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Post by fernandoamado on Feb 23, 2018 21:38:09 GMT
Not sure if anybody has started a thread about this before but, I was checking Discogs, and the B-side of All Over the World, Drum Dreams, says it was written by Jeff Lynne.
Could it be? I haven't read Bev's book yet, and I don't know if he mentions the track, but I thought it was written by him.
I now Jeff played the drums on All Over the World, or at least on a first go at it, but... Would Bev let the man write a drum track instead of giving the task to him?
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Post by ShardEnder on Feb 25, 2018 3:03:23 GMT
Drum Dreams is indeed a bit of a strange anomaly in the ELO catalogue, since you'd expect it to have come from Bev based on the name alone. However, much like Heavy Head, the b-side to his lone solo single, Let There Be Drums, it's really more of a collaborative piece (only without the shared credits of that earlier track). My understanding is that Jeff was responsible for building up the basic idea for Drum Dreams from a loop of Bev's playing made earlier in the overall Xanadu sessions, with Richard and Lou adding some musical input along the way. Of course, as was so often the case with the group, that didn't automatically guarantee the others any kind of official acknowledgement for their ideas, which is how the end result came to be attributed exclusively to Jeff. Really, though, we're discussing perhaps one of the most obvious examples of a throwaway in this band's history together.
P.S. 1979-80 was definitely a lean period for anyone in ELO who wasn't either Jeff or perhaps Richard at a push, but just how much of Bev's book was completed before Drum Dreams came into existence?
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Post by fernandoamado on Feb 25, 2018 3:25:45 GMT
Of course, as was so often the case with the group, that didn't automatically guarantee the others any kind of official acknowledgement for their ideas, which is how the end result came to be attributed exclusively to Jeff. Really, though, we're discussing perhaps one of the most obvious examples of a throwaway in this band's history together. I wonder how much we don't acknowledge about song credits. I believe Jeff wrote a 90% of ELO's stuff but, how much are we missing? You had said something about Kelly, a court case and some song's credits. Maybe we don't know that Kelly wrote something important as the verse of Standin' in the Rain, or maybe it's a minor thing like the bassline for Shine a Little Love. Who knows? I hope you can tell us one day, Shardender!
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Post by ShardEnder on Feb 25, 2018 15:57:30 GMT
Of course, as was so often the case with the group, that didn't automatically guarantee the others any kind of official acknowledgement for their ideas, which is how the end result came to be attributed exclusively to Jeff. Really, though, we're discussing perhaps one of the most obvious examples of a throwaway in this band's history together. I wonder how much we don't acknowledge about song credits. I believe Jeff wrote a 90% of ELO's stuff but, how much are we missing? You had said something about Kelly, a court case and some song's credits. Maybe we don't know that Kelly wrote something important as the verse of Standin' in the Rain, or maybe it's a minor thing like the bassline for Shine a Little Love. Who knows? I hope you can tell us one day, Shardender! There was one song in particular - or at least a very specific part of this - Kelly claimed to have written, and Jeff's lawyers felt it was better to settle out of court than risk his (soon-to-be-former) colleague going public or demanding that evidence be played in court that may have supported his cause. I'll hopefully be able to reveal more in my book, but for now I can probably get away with saying that the track in question is considered one of ELO's most popular hits, and that a whole section was supposedly absent from Jeff's original demo because he didn't write this. Make of that what you will... For the record, I'll be stating in print that Jeff typically played only a single verse and chorus when making his initial demos, with few songs developing to the stage where everything was complete before he entered the studio. Of course, he now does everything exclusively at home, so this point doesn't really stand anymore, though it may be telling that he's reluctant to release the demo for this song along with others from around the same period, which supposedly also had a lot of external input. I hope I'm not overstepping the mark with this, but I always thought it was a little odd that much of Out Of The Blue was allegedly written alone in a Swiss chalet over just a few days, yet the group's next intended double album, Secret Messages, required almost a year, with songwriting happening in batches separated by months, plus however long it took for Jeff to come up with the initial songs they worked on earliest into the album's sessions (during the period known as The Garden Rehearsals). Saying that, he didn't have a certain Jet executive pressuring him as much to deliver further hits by 1982 due to the label having bigger things to worry about, not to mention I've been told that Jeff was beginning to struggle personally at this point, with much of the drawn out recordings being a result of him beginning to second guess a lot of his musical decisions. To end for now, if I was to loosely break down writing contribution percentages for the albums made following Roy's departure, I'd guess that roughly 75% of the basic ideas were indeed Jeff's, and I'm in little doubt that he deserves the most credit. However, about 10% should probably go to Richard and Lou each, plus the remaining 5% deserves splitting between Kelly and certain string players who've gone on record claiming they were given some creative freedom. However, the counter argument is whether an improvised violin solo here and there or a short piano line constitutes helping fellow musicians out, rather than an attempt to potentially seize a greater cut of any subsequent royalties.
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Post by fernandoamado on Feb 25, 2018 16:38:53 GMT
However, the counter argument is whether an improvised violin solo here and there or a short piano line constitutes helping fellow musicians out, rather than an attempt to potentially seize a greater cut of any subsequent royalties. It's an arguable point. The violin solo of Rock and Roll is King to me doesn't deserve a composition credit, but the one that opens Livin' Thing does. The same for the bassline of Last Train to London or the orchestral incidentals that precede many of Face the Music's songs. They are really important.
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