Chart Week: August 20, 1977
\nSong: \u201cTelephone Line\u201d – Electric Light Orchestra
\nChart Position: #16, 11th week on the chart. Peaked at #7 for two weeks in September and October.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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<\/a> site. And the song of the day just happened to be Electric Light Orchestra\u2019s \u201cTelephone Line,\u201d which was deep in the second hour of this show. My decision was made for me!<\/p>\n I wish it had been something else. \u201cTelephone Line\u201d is not one of my favorite ELO songs.[1]<\/a> 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\u2019s career. I learned that despite all their hits, the band was never popular with music critics, and were often labeled as an \u201cuncool\u201d band. I wanted to figure out why that was the case.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t find any clear evidence. Thus it was left to me to form a theory (or theories) on my own. Oddly, I couldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cSons of the Beatles,\u201d meaning it as a compliment, and suggested you could draw a direct line from the Beatles\u2019 more experimental music to ELO\u2019s. That endorsement wasn\u2019t good enough for critics, I guess. Or perhaps they took it more as a put down than praise.[2]<\/a> While the sound may have helped sell albums, it did not earn them glowing reviews in Rolling Stone<\/em>, etc.<\/p>\n Next, while ELO had some similar traits to the prog rock acts of their era, they weren\u2019t exactly prog. Or art rock. Or AOR rock. Or any of those other \u201870s sub-genres. Critics hate it when they can\u2019t cram an artist into a rigidly defined box, and ELO was difficult to pin down.<\/p>\n The band was also largely a studio creation, and relied heavily on production wizardry and electronics when building their sound. All those \u201cstrings\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s no mistaking an ELO song for someone else.<\/p>\n Add all that up, and music critics found it easy to brush the band off.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n I did learn that there has been a long, slow, re-appreciation of ELO\u2019s catalog. I wouldn\u2019t say they\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n Now, \u201cTelephone Line.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s all been done a thousand-and-one times. Thus, you really have to nail it to stand out. The heartbreak in \u201cTelephone Line\u201d is right up front, drifting to the maudlin. But there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Then there\u2019s this:<\/p>\n Doo-wop, doo-be-doo-doo-wop, doo-wah, doo-lang<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Again, there are plenty of examples of nonsense lyrics in great songs that work just fine<\/a>. These are just dumb, especially in a song that\u2019s supposed to be a serious accounting of sadness.<\/p>\n To its credit, it does stand out from ELO\u2019s other big hits in that it is slower and doesn\u2019t make you want to dance. It doesn\u2019t stand out from all the other Telephone Songs, though.[4]<\/a> One critic called this the \u201cbest Lennon\/McCartney collaboration that never was.\u201d[5]<\/a> They must have heard a different song than me, because prime John and Paul would have done far better than this. 5\/10<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019t be answered and let it ring over-and-over until they could accurately mimic it on a Moog synthesizer.<\/p>\n \u201cSee!\u201d a critic might shout, \u201cThey couldn\u2019t even be honest about the emotional heart of the song, they had to use technology to recreate it.\u201d Not a terrible point. I wonder if Casey ever shared this anecdote while the song was in the Top 40.<\/p>\n