Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s

by David DeCouto

  Stanley and Sheila began quarreling incessantly the moment he arrived back from Iraq. They were unable to agree upon much, apart from a mutual admiration for their son’s musical abilities, which often proved a highlight of their frequent parties.

  “We used to put him to bed in the day and get him up to play at night,” his mother said.

  The prestige proved a double-edged sword, for while Reg enjoyed the eloquent melodies he was able to coax from the piano, he hated being forced to perform. “My parents always used to do it,” he said. “I was wheeled out at every occasion to play the piano. It was a way of getting attention and approval. It was what I turned to for safety—music and food.”

  One of Reg’s earliest musical influences came in the rotund figure of Winifred Atwell. An affable Trinidad-born pianist with a string of hits including “Coronation Rag” and “Let’s Have Another Party,” Atwell routinely kept two pianos onstage—a concert grand upon which she performed theater songs and classical pieces, and a honky-tonk upright which she used to play a selection of rags.

  “She was a huge influence,” Elton later said. “She was it for me.”

  Another favorite was Liberace, whose self-titled TV show was wildly popular throughout the U.K. Reg would sit transfixed each week before the family’s tiny black-and-white telly as the flamboyant pianist tickled the ivories of a sequin-encrusted, gold-leafed Blüthner Grand.

  “I don’t give concerts,” Liberace often told his television audience. “I put on a show.”

  Reg was enthralled, and at the age of five began taking piano lessons from a local teacher, Mrs. Jones. “She was lovely,” he said. “I could read okay, but I was never that much interested actually in becoming a classical musician, because ever since I could remember I always wanted to do something in popular music.”

  Stanley was promoted to RAF Squadron Leader in 1953. Now posted to RAF Lynam in Wiltshire, he could finally afford to move his young family to their own home—111 Potter Street, Northwood, a detached house only a couple miles down the road from Pinner.

  Reg spent countless hours alone in his new bedroom, desperately praying for a brother or sister. But his father seemed abjectly against the idea of having another child. The situation did little to calm Reg’s already delicate nerves. Indeed, he was to spend the majority of his youth on tenterhooks, living in constant fear of receiving a scolding from his father for such unforgivable infractions as chewing his celery too loudly at the dinner table, or accidentally kicking a soccer ball into the rosebushes. “I was petrified of him,” he later conceded. “I dreaded it when he came home.”

  As the underlying external strain of an increasingly fractured marriage metastasized, Stanley and Sheila’s incessant bickering escalated into one seemingly endless screaming row. Their angry voices would reverberate throughout the small house, causing Reg to withdraw more deeply into himself. “My mum and dad should never have gotten married. They weren’t really suited to each other. They’d both married the wrong person. Whenever my father came home, I knew there was going to be an argument with my mother. So you live in fear and you just go to your room, and basically it drove me to my music even more.”

  Though music would prove to be Reg’s first—and longest-lasting—obsession, another passion soon took root in the guise of the Watford Football Club. Starting at the age of seven, Reg and his father often attended soccer games together at Vicarage Road on Saturday afternoons. Side by side they’d walk through town, pay their six pence, and stand transfixed at the terraces on Rookery End. It was their one shared interest, they’re only binding tie. “Soccer matches were the one thing my father and I did together that I used to love,” Elton said. “But there was never an intimacy between the two of us. I didn’t know how to communicate with him, and he didn’t know how to communicate with me.”

  The narrow horizons of Reg’s world would permanently expand in August, 1956, the afternoon he went to get his hair cut in Penny Green. While waiting his turn for the barber’s shears, Reg picked up a copy of Life magazine and stumbled upon a photo essay on an American singer named Elvis Presley. “I’d never seen anything like it,” he said. “I thought he was from Mars.” The Friday after, Reg’s mother came home with a pair of 78s: “ABC Boogie” by Bob Haley & His Comets, and “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis himself. “I said, ‘Oh Mom, I just saw this bloke in a magazine.’ It was just weird that it happened the same week. That changed my life. It changed the way I listened to music forever.”

  Though skiffle was riding a crest of popularity throughout the British Isles at the time—with massive hits such as Lonnie Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” clogging the charts—Reg’s heart was immediately and forever taken by the rock ‘n’ rollers on the other side of the Atlantic. “All the people I idolized were Americans. I couldn’t believe how great they were.”

  In a vain effort to help steer his son’s musical path back onto the straight and narrow, Stanley presented Reg with a copy of Frank Sinatra’s just-released Songs for Swingin’ Lovers LP on his ninth birthday. Not surprisingly, his son was unmoved by the gesture. “I really wanted a bike, so I didn’t appreciate the sentiment too much.”

  Reg purchased the first records of his very own soon after: “Reet Petite” by Jackie Wilson, and “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors. His mother was impressed with his progressive musical taste. But that opinion changed the day he came home from the record shop brandishing a Little Richard platter entitled “The Girl Can’t Help It.”

  “She liked rock, but not Little Richard,” Elton said, “and I was really annoyed because it was my favorite record. I was really star-struck. Pop music was my whole life.”

  Reg entered Pinner County Grammar School in the fall of ‘58. From the start, the pudgy eleven-year-old found himself an outcast. “As a kid, I was always on the fringe of everything. I wasn’t part of the gang. Going to the cinema with mates, I was always the last one to be asked. I was Fat Reg to start with.”

  “He had…an odd little walk, special to him,” classmate Gay Search later told author Philip Norman. “I remember him as being totally different from the general rabble of younger boys. He had an air of being far more grown-up, more civilized.”

  After school let out each day, Reg would spend the balance of his free time barricaded in his bedroom with his Dan Dare comics and his ever-growing record collection. “I would buy records and file them. I could tell you who published what, and then I would just stack them in a pile and look at the labels.” His precious vinyl, like all his possessions, occupied a place near to his heart. “I grew up with inanimate objects as my friends, and I still believe they have feelings,” he said. “That’s why I keep hold of all my possessions, because I’ll remember when they gave me a bit of happiness—which is more than human beings have given me.”

  After performing a Mozart sonata and Chopin etude for the prestigious Royal Academy of Music admissions board, Reg was awarded a Junior Exhibitioners’ Scholarship to Britain’s senior musical conservatory later that fall. He soon found himself taking the tube to London every Saturday for course studies in musical composition and choir. Classes were arduous, running from nine a.m. to two p.m. without a break. “When I was at the Academy, I didn’t particularly enjoy it that much except, as a pianist, you love to play Chopin, because it’s just beautiful. [Though] I resented some of the classical music I had to play, like Bartok and stuff like that. I didn’t know whether I was playing the right notes or the wrong notes.”

  Reg amazed his piano instructor, Helen Piena, one day early in his training. After she played a four-page Handel prelude for him, he immediately played it back, just like a gramophone. “He just had a wonderful ear, but for all that he absolutely could not read a note of music,” she said. “So that’s what I taught him first. By the end of his studies with me, he could read as well as anyone.”

  Reg developed a crush on Piena, bringing her presents after coming back from beach holidays. “He was suc
h [a] sweet boy,” she said. “He would always send me postcards from wherever he went off to on holiday. Just so incredibly thoughtful.”

  Under Piena’s tutelage, Reg made his first public appearance three months into his formal training, with a performance of Groylez’s Les Petites Litanies de Dieu at the Ruislip-Northwood Music Festival in Middlesex.

  “Nerve-wracking,” he said. “But it was a start.”

  As puberty sank its hairy fangs into Reg’s psyche, he found himself perplexed by his burgeoning sexual feelings. “At school I used to have crushes on people, but not really any sex at all, male or female,” he recalled years later. “I never had any sex education when I was at school. Sex was never discussed…The first time I masturbated, I was in pain. I was so horrified. And my parents found out because I’d used up all my pajamas. And then I got ripped apart for doing it. Sex was completely frightening. At school everyone boasted about sex. Meanwhile, I was dying to be molested by someone…Just to teach me, just to find out.”

  Stanley Dwight blamed his son’s “confusion” on pop music, which he considered a corrupting influence. “My father didn’t want me to get into music, and I could never understand that because he’d been a trumpeter in a band. I mean, he did influence me…He used to play me his George Shearing records.”

  Though Reg’s appreciation of Shearing and other jazz greats would grow considerably over the years, his immediate musical worship was aimed more squarely in the direction of American rockers like horn-rimmed Buddy Holly, who toured the U.K. in March, ‘58. A starry-eyed Reg attended Holly’s second show at the Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn, sitting alone in the dark recesses, utterly transfixed.

  In an attempt to emulate the “Peggy Sue” singer—who would die in a plane crash months later at the age of twenty-two—Reg took to wearing his glasses constantly. “I only needed specs to see the blackboard, but I began wearing them all the time to be like Holly,” he said. “As a result, I soon became genuinely nearsighted…I looked terrible, a fatty with glasses and with a terrible inferiority complex.”

  In 1960, thirteen-year-old Reg formed his first group, along with bassist Geoff Dyson, a local boy he’d met at the capacious church hall around the corner from his home. Dyson was immediately impressed with Reg’s musical prowess. “He really did change when he was playing piano. When he got down on a piano and started to sing and play rock ‘n’ roll, he was quite remarkably transformed into someone else.” The duo joined forces with drummer Mick Inkpen and vocalist/guitarist Stewart Brown, the boyfriend of a friend of Reg’s cousin. At first, Brown was doubtful that the heavyset Reg was capable of properly rocking. “I was very fat,” Elton said years later, “and when I said I played the piano, [Stewart] laughed helplessly. [But] I showed him. I did my Jerry Lee Lewis bit and he stopped laughing.”

  The teenagers named their group the Corvettes, after a vintage brand of British shaving soap. The band practiced after school each day, rehearsing a repertoire comprised of songs by the Beatles, the Hollies and Cliff Richard. After six weeks of rehearsal, the Corvettes performed an hour-long set at a local Scout hut, for which they earned the collective sum of £2. “We had no amplifiers,” Elton said. “It all faded out after a few months. It was just a pastime.”

  As the Corvettes dissolved, so too did Reg’s parents’ strained marriage. The inciting incident came with a severe electrical shock that Stanley suffered while posted to Aden. During his three-month convalescence in a British hospital, Sheila refused to visit her husband even once. During his convalescence, troubling rumors began reaching Stanley’s ears that his wife was carrying on an affair with a man she’d first met during the war, a house painter named Fred Farebrother.

  When he was well enough, Stanley paid a visit to Farebrother’s council house in Carpender’s Park.

  Farebrother’s wife answered the door.

  “Where’s your husband?” Stanley demanded.

  “I wish I knew,” she replied wistfully.

  Frustrated, Stanley confronted his wife that night. After a screaming row, she tearfully admitted to her infidelity.

  Stanley filed for divorce that week.

  With the marriage’s dissolution, Sheila and her son moved into a two-bedroom first-floor maisonette at 30A Frome Court, Northwood Hills, along with Fred Farebrother. The move put Reg more closely into the orbit of Paul Robinson, a cousin who lived several streets down. Together the lads spent endless hours discussing their favorite band, the Beatles. “He said they were the greatest thing there’d ever been,” Robinson said. “We’d sit there with an album cover and he’d tell me which one was John, Paul, George and Ringo.”

  Besides possessing multiple posters of the Beatles—de rigueur for any self-respecting pop-loving child in early-‘60’s Britain—Reg’s bedroom walls were also covered with countless glamor shots of bouffant-coiffed soul singer Dusty Springfield. Hers was, in fact, the first fan club he ever belonged to.

  “She was my idol,” he said years later. “Dusty had a desperate desire to be needed. I could relate.”

  As rock ‘n’ roll took over Reg’s life, the staid Royal Academy began to exert less and less hold over him. “I used to go up to Baker Street, which was where the Academy is, sit on the Circle Line train, and go round and round on the Circle Line. Then go home and tell my mom that I’ve been to school.”

  The genial Fred Farebrother, who had quickly become something of a surrogate father to the highly insecure Reg, agreed to help him try and obtain a weekend pianist job at the Northwood Hills Hotel, a musty, dark-paneled 1930’s-style tavern and inn which sat across the street from the local tube station.

  “[Fred] asked me if I needed a pianist, because his boy wanted to have a go,” owner George Hill said. “I said, ‘All right. I don’t mind having a look at him.’”

  Reg appeared the next day looking like anything but an entertainer, wearing an old tie and grey flannel trousers, his hair cut unfashionably short. Sitting nervously before a dusty upright perched in a bay window, Reg performed a song he’d recently written himself, a bluesy rock ballad called “Come Back Baby.” The Hills were impressed enough by the performance to offer him a job playing every Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening. Each night, Sheila and Fred—whom the spoonerism loving Reg insisted on calling Derf, Fred backward—kept a close eye on him from a chipped table in the corner. “He wouldn’t go into the pub by himself,” his mother said. “So I used to have to go with him and just sit there all evening. It was dreadful.”

  Reg earned £1.10s per night—a hard-won wage, as the regulars were, at least at first, decidedly underwhelmed by what the portly teen had to offer. “They gave him terrible stick,” Hill said. “They’d shout ‘Get off!’ or ‘Turn it down!’ He’d have empty crisp packets and ashtrays thrown at him. We only had tin ones, so they didn’t hurt. Or somebody would sneak up and unplug the leads of his PA system. I think he had quite a few pints emptied into that piano as well.”

  With dogged persistence, Reg slowly won the patrons over. After several months, people started coming in specifically to hear him play; soon enough, the bar was packed out every weekend. “It was great training because I played on an old upright piano that was out-of-tune, and there were a couple of times when I had to dive out of the window when really bad fights broke out.” Despite their unruly behavior, Reg quickly learned how to placate the drunken crowd through an earnest mishmash of Jim Reeves songs, Al Jolson’s “Mammy,” and pub house standards like ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ and ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.

  “You had to play ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ or you’d get a pint of beer slung over you.”

  Derf would pass an old Punch cigar box around at the end of each evening’s performance. With the tips he collected, Reg was soon earning £25 a week—a not insignificant sum.

  Reg saved up his money to buy a £200 Hohner Pianette electric piano and amplifier.

  “During that whole period,” he said, “I don’t t
hink I ever missed a gig.”

  When not busy performing or going to school, Reg would spend what little free time he had with a gypsy girl named Nellie, whom he had met at the pub after one of his sets. “She had long blonde hair,” he said. “Dyed, I think. She lived in a caravan that got moved on by the police every few weeks. When I went there, it was, ‘Turn left at the third field in Southall.’ The caravan was the cleanest thing I have ever seen in my life. Her parents were great. Nellie was twenty, much older than I was. People have got the wrong idea about gypsies. She was fantastic, with a great sense of humor.”

  Their relationship, such as it was, only lasted a couple of months, until the inevitable day when Nellie and her caravan suddenly disappeared from sight, never to return.

  “Ah, young love,” Elton said. “I would never want to be a gypsy.”

  Nonplussed by the whole affair, Reg accompanied his cousin Paul to London to see a schoolboy’s exhibition. Bored with the display, Reg suggested that they sneak off to see one of their Christmas shows the Beatles were giving at the Hammersmith Odeon. The mop-topped lads from Liverpool not only impressed both of them musically—they also seemed relatable in a way that other famous performers of the time simply were not.

  “Before the Beatles, pop music in England was sort of an isolated thing,” Elton said. “It was for older people. But the Beatles were like the boys next door. We all wanted to be like them.”

  Though the Corvettes had long-since disbanded, Reg, Geoff Dyson, Mick Inkpen and Stewart Brown reteamed in the summer of ’64 to create a new unit called Bluesology. Named as an homage to three-fingered gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt’s seminal album Djangology, Bluesology was a soul band which eschewed Top 40 covers in favor of extended jams on relatively obscure songs by Mose Allison and Muddy Waters.