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

by David DeCouto

  Tumbleweed Connection’s bucolic packaging was nearly as impressive as the music itself. Though single sleeves were industry standard, the album—like its two predecessors—was given the deluxe gatefold treatment. Featuring a bi-fold which posited Elton and Bernie as a pair of gun-slinging vagabonds, all wide-collared jackets and youthful sneers, the imagery—photographed on a chilly Monday morning at the Bluebell Railway Station in Sussex—was dreamed up by Bernie himself. A 12-page rotogravure lyric booklet, meanwhile, came replete with faux nineteenth century woodcuts of riverboats, six shooters and other Civil War-era imagery. “I’ve always loved Americana and I loved American Westerns,” the lyricist said. “I’ve always said that [Marty Robbins’] ‘El Paso’ was the song that made me want to write songs, it was the perfect meshing of melody and storyline.”

  Sounds magazine was impressed with the entire production, calling the disc “a collection of strikingly strong tracks with a slight country flavor,” while also noting that “Elton’s piano work has gained momentum and confidence since the first album, and he lays down a rhythm that often goes into amazing complexity and fruitfulness…[It’s] soulful white music at its very, very best.”

  Perhaps even more important than the critical acclaim the album was generating, however, was the fact that the team responsible for its creation was truly pleased with the results. “Tumbleweed was incredible,” Gus Dudgeon said. “The songs, the performances—it all came out exactly as I’d wanted it to.” The normally self-critical Elton had to agree. “R&B, gospel and country—you fuse those together, and you’ve got a pretty soulful combination. [Tumbleweed Connection is] all much simpler and funkier.”

  Making a calculated decision not to pull any singles off the album—Elton instead decided to present the work to the public as an integrated whole. “There aren’t any singles on it anyway,” the pianist said. Even so, several tracks, including “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun, “Burn Down the Mission,” “Where to Now, St. Peter?” and “Country Comfort” would go on to receive massive exposure on album-oriented FM radio stations across the U.S.

  Chapter 6:

  Dylan Digs Elton!

  Flush with success, Elton, Dee and Nigel returned to America in the late fall to play their first proper U.S. tour. A fifteen-city, twenty-four-date undertaking, the tour would revisit Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York while also introducing several new destinations, including Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Bridgeport and Fulton.

  The tour began inauspiciously with a three-night stand at the Boston Tea Party, where Elton was introduced onto stage as “Elton Jones.” “It happened every night,” Russ Regan said. “I would go up to the emcee after the show and say, ‘It’s Elton John.” And the next night, ‘Elton Jones.’ I’m not sure whether he ever got it right.”

  Elton, for his part, hardly cared. “I’m ready for anything,” he insisted. “I’m ready to rock ‘n’ roll.”

  Believing fully in his leader, Dee was equally set to tear things up. “We had complete confidence by that point,” the bassist said. “We knew we were good, we knew we belonged where we were. And Elton was great to play with. Nigel and I always had the freedom to improvise.”

  Robbie Robertson and the Band appeared in the audience on their third and final night. After the show, they invited Elton and Bernie up to their hotel room.

  “Bernie was shaking with fear,” Elton said, “but they were really sweet and we talked together for about three hours.”

  The Band flew off to Worcester, Massachusetts, and Elton and his entourage flew down to Philadelphia for shows at the Electric Factory. The first gig went fantastically well, despite the fact that there were still many in the audience who expected Elton to come out with a full complement of violas and violins. “People come to see us do expect see an orchestra, they really do,” he said. “I can’t believe it, but they go away—after I’ve completely destroyed the piano or set fire to it—and they think, ‘God, I wasn’t expecting that.’”

  When the pianist got to his dressing room after the first Electric Factory show, he found all five members of the Band waiting there. “They’d put their show forward a couple of hours and flew down in their private plane to see our act,” Elton said. Moved by their efforts, the pianist played the entirety of the Tumbleweed Connection album for them.

  “Amazing,” Robbie Robertson enthused as the record finished. “I can’t believe these songs were written by someone who’d never even been to America.”

  Bernie allowed himself the tiniest of grins.

  “It was such a compliment that I couldn’t believe it,” Elton said. “They asked us to go up to Woodstock to record at their place, and when Robbie Robertson asked us to write a song for them…well, I think Bernie was a bit embarrassed, because Robbie’s his current idol.”

  Wherever and whenever Elton stepped into the spotlight, he seemed to undergo a cosmic transformation. Gone was the shy, unhappy Reg Dwight from Pinner. In his place stood the supremely confident Elton John, the screams and applause from the maddened crowds almost visibly filling his psychic sails. This ever-expanding confidence was reflected in his latest American set list, which had broadened greatly from his summer shows to include songs as far-ranging as “Honey Roll,” “The King Must Die,” “My Father’s Gun” and “Ballad of a Well-Known Gun.”

  This outing also saw the power trio co-headlining with groups like the Byrds, Poco and the Kinks—the latter of whom they blew off the stage at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom, as Elton danced against his piano to ecstatic cheers. And played beneath it. And did push-ups on top of it. “You do everything you can to make it interesting,” he said. “Otherwise you’re stuck behind a nine-foot plank.”

  One of the best-received moments each night came when Elton introduced the crowd to the stage-shy Bernie, who would give a timid nod before quickly slinking back offstage.

  “Whatever Elton John is about to become, Bernie Taupin is half,” Robert Greenfield opined in Rolling Stone. “Sweetheart, the rest is history.”

  Elton, Nigel and Dee began a three-night stand at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in San Francisco on November 12.

  “It’s the musician’s dream gig,” Elton said. “Bands take it for granted they’re playing the Fillmore, they don’t think about the fact that they’re getting the best PA system, the best sound, and the best lighting. The lighting is just incredible.”

  Bill Graham himself introduced the band onto stage, the audience exploding as each musician materialized out of the wings. Grinning madly at the adulation, Elton treated those in attendance to a consummate set, which included a muscular rendition of Junior Walker and the All-Stars’ “Shotgun,” as well as a cover of John Lennon’s brotherhood anthem, “Give Peace a Chance.”

  The crowd’s enthusiasm escalated during the encores, as they rushed past the security guards and jammed themselves tightly against the stage. For Elton, it was an unmitigated victory. “[San Francisco audiences are] like those in London, because they’ve seen everything, and one night it was like pushing over a brick wall very slowly, but they went in the end.” He laughed. “Every audience is good, if you get at them the right way.”

  Elton topped the bill at the 3,000-seat Santa Monica Civic Auditorium three nights later. Though contractually obligated to return to the Troubadour when he next found himself in the Los Angeles area, Elton was able to play the infinitely large Civic Auditorium by buying out his contract with the Troubadour’s Doug Weston, which he’d done at the prompting of his American agent, Howard Rose.

  “You are going to be big and you ought to invest in yourself,” Rose told him.

  The blossoming star agreed. “We felt the momentum would justify the move.”

  Elton took to the Santa Monica stage—after opening sets by Odetta and roots guitarist Ry Cooder—in a brown leather top hat, blue velvet cape, and lemon-yellow overalls. The ensemble was topped off with a flashing Santa Claus figurine—a gift from Bernie’s
girlfriend, Maxine, who’d recently joined the band on the road as their unofficial seamstress—placed strategically over his crotch.

  Though there were some early problems with Elton’s microphone, and a distracting parade of photographers shuffling constantly about the stage, the audience didn’t seem to mind—an hour in, they were nearly as bathed in sweat as the whirling dervish piano-pounder himself.

  “We played for nearly two hours there,” Elton said. “We seem to go on longer in America than in Britain, because the audiences are so incredible. They don’t vary at all.”

  As the concert headed toward its dynamic finish, mass hysteria ensued. Security guards stood by helplessly as the crowd rushed the stage. Not for the last time at an Elton John concert, pandemonium reigned supreme. “The crowd, to use Elton’s term, ‘went mental’,” David Felton noted in his Rolling Stone review of the show, parts of which had been filmed for inclusion in a Henry Mancini TV show entitled The Mancini Generation. “Sometimes he would stick out his lower lip like Stan Freberg used to do, or grit his teeth or pucker up his face like Alvin Lee. Sometimes he would recoil from the keyboard, his mouth falling open in horror as if his ass had been shot full of lightning.”

  Billboard’s Eliot Tiegel was less impressed than Felton, turned off by what he felt was Elton’s be-costumed gamesmanship. “Does he abandon his valid musical skills in favor of being a ‘stage freak’ using unnecessary physical tricks?” Tiegel wondered. The pianist was nonplussed by the critique. “I did get some feedback from people who thought I was being a little too much of a showman onstage. But I was just having fun, breaking out of my shell. It wasn’t any desperation to be successful. I just wanted to get away from the things that everyone else was doing. I could have come out onstage in a pair of Levi’s and a cowboy shirt, and everyone would have said, ‘Wow.’ But I would have been bored to death. I just couldn’t do it.”

  Backstage after the show, a group of journalists and record executives tossed back complimentary champagne and congratulated themselves on their great good fortune, while Elton stood by himself in a corner, still in his sweat-soaked stage clothes, spent and silent and alone.

  “I was comfortable onstage,” he said, “but not very comfortable off it. Although I was having a ball, I was still stuck with the insecure, nervous person inside. And just being successful doesn’t cure it.”

  While in L.A., Danny Hutton invited Elton over to his house in Laurel Canyon for a late-night dinner to celebrate the Brit’s ever-escalating success. Hutton’s girlfriend, June, cooked them a four-course dinner, and all three enjoyed a relaxing night of music and conversation that lasted well into the next morning.

  As Elton was driving back to his hotel, he thought, “I’ve never stayed up till 7:30 in the morning in my life. I feel really good. I must be excited.”

  Elation it wasn’t—Hutton would later confess to having laced the pianist’s dinner with cocaine.

  “I might’ve forgotten to tell him,” he said with a knowing smirk. “I think it certainly didn’t hurt him.”

  The signature gig of Elton’s second American tour happened in New York on November 17, at A&R Recording Studios’ 1A Studio on Seventh Avenue. Elton had agreed to play a live radio broadcast on WABC, New York’s premier rock station. It was to be the first FM performance broadcast live from a studio, with a hundred fans, record executives and radio contest winners—as well as Peter, Paul & Mary’s Mary Travers—ushered into the spacious facility to help create a concert-like atmosphere.

  Elton, Nigel and Dee arrived at A&R Studios forty minutes before air time, quickly rehearsed a couple numbers to check for sound levels, then huddled together in a small antechamber. Nigel and Dee shared a joint while Elton sat silently, eyes downcast.

  The show was being engineered by Phil Ramone, who would go on to produce Billy Joel in the latter half of the decade and beyond. “There was something in the air that night, you could tell it was gonna be a memorable show, you could just feel it,” Ramone later recalled. “When the three of them kicked in together, the whole place went nuts. Just incredible energy.” As for Elton’s piano playing, Ramone labeled it as exceptional. “He manages to make that piano sound large and vast,” he told journalist James Turano. “That is a rare talent. He doesn’t play sloppy, he’s very precise, and man, when he gets that left hand going, he creates some kind of sound. It’s like magic to hear. I’m not sure if he even knows what he’s doing, and the sound he is making. That is his gift. But also, it’s his vocal quality, too. His voice is so strong and rich. He’s got the whole package. Elton John is really the ‘melody king’. A talent like his…comes along once in a lifetime.”

  Elton and his band began their performance with the gentle strains of “I Need You to Turn To,” “Your Song” and “Country Comfort.” Soon enough they were flexing their road muscle as they ripped through energetically cymbal-crashing renditions of “Amoreena,” “Bad Side of the Moon,” “Take Me to the Pilot” and “Can I Put You On.”

  The audience sat enraptured throughout every reverb-soaked moment of the virtuoso performance.

  “We were all in the studio wearing headphones as if we were recording an album,” Elton said, “but we were playing live. We could all hear each other extremely well. We just jammed.”

  Nigel particularly enjoyed playing in headphones. “I thought, ‘If I could do this on gigs, this would be great, because I would hear so much better. I don’t have to have monitors blasting in my ears.’ The phones give me a great mix at a reasonable volume.” From that show onward, the drummer would wear headphones for every gig he ever played.

  Halfway through the set, Elton told the radio audience that Bernie Taupin has just run through the studio naked.

  “That’s our Bernie,” he joked. “Keeping the flag held high.”

  Before debuting the epic seven-minute “Indian Sunset,” Elton warned the audience, “This next number’s quite long, so if anyone needs to use the toilet, now’s the time. There’s a method to our madness, I tell you.”

  The pianist then closed the show with a ferocious extended reading of “Burn Down the Mission,” which incorporated portions of “My Baby Left Me” and “Get Back”—a nod to two of his rock ‘n’ roll forbearers—as the blistering finale brought those in attendance to their feet.

  “It was magic,” Nigel said. “The atmosphere in that studio was like going to a recording studio and just playing for mates.”

  As “Get Back” wound down, a breathless Elton told the crowd, “At this point, we’d like to thank you all for coming, and for everybody for listening. For ABC—for letting us play, for A&R Studios—for letting us have the studio. And after everybody in general, thank you and keep smiling, ‘cause that’s the most important thing, all right? We’re just gonna do one more thing…” And with that, he and his band kicked into warp-drive, edging the song into a relentless crescendo.

  “The eighteen-minute jam session is some of the finest drum and bass and piano playing I’ve ever done,” Elton said years later. “We were a bloody good band.”

  “Elton John was a hit!” progressive disc jockey Dave Hermann exclaimed the moment it all came to a crashing end, as the rabid audience cried out for more. Elton gladly complied, obliging them with a rousing encore of “My Father’s Gun.”

  By the end of the night, Elton’s ivories were stained red with blood—he’d been pounding the keyboard so furiously, he’d cracked his fingernails wide open.

  Elton began a two-night stand at the Fillmore East on Second Avenue on November 20. Elton was particularly pumped—not only was he playing the East Coast’s premiere rock palace, but he was also opening for his idol, Leon Russell. “I went out onstage and theoretically thought, ‘Leon, you’re going to have to work really hard to follow me.’ And I think that’s the only attitude to take if you’re the underdog. I can’t understand groups who go around thinking, ‘Oh, it’s just another gig.’ I’ve always played my balls off.”r />
  “Elton was the undercard for Leon Russell,” Eric Van Lustabder said. “But from the beginning, everyone was calling it ‘the Elton John concert’, which caused a terrible stir. Usually for the undercard, half the crowd isn’t there yet, they’re just walking in, they’re not paying attention, they’re smoking dope or whatever the heck they’re doing. But for these two concerts, from the moment Elton and his band came out to play, there wasn’t a seat empty in the audience. You could’ve heard a pin drop, which was incredible.”

  Publicity for the shows was handled by industry pro Carol Kienfner, who was bemused by the innate innocence that both Elton and Bernie displayed. “They were wide-eyed, like they couldn’t believe what was happening, and with being in New York,” she said. “But they were very sweet, and always on time…[Elton] was incredibly professional, and a great talent.”

  Elton appeared onstage in a floor-length cape and stovepipe hat, as the thousands in attendance leapt out of their velvet seats to wail out an ovation not heard since the heyday of Beatlemania.

  Seated out in the audience that first night were Elton’s label mates Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, in America for the first time to promote their rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar. “Elton had just broken through in America with MCA Records, just as Andrew and I had done on the same label,” Rice said. “I remember an electric performance of ‘Border Song’ was the highlight for me. Andrew and I were very impressed, but a little worried that MCA might decide to promote his records more than ours…But we knew that we were lucky to be on the same label as a genius of contemporary music, and forgave him.”

  Also in the crowd was local DJ Dennis Elsas. “I have very, very vivid memories of that show,” he said. “Elton did not disappoint. He blew the place apart.”

  By the end of the show, Elton was astride his Steinway, conducting a two-thousand-strong choir as he urged them to clap along to a fiery cover of Sly and the Family Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher.”