One advantage to forgoing a showy rock ’n’ roll persona is that you never get too old to pull it off.
Fronting a version of the band once known as the Electric Light Orchestra on Saturday night at Inglewood’s Kia Forum, 76-year-old Jeff Lynne looked — and pretty much sounded — like he has for the last half-century: dark pants and jacket, fuzzy hair and beard, eyes hidden behind a pair of aviator shades as he sang his finely sculpted melodies in a still-winsome voice.
Nothing about the 90-minute concert suggested that Lynne couldn’t go on doing this for years if he wanted — though nor did anything about it suggest he has any desire to continue.
Indeed, despite the durability of his vibe, Lynne announced last March that his current tour will be the last for the group billed these days as Jeff Lynne’s ELO; a gig scheduled for next summer at London’s Hyde Park, where ELO returned to the stage in 2014 after a couple of decades away, is being advertised as his grand farewell.
Why hang it up? Age undoubtedly has something to do with it: Elton John was also 76 when he wrapped his lengthy Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour; so was Don Henley at the outset of the Eagles’ latest goodbye excursion — you know, the one they keep extending at Sphere in Las Vegas.
Then again, when I visited Lynne at his home in Beverly Hills in 2015, he told me he’d hated touring even as a younger man. “You wake up at 9 o’clock, have a horrible hot dog at the airport for breakfast, then do three flights to get where you’re going,” he said. “As soon as I was able to stop, I said, ‘That’s it.’”
What seemed more likely during Saturday’s show, the second of two in Inglewood, is that Lynne has simply realized he has no use for the rock-star adulation to be had on the road. Standing at center stage as ELO’s music director introduced the dozen-plus members of the band, Lynne looked genuinely uncomfortable when the guy finally got to his name and he found himself showered — yet again — with the crowd’s enthusiastic applause.
The funny thing about Lynne’s almost radically low-key presence is how insanely vivid his music is. As a singles act in the ’70s, ELO was up there with Elton, ABBA and Paul McCartney’s Wings; the band’s string of Top 40 hits — “Evil Woman,” “Strange Magic,” “Livin’ Thing,” “Turn to Stone,” “Mr. Blue Sky,” “Shine a Little Love” — delivered one delight after another, each connected to Lynne’s stated goal of blending rock and classical music yet each with its own distinct flavor: a little folkier, a little more disco, a little harder-edged, a little more R&B.
On Spotify, many of the band’s tracks have streams in the hundreds of millions; ELO, in fact, has more monthly listeners on that platform than Tom Petty, George Harrison or Roy Orbison — three of the four rock legends with whom Lynne teamed in the late ’80s to form the Traveling Wilburys. (Bob Dylan, the supergroup’s fifth member, has more monthly listeners.) And you can detect echoes of ELO’s expansive but ultra-detailed approach in the work of a generation of indie-rock studio obsessives like Tame Impala, Phoenix and Vampire Weekend.
Which isn’t to say that anyone has come along that sounds quite like ELO. At the Forum, where the band performed beneath a giant prop spaceship, Lynne and his accompanists were somehow crisp, lush, funky and biting all at the same time; often, as in the swaggering “Don’t Bring Me Down,” you wondered how a riff you’ve heard so many times could have so much energy left in it.
Lynne said next to nothing over the course of the evening — noteworthy only in that this concert may end up the final one he ever plays in his adopted hometown. At the end of the night he led the band through the pop-psychedelic twists and turns of “Mr. Blue Sky,” then took a bow before walking slowly offstage to a life in which little about him seems likely to change.
