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

by David DeCouto

  The languidly earnest “Your Song” followed. Set in binary form, the track would prove a template for many of the pianist’s future ballads. With a pair of lengthy verses preceding the chorus, the musical architecture purposefully delayed—and thus heightened—the emotional payoff of the chorus.

  Though beautifully performed, the future standard was not seen as anything special by the musicians involved in its creation. “Not one of us at the time considered that song a future single,” Caleb admitted years later. “We were concentrating on the harder rocking songs—‘Take Me to the Pilot’ and so forth. Listen to the original demo of ‘Your Song’—it’s a bit soft and like the Carpenters almost. No one had any idea it’d become this classic song at the time.”

  As with every track at these sessions, a tremendous amount of care went into the creation of the track. “There’s this one little nylon-string guitar phrase that Gus really loved, he kept pushing it up in the mix,” Buckmaster said. “And I thought he was pushing it too far, and I told him so. But he replied that it was a nice piece and it should stand out. Everything was down to the details. Even with the bass line, we pushed things. There’s actually two basses on ‘Your Song’. An acoustic upright and an electric. And the drums don’t come in till the second verse. It’s important to hold back, to let the listener get used to the song before you introduce new elements. So you have somewhere to go.” As for the main drum fill, there were no exaggerated, bloated obese palm fills cluttering up the arrangement. “It’s a very discreet pat-pat-pat on the hand sort of fill,” Buckmaster said. “And it was all written out. Because that’s what an arranger does. It’s very frustrating for me sometimes, actually, for I am, in fact, a very frustrated rhythm section disguised as a human being. My middle name is actually ‘Funk Drummer’. Paul ‘Funk Drummer’ Buckmaster.” He laughed. “A friend once told me, ‘Man, you have hands like concrete, but you play like a motherfucker.’ And I arrange the same way.”

  “I Need You to Turn To” proved to be the most delicately restrained number of the entire sessions. Shifting from minor key verses to a major key chorus, the lover’s plaint—like ‘Valhalla’ before it—was heavily influenced by Leonard Cohen, whom both Elton and Bernie idolized.

  “Recording ‘I Need You to Turn To’ was a really nervous moment,” Elton said. “I was playing the harpsichord, [and] while the harpsichord looks very similar to the pianoforte, there’s a kind of delay to how its mechanism works, so it’s very easy to fuck it all up if you’re not thinking ahead.”

  Session virtuoso Skaila Kanga was brought in to overdub a graceful harp line onto the track. After nailing her part in a single take, Elton came down from the control room, grinning madly at her.

  “Do you remember me, Skaila?”

  “Yes,” the harpist lied, not recognizing the slender, shaggy-haired man before her.

  “We were in harmony class back at the Academy,” Elton said. “Reg Dwight. Remember?”

  Kanga’s mouth hung open in amazement.

  “The Cage,” a dark fantasy of sexual betrayal and emotional claustrophobia, was recorded the next morning. Powered by Barry Morgan’s relentless drums, the conga-accented track’s standout feature was its middle-eight solo. Originally slated to be performed by a brass section, à la the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour,” plans were changed when a Moog synthesizer from AIR Studio arrived at Trident, along with an operator to set up the mammoth, multi-paneled machine.

  Paul Buckmaster turned to keyboardist Diana Lewis, whom he was dating at the time, and asked her if she wanted to give it a shot. Pleased with the result, the arranger also let her lay down an improvised, hauntingly wistful Moog line on “First Episode at Hienton”—a holdover track from 1968—while the rest of the team was off at lunch.

  “She stayed behind and created it with the engineer,” Buckmaster said. “I came back and listened to it and thought it was just wonderful.” Lewis had, in fact, perfectly captured the somberly romantic feel of Bernie’s lyrics, a reminiscence of a schoolboy crush he’d harbored for a girl named Valerie, and the long walks they’d shared around the castle ruins of poet Alfred Lord Tennyson.

  “I love that one very much, the entire track,” Buckmaster said. “It completely achieved what it had set out to do.”

  Caleb agreed with the arranger. “That one is classic Elton John. Just a perfect marriage of guitar and piano, with a classic cinematic sound about it. Very free, very poetic.”

  Indeed, the synergy created by Elton’s gospel-cum-classical melodies, Bernie’s spectral, image-laden words, Gus’ singularly nuanced production, and Buckmaster’s lushly angular string arrangements proved particularly effective on this atmospheric track. It was in direct counterpoint to the swaggering “No Shoestrings on Louise,” a country-laced rocker about a city-dwelling harlot who has “milked the male population clean.” “That was another Stones song—three-quarter time, really emphasizing the first beat—like something off Beggar’s Banquet,” Caleb said. “Listen to Elton’s vocal, he’s doing his Jagger on that one.”

  Changing gears yet again, the team tackled “The Greatest Discovery” next. A touching vignette about Bernie’s older brother discovering him as a newborn (and not of Bernie discovering a younger brother, as many critics—and even Elton himself—later surmised), the track featured an elliptical cello solo from Buckmaster himself.

  “A perfect melody line,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

  The epochal “The King Must Die” proved to be the centerpiece of the sessions. Beginning with a quiet D-minor piano figure, and building dynamically to a full-complement orchestral flourish, the grandiose track was an ominous tale of treasonous hearts which Bernie would be forced to publicly explain, after certain members of the press erroneously presumed that the lyrics were about recently slain civil rights activist Martin Luther King. In actuality, the lyricist had been inspired by the novel of the same name by Mary Renault. “It’s a very famous book in England,” he said. “I just thought the title was nice. People say that [the song is] not about anything, but it’s about something. It’s about assassination. That’s it. That’s all.”

  Though Elton was pleased with his vocal performance on the track, years later he would reflect that he “was just an infant vocally at the time. Listening now, I sound like a school boy with my balls cut off.”

  “Elton and I had worked a long time on the whole concept of guitar and piano working together,” Caleb said, “and then Paul Buckmaster came in on ‘The King Must Die’ and he just added a whole other dimension on top of what we were doing, with the stings. He’s just absolutely brilliant. Paul’s contribution was really remarkable, because he came in and he got involved in the songs from the ground up. Instead of taking a paint brush and putting a bank of strings here or there after the fact, Paul really paid great diligent attention to what the songs were about, the dynamics of the songs. So the arrangements have a lot of intimate dynamics involved, which paid off great. So a song like ‘The King Must Die’, it’s just brilliant string writing. And all of these components just sort of came together, and we just knew there was something fresh happening. We just couldn’t wait to get in the studio the next day and hear what we’d done, and start working on the next tunes.”

  Other songs recorded during the prodigious sessions included “Thank You, Mama,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” “Grey Seal,” “All the Way Down to El Paso,” and the minimalistic “I’m Going Home”—tracks which, as often as not, explored the quotidian anxiety of the socially disenfranchised, a favored theme which Bernie would return to again and again in the coming years.

  The recording process ran smoothly, with an entire album’s worth of material being recorded and mixed in twelve frenetic days. Yet despite the harried schedule, the endeavor proved a pleasurable test for all involved. “We never stopped grinning, twenty-four hours a day,” Gus said. “Even as we were making it, we knew it was special. What we wondered was whether anybody else would recog
nize it as being anything at all.”

  “Gus was now God,” said Stuart Epps, who had replaced Clive Franks as the studio engineer at DJM. “The arrangements, the sound, the production. Everything. He’d taken Elton’s music into another realm. If you listen to Empty Sky and then Elton John, it’s like chalk and cheese. Gus was stupendous.”

  To his credit, Elton himself recognized the salutary effect a steady hand on the tiller brought. “Gus Dudgeon produced and the team was born,” he said. “It was just like Bernie and me. It was fate, basically.”

  With the sessions completed, a restless Elton approached Derek Shulman about joining his prog-rock outfit, Gentle Giant. An audition was organized, but ultimately Shulman passed, feeling that Elton’s piano playing was too rhythmically forceful for his needs. “He played us his songs,” Shulman later said, “and even though they were great songs, they weren’t going in the direction we were heading. Lucky for him, we turned him down….[as] he became the most successful solo artist in the world, and we were struggling to play for two-hundred people. So great luck for him that he didn’t take the job.”

  Elton suffered a similar setback the very next week with King Crimson. Scheduled to sing lead vocals on their second album, In the Wake of Poseidon—after Crimson’s lead vocalist, Greg Lake, had left to form Emerson, Lake & Palmer—Crimson’s founding guitarist, Robert Fripp, cancelled the session after hearing a test pressing of the Elton John album.

  “His style didn’t seem right for Crimson,” Fripp said. “Simple as that.”

  Elton then lent his piano skills to the band My Dear Watson. “We were invited down to Dick James’ studio in New Oxford Street, London, to do ten tracks for an album, and an actual single,” My Dear Watson’s Bill Cameron said. “I was told, ‘We’ve got a keyboard player in the company, do you want keyboards on the tracks?’ And we said, ‘Yes.’ And it turned out to be Elton John. My first impression of him was very high. Ian, our guitarist, was in the studio doing guitar overdubs. And Elton was sitting beside me in the control room, at the back, and I was telling him the chords to a song—you know: ‘C—E-minor—A-minor—D,’ and so on. He wrote it down in his little book and then he went through the studio, we wired up the Steinway, and he said, ‘Roll the track and give me five minutes to try it.’ And then he said, ‘Okay, I’m ready for a take.’ And we were all in the control room listening. And what came through the speakers was quite amazing. So we knew there and then that he was destined for greater things than our little album. We thought, ‘Yes, there’s something there. Reg is far too good to be just a session musician.’”

  Elton flew off to Switzerland the following weekend to sing “Border Song” on the March 3 episode of Hits A Go-Go. Seated behind a white baby grand and dressed in a reserved gray jacket, Elton performed before a couple hundred well-heeled Swiss teens. It was timely promotion for the single, which—backed with the thunderously seething “Bad Side of the Moon”—was released in the U.K. on March 20. Though hopes ran high at DJM, “Border Song” followed a similar trajectory as “Lady Samantha” the year before, receiving substantial airplay yet failing to make a serious dent in the charts. In a world dominated by guitar-slinging rockers like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Deep Purple, there seemed little interest in such an unassumingly introspective tune, or its equally reflective singer.

  Disappointed but determined, Elton attempted to expand his connections within the London music scene by paying the first of several visits to a communal house in Hampstead where twenty-year-old session singer Linda Lewis lived alongside Jeff Dexter—resident DJ at the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden—and Ian Samwell, who was soon to produce the group America’s first major hit, “A Horse With No Name.”

  “A lot of people would come through the house just to sit around and jam and just talk,” Lewis said. “So Elton was one of them, and so was Bernie. Cat Stevens came in and out, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, all of them. It was very sort of casual. I remember Cat Stevens playing me ‘Moonshadow’ at the house, he was still working it out, and the bridge sounded like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ to me. And Marc Bolan would walk around with tap shoes and these elegant bright jackets. He was a peacock. We had a little thing, Marc and I.” She sighed. “I was in a cloud in my own little world, very sort of naïve. And with all that [going on], Elton was actually quite shy and down-to-earth. Others would play their songs, but he’d sort of just sit there very quietly. David Bowie was quite shy too. He’d come round with all this makeup on, and I asked him once why he was wearing it, and he just sort of smiled at me and didn’t say a word. But Elton was the most shy of all, I’d say. Both he and Bernie.”

  On the other side of the Atlantic, DJM’s New York-based representative Len Hodes shopped Elton around for an American label release, after the Bell Records’ release of “Lady Samantha” had sunk without a trace the year before.

  Despite his best efforts, Hodes found little interest in the unknown British singer, who was turned down by five record labels in quick succession. The only music executive to show even a scintilla of interest was Russ Regan, head of Uni Records, a small subsidiary of MCA which specialized in bubblegum pop like the Strawberry Alarm Clock. Regan was a player in the industry, having lent an instrumental hand in the careers of both Neil Diamond and Barry White—though perhaps his most widely hailed accomplishment to date was having changed a certain Californian vocal group’s name from the Pendletones to the much more marketable Beach Boys.

  Hodes and Regan held a breakfast meeting at the Continental Hyatt House Hotel—better known to those within the rock world as the ‘Riot House’—on Sunset Boulevard.

  “He was telling me about this artist who he really liked and believed in,” Regan said. “That particular morning I wasn’t really in the mood to sit and listen to anyone, but out of courtesy I asked to hear him.”

  “Here,” Hodes said, handing Regan a brown manila envelope which contained copies of the Empty Sky album and “Lady Samantha” single. “You’re welcome in advance.”

  “I just put them off on a shelf somewhere until about five o’clock that afternoon,” Regan said. “Then I played the album and found that I really liked Elton as an artist, and especially liked the song ‘Skyline Pigeon’ from the Empty Sky album. It was six o’clock by then and I realized, ‘My God, they’re out shopping this artist. What if he’s called some other record company?’”

  Regan contacted DJM the next day and had them rush-ship him a white label test pressing of the Elton John album. “I listened to it and thought, ‘Oh my God, thank you, thank you!’” Realizing at once that he’d struck gold, the label head was ecstatic. “I’d been a promotion man for five years and promoted a lot of heavyweights and heard a lot of great products, but I’d never been overcome by an album like that.”

  Closing his office, Regan shut off the phones, called a company-wide meeting, and played the entire album for his staff—twice. “Everybody was just freaked out by that time, because we knew we had something. I looked at the sky and said, ‘Thank you, God’. I knew we had a superstar.”

  As coincidence would have it, Regan was also interested in another DJM act at the time, a psychedelic pop outfit called Argosy. Led by future Supertramp founder Roger Hodgson, Argosy’s debut single, “Mr. Boyd,” actually featured Elton on keyboards, along with Caleb Quaye and Nigel Olsson. “They did an awesome version…of my songs,” Hodgson said, “and then I sang on top…Actually it came very close to being a hit in England. It was played a lot on the radio, but never actually charted. But that was my first experience in a recording studio, and it was quite a thrill, I can tell you.”

  Offering $10,000 for Argosy, Dick James threw the American rights for Elton into the deal gratis. Regan readily accepted.

  “So I got Elton John for nothing, which is probably one of the best deals ever made.” He laughed. “Signing Elton John was luck. I was really lucky.”

  Chapter 2:

  Tumbleweed Connection />
  Half a world away, and oblivious to any contractual machinations happening on his behalf, Elton was heading back into Trident Studios to begin recording selections for his next LP, Tumbleweed Connection. “We had about three albums worth of songs stockpiled,” he said. “So we split the best of those numbers into two albums. The [introspective] songs that would suit the Elton John album, and those [more upbeat numbers] that would suit Tumbleweed Connection.”

  The rustic tunes which would end up compromising the bulk of Tumbleweed Connection reflected Bernie’s fascination with the American West of the 1800s, and his long-held fantasies of the Promised Land. “I’ve always been interested in the history of the Old West,” he said. “In a way, I suppose you can say they are cowboy songs.”

  The sessions ran like clockwork, Elton having already rehearsed a majority of the songs live with DJM label mates Hookfoot, an earthy blues-rock hybrid that had been formed by Roger Pope and Caleb Quaye during the Empty Sky sessions. Hookfoot invited Elton to air out some of his newer compositions at their Marquee Club and London Art College gigs. “What would happen was, Elton would ask if he could come and sit in with Hookfoot, to help flesh out his new songs,” Caleb said. “And so we said, ‘Yeah, great.’ So we’d do these gigs where we’d be playing, and Genesis would be playing, and we’d work Elton’s songs out. So by the time we went into the studio we had them down, because we’d already done them a million times on the road. Our rhythm section was hot. We knew those songs inside and out.”