“Tiny Dancer,” Bernie’s dreamy paean to Maxine, was captured next. The enigmatic song was an instant classic, one clearly based on Bernie’s wife. “Maxine was a really petite person, really into ballet dancing,” David Larkham said. “She’d dance at the side of the stage while Elton was playing. That’s what inspired those lyrics.”
“It seemed like sunshine just radiated from the poplars,” Bernie later said. “I was trying to capture the spirit of that time [with ‘Tiny Dancer’], encapsulated by the women we met…in L.A. They were free spirits, sexy in hip-huggers and lacy blouses, and very ethereal, the way they moved. So different from what I’d been used to in England. And they all wanted to sew patches on your jeans. They’d mother you and sleep with you. It was the perfect Oedipal complex.”
To help add complexity to the arrangement, steel guitarist B.J. Cole—whom Elton had known since his days recording demos at DJM back in the late ‘60s—was brought in. “Steve Brown rang me up about four p.m. and said, ‘Can you come in later this evening? We’re cutting this track and we’d like you to play on it,’” Cole said. “So I went in about eleven p.m. When I arrived, Elton’s band were set up in that big basement studio. Basically Elton put the arrangement together on the spot, with the help of the musicians in the studio, including me. We spent till about five in the morning structuring it and working out what went where, because that song has got more sections in it than almost any other pop song. It was pretty unique for me in that situation, because no other pop song had been done with the pedal steel going down with the rhythm section, where the pedal steel is part of the basic track; the pedal steel is usually added on later. If you notice, when it comes in [on the second verse], it stays in, right till the end.”
The rhythm section on “Tiny Dancer” consisted of Roger Pope and Dave Glover—both of whom had come to the studio directly from their day jobs at a construction site. Roger, who had been working an industrial hopper, had cement dust in his hair. The dust mixed with his sweat as the session proceeded, hardening into a helmet against his scalp. “I even still had my work clothes on,” the drummer later told journalist George Matlock. “No time to get changed.”
Roger forewent a royalty for the session, opting instead for a standard fee of £36.
“I was a daft young man,” he said later.
The neo-spiritual “All the Nasties” was attempted next. Featuring tasteful tambourine flourishes from percussionist Ray Cooper—a highly-sought session man—the silken, gospel-steeped tempest was also the token track to feature Nigel and Dee.
Lyrically, the song originated when Elton—fed up with the causticness of the British press—asked Bernie to pen a response to their critics.
“It’s not meant to be biting,” Bernie said. “It’s just meant to be, we hope, subtle.”
“I wasn’t getting criticism, I was getting bitchiness,” Elton said. “And I can’t take that.”
The luminous track, which featured the Cantores in Ecclesia Choir—directed by Nick Drake’s arranger, Robert Kirby—was also a thinly veiled treatise on Elton’s sexuality, still very much a taboo subject in the homophobic early ‘70s.
“Razor Face” was powered by a more straightforward lyric. A character study about a young man who spends his days looking after a blind old jazz musician who’s stuck inside a bottle, the recording featured memorable turns from session men Jack Engblom—who provided bluesy accordion flourishes—and Rick Wakeman, whose atmospheric organ line lent a wistful claustrophobia to the track.
“I got [Wakeman] for that because I’m the world’s worst Hammond organ player,” Elton said. “I’m more used to playing my old Vox Continental, and that very badly as well. I couldn’t even understand the drawbars on the Vox, and there were only six on that, but I still didn’t know what they were for.”
A follow-up session was held on August 14. The first track attempted was “Rotten Peaches,” a country rocker about a repentant European who finds himself imprisoned on an American chain-gang, wasting his days picking rotten peaches. The track was notable for featuring Pentangle’s drummer Terry Cox, as well as slide guitar from Chris Spedding, who would go on to produce the Sex Pistols’ first demos just a few short years later. Completing the track lineup was bassist Herbie Flowers, who would feature prominently on Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” the following summer.
Written the previous October while in the U.S., “Indian Sunset”—a polemical examination of American Expansionism—was the oldest number attempted at the sessions. “That song was a case of us really having something to say,” Elton said, “and having to write a song to say it. The Indian situation in America really is appalling…but [the song] is a dramatic idea and not a social criticism. If the criticism is also part of the reaction to the song, that’s just fine. But that’s not our aim. We’re not naïve enough to…go see a reservation for an hour and a half and think we understand all about Indians. We simply work out of our imaginations, like the old writers used to do back in the days of Tin Pan Alley. The songs are completely romantic, let’s face it. You can get involved in them like you’d get involved in a story or a poem. We don’t want to say anything in our music in the sense that people insist that Dylan said something.”
“Maybe it’s bad,” Bernie added, “but I never read the newspaper and I never watch the news. I just couldn’t get into politics because I just don’t believe in anybody enough to really care. In England, life is not as freaky as it seems to be here in the States. We’re more concerned with everyday things.”
Opening with an urgent a capella turn, the song quickly built to an impassioned crescendo of genocidal heartache, as it poignantly depicted the death of Apache renegade Geronimo. “He was laying down his weapons/When they filled him full of lead,” Elton howls with unbridled passion. The song’s basic historical inaccuracy—the real Geronimo died of pneumonia after serving over twenty years as a prisoner of war—did little to diminish the dramatic effect it achieves, and the basic tragedy behind the lyrics remains all too valid.
Short on material, Elton decided to record his own simmering take of “Rock Me When He’s Gone,” the track he and Bernie had originally written for Long John Baldry. Though this new version of the retro-soul vamp crackled with playful urgency, its party mood didn’t fit with the thematic unity shared by the rest of the tracks. As a result the song would be shelved for over two decades, before finally seeing a proper release in 1992, when it appeared as part of Elton’s Rare Masters double-disc set.
The final song attempted at these sessions was a remake of the structurally complex “Madman Across the Water,” a dark tale of a paranoid-schizophrenic trapped in an insane asylum. When it came time to record the propulsively cinematic tune, Buckmaster arrived at the studio with no score in hand. “There were sixty string musicians sitting there and we had to scrap it,” Elton said. “There were all those sort of disasters [during the sessions].”
Patience won the day, however, and the haunting arrangement that Buckmaster eventually came up with helped guarantee the track heavy rotation on album-oriented FM radio stations for years to come. Perhaps even more importantly, “Madman Across the Water” helped cement guitarist Davey Johnstone’s place as a fixture within Elton’s musical arsenal. Impressed with his fret work, which—with the aid of heavy reverb and backward echo—seemed to fit the song’s melancholy mood far better than Mick Ronson’s showy licks had done the preceding year, Elton approached Davey about joining his band once their final touring commitments were completed for the year. The guitarist was excited for the opportunity. “That live album they did [11/17/70] was fantastic. I was really into the idea of getting in with the guys that made that record.”
“Davey and Elton hit it off on a personal level, and that was that,” Gus said. “He was one of us.”
Chapter 9:
‘We Literally Played in Our Overcoats’
Elton, Nigel and Dee went back on the road the moment the sessions
were over, touring the U.S. from August 26 through September 16. Reenergized by the fruitful Trident sessions, the Briton banged the piano so hard during their opening dates that his nails splintered apart, causing his hands to bleed every night. With perseverance, it proved a manageable problem. “Once you’ve got over the first three or four dates,” he said, “your hands harden up, the skin just hardens up.”
While his partner bled beneath the spotlight, Bernie put his relative anonymity to maximum use, releasing a self-titled album of poetic recitations—with such obscure titles as “Solitude” and “Ratcatcher”—over gentle folk accompaniment provided by Davey Johnstone, Diane Lewis, Shawn Phillips, Caleb Quaye and others.
Bernie was hopeful that the disc’s release would allow him to begin staking out his own public identity. “I just started to not want to be a bracket name,” he said. “Like if anyone wrote about me, they always had to put ‘Elton John’s lyricist’ in brackets so people knew who they were talking about. This new album was made to get away from that…Those brackets just have to go, no matter what.”
Widely seen more as a vanity project than as a legitimate musical offering, the LP was released on DJM Records in the U.K., and on Elektra in the States. Bernie only had a single contractual stipulation for his labels during the promotional phase of the album: that Elton John’s name not be mentioned in any of the publicity releases. Despite—or perhaps because of—this, Bernie Taupin was poorly received. “Bernie Taupin is Rod McKuen in pretty British pop-star drag, and he knows it,” Lester Bangs chided in Phonograph Record. “Just like the V.W. as a vehicle for universal brotherhood, his lyrics appeal to people who wear their sensitivity—if not their politics—on their sleeves.” Crawdaddy’s Allan Richard concurred, asserting that “Taupin is hardly a great poet, more a better-than-average storyteller, and his interpretations are tediously monotonous. His chosen musical accompaniment also drags like a horse with a lame hoof, and I walk away from this recording a better man for never having to hear it again.”
Bernie shrugged off the reviews. “It was my first shot at the spotlight,” he told journalist Mary Anne Cassata. “Someone suggested that I make the album, and I foolishly accepted. It was fun while we did it.”
Elton made his first foray into Japan for a six-date tour that October. Beginning at the Shibuya Kohkaido Hall in Tokyo and ending at the Shinjuku Kohsei Nenkin Hall, each show opened with “It’s Me That You Need,” a rare live treat performed as a special “thank you” for the superior chart performance the island nation had granted the soaring elegy.
Pandemonium greeted each performance. The Osaka concert was particularly animated, reaching near-riot levels as hundreds of crazed teenagers broke protocol to assault the barricades that separated them from Elton, Nigel and Dee. More athletic members of the audience simply leaped over the concrete partitions. By the end of the show, hundreds of kids crowded the stage. Yet even in their hysteria, they gave the musicians a respectful amount of space in which to play.
“Very strange, crazy people, very polite,” Elton said. “I could never understand why they went to war, because they always bow.” He grinned. “I quite like Japan. The only thing is, nobody talks English.”
With little time built into their schedule for rest or relaxation, the band flew directly on to Australia.
Minor drama occurred at the Perth airport, when local authorities grew indignant at a few of the more risqué patches sewn into Elton’s jean jacket.
“Can’t let you through, mate,” one burly guard said, pointing to a sexually suggestive patch on the pianist’s sleeve. “Let’s have it.”
“No,” Elton said.
The guard shrugged. “Can’t let you through then.”
The line behind Elton’s entourage grew steadily longer and more agitated as the standoff continued.
“Hand it over now,” a second guard barked. “That’s the kinda thing, could damage our society good.”
Elton grunted. “Well, I certainly can’t help your society,” he said.
John Reid intervened. Armed with a fresh roll of Australian dollars, he quickly smoothed over the “stupid, needless hassle.”
“It was always crazy on the road,” Dee said. “Never a dull moment, y’know? Just a constant flow of madness. It was great.”
Things went far more smoothly at the Subiaco Oval a couple nights later. After a thunderous show—which utilized the largest sound system ever assembled within the country—Elton, Nigel and Dee were already in their car and preparing to drive back to their hotel when the concert promoter began banging desperately on their windshield.
“Please come back and do us another encore,” he begged. “They’ll tear the place down otherwise.”
Elton stared out his window and grinned—perhaps he could help their society after all.
The band played the Kooyong Stadium Lawn Tennis Club in Melbourne days later, on October 24. The show almost didn’t happen—the scaffolders had gone on strike the morning of the concert, and organizers were left scrambling to secure men to help construct the stage. In the end, the concert went off without a hitch. The final ovation Elton, Nigel and Dee received lasted nearly fifteen minutes.
“Elton was amazed by the crowd,” the concert photographer said. “The audience just loved him. You could see he was truly moved by it all.”
The pianist was equally touched by his face-to-face meeting with childhood idol Winifred Atwell the next afternoon. “[We] had a wonderful time together,” he said. “She gave me a little koala bear toy…To meet her was the greatest.”
After imbibing more than their fair share of complimentary backstage champagne at Western Springs Stadium, Elton reminded Nigel and Dee—as he often did—that their audience had never seen them play before.
“Let’s give ‘em hell then,” he said.
Nigel and Dee nodded their agreement as compère Barry Coburn, a co-promoter of the show, took to the stage. “Please welcome that madman from across the water,” Coburn said to the 20,000 in attendance, “the Captain Marvel of pop…Elton John!”
The pianist took to the stage in a star-spangled Stetson and velvet cape, white shorts, striped knee-high socks and a long-sleeved jersey with a self-portrait emblazoned across the chest.
With the merest of nods, he and his band began pounding out their set with their usual abandon.
“It was just a three-piece, and they were fantastic, phenomenal players,” said Ricky Ball, drummer for the opening band, Ticket. “They rocked the whole night….[It was a] really responsive crowd. Elton went over well.” As strongly as the concert was received, Ball was left even more impressed by the pre-show soundcheck. “I got to play on Nigel Olsson’s drums…It was the most fabulous drum kit I’d ever played on.”
During Elton’s two-week tour of Australia, he played a football stadium, two racetracks and a speedway—during the middle of winter.
“The stage blew away on one gig, and we literally played in overcoats,” he said. “It was raining on the piano…But we’ll go back again. Why not?”
Elton’s newest album, Madman Across the Water, was released soon after—on November 5 in the U.K. and ten days later in the U.S. A release party was held at Marlon Brando’s house. “One of my favorite pictures of all time was taken at that party,” Russ Regan said. “Neil Diamond is kissing me on this cheek and Elton John is kissing me on the other cheek. Later on I showed that picture to Elton and he said, ‘You know how you got that? I was on my way to kiss Neil on the mouth and you got in the way.’ I think he was joking. Who knows? I love the guy.”
Despite overflowing with somber insights and melodic inventiveness, Madman Across the Water failed to trouble the upper reaches of the BBC charts, only managing a relatively dismal 41 in Elton’s homeland. “I was disappointed,” he acknowledged, “because I know the sales it did should have got it [higher] into the charts. I wouldn’t have been worried if it didn’t sell at all, but it did sell. Not as well as we hop
ed, of course.” His fifth album in a year and a half fared much better in the States, instantly going Gold and reaching a lofty Number 8. The LP would also do well internationally, reaching Number 14 in Italy, Number 13 in Japan, Number 9 in Canada, and Number 8 in Australia.
The distinctive cover artwork proved as idiosyncratic as the music it heralded. “By that time,” album designer David Larkham said, “we had all visited California a few times and picked up clothes that reflected what was going on—worn denims, badges, embroidered bits and pieces. Hence my thoughts for the cover.” Larkham cut out the back panel on his old denim jacket and drew the outline for the album’s title in ball-point pen. His wife, Janis, then silk-embroidered the letters, while Steve Brown’s wife, Gill, worked on sewing in the back cover song titles.”
The gatefold was equally as impressive, opening up to reveal a 12-page lyric booklet which featured Victorian-era photos Larkham had picked up in Portobello Market in London. Grainy genteel images stood in for the actual band and production staff: a pair of street urchins were labeled ‘Elton John & Bernie Taupin’, a forlorn baby atop a large cracked egg was ‘David Larkham’, an Edwardian constable stood in for ‘Steve Brown’, and so on.
The ambiguous images seemed to fit well with the enigmatic lyrics, which received creative interpretations from their fan base. “My favorite one,” Bernie said, “is ‘Madman Across the Water’…Everybody thought the ‘Madman’ was Nixon in the White House. It had never crossed my mind for a minute, but I thought that was a fabulous idea.” Indeed, the lyricist preferred people bring their own interpretations to his work. “I don’t like to be asked what a song is about, because I think that spoils the fun. I think it’s half of the fun of being able to listen to a record. Like reading a book, you visualize the characters in your own mind even if they are described in the book. You see them in your mind how they are. And I think that’s how it should be with songs. I think people should interpret them in their own way.”
Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 19
