![]() ![]() ![]() This is immediately ironic, for who really is “unwoken”, the dreamer or the rationalist? Annie Dillard once wrote, “we wake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery.” She implies that the real sleepers are the efficient, routine-bound (most of us) those whose lives are too absorbed in temporal pursuits to recognize the beauty and transcendence within their grasp. Enveloped in a dreamy, cinematic swirl of orchestration, he speaks of our protagonist (Lynne) as, “the dreamer, the unwoken fool”. The album opens with an ominous, deep-voiced narration from Peter Ford-Robinson. Thankfully, Sony’s Epic/Legacy label has reissued a gorgeous digital remaster of this album, which will carry its timeless message to another lost generation. And Eldorado (named for the mythical, gilded king of a golden kingdom) struck a responsive chord, breaking through like sunlight on the buried desires of the discouraged and disillusioned ’70s audience. For most of us, Jeff Lynne was, at least at that time if no longer still, a songsmith that combined McCartney’s keen melodic sense with Lennon’s wit and irony. ![]() Under the canopy of intimidating prog orchestrations, ELO’s music was actually sweet pop as benign as a child’s snow cone. Happily the masses don’t usually accept these condemnations. But critics are finicky creatures, and despite their pining for “Beatle-esque pop”, they are quick brand an artist working in that idiom as “derivative” if not altogether “unoriginal”. At its conception, ELO declared its purpose to “pick up where the Beatles left off with ‘I Am the Walrus'”. Lynne has endured a hailstorm of slings and arrows ever since taking the reins of ELO from fellow Move member Roy Wood, who went on the form his eccentric Wizzard at the turn of the ’70s. The Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music (edited in Britain) described ELO as “wildly unfashionable but commercially successful.” The prophet without honor in his homeland was Jeff Lynne, the single-handed mastermind behind nearly all of ELO’s material. As it turned out, this Beatles meets the Moody Blues meets Dorothy meets Don Quixote of an album catapulted ELO to literal gold in the US., but fell flat in the band’s home UK. If that is true, then only the hand of divine providence could have orchestrated the sounds and themes that so perfectly meshed with the still image from the movie: the crooked fingers of the Wicked Witch of the West grasping for the unattainable - Dorothy’s ruby slippers. ”Īccording to one unofficial Electric Light Orchestra web site, the members of ELO were largely unfamiliar with The Wizard of Oz, so much so that they were actually disappointed with the cover art chosen for their fourth album, Eldorado. Oh, but anyway, Toto, we’re home! Home! And this is my room - and you’re all here! And I’m not gonna leave here ever, ever again. But just the same, all I kept saying to everybody was, ‘I want to go home.’ And they sent me home. ![]() And I remember some of it wasn’t very nice. “But it wasn’t a dream this was a real, truly live place. Coming out of her Technicolor dream-state, Dorothy, surrounded by loved ones, describes what she saw and felt: “Romance is the deepest thing in life, romance is deeper even than reality.”įor many, the experience of suddenly waking up in the hereafter will be similar to that of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz. It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. #The electric light orchestra full#“The communion of the saints, in earlier times it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of peace. ![]()
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