Clinton announced he’s retiring in May 2019, although the only announced date at the moment is this Sunday at the Summer Soul festival in Rochester. Funkenstein is still out there bringing love to the people with some iteration of the 100 musicians and singers who’ve called P-Funk home. Clinton’s MSG days are behind him, perhaps in part because he doesn’t have ELO’s absence-hearts-fondness trifecta, but Dr. It’s understandable, because unlike Lynne, Clinton has been the ultimate atomic road dog, touring year after year. They weren’t looking back to 1950s touchstones like Forbidden Planet or It Came From Outer Space, with their cheap, lo-fi, yet lovable, special effects.Īt 70, Jeff Lynne has achieved greatest-hits liftoff, while at 77, George Clinton is preparing to hang up his full-length furs. While working on Out of the Blue, Kosh and illustrator Shusei Nagaoka knew they wanted it to be futuristic, in line with the cutting-edge quadraphonic ELO sound. I believe Jeff Lynne is still using a modified version of it today. The ELO logo as a flying saucer was a device that really hit. “I threw it to my son, and while it was in the air, I thought, ‘There’s the new album cover right there.’ We didn’t necessarily set out to do something ‘spacey,’ but you pick a theme and off it goes. “We made stickers for A New World Record and I slapped one on a blue Frisbee,” he says. Earlier, he’d hit on that piece of rock-and-roll history that came about thanks to child’s play. He came up with a concept of a space jet delivering food to the giant ELO flying saucer.
The songs nudged Kosh into the science-fiction realm.
He always listened to a few tracks, so as to not design a cover that had nothing to do with the music or the grooves. “The logo on the 1976 album A New World Record is an homage to my dad, an engineer who designed the undercarriage for the Mosquito fighter plane, and then after World War II, went to work for Wurlitzer as an organ builder,” says Kosh, the designer behind the covers of countless record collection staples like Abbey Road, Who’s Next, and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! “It’s a combination of the General Electric logo turned into ELO and the lights of a Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox.”įor Out of the Blue, the 1977 album that spawned the massive tour with the five-ton 525,000-watt $300,000 spaceship, Kosh relied on audial and familial inspiration. Look up in the sky, it’s not a Simon, it’s the ELO flying saucer. This tour, the musicians aren’t rising up on hydraulic lifts, but the famous imagery still abounds. The chance to finally see ELO live across the country holds special appeal for children of the ’70s, too young for arena rock, but still captivated in middle-age-dom by the band’s glowing blinking whirling logo. Blue Sky,” “Livin’ Thing” and “Don’t Bring Me Down” to the masses. Lynne has assembled a 13-piece band to bring ELO’s violin-and-cello-inflected pop masterpieces like “Mr. For ELO fans, and there’s a lot of them as the band has sold 50 million records worldwide, it’s been a long time coming. This week, ELO (officially, Jeff Lynne’s ELO, a hedge against former bandmates and their assorted tribute acts) return to the Garden for the first time since 1978. Not only does it reinforce the mythic and completely fun idea of the rock star as a transcendent being, it drives home the underlying power of music: It transports us.” “It’s the ultimate in showmanship, and popular music’s perpetual need to outdo itself probably made such a spectacle inevitable. “There is nothing cooler than a band who uses spaceships on stage,” says Jason Heller, author of Strange Stars, an authoritative look at the intersection of science fiction and music in the 1970s. George Clinton, led his righteous collective in offering celestial salvation. At the end of Parliament-Funkadelic’s 1977 gig, the legendary Mothership descended from the cosmos and Dr. The band was touring off their smash double album Out of the Blue, but amazingly, their show wasn’t the only one at Madison Square Garden that year to feature an alien invasion. As the roof to the extraterrestrial pod rose up, a group of men known as the Electric Light Orchestra ascended in the smoke. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Imagesįorty years ago, a spaceship touched down in New York City.
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