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

by David DeCouto

  Davey overdubbed four open-tuned acoustic guitars over the choruses to “Rocket Man,” creating a lush harmonic soundscape underpinned by Dee’s melodic bass lines.

  “Dee is probably the most amazing bass player,” Davey said. “Dee Murray was a phenomenal bass player, singer, friend. If you listen to ‘Rocket Man,’ nobody told him what to play. That was the thing about our band then, nobody told you what to play.”

  Happy with the instrumentation, Gus suggested that Nigel, Dee and Davey add background vocals to the track. It was a key decision, one which introduced a trademark sound integral to Elton’s signature ‘70s sound.

  At first, the producer found it a challenge to get a proper blend with such disparate voices huddled around a single microphone. “It’s like trying to take a trombone, a triangle and a bloody string bass and…get a balance,” he said. “The three of them had totally different types of singing voices. Nigel’s voice is really high, he can hit those top notes really great but he doesn’t have a lot of middle or bottom energy in his voice. Davey…has quite a husky voice and doesn’t have a lot of energy. Dee has just pure energy, and no top and no bottom.”

  After a couple frustrating hours of not getting anywhere, Gus decided to set up three separate microphones so he could better control the balance of Nigel, Dee and Davey’s individual voices. “Suddenly we arrived at a perfect blend of voices,” the producer said. “I’ll be the first to admit, it was blind luck. So much of this business is down to luck.”

  The backing vocal sessions proved as enjoyable as they were effective. “There was always a lot of laughing going in the studio,” Nigel said. “The spirit was loose and fun. Basically, we’d be left alone. Elton would sing his [lead] vocals, and then he’d say, ‘OK, you guys can get on with the backgrounds.’ We’d come up with our harmonies and experiment a bit. If something didn’t work, we’d try another approach till we nailed it.”

  For the high notes, Gus would place a microphone behind Dee, who would often have to sing through his legs. “He actually did,” the producer said, bemused. “[Dee] couldn’t get certain notes without bending over.”

  “I’m ahead of my time,” Dee said with a grin. “Now fuck off.”

  In stark contrast to the transcendent interplanetary ode, “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” was a whimsical honky-tonk romp that satirized the typical teenager’s melodramatic view of the world.

  After discarding the notion that Elton’s stepfather Derf play a solo on the spoons, Gus brought in “Legs” Larry Smith—drummer for the outlandish Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band—for a tap dance solo. Smith, who’d gained notoriety in the late ‘60’s by performing “Death Cab for Cutie” at the tail end of the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film, was all too happy to oblige, even going so far as to bring his own floor into the studio to tap on.

  “He danced his ass off,” Gus said. “It went down a storm.”

  After that night’s session had ended, Gus ambled off to his master bedroom suit—only to be woken at four A.M. by an apparition floating at the foot of the bed that he and his wife Sheila shared. Everyone teased the couple relentlessly when they’d confessed what they’d seen—until they, too, had similar run-ins.

  “It was haunted as fuck,” David Bowie’s producer, Tony Visconti, later acknowledged. “David took one look at the master bedroom and said, ‘I’m not sleeping in there!’ [So] he took the room next door. The master bedroom had a very dark corner, right next to the window, ironically, that seemed to just suck light into it. It was colder in that corner, too.” Not fearing the spirit world, Visconti ended up taking the master bedroom for himself. “What could Frédéric and George really do to me? Scare me in French?”

  Ghosts or no, the recording continued apace, with the pounding “Susie (Dramas),” a Move-flavored rocker which featured Davey’s first-ever attempt at an electric guitar solo. “When he hit the first note and this sound leapt out of his amplifier, he nearly fell over,” Gus said. “It’s a very structured solo because he just didn’t know how to do a free solo…Davey was an acoustic guitarist, not an electric guitarist, and this was the first solo he had ever had to play.”

  “Really superb tune, Reg,” Gus said after the track was finished.

  Elton’s face darkened. He bit his lip, pushed his glassed up his nose, and wordlessly left the room. Everyone looked at each other, mystified.

  A few minutes later, John Reid came into the control room and sat Gus and the band down.

  “Listen guys, can you just call him Elton from now on. No more Reg. Just Elton, okay?”

  Gus, Nigel, Dee and Davey nodded in unison.

  “That was kind of…interesting…shall we say,” Dee later recalled. “It was definitely a line in the sand.”

  Elton was soon back in the studio to work on the gospel-soaked “Salvation,” which everyone assumed would get the nod as the leadoff single for the new LP. As it turned out, the song was destined to languish in semi-obscurity as a largely overlooked album cut.

  “You can only guess,” Elton admitted. “You never really know which songs are going to work till you lay them down.”

  Jazz pioneer Jean-Luc Ponty, who’d recently gained acclaim for his cutting-edge work on the Frank Zappa-produced album King Kong, was brought in to add electric violin to “Amy,” a rollicking Stones-like rocker of sexual awakening.

  “I got an excellent impression as soon as I walked in the studio the first day,” Ponty said. “Although Elton had hits in America and the U.K. already, he was not yet well-known in France, and I was not familiar with his singing. So I was very impressed as I was discovering how talented he was just hearing him alone, singing at the piano.”

  Elton was similarly taken with Ponty. Recording with the Frenchman was “probably the most exciting moment of my musical career,” he said. “Hands down.”

  Ponty’s playing proved remarkable enough, in fact, that Elton asked him to also lend his chops to “Mellow,” a Leon Russell-inspired bliss-out that memorialized the sexual utopia Bernie and Maxine had found at Piglet-in-the-Wilds. Ponty was more than pleased to help out on the track. “‘Mellow’s an incredibly inspiring song, just beautiful,” he said. “Gus asked me to plug my violin into the Hammond [organ] to get a unique sound. It really worked perfectly. I used violinistic expressions—sliding notes that cannot be played on an organ, for example—and mixed them with more usual organ-style phrasings. It came out great.”

  “Ponty was an inspiration,” said Dee, who ended up altering his bass sound after every take—a habit which drove his producer crazy, but which his band mates appreciated. “There was no one like Dee,” Nigel said. “A musical genius across the board.” Davey had to agree. “Dee was brilliant. He was a beautifully instinctual musician. His ideas were so fucking great. He’d work things out so meticulously, fiddling around. What a player.”

  The session’s signature cut came in the guise of “Honky Cat,” an idiosyncratic, New Orleans-soaked tune accented with playful Chinatown-esque piano licks. Lyrically, the song saw Bernie pining to get back to the rural countryside of his youth. Played at a daring 171 beats per minute, the syncopated stomper was fueled by a quartet of local French horn players: trombonist Jacques Bolognesi, trumpeter Ivan Jullien, and saxophonists Alain Hatot and Jean-Louis Chautemps.

  Gus recorded Elton and the band playing live together as they laid “Honky Cat” down, to capture the essence of a live stage performance. But maintaining a modicum of isolation—so that he could later manipulate the piano within the framework of the entire mix—proved a bit problematic for the producer. “When I first started off,” he said, “we did it the same way anybody does—you lift the lid up. I never close the lid on [Elton’s] piano. It’s the worst thing you can possibly do. Taking the lid off is even better, if you can get the lid physically off. The lid is only there to bounce the sound out into the hall when you’re playing live with an orchestra.”

  The problem, Gus quickly found, was that se
paration was lost in a studio situation. “It’s very unlikely you’re going to be able to get the piano somewhere isolated, so with rock ‘n’ roll you’d like to be able to keep it shut to keep some of the noise out. But the trouble is, when you do that you’ve got the mics only a matter of inches from the strings, so you’re going to hear all the harmonics—which you’re not supposed to hear—and the sound’s going to be way out of balance, because you cannot get a balanced sound across the whole keyboard unless you’ve got a mic every couple of feet, which would be ridiculous.”

  To combat this technical asymmetry, Gus commissioned a carpenter to build the shell of another piano, three times as deep and upside-down, which was then placed directly above Elton’s piano. “So, physically, the piano was now about 10 feet tall, and it was padded inside. We had two holes at the side, and we just poked the mics in there, and then you could get the mics high above the strings. You could put the piano right in the middle of the rhythm section [that way], and you might just hear a little bit of low rumble from the bass—or the bass drum or something—but you could usually filter that out without spoiling the piano sound in any way.”

  When it came time to lay down the lead vocals on “Honky Cat,” Elton knocked them out in a single take, with the volume in his headphones turned up so loud that they were literally breaking up. “How he is not deaf, I don’t understand,” Gus said. “He sings through this blitzkrieg of crap and sings these wonderful vocals.”

  “Slave” followed. an internal monologue from an indentured servant in the early 1860s who dreams of burning his master’s “whore house to the ground,” the track was initially recorded as a straight-ahead rocker, at double-speed.

  “‘Slave’ was hilarious the way we cut it originally,” Davey said. “Like the fastest rock track of all time. When we listened back we decided, after we stopped laughing, to try it totally differently.”

  Elton suggested that Davey attempt a swampier, largely solo, take. Laying down acoustic guitar, mandolin, slide guitar and banjo, the Scotsman’s efforts brought the song to life.

  “It makes much more sense,” Bernie said of the newer, laconic version. “It makes it that sort of southern, steamy kind of thing.”

  “A million times better,” Elton said. “Our Jean Harlow came through yet again.”

  The team then began working on one of the most majestic hymns in the entire John/Taupin oeuvre, “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters.” For Elton and Bernie’s “first real New York song,” the arrangement was simplified to just piano, acoustic guitar and mandolin, which lent the track a prayerful aura that perfectly underscored Bernie’s pensive lyrics.

  Gus was more than pleased with the result, labeling it “a magic song with a magic performance, and a great lyric.”

  “One of my all-time favorites,” Elton was to later agree. “I always thought it was one of my most underrated songs.”

  Less favored was the stark rumination “I’ll Be There Tomorrow,” which never made it past a single piano-only take.

  Still, the sessions ended on a true party note with “Hercules,” a rockabilly raver in open-G tuning. The track—which wryly canonized Elton’s new middle name—was something of a milestone for Davey, who was pleasantly surprised by his new-found rhythmic precision. He credited his boss for the confidence which allowed him to so quickly expand his chops. “[Elton] has this subtle sort of control over his musicians,” he said. “He doesn’t actually tell you what to play, but you get to know what he wants, and he forces the best out of you.”

  Ecstatic with the way the sessions had gone, Elton called Nigel, Dee and Davey together in the Château’s dining room their final night together for an announcement.

  “This is such a great album,” he said, “you guys are going to get royalties from now on.”

  The men were astounded.

  “That was unheard of,” Nigel later recalled. “It still is, to this day.”

  To Elton, his generous decision was the least he could do. “Everyone rose to new heights in France,” he said. “Especially with Davey in the band. It was the first time we’d really got together with him, and he gave everyone such a boost.”

  While “Tiny Dancer” was hitting U.S. record shops in a 3:38 edit of the 6:12 album track, Gus took the master tapes from the Château sessions back to Trident Studios in London, where he had album engineer David Hentschel—who had recently earned plaudits for his detailed efforts on George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass LP—record an evocatively otherworldly synth line on “Rocket Man” with a state-of-the-art ARP 2600. After laying down bongo overdubs with percussionist Ray Cooper on “Amy,” Gus then began the painstaking task of sculpting a final mix of the album over the following weeks.

  At the same time, Elton went into rehearsals with the 80-piece Royal Philharmonic orchestra for a February concert at the Royal Festival Hall. The event, conducted by Paul Buckmaster, was being filmed for a possible theatrical release, though in the end it would be aired by London Weekend Television. Rehearsals went poorly, however, as the classically-trained musicians openly looked down upon their rock ‘n’ roll counterparts.

  “That was a very large orchestra and I felt very intimidated,” Buckmaster said. “The orchestra sensed my uncertainty. The brass, they’re the ones who will tear a conductor to shreds. The strings are always very discreet. Woodwinds are noncommittal. But the brass…they did this thing during rehearsals, they shuffled their feet on the floor, which is a sign of disrespect for the conductor, and that made things even worse. And I lacked the guts to find a proper teacher to show me how it was done.”

  Emblematic of the orchestra’s disconnect was the moment Buckmaster cued them up to rehearse “Take Me to the Pilot.”

  “Can I have a bit of quiet?” he asked.

  “If you got your fucking hair cut perhaps you could hear a bit of quiet,” a heavyset trumpeter sneered.

  “It was all down to that sort of scene,” Elton said. “Cunts.”

  The pianist and the conductor gamely persevered, however, and days later Elton was taking to the stage in a glittery silver satin jacket that left little doubt which direction the compass of his artistic aspirations were pointing.

  Opening the show with the premiere of his imminent single, “Rocket Man,” Elton ran through a string of solo numbers before being joined by his band, augmented for the night by backing vocalists Lesley Duncan and Madeline Bell. This concert not only marked Davey’s live debut, but was also notable for featuring percussionist Ray Cooper, who stood center stage bashing away on a myriad of instruments, from tubular bells to cymbals.

  As in the studio, Elton’s expanded lineup clicked from the very first bar, yet a predictably subpar performance by the capricious Royal Philharmonic left the pianist furious. “I just thought they gave a quarter of their best, and they didn’t take the event seriously, and I was taking it seriously,” he fumed. “That concert was a torture for me, and I was so relieved when it was over. I’d sunk a lot of bread into it. I’ll never do it again.”

  Chapter 11:

  The Ghosts of a Hundred Songs

  Now a dollar millionaire, Elton upped sticks again, trading in his Water Garden digs for a private estate in chic Virginia Waters, Runnymede, Surrey. A Bel Air-style split-level bungalow that boasted a swimming pool and mini-football pitch at 14 Abbots Drive, Elton christened his new residence Hercules.

  Elton’s new home overflowed with a surplus of objets d’art and electronic gadgetry. A signed Andy Warhol silk-screen print, “Last Suite of the Electric Chairs,” hung beside a framed Victorian poster advertising: Exposition Internationale de Madrid, 1893-94, which was positioned above an antique brass cash register full of emerald rings and diamond bracelets, while a vintage Rock-Ola jukebox stuffed full of favorite platters from the ‘50s and ‘60s burbled beside a teal Victrola, which sat in the shadow of a Grand Slam pinball machine. A suit of armor, meanwhile, stood watch over multiple Old Master etchings.

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sp; “I never dreamed there were Rembrandts still to buy,” Elton said. “I thought they were all in museums.”

  The sloping driveway was as ostentatious as the house itself, showing off as it did the pianist’s latest infatuation—car collecting. To date, Elton’s collection included an Aston Martin, a powder-blue Rolls-Royce Corniche hardtop, a scarlet Ferrari Boxer, a monogrammed chocolate Rolls-Royce Phantom VI (to be used exclusively for touring), a vintage Bentley, and a Mini GT—which featured a minibar as well as a color television set.

  Chez Hercules quickly became a revolving door of rock gentry. “Donovan’s having a party [here] next week,” Elton said, “and he’s invited the whole world. Keith Moon says he doesn’t want any Galactic Fairy Dust, he wants a good booze-up. Rod [Stewart] says he’s not much into mushrooms and toadstools, but he’ll go…David Bowie was just here. I really liked what Mott the Hoople did with his song [‘All the Young Dudes’], so I rang him up and invited him for a meal.”

  Of his many famous guests, Elton got on best with T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. “I’ve known Marc ever since that Roundhouse thing we did the first time,” he said. “I’ve really got into his music a lot and I really like him, and we’ve been friends ever since then.”

  Bolan admired Elton as well, although an unmistakable touch of rivalry was simmering just beneath the surface. “I was really envious of Elton John,” the diminutive glam-rocker told journalist Spencer Leigh. “He made about seventy-two sides [recordings] for those cheap labels. The idea was to copy the big hits of the moment, like ‘Signed, Sealed and Delivered’, as accurately as you possibly could. Elton was brilliant at it. He could do ten a day and he’d get paid £8 for each one. I also wanted to do them, but even then my voice was thought to be too distinctive. I could never impersonate anybody else.”