Jeff Lynne brings ELO to the Forum one last time

One benefit of shedding a flashy rock ‘n’ roll persona is that you’re never too old to do it.

Fronting a version of the band once known as the Electric Light Orchestra Saturday night at Inglewood’s Kia Forum, 76-year-old Jeff Lynne looked — and sounded pretty much — like he has for the past half-century: dark pants and jacket, fuzzy hair and beard, eyes hidden behind a pair of aviator shades as he sang his finely sculpted tunes in an ever winning voice.

Nothing about the 90-minute gig suggested Lynne couldn’t keep doing this for years if he wanted to — but nothing about it suggested he had any desire to continue, either.

Indeed, despite the durability of his vibe, Lynne announced last March that his current tour will be the last for the group billed these days as Jeff Lynne’s ELO; a concert planned for next summer in London’s Hyde Park, where ELO returned to the stage in 2014 after a couple of decades away, is being billed as his grand farewell.

Why hang it up? Age no doubt has something to do with it: Elton John was also 76 when he finished his long Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour; so was Don Henley at the start of the Eagles’ latest farewell outing — you know, the one they keep expanding at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

Then again, when I visited Lynne at his home in Beverly Hills in 2015, he told me he had hated touring even as a younger man. “You wake up at 9 a.m., get a terrible hot dog at the airport for breakfast, then make three flights to get where you need to go,” he said. “As soon as I was able to stop, I said, ‘That’s it.'”

What seemed more likely during Saturday’s show, the second of two in Inglewood, is that Lynne has simply realized that he has no use for the rock star hype that’s on the road. Taking center stage as ELO’s music director introduced the dozen-plus members of the band, Lynne looked genuinely uncomfortable when the guy finally got his name, and he found himself showered – once again – with the crowd’s enthusiastic applause.

Jeff Lynne was joined by a dozen plus players at the Forum.

(Timothy Norris / Kia Forum)

The funny thing about Lynne’s almost radically low-key presence is how insanely alive his music is. As a single act in the 70s, ELO were up there with Elton, ABBA and Paul McCartney’s Wings; the band’s string of top 40 hits – “Evil Woman”, “Strange Magic”, “Livin’ Thing”, “Turn to Stone”, “Mr. Blue Sky”, “Shine a Little Love” – ​​provided the one pleasure after the other, each associated with Lynne’s stated goal of mixing rock and classical music, yet each with its own distinct flavor: a little folkier, a little more disco, a little harder-edged, a little more R&B.

On Spotify, many of the band’s tracks have streams in the hundreds of millions; ELO actually has more monthly listeners on that platform than Tom Petty, George Harrison or Roy Orbison – three of the four rock legends Lynne teamed up with in the late ’80s to form the Traveling Wilburys. (Bob Dylan, the supergroup’s fifth member, has more monthly listeners.) And you can recognize echoes of ELO’s expansive but ultra-detailed approach in the work of a generation of indie-rock studio obsessives like Tame Impala, Phoenix and Vampire Weekend.

Which is not to say that someone who sounds like ELO has come along. At the Forum, where the band performed under a giant prop spaceship, Lynne and his accompanists were somehow crisp, lush, funky and biting all at the same time; often, as in the exuberant “Don’t Bring Me Down,” you wondered how a riff you’ve heard so many times could have so much energy left in it.

Lynne said next to nothing during the evening – notable only because this gig may end up being the last he ever plays in his adopted hometown. At the end of the night, he led the band through the pop-psychedelic twists of “Mr. Blue Sky,” then bowed before slowly walking off the stage to a life where little about him seems to change.