Jeff Lynne and the Electric Light Orchestra
As August comes to a close we’re rapidly approaching that special night where a magical being descends from the sky to share the gifts of joy and merriment. That’s right, in just a few short days, Jeff Lynne will arrive in Portland, Oregon for ELO’s Over and Out final tour.
To celebrate this sacred night, we’re taking a look today at the Christmas music contributions of Jeff Lynne and his Electric Light Orchestra.
Jeff Lynne is sadly not the household name he should. In interviews, Lynne has stated he much prefers putting in long days at the mixing desk to living the rockstar life. An ethos that has likely contributed to his ability to build a staggering resume over the last 50 year while remaining fairly under the pop culture radar.
ELO started as a side project of the English band The Move, an outlet for them to explore the fusion of early ’70s rock and classical music. Roy Wood, the other creative force in ELO left shortly after the release of their first, self-titled first album in 1971, leaving Jeff to chart the course through another 14 albums over 51 years; from 1973’s ELO 2 to 2019’s From Out of Nowhere.
But ELO’s heyday was squarely the latter half of the ’70s, where Lynne produced a series of albums, from Face the Music in ‘75 on through to the Xanadu Soundtrack in 1980, all cracking the top 10 of the US Billboard 200 chart. This run is responsible for hits including “Evil Woman”, “Strange Magic”, “Telephone Line”, “Livin’ Thing”, “Sweet Talkin’ Woman”, “Don’t Bring Me Down” and the title track “Xanadu” featuring Olivia Newton John.
This period also produced an ELO song that, while not initially a chart-topper has gone on to become their most recognizable tune: “Mr. Blue Sky” from the 1977 album Out of the Blue. This song has been everywhere recently: From the opening credits of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to closing out The Super Mario Bros. movie. Not to mention being featured in both the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London and, my personal favorite appearance of the song: a cover version by the Muppets band Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem for Google’s Dear Earth special in 2021.
Quick tangent: “Mr. Blue Sky” was almost used as the theme song to American version of The Office. When Greg Daniels was first adapting The Office, he originally intended to use an existing song for the show’s theme. As Jenna Fischer shared on her podcast, Daniels had narrowed it down to three choices: “Better Things” by the Kinks, “Float On” by Modest Mouse and “Mr. Blue Sky”.
Daniels cut opening sequences using each song and sent them out to the cast to vote on. “Mr. Blue Sky” was the overwhelming winner. It went so far that the DVD pilot distributed to the cast included the ELO song.
But…before the first episode of The Office aired, another NBC show, LAX, which starred Heather Locklear debuted and also used “Mr. Blue Sky” for its opening theme. So Daniels turned to James Ferguson to record the original, now iconic Office theme. And that’s history.
And since we’re already on a tangent, I’ll also take a moment for a small shout-out to another of my favorite ELO songs, “Do Ya” from the 1976 album, A New World Record. This song has received a massive amount of attention recently, being featured in all the trailers for the new Borderlands movie. And while I have not seen the movie yet, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that the trailer featuring a 30-second action montage set to “Do Ya” is way better than watching the actual movie. Just a guess.
OK, back on topic. Outside of his work steering the good ship ELO, Lynne has also notched a pair of solo albums and continues to add his list of writing and producing credits, including his work with Bryan Adams, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Ringo Star, Paul McCartney, Brian Wilson and Joe Walsh.
Lynne was also a member of the Traveling Wilburys, a musical supergroup that included Bob Dylan and the aforementioned Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and George Harrison. Jeff was the man entrusted to produce two new Beatles tracks, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” for the Anthologies series, both based on demo tapes recorded by a post-Beatles John Lennon.
So, now that we’ve spent a few minutes catching up on Lynne’s musical credentials, we can turn to look at his contributions to the Christmas Music tapestry, which includes exactly…zero songs!
That’s right over 50 years of writing, producing and recording and there isn’t a single Jeff Lynne or ELO Christmas track. Nothing, nada, zilch!
So, you might be asking why we are here today. Well, first, this post gave me a reason to talk about Jeff Lynne and that’s an opportunity I wasn’t going to miss. And second, while not directly responsible for creating any Christmas tunes, Lynne has indirectly left his mark on the holidays in several ways over the year, which is exactly what we’ll be digging into now.
To start, we’re going to look at a pair of Christmas adverts that prominently feature ELO music.
The first is a JCPenney commercial that I’ve mentioned in a previous episode. It was from their 2005 “Unwrap the Magic” campaign and features the ELO song “Livin’ Thing”, also from the album A New World Record. The premise of the advert is that holiday shopping online (something that was still fairly novel in 2005) is “like Magic.” It depicted a giant mouse cursor dragging gift boxes to family members in a living room and clicking to transform them into their unwrapped presents.
The advert uses the first verse of the song, emphasizing the “it’s like magic” lyrics before a voiceover starts stomps on top of it. It ends by cropping out the third line of the chorus, “It’s a given thing”, which I’m guessing was used to punctuate the commercial since given sounds very close to giving.
The commercial also brings up an interesting (well interesting to me at least) question: looking at the gifts in the commercial, who was buying their expensive telescopes and guitars from JCPenney in 2005? From the assortment of gifts shown in the ad, I think the most plausible gifts were the Jeff Gordon NASCAR jacket and BMX bike with fake dirt bike facade.
The second and in my opinion much better use of ELO music is the 2014 Kohl’s “Yes to Holiday Magic” advert, a much more sentimental affair, featuring “Strange Magic” from the Face the Music album. The setup for this one is a dad and his pre-teen son driving down a road into a snowy, wooded area. The dad starts to explain that the son’s mom and he thought the son might like “this” and how his dad had brought him out here, but he stops when he realizes the kid has earbuds in and isn’t listening.
They park at the edge of the woods and walk in as an arrangement of “Strange Magic” starts playing. They come to a clearing and see a Santa-eque fellow in front of a cabin, feeding a herd of reindeer. One of the reindeer approaches the son, then, after a brief staring contest, it runs off into the fog and you see it start to take flight just as it disappears. The kid runs off after his dad asking him if he just saw that while the dad continues to walk away smiling.
The lyrics come in during this last part. They are a mash-up of four separate lines plucked from the end of the first verse and various points in the chorus. But…it works…really well…the whole thing…the commercial and the music. I did a bit of searching (though full disclosure, not too much) to see if the commercial version of the song exists anywhere, but it looks like it was created by the Peterson Milla Hooks agency specifically for this advert.
One more quick tangent. The son in the commercial is Anton Starkman, who a year or so later played Max Ellison in a handful of episodes of American Horror Story, season 5. He also recently played Milo, a comic book shop manager and lead character in the Nickelodeon series Warped!. So, good for him. Christmas magic and a respectable acting career.
While I was only able to find two holiday commercials featuring ELO, there are still a couple more Jeff Lynne Christmas connections. I mentioned at the beginning of the post that ELO was initially a side project of the band The Move and that shortly after their first album, creative differences caused Roy Wood to leave the group. He left to work on another project, a new band with the intent to stitch together early ’60s rock with the “Wall of Sound” style of Phil Spector’s productions. That band was Wizzard…the same Wizzard that released “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” about a year later in 1973. A song which was voted the UK’s second various Christmas song on the “The Nation’s Favorite…” documentary series, just behind the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York”.
So…in a way if it wasn’t for Jeff Lyne joining The Move and Roy Wood going a different direction, we might not have one of the greatest Christmas songs of the 1970s. Or…I suppose in another timeline, Wood may have stayed, and we’d have an ELO version of the song…but let’s not dwell on that.
Jeff also notches another Christmas connection through his production of Tom Petty’s holiday tune, “Christmas All Over Again”, which appeared on Home Alone 2 and A Very Special Christmas 2, the second album in the compilation series benefitting the Special Olympics.
The final and most recent Jeff Lynne connection is the 2022 holiday track, “It Was A Silent Night At Least Until Jeff Lynne Arrived,” by the band Grandaddy. The song is about an unexpected holiday visit from Jeff Lynne, set to “Silent Night”. On Bandcamp, frontman Jason Lyte shared that, “Santa Claus gave me some pretty cool gifts as a kid. But I have to say Jeff Lynne has given me about a million or so more. Here is my little light-hearted holiday combo-homage to the two of them.”
And with that we have reached the end of our dive into Jeff Lynne’s and ELO’s Christmas music exploration. Before we depart, since we have talked about a few non-Christmas songs, I want to run them through the Chrismometer, our highly tuned 5-point Christmas music scale that rates holidayness of a song from Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” at the top all the way down to the Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein” at the bottom. For the songs discussed today, we have:
- Livin’ Thing at 1.25 - A great song, but you aren’t going to squeeze much more Christmasness out of this one than you are from Edgar Winter.
- Strange Magic at 2.75 - Another great song and if we assume the magic is Christmas-rated, we’re squarely in Fleet Foxes’ “White Winter Hymnal” territory.
- I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday at a solid 3.9 - Just a hair under Dean Martin singing “Winter Wonderland”.
- Christmas All Over Again at - 3.75, A solid Christmas song.
- It Was a Silent Night At Least Until Jeff Lynne Arrived - The Chirsmometer did know what to do with this one. And, from the pile of wreckage on the floor that was once our precision instrument, I’ll calling it either a 6 or a negative 1. I’ll leave that one for you to decide.
Cheers and Merry Christmas!