ELO, 10CC and Supertramp

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   Hi,

They all have their place, and made their own history ... and there are things they did ... that we still see today!

Of these, ELO maybe considered the one that went the furthest and that would be because Jeff Lynne was a neighbor and close friend to George Harrison, and eventually put together the Travelling Willburys ... which might not have happened if there was not someone like Jeff to pull together things and organize them. Even Tom Petty comments on it in the movie (worth seeing btw)

Sadly, there is one thing that is sadly forgotten. I always thought that some of the humor and fun in ELO was brought in by Roy Wood ... and he has been hung out to dry ... and one listen to his albums shows more impressive experimentation and variety of things than many other musicians out there. 

10CC ... is one of my favorites ... unffortunately the "moving picture music" that their songs and lyrics helped create for your imagination died one day ... and no one could do anything about it anymore ... maybe they got tired of little home movies, as it were. But I still have the first 5 albums and I can sit through them any time and still enjoy them ... after that ... the enjoyment goes out ... 

If anything hurt this band more, it was that Creme and Godley were very good together and what they were doing in solo albums (they had several together) was magnificently (progressive and off the wall too!!!) nice, but not designed for a "pop song" as 10CC was. And it became evident when Godley ended up writing and directing several videos for The Police ... 

You have to remember that these same guys were almost single handedly responsible for dressing up Neil Sedaka and right after they were also responsible for undressing us with some kind of neanderthal love! The kind of thing that most fans can not ... understand ... we want pop songs after all, or some prog bullship! But music? ... and humor on top of it? Goodness gracious ... how dare you?

Supertramp ... It was in Santa Barbara and I just came home from work and my roomate has tears in his eyes. He had just brought home "Crime of the Century" amidst a couple of other things ... and he had just finished playing the album ... he was just in tears .. and was kinda moved that someone could write something like this and be ... relevant and important. When he went on the air that night he played both sides back to back ... and that was the number one FM station in Santa Barbara at the time ... and within days the whole station was playing it and within months ... everyone knew about this band. Same thing happened with the Average White Band. And Camel ... endless history here.

They were very good as long as they were sticking to themselves. One day ... one of them or another got into of those  "opiate for the rich" things ... and the band died. It was sad for me. I happened to like the first 3 albums immensely, for their freshness and approach.

Imagine this stuff being played on the air in 1973 ... in those days FM radio was slightly new and it was known for "long cuts" and far-out music that represented the natural progression from the "pop" orientation of the hippie days, and the desire for many of those musicians to "grow" and take things into a new era and generation ... and it worked for a while ... and I'm not sure that Led Zeppelin (for example) would have made it so nicely if it weren't for FM radio, since many of their cuts were longer and AM radio was not gonna touch anything over 3 minutes ... see the difference? Goota play all those commercials ... gotta pull in t money ... it's never the music that matters ... and few stations EVER ... made time and space for "something else" out there. 

All three of those bands lost their focus ... as they got bigger. In a way 10CC did get bigger, but into being the artists that they were ... you were not going to keep Creme and Godley writing pop songs all the time ... specially when they decided (finally) to get visual ... and forget the money and royalties they were not gaining/getting that they should have been getting ... the internet came up 10 years later ... and in a way one of these guys even invented the GIZMO, which became eventually know as a guitar synthesizer later on ... in this case we were dealing with highly intelligent folks that were doing much more than just pop musik.

Thx

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