ELO
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Artist:
I've been working on a song for a quite appalling length of time now, and its title - "Classic Rock" - is essentially its subject. What I wanted to create was a tribute to the kind of music that, since the punk movement, has far too often been dismissed by critics and self-anointed connoisseurs as "overproduced" (see my post explaining why Queen is the second greatest rock band of all time for further details on the subject). Anyway, the song is meant to be very richly orchestrated, and I spent about six months trying to create arrangements for forty musicians, and, having eventually recognized my limitations, I handed the job to a professional.Said professional has very sound credentials, and I know him personally (although not a full-fledged member, he played bass with my band ten years ago, during our brief and terrifying experiments with live performance), and respect him. He teaches music composition at a very well-known university; his musical knowledge is positively encyclopedic; he's the sort of guy that can tell a trumpet from a cornet with his eyes shut. What he came back with, though (a first draft, to be fair) was a bit disappointing. I heard only a very hastily recorded MIDI version, but I thought there was a prevailing classical feel, rather than rock'n'roll, in his arrangements; they were too busy and challenging for what was really an extremely straightforward chord progression and melody, with nothing trickier than a 7th in the bridge. They sounded like Mozart, when I wanted Paul Buckmaster (who arranged strings for Elton John and The Rolling Stones, for those of you who might not recognize the name).Part of the problem was no doubt the notoriously poor quality of MIDI strings, which can't do legato, and always sound hideous unless they're just doing long sustained notes (which are surprisingly tough for flesh and blood musicians), but it still had a ??difficult?? quality to it that nagged at me. Classical music can be lovely in short bursts, frankly, but after five minutes, I can't recognize what I'm listening to anymore. I guess I'm a bit dim; I need a hook, a riff, something to serve as a reference point for the song to move away from or towards, or to inhabit, but always to exist in relation to. What that is in classical music (with the exception of Beethoven, who, alone among classical composers, understood riffs intuitively), I can never figure out. Or can for only short periods before losing interest.So what's this got to do with ELO? Not as much as it seemed to when I started, but I still say they made traditionally classical instrumentation rock with a force it had never possessed before. The Beatles may have been the first to use orchestral instruments in rock music (then again, they might not have been; I'm not really sure -- they were the first to make it sound good, anyway), but their actual sound was still familiar; only their setting had really changed (not to belittle a real turning point in musical history).You see, orchestrating a rock song is ??really?? difficult; I spent months trying to figure it out and got essentially nowhere. An orchestra resists rock in every way, because rock is basically three or four guys, playing an electric guitar or two, a bass and a drum kit, whereas an orchestra could populate a small village, and needs to work together, with a rigid script, under the leadership of a conductor. Orchestras rarely tour - if a member of an orchestra goes to a new town, it's usually because they got promoted or demoted. Their energy comes from an accumulation of small units playing very precise roles, rather than a few big ones defying every role you try to attach to them. There's a fixed idea of what an orchestra should play and how they should play it, down to metronome settings and detailed instructions on intonation. They're not hailed by critics or called "original" if they violate those instructions - they're fired. From its philosophy to its instruments to its music to its aesthetics, a rock band and an orchestra have nothing in common, except maybe that they both owe a small debt to European folk music. Actually, even that isn't really something they share; orchestras don't write their own music, so they owe nothing at all to European folk music. Rock bands, as a general rule, actually ??do?? write their own music, so what I thought was a point of similarity is, in fact, another example of their utter and complete difference.But Jeff Lynne somehow crossed that barrier, marched into the classical camp, and brought prisoners back to rock'n'roll to do his bidding. He didn't just make classical instrumentation work successfully in the context of a rock song: he made classical instrumentation ??rock?? like it was born to it. That he managed this at all was remarkable; that it resulted in such amazing music is bloody miraculous. Or then again, maybe it couldn't have worked if the songs hadn't been great to begin with. On one track - "Rockaria!" - Lynne even tried to make operatic singing rock, but I don't think it was quite as successful. In any case, my original lyrics to "Classic Rock" mentioned ELO, but I always sensed it would be impossible to create a song with classical orchestration in which I could bring up their name without invoking unfavorable comparisons. Even if they were only my own. I changed it to "UFO." Cowardly, perhaps, but probably the smart move - you don't pitch to Barry Bonds; you don't swim up to pet a shark; you don't bring up Jeff Lynne when you're writing a rock song with classical instrumentation.ELO: the eighth best band of all time, because there's something to be said for achieving the impossible.
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