiquitous bands that could be due for a second glance, a concept that briefly gained some momentum when 'Mr.

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