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

by David DeCouto

  The band practiced every Saturday, alternating between a small reception hall at the Northwood Hills and a storage room in the back of St. Edmunds’s Church.

  “[Reg] had an enormous personality even then,” Inkpen later said. “He was an amusing bloke, and he could play the piano like nobody’s business.” It seemed to his band mates, in fact, that Reg could do whatever he set his mind to. “He could sit down with a stack of music and work his way through it. He could play rock ‘n’ roll, boogie-woogie, jazz, you name it. We couldn’t have done what we did without him, really. Because of his musical knowledge, he was the only person to knit it all together.”

  A mere two months into their existence, Bluesology secured their first steady gig, a weekly slot at London’s trendy Establishment Club. “We thought we were a cut above the local sort of groups that were playing ‘Apache’ and things like that still,” Elton later told the BBC’s Andy Peebles. “We played Jimmy Witherspoon numbers like ‘Times Are Getting Tougher Than Tough’ and ‘When the Lights Go Out.’ It didn’t give us a particularly big audience, but it did wonders to our own egos, because nobody else did them.”

  Long out of the house, Stanley Dwight remained very much concerned with his son’s questionable future. “Reggie must get all this pop nonsense out of his head,” he wrote to Sheila when Reg turned sixteen. “Otherwise he’s going to turn into a wide-boy. He should get a sensible job with either British European Airways or Barclays Bank.”

  Reg was hardly surprised by the umbrage his father took. “He didn’t approve of me doing what I did at all. It made me very determined to be successful at what I was going to do, and [it] made music my life.”

  With Bluesology absorbing nearly all his time, Reg decided to end his studies at the Royal Academy, much to the disappointment of his teachers. “There was so much music inside of him [that] I just couldn’t bring out,” Helen Piena said. “I prided myself on being able to bring out whatever gift was inside my students, but try as I might, I couldn’t do it with Reg. It was the wrong kind of music. I couldn’t reach him like I wanted.”

  For his part, Reg was relieved to be done with the strictures of classical training. Even so, he would later reflect that he was fortunate to have had the experience, as it allowed him to appreciate a wider range of music than he otherwise might have. “It also helps you as a writer, because—as a keyboard player—you tend to write with more chords than a guitar, and I think that has a lot to do with my piano playing and my love of Chopin, Bach, Mozart, and my love of singing in a choir. I think my songs have more of a classic leaning to them than other artists who haven’t had that classical background, and I’m grateful for that.”

  Two weeks before Reg’s final pre-university A-Level exams in English and Music at Pinner County Grammar School, his cousin, Roy Dwight, told him that he knew someone at Mills Music, a West End music publisher on Denmark Street, who had a vacancy for a tea-boy. Though the position was not much more than that of a glorified goffer, it immediately appealed to Reg, who saw it as a valuable inroad to the music business he so idolized. As Roy enjoyed a certain level of fame, having scored the first goal for the Nottingham Forest football club at Wembley Stadium in the ‘59 FA Cup Final, he was able to secure an interview for Reg with office manager Pat Sherlock. “I can see him now, sitting in my office,” Sherlock said. “I remember thinking what small hands he had for a piano player. He had this nervous mannerism of pushing his glasses back up his nose. And a funny little pouting look.”

  With Roy’s endorsement, his cousin landed the job at £5 a week. Reg promptly dropped out of school. “I was probably a good enough scholar to go to university, but I never tried more than thirty percent. I was always into pop music or football, and I just squeezed through my exams. I was very lazy.”

  Reg attended class for the final time on March 5, 1965. History teacher Bill Johnson was flabbergasted at his decision to abandon his studies. “When you’re forty,” he told the boy, “you’ll either be some sort of glorified office-boy or you’ll be a millionaire.”

  With his formal education behind him, Reg spent his days running menial errands—posting the mail, making tea for the office, and delivering sheet music to nearby publishers. “I’d work in the packing department, wrapping up the parcels and taking them on a wheelbarrow to the post office in Kingsway near the Oasis swimming pool.” It was a low rung on the ladder, yet a rung nonetheless. “It was what I wanted. That was a very happy time.”

  In early April, Reg made friends with Caleb Quaye, a messenger boy from Paxton’s, a music delivery company headquartered on Old Compton Street. Caleb was a handsome and genial boy, as well as a talented guitarist. Caleb was also an unsparing mocker who never missed an opportunity to tease Reg. “I just used to laugh at [Reg],” he said, “because he looked so much like [comic book character] Billy Bunter.”

  “Caleb Quaye…used to take the piss out of me because he was a runner for another office,” Elton later told Melody Maker’s Richard Williams. “I told him I was in a group and he’d stand there and laugh at me. I really hated him.”

  Despite the merciless teasing, Reg and Caleb became buddies. “He and I would hook up and spend a lot time and all our spare change going round record stores and listening to record stores and stuff,” Caleb said. “He’d go round my house, I’d come round his house. He used to tell his mother, ‘The reason Caleb is my best friend is because we like the same kind of music.’ We used to scour the record stores, every last penny we had was spent buying records. We spent hours listening to music, just getting inspired. We were teenagers that dreamed together. We learned our craft together.”

  One rainy spring afternoon at Caleb’s house, Reg watched in astonishment as his friend pounded out chords on an upright that sat in the parlor. “Reg had been a student at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and that’s a very strict classical format, that was his training,” Caleb said. “And classical players tend to use all ten fingers. And especially when you adapt that technique to rock or jazz playing, the chords tend to sound rather dense. But I grew up with a jazz background—my dad was a jazz player—and the philosophy of that technique was ‘less is more’. There was a technique of using only three notes to get the chord to sound really fat—you don’t have to use all ten fingers. So one day Reg came over to my house and I played something on the piano, and he was amazed. ‘How did you get that big sound?’ So I showed him what my dad showed me, just using three fingers and spreading the notes out—basically playing an octave bass line in the left hand and a three-note chord position in the right hand—and that’s how you got this big sound. A rich, full sound. Reg was amazed at that. And that was the beginning of him starting to intensely change his sound from the classical training that he’d received. And it started in the living room in my house.”

  The technique would, in great part, help Bluesology gain a reputation as a solid blues ensemble. Though in their hard-nosed attempt to appeal to minority tastes, they found they were always playing the wrong material. “We were either two months too late, or three years too early.”

  Local businessman Arnold Tendler saw the group performing at a church hall in late April and immediately recognized the potential of the band. “I was really bowled over,” Tendler said. “At the piano there was this little roly-poly boy in clothes even I called square. But when he played, he was marvelous. Even then, he used to kick away the piano stool and play sitting on the floor.”

  Tendler became Bluesology’s manager. He brought a much-needed dose of discipline to the band, regimenting their rehearsals and buying them proper uniforms that consisted of maroon sport shirts, blue-and-white-striped dinner jackets and dark blue slacks. He even agreed to bankroll a demo recording of a potential single. With little original material to choose from, “Come Back Baby”—Reg’s sole composition—got the nod.

  “Reg wasn’t a prolific writer at that time,” Stewart Brown later told journalist George Matlock. “It was his song,
and his style completely, even though we didn’t know what his style was back then,”

  The recording session was held on May 13 at disc jockey Jack Johnson’s four-track studio in Rickmansworth. The band ran through “Come Back Baby” twice, then committed it to recording tape. As the key was too high for Stewart Brown, Reg was tasked with handling lead vocal duties. The eighteen-year-old gladly complied.

  An acetate of the demo was sent to Fontana’s A&R Director Jack Baverstock, who promptly offered the band a limited recording contract. An enthusiastic Bluesology headed into Philips Studios weeks later, and on June 3 attempted to record a more polished version of the song for proper record release. The band laid the song down four times; each take was marred by an inability to properly mic Reg’s piano, the song’s lead instrument. Frustrated, Baverstock decided to use the original demo as the single instead.

  “Come Back Baby” was released on July 23, backed with a cover of Jimmy Witherspoon’s classic blues number, “Time’s Getting Tougher Than Tough.” The single’s chances for success seemed dubious at best, as it fought for radio airtime against such heavy hitters as the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” the Yardbirds’ “For Your Love,” and the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Still, the band was thrilled at having any kind of official release. The first time Reg heard his song blaring out of a radio—on Jack Jackson’s Sunday Night Record Programme—he was beside himself with joy. “I can remember sitting in the car and hearing the record being played on Radio Luxembourg and saying, ‘Hey, that’s me singing, folks!’ I was really chuffed, because that was the very first time that I’d really sung anything.”

  The single sank without a trace—but not before Reg managed to sell the publishing rights of his modest tune to Mills Music for £500. The enterprising teenager used the funds to trade in his Hohner Pianette for a transistor-based Vox Continental organ and Vox AC 30 amplifier. An archaic beast with reverse-colored keys and a bright metallic orange casing, the Vox quickly proved problematic for the Luddite keyboardist. Instead of taking advantage of the myriad sound settings available to him, Reg would inevitably leave the instrument’s multiple levers stuck in the same position continuously.

  Worse still, the middle-C key would often get stuck during performances. During one gig at the Scotch of St. James, Reg’s Vox got jammed up particularly badly. Helpless to fix it, the drunken crowd was soon laughing at his embarrassing plight.

  “Hold on, mate,” a thickly accented voice called from the smoky dark. Alan Price, keyboardist for the Animals, clomped onto stage, winked at Reg, and gave the undercarriage of the organ a mighty punch.

  “I have never seen Reg look so shocked,” Inkpen said. “But it pleased the audience no end.”

  A week hence, Bluesology—with bassist Rex Bishop having replaced Geoff Dyson, who left to join rival group the Mockingbirds, and with the addition of a new brass section consisting of trumpeter Pat Higgs and tenor saxophonist Dave Murphy (“They were much better musicians than the rest of us,” Elton said)—joined hundreds of other hopeful groups to play a “Battle of the Bands” at the Kilburn State Cinema, an enormous venue modeled after the Empire State Building. Though the group failed to place in the final three spots, a representative from the Roy Tempest Agency was stimulated enough by their set to offer them a contract backing fading American soul acts as they toured Britain for two-week-long club dates.

  Exhilarated at being a professional musician (“I simply couldn’t dream of anything better”), and with the heady prospect of earning a guaranteed £20 a week, Reg promptly tendered his resignation at Mills Music.

  Bluesology’s first assignment was to back soul great Wilson Pickett, who had recently scored a Top 20 hit with “In the Midnight Hour,” on his upcoming tour of the United Kingdom.

  “You can imagine how we felt,” Elton said. “[Pickett] was such an important figure in the music we were playing, and here we were about to tour as his band.” But things didn’t go quite as planned. At their one and only rehearsal, Pickett’s guitarist decided that he didn’t care for Bluesology’s drummer. “He didn’t particularly like the rest of us either,” Elton said. Pickett tore up the contract and Bluesology was off the tour. “We were very brought down.”

  Things went considerably better with Major Lance, an R&B singer who’d enjoyed several moderate hits including “The Monkey Time,” “The Bird” and “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um.” Bluesology rehearsed comprehensively before their first rehearsal with the physically imposing Lance. “We learnt every song he’d ever made, to the point where he didn’t even feel the need to go through the songs more than one time…Backing Major Lance was probably the biggest thing that had ever happened to me.”

  After a successful tour which ended at Count Suckle’s Cue Club on Praed Street, Paddington, Bluesology soon found themselves backing a succession of artists, including the Ink Spots, the Exciters, Lee Dorsey, the Original Drifters and Doris Tory. Their most memorable outing, however, came when they paired up with Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, a vocal group which included future Supreme Cindy Birdsong. The group was riding a wave of popularity at the time, having recently hit the charts with the Top 20 R&B hit “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman.”

  LaBelle’s group rehearsed with Bluesology for a single rainy afternoon at the Marquee Club on Wardour Street before tramping over to the Scotch of St. James in Mayfair for their premiere gig together. The audience was packed with a host of luminaries that night, including George Harrison, Pete Townshend, Eric Burdon, Brian Jones and Keith Richards. Unfortunately for all involved, the club’s faulty stage lights cut out two songs into the set, forcing Bluesology to play in near darkness. Still, the show went down well, thanks largely to Reg’s efforts. “He was a little chubby guy with glasses,” Bluebelle Sarah Dash later recalled to author Mark Bego. “He was a delight. He was upbeat and he was just a delightful kid…I don’t remember how good the band was, but we always remember how well he played. I remember him as being the one in the band who could pull it together.”

  “I didn’t think [Reg] was better than we were, but he was,” LaBelle said. “He could play keyboards like no other white boy I have ever heard.”

  The band headed back to the Bluebelles’ hotel room after the gig, got drunk on cheap scotch and played a Rummy-like card game called Tonk well into the night. “For some reason,” LaBelle said, “[Reg] thought he could play cards like he played that piano, and he wouldn’t give up until I had won what little money he had. ‘Come on, Patti,’ he would say in his cute British accent. ‘One more game of Tonk and I will win back all my pounds.’ Of course, the only thing he ever won was my sympathy. I might have sent him home with an empty pocket, but I never let him leave with an empty stomach.”

  Life on the road for Bluesology was proving to be a grueling and less-than-glamorous grind, one that often required playing multiple shows in a single twenty-four-hour period. “Sometimes we did four gigs in one day, with someone like Billy Stewart,” Elton said, referring to the portly R&B singer whose modest hits included “Sitting in the Park” and “I Do Love You.” “We did the U.S. Serviceman’s Club at Douglas House, Lancaster Gate, at around four in the afternoon. Then we did the Ritz and the Plaza Ballroom in Birmingham, and then we finished off by playing the Cue Club in Paddington at around six in the morning. If playing four gigs wasn’t bad enough, we had to load up, unload and set up our own equipment at each gig…We used to really work our asses off.”

  Reg did his best to keep his band mates laughing on their endless musical marathons with spot-on imitations of various Goon Show characters made famous by Spike Milligan and a pre-Pink Panther Peter Sellers. They were, for the most part, happy days. “I can’t ever remember being miserable, even though when the van breaks down when you’re on the road from Skegness to Boston at three-thirty in the morning and it’s snowing, it isn’t particularly cheerful. [But] I don’t have any bad memories of it at all.”

  Bluesology released a second s
ingle on the Fontana label in February, 1966. Entitled “Mr. Frantic,” and backed with a cover of B.B. King’s “Everyday (I Get the Blues),” the disc—like its predecessor—was also written and sung by Reg. Unfortunately for the group, the muddled, double-tracked drums and uninspired lyrics guaranteed that it too would fail to make much of an impression on the record-buying public.

  “It was painfully obvious that though I could write a good melody, I wasn’t really a words man,” Elton said. “I never had the confidence to write down my feelings, because my feelings have never come to the surface that much. They’ve always been suppressed.”

  With the single’s failure, Bluesology decided to leave the Roy Tempest Agency and sign with Marquee Enterprises instead. This move led to a string of elite gigs, with Bluesology suddenly finding themselves playing alongside the likes of Manfred Mann and the Who. “We did a gig with [the Who] on Brighton Pier,” Rex Bishop said. “They smashed the place up, did the lights in and everything. Then we went on and we were tame in comparison. We were also on the same bill as Georgie Fame and Spencer Davis. I was just proud that our band was on the same stage as them. But when you heard a band like the Spencer Davis Group at the Flamingo, you knew they were streets ahead of you.”

  Managing to land a series of gigs at the Cavern Club, the famed birthplace of the Beatles, Bluesology felt like they had well and truly arrived. Reg, however, was unimpressed. “It was definitely one of the worst places for getting your gear nicked,” he said. “[It was] so bad, we had to keep someone posted all the time. And the overflow from the men’s toilets was disgusting.”