Travelin’ Light Past His ELO Image : The success of the Traveling Wilburys and his first solo album helps Jeff Lynne move on after Electric Light Orchestra

“I don’t really want to talk about ELO, actually.”

Jeff Lynne’s frequent, calm protests to that effect during a recent interview were like a latent bug in his normally pleasant demeanor, as if he was being unreasonably pestered on a particularly irrelevant tangent.

But the Electric Light Orchestra was the biggest part of the Jeff Lynne story--at least until the Traveling Wilburys came along in 1988.

A decade and a half ago, Lynne’s music with ELO came to represent all that was big and ambitious about rock: orchestras, choirs and banks of synthesizers drawing heavily on classical influences, as well as borrowing power chords, disco rhythms and Beatlesque touches from pop sources. At its grandiose mid-’70s peak, ELO was either wretched or blessed excess, depending on the ear of the beholder.

Lingering sensitivity to old criticisms leveled at ELO may be one factor in Lynne’s eagerness in the interview to move to other topics--mainly his newly released debut solo album, “Armchair Theatre.” But at least part of his discomfort stems from the impending release of a three-CD boxed set of ELO material, “Afterglow,” due from Epic Records in early July, a potential competitor with his own new release.

“Do I have anything to do with it?” he said, repeating a question about the retrospective. “Well, I wrote all the songs that are on it!”

Other than that, Lynne’s input into the 47-song set, which includes nine previously unreleased or non-album tracks, was minimal. He remembers being asked for his comments on the song selection, but when he suggested omitting some of ELO’s hit singles--including some of the 19 U.S. Top 40 hits--in favor of lesser-known and less dated tunes, he was rebuffed, he says.

“So in actual fact, I didn’t have much control over it. They’ve got the right to do it, and I’m not opposing it. But they were nice and asked me to write a little thing on the back about my thoughts about it, which range from horror to being proud of some of the songs. It’s the weird and wacky ones I find a bit hard to take now, but at the time, I thought they were really good. Your perspective changes.”

For evidence of a changed perspective, consider “Armchair Theatre,” which brings Lynne full-swing from classical-rocker to rock ‘n’ roll classicist. Aside from his trademark stacked vocal arrangements, it’s almost the very model of simplicity. More than anything, it’s influenced by early rock. Strings are barely in evidence, and there’s nary a baroque flourish in earshot. (See adjoining review.)

Beethoven need not roll over.

“What I tried to do is make it with all the values of a ‘60s record,” said Lynne, 42, chatting at Warner Bros. Records’ Burbank office, looking not all that different than he did in the ‘60s, with his curly hair and shaded glasses. “There’s nothing high-tech or digital on it at all. It’s all done by hand. It’s like a steam mixer; it’s really basic. I loved having a whole album of live instruments again.”

Why would an erstwhile art-rock expansionist go back to basics--albeit carefully crafted, meticulously sculpted basics--after having once pushed the edge of the rock envelope with a symphonic sound?

“Apathy, I suppose, crept into it,” he recalled with some reluctance. “I’d basically done more or less all I thought I could do with that concept, with the strings and the big orchestra and the choir, and I was just fed up. I felt a bit trapped by it. I was glad to get out of that situation.

“All those early things were just learning, really, trying to be different,” Lynne said, sounding almost apologetic about ELO’s initial experimentalism. “Everybody in rock was doing 20-minute guitar solos in those days, and I just tried to do something that wasn’t that .”

The solo album’s much more streamlined pop is equally “totally self-indulgent,” he hastened to add, “but that’s what music is anyway. Not having to answer anybody’s expectations, not having to think about ‘Well, what’s ELO supposed to sound like?’ It’s ‘What do I want to sound like, right now?’ ”

In the years before recording “Armchair Theatre” in his home studio in England, Lynne spent much of his time as a producer, arranger and co-writer for such famous friends as George Harrison, Tom Petty and Roy Orbison. It’s a lucrative side career he didn’t plan, but rather fell into.

“I’d had enough of the ELO situation by 1986, so when George asked me to produce ‘Cloud Nine,’ it was perfect timing for me,” Lynne recalled. “I didn’t really know what to do at the time. It snowballed into this thing where I ended up working on loads of albums, and then forming this group with George.”

This group , of course, was--and still is--the Traveling Wilburys, the wittily impromptu supergroup to end all supergroups.

The lineage goes like this: Lynne produced a few tracks for Dave Edmunds, who happened to mention one day that some months earlier his friend Harrison had inquired as to whether Lynne might be interested in producing some sides for an ex-Beatle in bad need of a new sound. Lynne was.

Then Petty pulled up alongside Lynne at a stoplight in Beverly Hills and hollered out hosannas about the completed Harrison album. The two soon got together to write one song--the hit “Free Fallin’ “--for Petty’s solo album. One track led to another, and another, and soon Lynne was co-producing Petty’s entire “Full Moon Fever” album.

Well before that was finished, Lynne and Harrison had a tavern summit in which they plotted the lineup of their ultimate fantasy band. Unlike most drinking buddies who play that game, these two had the means to achieve it: Petty, whom they both knew, was an easy score, and much to their delight, Bob Dylan and Roy Orbison were equally willing to enlist.

After the Wilburys’ acclaimed debut--which bears Lynne’s unique stamp perhaps more than any other member of the group’s-- he finished the Petty LP, and produced several tracks for what would be Orbison’s final album, as well as sides for Brian Wilson, Randy Newman and Del Shannon, Randy Newman and Del Shannon.

The Wilburys, a foursome since the death of Orbison in 1988, have been working on “Volume Two” in Los Angeles. They’ll finish it in England and plan to release it in October. And Lynne says that as much as he grew to hate touring during ELO’s stadium-packing heyday, a Wilburys tour may be in the offing for next year.

“I ended up being trapped in this situation where the better the albums did, the longer I had to go on tour, and the less time I could spend back in the studio,” Lynne said of the old ELO syndrome.

“It was a vicious circle--the better I did ‘em, the bigger drag it became. Even though I’m grateful for the people who liked it and enjoyed the music, it ceased to be fun toward the end. Once you got to be in these vast arenas, you couldn’t hear anything. I mean, it was going down well and everybody cheered and was happy, but there wasn’t any satisfaction musically.

“So I’d rather be in the studio knowing that I’ve got the best sound I can get at the time. It’s a much better world now for me and I enjoy myself much more. And I’ve worked with all the people I admire, which is a great thing, and I’ve made an album that I’m really pleased with.”