Me Elton John

by Elton John

  After the show, Yoko came backstage. We all ended up back at the Pierre hotel – me, John, Yoko, Tony and John Reid. We were sat in a booth having a drink and – as if the whole situation wasn’t peculiar enough – Uri Geller suddenly materialized out of nowhere, came over to our table and started bending all the spoons and forks on it. Then he began doing his mind-reading act. It had been a bizarre day. But ultimately it led to John reuniting with Yoko, having Sean – my godson – and retreating into a life of domestic contentment in the Dakota Building. I was happy for him, even if I could think of better places to retreat into domestic contentment in than the Dakota. There was something really sinister about that building, the architecture of it. Just looking at it gave me the creeps. You know, Roman Polanski chose to film Rosemary’s Baby there for a reason.

  * * *

  Recording Captain Fantastic had turned out to be as easy as writing it. The sessions were a breeze: we had gone back to Caribou in the summer of 1974 and taped the songs in the order they appear on the album, as though we were telling the story as we went along. We had knocked out a couple of singles, too, a cover of ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ that John played guitar and sang backing vocals on, and ‘Philadelphia Freedom’, which is one of the few songs I ever commissioned Bernie to write. Normally, I just let him write lyrics about whatever he wanted – we’d learned we couldn’t really write to order back in the days when we kept trying to write singles for Tom Jones or Cilla Black and failing miserably – but Billie Jean King had asked me to write a theme song for her tennis team, the Philadelphia Freedoms. I couldn’t refuse; I adored Billie Jean. We’d met at a party in LA a year before, and she’d become one of my best friends. It seems a strange comparison, but she and John Lennon reminded me of each other. They were both really driven, they were both kind, they both loved to laugh, they both felt really strongly that they could use their fame to change things. John was politically engaged, Billie was a huge pioneer for feminism, for gay rights, for women’s rights in sport, not just tennis. All today’s huge female tennis stars should get on their knees and thank her, because she was the one who had the guts to turn round when she won the US Open and say, ‘You have to give women the same prize money as men, or I’m not playing next year’. I just love her to death.

  Perhaps understandably, Bernie wasn’t hugely enamoured with the idea of writing about tennis – it’s not exactly the ideal topic for a pop song – so instead, he wrote about the city of Philadelphia. That worked perfectly, because the song’s sound was influenced by the music that was coming out of the city at the time: The O’Jays, MFSB, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes. That was the music I heard when I went out to gay clubs in New York: Crisco Disco, Le Jardin and 12 West. I loved them, even though Crisco Disco once refused to let me in. I was with Divine, too, the legendary drag queen. I know, I know: Elton John and Divine getting turned away from a gay club. But he was wearing a kaftan, I had on a brightly coloured jacket and they said we were overdressed: ‘Whaddaya think this is? Fuckin’ Halloween?’

  You didn’t go to those places to pick up guys, or at least I didn’t. I just went there to dance, and if there was someone there at the end of the night, then great. No drugs, except maybe poppers. You didn’t need them. The music was enough: ‘Honey Bee’ by Gloria Gaynor, ‘I’ll Always Love My Mama’ by The Intruders. Fabulous records, really inspiring, brave music. We got Gene Page, who arranged all Barry White’s records, to do the strings on ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ and we got the sound and style right. We must have done – a few months after it came out, MFSB covered it and named an album after it.

  ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ went platinum in America, then a few months later, Captain Fantastic became the first album in history to go straight into the US charts at Number One. I was everywhere in 1975. Not just on the radio: everywhere. I was in amusement arcades – Bally made a Captain Fantastic pinball machine. I was on black TV: one of the first white artists ever to be invited to appear on Soul Train. I was interviewed by the exceptionally laid-back Don Cornelius, who took a shine to yet another Tommy Nutter creation I was wearing, this time with huge lapels and brown and gold pinstripes: ‘Hey, brother, where did you get that suit?’

  But I was still keen to keep moving. I decided to change the band and let Dee and Nigel go. I rang them myself. They took the news quite well – Dee was more upset than Nigel, but there wasn’t a huge row or a feeling of bad blood from either of them. I feel worse about it now than I did at the time. It must have been devastating for them – they’d been integral for years and we were at the peak of our careers. Back then, I was always looking forward, and I felt in my gut that I needed to revamp our sound: make it funkier and harder-driving. I brought in Caleb Quaye on guitar and Roger Pope on drums, who’d played on Empty Sky and Tumbleweed Connection, and two American session musicians, James Newton Howard and Kenny Passarelli, on keyboards and bass.

  I auditioned another American guitarist as well, but it wasn’t a success. For one thing, it didn’t gel musically, and for another he freaked out everyone else in the band by telling us that he liked fucking chickens up the arse, then cutting their heads off. Apparently when you do that their sphincters contract and it makes you come. I couldn’t work out whether he had an absolutely horrendous sense of humour or an absolutely horrendous sex life. There aren’t many rules in rock and roll, but there are some: follow your gut musical instincts, make sure you read the small print before you sign and, if at all possible, try not to form a band with someone who fucks chickens up the arse and decapitates them. Or even talks about it. Whichever it is, it’s going to wear on your nerves after a while if you have to share a hotel room with them.

  There was one other complication. Bernie’s marriage to Maxine had broken up, and she’d started having an affair with Kenny Passarelli. So my new bass player was sleeping with my songwriting partner’s wife. It was obviously really hurtful for Bernie, but I had enough going on in my own life without getting embroiled in other people’s relationships.

  I took the new band to Amsterdam to rehearse. The rehearsals were fantastic – we were an absolutely shit-hot band – but the days off were bedlam: it turned out we were absolutely shit-hot at taking drugs, too. Tony King turned up with Ringo Starr and we all went on a boat trip along the canals, which swiftly degenerated into a mammoth drug fest. It was completely debauched. I’m afraid the aesthetic loveliness of the Grachtengordel went entirely unnoticed that day. Everybody was too busy doing coke and blowing spliff smoke into each other’s mouths. Ringo got so stoned that, at one point, he asked if he could join the band. At least, that’s what people told me afterwards – I didn’t hear him. If he did, he probably forgot he said it about ninety seconds after the words came out of his mouth.

  One of the reasons I was taking so many drugs was because I was heartbroken. I’d fallen in love with someone who was straight and didn’t love me. I spent so much time in my hotel room weeping and listening to 10CC’s ‘I’m Not In Love’ that Tony eventually had a gold disc made up and presented me with it: to Elton John for a million plays of ‘I’m Not In Love’.

  In fact, since I had broken up with John, my personal life had been, more or less, a disaster. I’d fall in love with straight men all the time, chase after the thing I couldn’t have. Sometimes it went on for months and months, this madness of thinking that today was the day you’d get a phone call from them saying ‘oh, by the way, I love you’, despite the fact that they’d told you it was never going to happen.

  Or I’d see someone I liked the look of in a gay bar and before I’d actually spoken to them, I’d be hopelessly in love, convinced this was the man I was fated to share the rest of my life with and mentally sketching out a wonderful future. It was always the same type of guy. Blond, blue eyes, good-looking and younger than me, so I could smother them with a kind of fatherly love – the sort of love I suppose I thought I’d missed out on myself as a kid. I didn’t pick them up so much as take them hostage. ‘Right, y
ou have to give up what you’re doing, come on the road, fly round the world with me.’ I’d buy them the watch and the shirt and the cars, but eventually these boys had no reason to be, except to be with me, and I was busy, so they’d be left on the sidelines. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was taking their existence away from them. And after three or four months they’d end up resenting it, I’d end up getting bored with them, and it would end in tears. And then I’d get someone else to get rid of them for me and start again. It was absolutely dreadful behaviour: I’d have one leaving at the airport at the same time as the new one was flying in.

  It was a decadent era, and plenty of other pop stars were behaving in a similar way – Rod Stewart occasionally let girls know he’d finished with them by just leaving a plane ticket on their bed, so he wasn’t going to win any awards for chivalry either. But somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew this can’t be right.

  I had to have some arm-candy, though, someone to talk to. I couldn’t stand being on my own. There was no solitude, no reflection. I had to be with people. I was incredibly immature. I was still the little boy from Pinner Hill Road underneath it all. The events, the shows, the records, the success were all great, but when I was away from that, I wasn’t an adult, I was a teenager. I had been completely wrong when I thought that changing my name meant I’d changed as a person. I wasn’t Elton, I was Reg. And Reg was still the same as he’d been fifteen years ago, hiding in his bedroom while his parents fought: insecure and body-conscious and self-loathing. I didn’t want to go home to him at night. If I did, the misery could be all-consuming.

  One night, while I was recording with the new band up at Caribou studios, I took an overdose of Valium before I went to bed. Twelve tablets. I can’t remember what exactly prompted me to do that, although it was probably some catastrophic love affair gone wrong. When I woke up the next day, I panicked, rushed downstairs and called Connie Pappas, who worked with John Reid, and told her what I’d done. While I was talking to her, I blacked out. James Newton Howard heard me collapse and carried me back upstairs to my room. They called a doctor, who prescribed me pills for my nerves. With the benefit of hindsight, that seems quite an odd thing to do to someone who’s just tried to finish himself off with a load of pills for his nerves, but they must have helped, at least in the short term – the sessions got finished.

  * * *

  The new band’s first show was at London’s Wembley Stadium on 21 June 1975. It was more like a one-day festival than a gig, called Midsummer Music. I’d picked the bill myself: a band signed to our label, Rocket, called Stackridge, Rufus with Chaka Khan, Joe Walsh, The Eagles and The Beach Boys. They were all great. The audience loved them. For my headlining set, I played Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy in its entirety, all ten songs, from start to finish. It was the biggest show I’d ever played. Everything was perfect – the sound, the support acts, even the weather. And it was an unmitigated disaster.

  Here’s something I learned. If you’ve elected to come onstage immediately after The Beach Boys – whose set has consisted of virtually every hit from one of the most incredible and best-loved catalogues of hits in the history of pop music – it’s a really, really bad idea to play ten new songs in a row that no one in the audience is particularly familiar with, because the album they come from was only released a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I learned this vital lesson about three or four songs into the Wembley performance, when I sensed a restlessness in the crowd, the way schoolkids get restless during a particularly long assembly. We ploughed on. We sounded wonderful – like I said, we were a shit-hot band. People started to leave. I was terrified. It was years since I’d lost an audience. The feeling I used to get onstage in the clubs when Long John Baldry insisted on playing ‘The Threshing Machine’ or doing his Della Reese impersonation came flooding back.

  The obvious thing to do would be to turn it around and start playing the hits. But I couldn’t. For one thing, it was a matter of artistic integrity. And for another, I’d made a big speech when we came onstage about performing the album in full. I couldn’t just suddenly strike up with ‘Crocodile Rock’ halfway through. Fuck. I’d have to stick with it. I could already imagine what the reviews were going to be like, and I was only half an hour into the show. We kept going. The songs still sounded wonderful. More people left. I started thinking about the big celebratory post-gig party that was planned. It was going to be filled with stars who were supposed to have been dazzled by my performance: Billie Jean, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr. Great. This is just fucking wonderful. I’m screwing up in front of 82,000 people and half The Beatles.

  We eventually got round to the hits, but it was too little, too late, as the reviews quite rightly pointed out. We went back to America, having been taught both a lesson in the perils of artistic integrity and that you’re never too successful to fall flat on your arse.

  I was spending more and more time over in the States, so much that it made sense to rent a house in LA. I found one at the top of Tower Grove Drive, which I eventually bought. It was a Spanish Colonial-style house that had been built for the silent movie star John Gilbert. He’d lived there while he was having an affair with Greta Garbo. There was a hut in the garden by a waterfall, and that was allegedly where Garbo slept when she wanted to be alone.

  It was a nice neighbourhood, although a house nearby did burn down shortly after I moved there. The fire allegedly started because the owner was freebasing cocaine, something I very much frowned on. Cooking up drugs meant that you were a druggie, which – with the help of some remarkably convoluted internal logic – I had worked out that I definitely wasn’t, despite some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary. I would stay up all night on coke, then not touch it for six months. So I wasn’t an addict. I was fine.

  It was a beautiful house, and I employed a housekeeper called Alice to look after the place and nurse me through my hangovers. I filled it with all the stuff I was collecting – art nouveau, art deco, Bugatti furniture, Gallé lamps, Lalique, incredible posters – but I only really lived in three rooms: my bedroom, the TV room and the snooker room. Actually, I mostly used the snooker room to seduce guys. Strip snooker! It usually seemed to do the trick, especially after a couple of lines of coke.

  That was another reason I took a lot of coke: I found it was an aphrodisiac, which is strange, because for most people it kills the erection side of things completely. Never a problem for me, I’m afraid. Quite the opposite. If I took enough coke I could stay hard for days. And I liked the fantasy of it: I did things on coke that I would never have had the courage to do or try if I hadn’t been. It takes all the inhibitions out of people. Even straight guys sometimes. You gave them a couple of lines and they’d do stuff they wouldn’t ordinarily do in a million years. Then regret it in the morning, I suppose – or occasionally come back for more.

  But I was never actually into fucking that much. I was an observer, a voyeur. I’d kind of set up my perversion, have two or three guys doing things for me to watch. That was where my sexual pleasure came from, getting a bunch of people who wouldn’t normally have sex with each other, to have sex with each other. But I didn’t really participate. I just watched, took Polaroids, organized things. The only problem was that I was incredibly houseproud, so they’d end up having sex on the snooker table with me shouting, ‘Make sure you don’t come on the baize!’ which tended to puncture the atmosphere a bit. Not being that interested in having sex myself is the reason I never got HIV. If I had been, I’d almost certainly be dead.

  Tower Grove Drive turned into a big party house, the place everyone came back to after a night out. LA was the centre of the music industry in the mid-seventies. Plus, LA had amazing gay clubs: the After Dark and Studio One. The first was a disco, quite underground; the second had cabaret. It was where I saw Eartha Kitt, who I’d loved when I was a kid, although strictly speaking I didn’t actually see Eartha Kitt perform. I went backstage to meet her before the show and her openin
g words to me were: ‘Elton John. I never liked anything you did.’ Oh, really? Well, thanks for your frank and honest appraisal. I think I’ll go home.

  If Dusty Springfield was around, we’d go to the roller derby to see the LA Thunderbirds. It was so camp and fabulous, all scripted, like wrestling, but lesbians loved it – it was basically a load of dykes whizzing round on skates and fighting each other. And we’d have fantastic lunch and dinner parties. Franco Zeffirelli came for lunch and revealed that his close friends called him Irene. Simon and Garfunkel had dinner one night, then played charades. At least, they tried to play charades. They were terrible at it. The best thing I can say about them is that they were better than Bob Dylan. He couldn’t get the hang of the ‘how many syllables?’ thing at all. He couldn’t do ‘sounds like’ either, come to think of it. One of the best lyricists in the world, the greatest man of letters in the history of rock music, and he can’t seem to tell you whether a word’s got one syllable or two syllables or what it rhymes with! He was so hopeless, I started throwing oranges at him. Or so I was informed the next morning, by a cackling Tony King. That’s not really a phone call you want to receive when you’re struggling with a hangover. ‘Morning, darling – do you remember throwing oranges at Bob Dylan last night?’ Oh God.

  There was a strange, dark undercurrent to LA, too. The Manson murders still hung over the place six years on. They’d left this weird sense that you were never really safe there, even in a big house in Beverly Hills. These days, everyone has security guards and CCTV, but no one did then, not even the former Beatles, which is why I woke up one morning to find a girl sitting on the end of my bed, staring at me. I couldn’t get up, because I never wore anything when I slept. All I could do was sit there screaming at her to get the fuck out. She didn’t say anything back, she just kept staring, which was somehow worse than if she’d spoken. Eventually the housekeeper came down and got her out of there. It scared the shit out of me – we couldn’t work out how the hell she’d got in.