Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Doin' That Crazy Thing

Back in March I found myself a bit tipsy and surrounded by sleeping people so I did what anyone would have done, posted a crapload of ELO related stuff. I made a comment about how four ELO posts was probably enough and frequent commenter and ELO freak Koop vehemently disagreed. So here's a little leftover that I couldn't post that night, being that it's really hard to rip vinyl without waking people up.

This is ELO mastermind Jeff Lynne's first solo record, Doin' That Crazy Thing. Released in 1977, both sides are midtempo disco jams featuring Lynne in fine voice and his production sharp as ever. The weirdest thing about the record is that is was a stab at having a "dance", you know... like the Hustle. The front cover features two dancers (the dude sporting a sweet stache by the way) doing twenty steps with little captions on how to execute them. For example box six says, "Right leg side straight, left knee bent, right arm locked, left side 90". If you had any doubts about Jeff Lynne as a control freak before, I'm sure that settles it right? If not the back has a note thats says, "Arm movements swing in natural opposition for everything but sequences 2 & 5, these should be clean and sharp to form visual contrast". whoa, way to take the fun out of dancing. I embedded the artwork for the front and back cover so I'm expecting everyone to learn the steps okay? First one to upload their dance on youtube gets a mental high five from yours truly.

Jeff Lynne- Doin' That Crazy Thing
Jeff Lynne- Goin' Down to Rio

1 comment:

Koop said...

Hey Mister Restless, nice to see myself namedropped here. And thx for the post - a 'nice to have' for sure. And if you're looking for more Lynne related eighties-and-dated-sounding stuff: check the song he wrote and produced for Dave Edmunds, "slippping away". Has the vintage ELO avalanche of sounds all over it.
Anyway, keep up the good work!