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

by David DeCouto

  “We took the train down to Philadelphia and checked into the Marriott hotel,” Russ Regan said. “And I was having a lot of people over to my suite that night—writers and the press, and various DJs—and I get a call from California, from my boss’ assistant, who told me they were very upset about me going on the road, and how I was spending all this money on this ‘bloody Brit’.”

  “We’ve heard you’re spending money like water,” his boss’ assistant yelled. “You’re wasting money on that Englishman.”

  “Well, that Englishman is gonna be a superstar,” Regan retorted.

  “You know what they’re calling this guy at the Tower, Russ?”

  “No. What are they calling him?”

  “‘Regan’s Folly’, that’s what they’re calling him.”

  “Go to hell, motherfucker! We’ll show you!” Regan screamed, smashing the receiver down and storming down the hall to Elton’s room.

  “Don’t worry,” Elton said after Regan had told him what had just transpired. “Tonight I’m gonna burn the city of Philadelphia down.”

  Good for his word, the uninhibited showman brought the three-thousand in attendance at the Electric Factory to the brink of pandemonium with a ferocious, twenty-five minute rendition of “Burn Down the Mission.”

  “Elton was on top of the piano, under the piano, he was out in the audience,” Regan said. “He was everywhere. It was just electrifying. People went crazy—including me. It was ten times greater than the Troubadour. It was wild.”

  “The people were all clapping, I was up on the grand mashing about with my feet, I just gave them a signal with my hand and the whole crowd was standing,” Elton said after the show, ecstatic. “We just steamed on. No one had a clue who we were, so we had nothing to lose. We just blew the place apart.”

  “It was like magic,” Dee said. “That’s the only word for it: magic.”

  “We came back to the hotel and I called room service and had three banana splits,” Regan said. “The next day, all of a sudden, by 10:30 that morning, I get a call from Sam Pasmano, the local MCA distribution guy, and he wanted to order 5,000 Elton John LPs. I said, ‘Oh my God, something happened last night.’ And then, by 1:00, Sam ordered another 5,000. It was magical. So by 1:30 I called my boss’ assistant and told him, ‘You tell those motherfuckers that ‘Regan’s Folly’ is coming home, and go screw yourself!”

  The Electric Factory gigs not only jumpstarted Elton’s U.S. record sales, they also earned him yet more raves from the national press. John Mendelssohn, writing in Rolling Stone, summed up the critical reception succinctly, asserting that Elton’s voice combined “the nasal sonority of James Taylor with the rasp of Van Morrison with the slurry intonation of M. Jagger with the exaggerated twang of Leon Russell…Elton John really is a gas.”

  Chapter 5:

  Friends

  Upon flying back to England, Elton’s first order of business was to renew his visa. Second up was to perform a one-off show as the opening act for folk-rockers Fotheringay at the Royal Albert Hall, on October 2. Elton was thrilled—the gig was an opportunity to show off the musical tightness he and his trio had honed on their U.S. dates. “It’s a real band now,” he told Melody Maker’s Richard Williams the day before the show, “and the boys have helped me a lot. It’s so tight now, but in a year’s time it’ll be unbelievable. America did our confidence a lot of good, and I don’t ever have to tell them what to do because we all know what we’re doing. There are some songs with very broken rhythms, but [Nigel and Dee] just play them without having it said to them.”

  An hour before show time, Elton could be found sitting by himself on the stairs outside the Royal Albert Hall, waiting for his mother, Derf, and Sue Ayton—a secretary and good friend from DJM—to arrive. No one recognized him as they passed by; the recent hysteria in America was still merely a whisper on the chilled English breeze. “When Reg got back from America that first time,” Caleb Quaye said, “he couldn’t believe the reception he’d gotten. When he told us about their American gigs, his eyes just lit up. He couldn’t believe how sudden it all was. From total anonymity to being mobbed on the street. No one could believe it, really. But back in England, it hadn’t happened yet.”

  The pianist was determined that that situation would change soon enough. Appearing onstage that night in a gold lamé tailcoat from a 30’s Busby Berkeley musical—a gift from promoter Bill Graham—Elton gave a hyper-charged performance, tearing off his tailcoat and collapsing to his knees during an incendiary finale of Elvis’ “My Baby Left Me.” The thousands in attendance were left begging for more.

  Fotheringay watched his hypnotic performance from the wings, shell-shocked. “If we’d have known that he was going to do what he did and blow us off the stage, then we wouldn’t have chosen him,” Fotheringay guitarist Jerry Donahue later told author Keith Hayward. “When Sandy [Denny, Fotheringay’s lead singer] went backstage after the Elton set had finished she was really shaken and making comments like, ‘How are we supposed to go out there now?’…[Elton] just took control of the audience. We sounded weak compared to what they had just witnessed.” Sandy Denny was so demoralized by the disastrous night, in fact, that she and her band mates would pulling the plug on Fotheringay three short months later.

  “He was amazing on stage,” Sue Ayton said years later. “He seemed to take everything in his stride. Brilliant showmanship, beautiful voice, funny and exciting. [It was] staggering the way he reached out to everyone in the audience, with the huge Albert Hall audience on its feet.”

  The critics agreed. “Elton John is an exciting man to watch,” noted journalist Penny Valentine the next day. “He is a man who enters into live appearances with a relish and glee that is both a change and a pleasure to watch.” London Times music critic Karl Dallas concurred, labeling Elton “a welcome, fresh, individual voice.” Phonograph Record’s Richard Cromelin wasn’t quite as impressed however, commenting that Elton “looked like the last person you’d cast in a rockin’ role…A small, stubby man, he looked as if he belonged in a physics lab or behind an accountant’s desk, but surely not on a concert stage.”

  Elton was equally as displeased with the performance as Cromelin had been, but for a far different reason. “I don’t think that I’ve heard anyone but Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young sound good there,” he said of the Royal Albert Hall, which he found sonically unbalanced. “But then you learn by your mistakes. We’d never play it again.”

  While in London, Elton came into the orbit of director Lewis Gilbert, famed for the films Alfie and You Only Live Twice. Gilbert had fallen in love with the Elton John album while shooting his latest film, a teen romance cut from the same cloth as the recent box-office smash Love Story, and commissioned Elton to record a soundtrack for it. “They were going to call the movie The Intimate Game,” Elton said, “and Bernie and I said, ‘No, we will not write any songs named for a movie [called that]’, and we suggested Friends, so [they said] ‘We’ll settle for Friends.”

  Elton and Bernie wrote all of their songs in a single weekend. “I spoke with the director’s son, John Gilbert,” Bernie said, “and he told me what it was about. I was too lazy to read the script, so I wrote all the songs for it having never seen a cut of the film.”

  The soundtrack sessions took place at Olympic Studios, with Elton and his musicians watching the film unspool on a gigantic screen as they played. “It was an exercise in mathematics,” he said. “You have to write forty seconds of music, and if you don’t write forty seconds it’s a disaster. I’d never do it again.”

  Disappointed with the overall sound at Olympic, and with the constant interruptions of a myriad of film executives who attempted to commandeer the sessions, Elton decided to decamp to Trident Studios to rerecord all his songs. “For me, a studio has to be cozy and a bit moody,” he said, “and Trident’s like that. Another advantage is that there the drums are contained in a little booth of their own, completely shut off from everyth
ing, so there’s almost perfect separation and no leakage of sound to speak of.”

  Elton’s faith in the studio paid off—the resulting Trident sessions produced a vastly superior set of recordings. While the film itself would utilize the original Olympic sessions, the eventual soundtrack album would feature the Trident cuts. Besides providing four original tracks (“Friends,” “Michelle’s Song,” “Seasons,” and a brief reprisal of the title track), nearly half the album consisted of Paul Buckmaster’s reworkings of Elton’s main themes, pastoral variations played out on woodwinds and strings.

  Displeased with the “filler” aspect of the gauzy incidental score, Elton offered Gilbert a pair of additional songs—tracks which had been earmarked for his next LP—free of charge. “I didn’t want them to release a soundtrack album with three songs on it and fill it out with garbage, motorists peeing by lakes and things like that, so we said, ‘Well, we’ve got two spare songs, have those—“Honey Roll” and “Can I Put You On”—which we were going to put on Madman [Across the Water], and which we’d been doing on stage anyway. So they put them on during transistor radio sequences.”

  Elton recorded a duet with Island Records’ Cat Stevens days later at Pye Studios. “Honey Man” was a jaggedly melodic piano stomper that Stevens had co-written with Ken Cumberbatch. Elton and Stevens were pleased with the finished track, but hopes for its release were dashed when an ongoing dispute between Uni Records and Island over royalty distribution failed to find a proper resolution. A casualty of the legal wrangling, the single was ultimately scrapped.

  Even with this minor setback, things were still progressing apace for Elton. Later that same week, in fact, he purchased a luxury flat in central London, at 384 Water Garden, near the M40. To complete his lifestyle upgrade, the pianist traded in his car—a used Ford Escort—for a lavender Aston Martin previously owned by Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees.

  “I didn’t live that far away, [in] Sussex Gardens,” journalist Chris Charlesworth said, “and I bumped into Elton in the Edgware Road area just by chance. I remember distinctly bumping into him in a drycleaners when he was getting his stuff and I…had a drink with him in a local pub. I also met him at the Speakeasy a few times. The music business was very insular in those days.”

  Insular enough that—with his move to the affluent Water Garden neighborhood—Elton decided that John Reid would make the perfect roommate.

  The afternoon the Scotsman moved in, Elton sat his mother down to explain the unusual situation to her. “My mother has always said how hurt she’d be if I was ever deceitful and so when I confided in her that I might be gay, she was very understanding about it. I was very lucky in that respect. My family was very accepting.”

  Elton and Reid’s digs quickly became a trendy, early-‘70s showplace, a neo-futuristic space anchored by orange shag-pile, mirrored wallpaper, mirrored walls, and a carpeted elevator which whisked guests from the driveway directly into the living room.

  Elton barely had time to unpack before Dick James hosted a lunchtime album launch party for his new album, Tumbleweed Connection at the Revolution Club.

  “[Tumbleweed Connection] deals very heavily with the Civil War and a lot of my interests in America,” Bernie explained during the event, which took place on October 14. “It wasn’t really meant to have a theme, it was just that all the songs we did ended up having that feel to them, so it ended up being a slight concept.” He glanced about with a wry grin. “Some circus, huh?”

  “It’s groovy,” a nameless, shaggy-bearded journalist slurred.

  Bernie eyed him suspiciously. “Jesus.” Suddenly he noticed that the music playing from the club’s sound system was from Elton John and not Tumbleweed Connection. “Hey, why aren’t they playing the new album?”

  Dee Murray lit a cigarette. “Don’t know.”

  “You’re on the cover of Music Now,” Bernie informed the bassist. “And there’s an inside picture of the four of us in Disc. They’re calling you ‘smiling Dee Murray’.”

  Dee grinned. “I’m a star, baby,” he said dreamily.

  A hush fell over the room as the first indelicate notes from Tumbleweed’s steel-laced opener, “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun,” came tumbling out of unseen speakers. When the track ended, the room broke into authentic applause. Indeed, each successive track was to receive a warmer reception than the track before it.

  Elton arrived halfway through “Country Comfort,” wearing a shiny black overcoat, blue denim shirt, crimson boots and a light-up toy clown on his lapel. He was in a boundless mood, calling his new album the “funky one” and promising that “the next [album] is going to be more classical and orchestral…At the moment I am still struggling to get rid of this image that media people like Radio One have built up for me. You know, people think that I’m all cuddly and lovely and beautifully pop-star-ish. [But] I’m not, I’m really not.”

  As the last notes of the album closer, “Burn Down the Mission,” faded out, Elton grabbed a microphone and stepped onto a makeshift stage. “Thank you all for coming,” he told the two-hundred amassed before him. “If you listen to the album, if you dig it, you should know it’s Steve Brown as much as me, Gus Dudgeon as much as me, Paul Buckmaster as much as me. It’s a team effort, God knows.”

  After a final round of applause, the club quickly emptied out. Elton headed to a table in the corner, where Rolling Stone reporter Robert Greenfield awaited him. “I live, eat, sleep, breathe music,” the pianist confessed. “Neil Young, the Band, the Springfield, the Dead, the Airplane. I feel more American than British, really.”

  After a brief conversation, Greenfield thanked Elton for his time, packed up his tape recorder, and headed out for a curry.

  Elton remained sitting there by himself.

  Unmoving.

  Obscured in the gloom.

  5,000 miles away, Aretha Franklin—one of Elton’s favorite singers—released a cover version of “Border Song.” The single reached Number 37 on Billboard’s pop singles chart, and Number 5 on the R&B charts. It was a small but not insignificant moment: the John/Taupin team had scored their first ever U.S. Top 40 writing credit.

  That the Queen of Soul deemed one of Elton’s songs worthy of her time spoke volumes to his quickly changing stature. Franklin’s was, in fact, only one of many John/Taupin covers suddenly flooding the market. A flattering situation, perhaps, yet the pianist was hardly best pleased. “Most of the stuff that has been covered has been diabolical,” he said. “Brainchild have done one of our songs. Who are they, anyway? That’s awful. Rod Stewart has done ‘Country Comfort’ on his new album, Gasoline Alley. It’s still worth getting anyway, [but] we’re really pissed-off about it. He sounds like he made it up as they played. I mean, they couldn’t possibly have got farther away from the original if they’d sung ‘Camptown Races’. It’s so bloody sad, because if anyone should sing that song it ought to be him, such a great voice, but now I can’t even listen to the album. I get so brought down. Every other word is wrong.”

  Problems of a more pressing nature arose closer to home, as Ray Williams suffered Dick James’ wrath at having “deserted” Elton back in L.A. An enraged James dramatically tore up Williams’ management contract and threw it at him like so much confetti.

  “Sue me if you want,” the publisher snarled. “We don’t need dead weight round here.”

  Williams simply hung his head.

  “I totally agreed with him,” he later admitted. “I could see the kind of manager [Elton] needed, and it wasn’t someone like me.”

  Williams was given a fifteen-hundred-pound severance (“At least it was enough to pay my back rent and put some food in the fridge...”) and quickly became persona non grata around DJM. As if in some kind of distantly-tuned karmic response, the Elton John album suddenly broke into the U.S. Top 40, ultimately rising as high as Number 4 and going Gold. The album would remain in the Top 40 for twenty-eight consecutive weeks, receiving a Grammy nomination early the next
year for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance, Male. The disc also proved successful internationally, going to Number 4 in both Australia and Canada, and Number 2 in the Netherlands.

  Tumbleweed Connection’s impressive performance was in no small way aided by the success of “Your Song,” which was released on October 26 as the intended B-side to “Take Me to the Pilot.” But David Rosner convinced Uni Records to leave the A- and B-side designations off the single, thus allowing the disc jockeys to make up their own minds which track they preferred. “Before you knew it,” Rosner later told journalist Tom Stanton, “[‘Your Song’ was] on the air all over the country.”

  “Your Song” would slowly but steadily push its way up the charts throughout the fall, ultimately topping out at Number 8 in January, alongside offerings from the Fifth Dimension and George Harrison.

  Hearing the song on the radio, John Lennon was duly impressed. “There was something about his vocals that was an improvement on all the English vocals till then,” he would tell Rolling Stone in 1975. “When I heard it, I thought, ‘Great, that’s the first new thing that’s happened since we [the Beatles] happened.’ It was a step forward. I was pleased with it.”

  The European release of Tumbleweed Connection took place on October 30. It would take the album two-and-a-half months to finally enter the English album charts, where it ultimately topped out at Number 2. It would remain in the charts for five months running.

  “I like Empty Sky because of its naivety, Elton John because it was panic stations,” the pianist said. “But I’m very happy with the new album, it’s much more the way I want to come over. The last album was a little too soft and too orchestrated for me.”