Reaching For The Stars, Vol. 116

Chart Week: August 20, 1977
Song: “Telephone Line” – Electric Light Orchestra
Chart Position: #16, 11th week on the chart. Peaked at #7 for two weeks in September and October.

When I dove into this countdown last Saturday I was interested to see what it had to offer. Would a particular song jump out and lead to my next RFTS post? Or would Casey share some fun, new-to-me story that got my music trivia juices flowing?

Turns out it was neither. Instead, just after I pushed Play, I began working through my RSS feeds for the morning. One of the first new posts I saw was from the Classic Song of the Day site. And the song of the day just happened to be Electric Light Orchestra’s “Telephone Line,” which was deep in the second hour of this show. My decision was made for me!

I wish it had been something else. “Telephone Line” is not one of my favorite ELO songs.[1] But I stuck with it. After reading that Classic Song post I pulled up some other pieces about the record. Then I read up on ELO’s career. I learned that despite all their hits, the band was never popular with music critics, and were often labeled as an “uncool” band. I wanted to figure out why that was the case.

I couldn’t find any clear evidence. Thus it was left to me to form a theory (or theories) on my own. Oddly, I couldn’t find confirmation that critics actually hated ELO, either. Instead, the band was simply dismissed as lightweights, never given the same respect as other acts that were charting at the same time.

I think there are several explanations for this. One of the biggest was the elephant in the room: they sounded a lot like the Beatles, or rather an updated take on the Beatles sound. John Lennon even called them the “Sons of the Beatles,” meaning it as a compliment, and suggested you could draw a direct line from the Beatles’ more experimental music to ELO’s. That endorsement wasn’t good enough for critics, I guess. Or perhaps they took it more as a put down than praise.[2] While the sound may have helped sell albums, it did not earn them glowing reviews in Rolling Stone, etc.

Next, while ELO had some similar traits to the prog rock acts of their era, they weren’t exactly prog. Or art rock. Or AOR rock. Or any of those other ‘70s sub-genres. Critics hate it when they can’t cram an artist into a rigidly defined box, and ELO was difficult to pin down.

The band was also largely a studio creation, and relied heavily on production wizardry and electronics when building their sound. All those “strings” in their songs? More often than not, those were synthesizers. In the mid-to-late Seventies synthesizers meant fake and stings meant disco, two strikes with a lot of tastemakers.

I believe there was also some pushback because they were a very successful band, in terms of record sales, but most viewed their music and lyrics as rather vapid. Compared to contemporaries like Pink Floyd and Steely Dan, ELO took far fewer chances and were telling far less complex stories. You didn’t need an advanced literature degree and a thesaurus to understand their songs, which made them seem insignificant in comparison. They were neither cynical nor ironic but rather straightforward.

Finally, as I reviewed their hits while working on this post, I was reminded how many of their songs sounded alike. There are a lot of really good tunes in there, but they all sound so similar that they blend together. Jeff Lynne’s voice never varied much. There was almost always the same combination of instruments, arranged in comparable ways. Tempos stayed in a familiar range. If you didn’t speak English, you might think the layered vocals in all their choruses were singing the same words song-to-song. They found a formula that worked and stuck with it. There’s no mistaking an ELO song for someone else.

Add all that up, and music critics found it easy to brush the band off.[3]

I did learn that there has been a long, slow, re-appreciation of ELO’s catalog. I wouldn’t say they’ve been elevated to the top of their era, but many more recent discussions of their work give Lynne credit for his production skills and describe the songs as serviceable and memorable, if not necessarily era-defining.

Now, “Telephone Line.”

The whole Telephone Song thing is one of the most used tropes in pop music history. Whether it is the nervous call to ask someone out for the first time, a call just to say you love someone, or, the worst, the call to a former lover that goes unanswered, it’s all been done a thousand-and-one times. Thus, you really have to nail it to stand out. The heartbreak in “Telephone Line” is right up front, drifting to the maudlin. But there’s nothing compelling about it. In fact, have a bigger urge to laugh at Lynne than sympathize with him. I want to grab him by his shirt, give him a good shake, and tell him to get the fuck over it and find someone new, that he sounds ridiculous with all this whining.

Then there’s this:

Doo-wop, doo-be-doo-doo-wop, doo-wah, doo-lang

Again, there are plenty of examples of nonsense lyrics in great songs that work just fine. These are just dumb, especially in a song that’s supposed to be a serious accounting of sadness.

To its credit, it does stand out from ELO’s other big hits in that it is slower and doesn’t make you want to dance. It doesn’t stand out from all the other Telephone Songs, though.[4] One critic called this the “best Lennon/McCartney collaboration that never was.”[5] They must have heard a different song than me, because prime John and Paul would have done far better than this. 5/10

An interesting tidbit from that Classic Song of the Day post: because Lynne viewed the US market as more important than the British, he made sure the ring tone was an American one rather than European. He said they dialed a US number they knew wouldn’t be answered and let it ring over-and-over until they could accurately mimic it on a Moog synthesizer.

“See!” a critic might shout, “They couldn’t even be honest about the emotional heart of the song, they had to use technology to recreate it.” Not a terrible point. I wonder if Casey ever shared this anecdote while the song was in the Top 40.