Me Elton John

by Elton John

  Every time I went to a foreign country to play live, I found out where the AA or NA meeting was and went there as soon as I landed. I went to meetings in Argentina, France, Spain. I went to meetings in Los Angeles and New York. And I went to meetings in Atlanta. Even though I’d broken up with Hugh, I was still in love with the city. I’d met a great circle of friends through Hugh, people from outside the music business, whose company I enjoyed. It was a great music town – there was a big soul and hip-hop scene – but it was strangely relaxed; I could go to the cinema or the shopping mall on Peachtree Road and no one would bother me.

  I was spending so much time there that I eventually decided to buy an apartment, a thirty-sixth-floor duplex. The views were beautiful, and so, I couldn’t help noticing, was the real-estate agent who sold it to me. He was called John Scott. I asked him out, and we became a couple.

  Eventually, I stopped going to meetings. I had gone virtually every day for three years – something crazy like 1,400 meetings – but I’d finally decided that they had done all they could for me. I got to a point where I didn’t want to talk about alcohol or cocaine or bulimia every day. I suppose because I was a high-profile addict who turned his life around very publicly, I became someone that my peers looked to if they had a problem. It’s become a bit of a running joke – Elton always springing into action whenever a pop star has an issue with drink or drugs – but I don’t mind at all. If someone is in a state and needs help, I call them, or leave my number with their manager, just saying, ‘Listen, I’ve been there, I know what it’s like.’ If they need to contact me, they can. Some of those people everyone knows about. I got Rufus Wainwright into rehab – he was taking so much crystal meth that, at one stage, he’d gone temporarily blind – and I’m Eminem’s AA sponsor. Whenever I ring to check in on him, he always greets me the same way: ‘Hello, you cunt’, which I guess is very Eminem. And some of them no one knows about, and I’m not going to spill the beans now: they wanted to keep their problems private, and that’s fine. Either way, it’s incredibly rewarding. Helping people to get sober is a wonderful thing.

  But some people you can’t help. It’s a horrible feeling. You end up just looking on from the sidelines, knowing what’s going to happen, knowing that there’s only one way their story’s going to end. It was like that with Whitney Houston – her aunt, Dionne Warwick, asked me to call her, but either the messages I left didn’t get through, or she didn’t want to know. And George Michael really didn’t want to know. I nagged at him because I was worried and because mutual friends kept contacting me, asking if I could do something. He wrote an open letter to Heat magazine, most of which was concerned with telling me, at considerable length, to fuck off and mind my own business. I wish we hadn’t fallen out. But more than that, I wish he was still alive. I loved George. He was ludicrously talented, and he went through a lot, but he was the sweetest, kindest, most generous man. I miss him so much.

  George was one of the first people I performed with after I got sober. As much as I enjoyed my time off, I knew it couldn’t last forever and I didn’t want it to last forever – I wanted to get back to work, even if getting back to work felt daunting. I’d started thinking about playing live again, and to test the water a little, I agreed to appear onstage at one of George’s gigs. He was doing a run of shows at Wembley Arena. This time, I didn’t turn up in a Ronald McDonald costume or drive a Reliant Robin. I dressed down in a baseball cap and we sang ‘Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me’ together, as we had at Live Aid six years before, in 1985. It felt great. The audience went insane when my name was announced, and when the duet was released as a single, it went to Number One on both sides of the Atlantic. I booked a studio in Paris and tentatively suggested recording a new album, which ended up being called The One.

  The first day there, I managed twenty minutes before leaving in a panic. I can’t remember now what the problem was. I suppose I thought I couldn’t make an album without drink or drugs, which made no sense whatsoever. You only had to listen to Leather Jackets to realize that the opposite was true: it was pretty compelling evidence that I couldn’t make an album while taking drugs. I went back the next day, and I gradually settled into things. The only real problem came with a track called ‘The Last Song’. Bernie’s lyrics were about a man dying of AIDS being reconciled with his estranged father, who had excommunicated him when he found out he was gay. They were beautiful, but I just couldn’t cope with singing them. It was just after Freddie’s death. Somewhere in Virginia, I knew Vance Buck was dying, too. Every time I tried to get the vocal down, I started crying. Eventually I managed it and ‘The Last Song’ was subsequently used as the finale of And the Band Played On, a docudrama about the discovery of, and the fight against, HIV. They played it over a montage of images of prominent AIDS victims. Half of them were people I knew personally: Ryan; Freddie; Steve Rubell, the owner of Studio 54.

  By then, I had started the Elton John AIDS Foundation. I had kept doing charity work, but the more I did, the more I realized I needed to do. The thing that shook me the most was volunteering for a charity called Operation Open Hand that delivered meals to AIDS patients all over Atlanta. I did it together with my new boyfriend John. At some houses we delivered to, the person inside would only open the door a crack when we knocked. They were covered in lesions and didn’t want to be seen, because the stigma attached to AIDS was so great. Sometimes they wouldn’t open the door at all. You would leave the meal on the step, and as you walked away you would hear the door open, the meal would be snatched in and the door would slam shut again. These people were dying horribly, but worse, it seemed as if they were dying in shame, alone, cut off from the world. It was horrendous, like something you read about happening in the Middle Ages – sick people being cast out of society because of fear and ignorance – but it was happening in the 1990s, in America.

  I couldn’t get it out of my head. Eventually, I asked John if he would help me start a charity of our own, concentrating on helping people protect themselves from HIV, and on the basic things that people with HIV needed to live a better, more dignified life: simple stuff like food, lodging, transportation, access to doctors and counsellors. For two years, John ran it from his kitchen table in Atlanta. Virginia Banks, who worked on my team in LA, became the secretary. There was a staff of four, including me. We didn’t have any experience, we didn’t know anything about infrastructure, but I did know that we had to keep overheads down. I’d seen too many charity foundations, especially celebrity ones, wasting money. You’d turn up to a fundraiser and everyone would have been flown in and chauffeured around at the charity’s expense. Even now, nearly thirty years later, our overheads are minimal. We put on some pretty glitzy events, but they’re all sponsored. The charity doesn’t pay a thing towards them.

  I really threw myself into the AIDS Foundation. In rehab, my counsellor had asked me what I was going to do with the spare time and energy I would have now I was sober, time and energy that had previously been consumed by taking drugs or recovering from taking them. They called it the hole in the doughnut and they wanted to know how I planned to fill it. I talked wildly about my grand plans – I would learn to speak Italian and to cook. Of course, neither of those things happened. I suppose the AIDS Foundation was the thing that filled the hole in the doughnut – it gave me a new sense of purpose outside of music. I was determined that it was going to work: so determined, I auctioned off my record collection to raise funds to get it started. There were 46,000 singles, 20,000 albums, even the old 78s with ‘Reg Dwight’ proudly written on the sleeves in biro. It went in one lot, for $270,000 to an anonymous bidder. I talked anyone I thought could help into getting involved: businessmen who could show us how to run things as efficiently as possible; people who worked at my record label; Robert Key from Rocket; Howard Rose, the agent who’d steered my live career from the moment I first turned up in America.

  I tapped friends for ideas. Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss came up with Smash Hits, an
annual fundraising tennis tournament that’s been running since 1993: tennis stars were really keen to get involved because of Arthur Ashe’s death. Competitive as ever, I often took part myself, although the most famous thing I’ve done on a tennis court remains falling flat on my arse while trying to sit in a director’s chair courtside at the Royal Albert Hall. Another breakthrough was the Academy Awards Viewing Party. It was effectively given to us by a guy called Patrick Lippert, a political activist who founded Rock the Vote. He always held a fundraising Oscars party for one of his causes, but after being diagnosed with HIV, he decided to turn the event into an AIDS foundation fundraiser, and asked if we wanted to be involved. The first party was held in 1993 at Maple Drive, the restaurant owned by Dudley Moore. There were 140 people there – that’s all the restaurant held – and we raised $350,000, which seemed like an enormous amount of money at the time. The next year we did it again, and more stars turned out: I ended up sitting in a booth with Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen and his wife Patti, Emma Thompson and Prince. But Patrick wasn’t there. He died of AIDS three months after the first party, aged thirty-five. Like Freddie Mercury, he just missed out on the antiretroviral drugs that could have saved his life.

  Since then, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised over $450 million, and we’ve hosted some incredible events. The last time Aretha Franklin performed live was at our twenty-fifth anniversary gala, at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. She had been supposed to play the previous year, but had to pull out as she was too sick. She was dying of cancer, and had announced her retirement, but she made an exception for us. When she arrived, I was shocked: I wasn’t prepared for how thin and frail and unwell she looked. Backstage, I found myself asking her if she wanted to sing. I suppose I was really asking whether she was well enough to sing. She just smiled and nodded and said, ‘I would never let you down again.’ I think she must have known that this was the last time she would perform, and she liked the fact that it was for the charity and that the gala was in a church, where her singing career had begun. She sang ‘I Say A Little Prayer’ and ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ and she tore the roof off. However sick she was, it hadn’t affected her voice – she sounded astonishing. I stood at the front of the stage watching the greatest singer in the world sing for the final time, crying my eyes out.

  The AIDS Foundation has given me experiences I would never otherwise have had and taken me to places I would never have visited. I’ve had to speak before Congress several times – asking for the US government to increase AIDS funding – which strangely wasn’t quite as nerve-racking as I expected. Compared to trying to convince Watford Borough Council’s planning committee to let us build a new football stadium, it was a walk in the park. I thought I would get a hostile audience from the more right-wing, religiously zealous Republicans, but no: once again, compared to some members of Watford Borough Council’s planning committee, they were the absolute model of open-mindedness, flexibility and sweet reason.

  And, unexpectedly, working with the AIDS Foundation would indirectly lead to the most profound and important change that’s ever taken place in my life. But we’ll come to that later.

  thirteen

  I don’t want to sound mystical – or even worse, smug – but it was sometimes hard to escape the feeling that life was patting me on the back for getting sober. The One became my biggest-selling album worldwide since 1975. After two years, the renovations at Woodside were finished and I moved back in. I loved it. It finally looked like somewhere a normal human being might live, rather than a coked-up rock star’s preposterous country pile. Ten years after we’d last written a song together, Tim Rice phoned up out of the blue, asking me if I was interested in working with him again. Apparently Disney were making their first animated film based on an original story rather than an existing work, and Tim wanted me involved. I was intrigued. I’d written a movie soundtrack before, for Friends, a 1971 film that got some pretty hair-raising reviews – I remember Roger Ebert calling it ‘a sickening piece of corrupt slop’, but not all the critics enjoyed it as much as that. I’d given soundtracks a wide berth ever since, but this was clearly something different. The songs had to tell a story. The plan was that we wouldn’t write the usual Broadway-style Disney score, but try and come up with pop songs that kids would like.

  It was a strange process. Tim wrote the same way as Bernie, lyrics first, so that was fine. In fact, writing a musical was like writing the Captain Fantastic album, because there was a storyline: there was a specific sequence that you had to follow; you always knew in advance which order the songs had to go in. But I would be lying if I said I never had doubts about the project or, rather, my place within it. I have many flaws, but being an artist who takes himself too seriously is something you could never accuse me of. Even so, there were days when I’d find myself sat at the piano, thinking long and hard about the path my career seemed to be taking. You know, I wrote ‘Someone Saved My Life Tonight’. I wrote ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’. I wrote ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’. And there was no getting around the fact that I was now writing a song about a warthog that farted a lot. Admittedly, I thought it was a pretty good song about a warthog who farted a lot: at the risk of appearing big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top. Still, it felt a long way from The Band turning up backstage and demanding to hear my new album, or Bob Dylan stopping us on the stairs and complimenting Bernie on ‘My Father’s Gun’. But I decided that something about the sheer ridiculousness of the situation appealed to me, and carried on.

  It was the right decision. I thought the finished film was completely extraordinary. I’m not the kind of artist who invites people over to play them my new album, but I loved The Lion King so much that I arranged a couple of private screenings so friends could see it. I was incredibly proud of the whole thing; I knew we were on to something very special. Even so, I couldn’t have predicted that it would become one of the highest-grossing films of all time. It introduced my music to a completely new audience. ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight?’ won an Oscar for Best Original Song: three of the five nominations in that category had come from The Lion King: one of them was ‘Hakuna Matata’, the song about the farting warthog. The soundtrack sold eighteen million copies – more than any album I’ve ever released except my first Greatest Hits collection. As an added bonus, it kept Voodoo Lounge by The Rolling Stones off the number one spot in America all through the summer of 1994. I tried not to be too delighted when I heard that Keith Richards was furious, grumbling about being ‘beaten by some fuckin’ cartoon’.

  Then it was announced that they were turning it into a stage musical, for which Tim and I were asked to come up with more songs. Once more demonstrating my uncanny ability to predict exactly what isn’t going to happen, I kept telling people that turning an animated film into a stage show was both impossible and doomed to failure – I couldn’t see it at all.

  But the director, Julie Taymor, did an amazing job. It opened to rave reviews, was nominated for eleven Tony Awards, won six, and became the most successful theatrical production in the history of Broadway. The whole thing looked astonishing – the sheer ingenuity they had used in staging it was breathtaking, but I still found the experience of actually sitting through it oddly awkward. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the show itself. It was just that I was used to making albums where I had the last word, or to being completely in charge of my live shows. Here was something I’d helped create, and yet once it was onstage, it was unfolding completely out of my control. The arrangements were different from the way I had recorded the songs, and so were the vocals. In musical theatre, every word has to be clearly enunciated, it’s a completely different way of singing to anything a rock or pop artist does. It was a totally new experience for me: simultaneously amazing and slightly unnerving. I was completely outside of my comfort zone, which, it slow
ly dawned on me, was an extremely good place for an artist to suddenly find himself, forty years into his career.

  Disney were absolutely overjoyed with The Lion King’s success – so overjoyed, they came to me with a deal. It was for a ridiculous amount of money. They wanted me to develop more films, do TV shows and books; there was even some talk about a theme park, which boggled the mind a little. There was just one problem. I’d agreed to make another film with Jeffrey Katzenberg, who had been chairman of Disney when The Lion King was made but then left a few months after the film was released and set up DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. But he didn’t just exit: his leaving prompted one of the great Hollywood wars between studio executives, so epic that people have literally written books about it. The Disney deal was exclusive: it was particularly exclusive of anything involving Jeffrey, who was now suing them for breach of contract and $250 million, which he eventually got. There wasn’t anything in writing with Jeffrey, but I’d given him my word – he was one of the people who had brought me in to The Lion King in the first place. So I regretfully turned Disney’s deal down. At least the world was spared an Elton John theme park.