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

by David DeCouto

  Cousin Ray was to prove a slightly less begrudging friend. Grateful for all the help his relation had shown him, Elton gave Ray £12,000 to open a clothing boutique called Lady Samantha.

  The gesture seemed to open the floodgates of familial generosity. Within weeks, the pianist bought his mother a three-bedroom home—dubbed the Gingerbread House—in nearby Ickenham, as well as a sleek white MGB sports car. When she and Derf finally married that spring, Elton volunteered to witness the union, signing the marriage certificate: Elton Hercules John.

  Not to be outdone by his more glamorous partner, Bernie splurged on a magenta Rolls that came with all the trimmings.

  “I even had a phone put in the Rolls,” he said. “One of the very earliest type, when you still had to ask an operator for the number. I never called anyone on it, because of all that hassle of going through the operator. One night, we were sitting in the car outside the BBC, and we suddenly heard a beep but had no idea what it was. Then I realized, ‘My God, it’s the car phone! Ringing for the very first time!’ I rushed to answer it, but before I could pick it up, it stopped. I never discovered who the call was from. And it never rang again.”

  When not missing phantom calls, Bernie often found himself hanging out at the trendy Tramp disco in St. James. “There was me, Rod Stewart, Ringo, Gary Glitter. Others came and went, but Rod, Gary and I were the nucleus. You’d see our picture in Melody Maker with a caption saying, ‘Yes, it’s the same old crew again…’” The lyricist laughed. “It was just like still being schoolboys, really. You did the same thing every night—went to some club and got legless while your car waited outside…I’d end up so wasted, I wouldn’t even know which of the cars outside the club was mine. I put Harry Nilsson into what I thought was my car one night, and told the driver to take him back to his hotel. Next day, I found it hadn’t been my car at all, but some Arab sheikh’s. He comes out of the same club later with two hookers, and it’s gone.”

  Sharing a similar bacchanal existence, Bernie and Rod became particularly close.

  “Rod lived at Ascot, only a couple of miles [away],” Bernie later told author Philip Norman, “so if I’d fallen out with Maxine, I’d go back and sleep on his floor. He was always fighting with his girl, Dee [Harrington], so another night he’d come back to my place.”

  While Bernie and Rod were spending drunken nights passed out on each other’s tiles, Elton and his band were embarking on a four-week tour of British universities. With his new guitarist’s presence, the outing proved particularly rewarding. “It seems like more of a group now that we have four members,” he said. “Since Davey joined on guitar, it’s been like a piece of cake for me. I can really relax when I play, whereas before we had to all work at filling in the sound. It’s streets ahead of anything we’ve ever done before.”

  Nigel felt much the same. “When Davey joined, it took a lot of weight off Dee and I. We had to be thinking all the time about filling it out as far as we could and making it as big as the records, but when Davey joined we could become more of a tight rhythm section and leave the fancy stuff to him. Having Davey there really helped.”

  Dee, for his part, wasn’t quite as convinced. “In some ways, I preferred it when it was smaller,” the bassist told Record World. “I didn’t object to Davey joining, but I was a bit concerned that we might lose the image that we were in the process of building up as a three-piece. As it happened, it worked out fine.”

  Though Elton’s new lineup was proving itself a reliable live unit, all wasn’t rose petals and champagne bubbles on the concert trail. The pianist was, in fact, becoming increasingly disenchanted by the sound emanating from the stage, as muddy mixes and feedback squalls often degraded his band’s performances. Each night was a different house engineer and a different headache. Exasperated, Elton contacted Clive Franks, DJM’s studio engineer and tape operator on the Empty Sky album. “I got a call from Elton saying, ‘We need an engineer, we’ve been having problems on this European tour,’” Clive told journalist George Matlock. “The sixth one was the biggest show of the six, in a town hall in Amsterdam, Holland, and they said they really need a good sound.”

  Clive demurred, having never engineered a live show before. But a persistent Elton got his way, and later that same night Clive found himself manning Elton’s soundboard. Not having the slightest idea how to tune a PA system—and with no independent monitoring system available—Clive soon ran into trouble. Four songs in, screeches of electronic feedback began ripping through the hall.

  A fed-up Elton stopped playing halfway through “Sixty Years On,” slammed his hand on the piano, and angrily kicked his piano bench over.

  “Who the fuck is mixing the sound tonight?” he roared.

  Clive did his frantic best to minimize the damage, but was in low spirits by the time the show had ended.

  “I sat down nearly in tears,” he said. “I had let [Elton] down. He had brought me here to make it special.”

  John Reid found Clive sitting alone in the empty hall, and convinced him to go backstage to talk to Elton.

  Reluctantly Clive headed back, feeling like a condemned man.

  Elton came up and embraced him in a bear hug. “Great job, Clivey,” he said in all sincerity. “It was amazing.”

  Clive looked at him in shock. “Amazing? But you stopped the show. The sound was a disaster.”

  Elton grinned. “You should have been at the other shows.”

  Understanding the important role a competent live sound engineer played, the pianist offered Clive a full-time job that night. “Someone’s creating your sound up front, which you’re never going to hear,” Elton said. “The element of trust is one-thousand percent, because I’m hearing what I’m hearing onstage [through stage monitors], I’m not hearing what everyone’s hearing out front.”

  Moved by Elton’s faith in his abilities, Clive accepted straightaway. He quickly got himself up to speed on the vagaries of live sound mixing, and was soon expertly mixing each of Elton’s shows on a 19-channel mixing board. Being the infancy of arena rock technology, the unit Clive utilized was basic, with little equalization and absolutely no effects. “We didn’t use reverb or anything like that,” he said. “But I would do the best I could.” The engineer’s ultimate aim was to recreate onstage—as closely as possible—the aural nuances of a studio session. “So many concerts I’ve been to, I can’t breathe because the bass drum is the loudest thing in the mix. I was into sonic balance and hi-fi. I took that knowledge from the studio and I tried to reproduce it in a live situation.”

  Clive would go on to work nearly every live performance Elton gave for the next four decades.

  The afternoon before a concert at Shaw Theater in London, an extravagantly fur-coated Elton visited a small bookshop just down the road from his house. The proprietor, Bryan Forbes, welcomed the purple-haired, green-sideburned pianist and helped him hunt down a biography on Noel Coward.

  Far from being a mere book clerk, Forbes’ was, in fact, a major player in British cinema, having starred in such British classics as The Quartermass Experiment and The Guns of Navarone, while directing such films as Whistle Down the Wind and The L-Shaped Room.

  “You know, I’m going to a pop concert tonight,” Forbes told Elton, believing the pianist to be one of the Bee Gees.

  “That’s funny,” Elton said. “So am I.”

  The pianist thanked Forbes and left. Later that evening, he drove himself to Shaw Theatre to give a benefit concert for the Council of the National Youth Theatre, whose stated goal was to provide “good theater at prices young people can afford.” Elton had initially become involved with the organization after his solicitor—who was serving as chairman of the National Youth Theatre—had invited him to a production of Peter Terson’s Good Lads at Heart. “I was so knocked out,” Elton said. “It had everything in it that everything else I’d ever seen lacked. I really became involved with it. I felt completely there.”

  When as
ked if he would be willing to play a fund-raising show for the group, Elton quickly agreed to three: one for the general public at £1 per ticket, a second for the more well-to-do at £5 per, and a final free show for the members of the National Youth Theatre who were otherwise unable to attend.

  Bryan Forbes, who was serving as the president of the National Youth Theatre, visited Elton backstage after the show and toasted his performance. “I invited him to join my wife [Nanette] and I at dinner at an Indian restaurant in Hampstead, to thank him for the concert,” Forbes said. “Princess Margaret came along as well. We became inseparable.”

  The charmingly self-effacing Forbes was soon inviting Elton over to his home regularly for dinner. It was a seemingly fated arrangement, as the pianist lived only five-minutes away. On these visits, Elton found himself particularly taken with Nanette—as she was with him. “He struck me as someone who was totally without conceit,” she said. “And it wasn’t the affectation of modesty some people put on. With Elton, it was completely genuine.”

  Elton was equally as impressed with the Forbes daughters, Sarah and Emma, whom he agreed to watch over on several occasions.

  “I remember when Deep Throat was in the cinema and Elton wanted to see it, but he was babysitting Emma,” Nanette told author Keith Hayward years later. “So he took her with him. Apparently the man in the box office said, ‘You can’t bring that child in here,’ and Elton replied, ‘How dare you! It’s not a child, it’s a midget! A forty-five-year-old midget!’ Full of apologies, the box office clerk let them in. Emma of course went to sleep, as she didn’t know what it was about anyway.”

  Katharine Hepburn came to stay with Bryan and Nanette later that spring. Excited to meet the screen legend, Elton invited her over for a swim in his pool. Hepburn accepted, bicycling over one sunny Friday afternoon in a bright green bathing suit. Declining the elaborate tea service Elton had set for her, she went straight out to his pool and did an elaborate dive into the deep end.

  Elton was preparing to join her when he spied a dead frog floating at the bottom of the pool.

  “C’mon in already,” Hepburn said.

  Elton pointed at the dead frog and shook his head.

  “I wouldn’t go in,” he later confessed. “How butch. No way was I going in that pool.”

  Hepburn swam over to the frog, scooped it up in her hands, and nonchalantly tossed it out onto the lawn.

  Elton was astounded.

  “How could you do that?” he asked.

  “Character, dear boy,” Hepburn said with a wry grin. “Character.”

  Having recently surrounded himself with those in the movie industry, it seemed only natural that Elton dip a tentative toe into cinematic waters himself. Heading off to Ascot Sound studios—located on the grounds of John Lennon’s eight-acre estate in Berkshire, Tittenhurst Park—he agreed to appear in Marc Bolan’s surrealistic documentary, Born to Boogie. Directed by ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, the three stars were soon jamming away on a barnstorming cover of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.”

  “I loved the way we did ‘Tutti Frutti’,” Bolan said in an affected faux-posh drawl. “Elton added a whole new thing to that song.”

  As well as the Little Richard performance went down, it was Elton’s cameo appearance on “Children of the Revolution” that would ultimately prove the true highlight of the day. “The version of ‘Children of the Revolution’ we did is far superior to the single Marc put out, and he knows it,” Elton said, “but it would be impossible to edit [to a releasable length].”

  Elton and Bolan would attempt to write a tune together a few days after filming on Born to Boogie had concluded. Swinging by Chez Hercules with a battered guitar, Bolan and Elton sat around a piano rocking out to songs from Bolan’s Electric Warrior album.

  Clive Banks, who had recently joined the employ of DJM, happened to be there that fateful afternoon.

  “Elton had a brilliant natural voice,” Banks said, “but Marc’s was all put-together in the studio. In real life, it wasn’t much more than a little squeak. You’d get Elton playing ‘Jeepster’ and doing a great vocal, and this squeak going on on top of it.”

  With no tours imminent, an ever-restless Elton soon joined Rod Stewart to produce a second album for Long John Baldry. Entitled Everything Stops for Tea, Elton recorded the tracks for his side of the disc at IBC Studios. The pianist was happy to be working with Rod again. The feeling was mutual, as Elton’s rooster-haired counterpart greatly admired the deep musical knowledge the former Reg Dwight brought to the table. “I respected his opinions about music,” he said. “[Elton] had a proper understanding of blues and soul, and if he liked something I had done, it meant a lot to me, coming from him. I quietly envied the way that gigantic-selling popular melodies seemed to come to him in such a constant flow.”

  Utilizing the talents of Davey, Nigel, Ray Cooper and bassist Klaus Voormann, the songs Elton produced for Baldry this time around included the Dixie Cups’ “Iko Iko,” Willie Dixon’s “Seventh Son,” and the traditional Scottish folk song “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Perhaps the most interesting moment of the double-sided sessions, however, came on the Rod Stewart-produced “You Can’t Judge a Book (By Looking at the Cover),” during which Baldry adlibbed: “You can’t judge Rod Stewart by looking at his nose/You can’t judge Elton John by fathering at his clothes…”

  Released in April, Everything Stops for Tea—which featured cover artwork by Ronnie Wood—would spend six weeks on the American charts before quietly slipping away. Proving less successful than its predecessor, the LP would mark Baldry’s final major release.

  While his partner busied himself with his former mentor, Bernie completed the first draft of a book of children’s poems (“They’re fun. You can write a couple of songs and then some silly verse…”) before heading to a Cannes studio to helm a series of David Ackles sessions.

  Producing proved a real joy for the lyricist.

  “I love being in the studios anyway,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to get behind the desk. I love the jobs which most people seem to find boring—like mixing and dubbing.” His efforts ultimately yielded Ackles’ American Gothic album, which in time would become the most celebrated album of the cultish singer’s short-lived career.

  “Rocket Man,” the lead-off single from Elton’s Château sessions, touched down in American record stores on April 17, and days later in the U.K. An instant success, “Rocket Man” garnered massive critical praise. “While astronauts are on the moon,” Record World wrote, “Elton John explores the outer limits of the possibilities of pop music. This should be a huge hit; it’s one of his best.” Across the pond, Disc’s John Pee determined that the single was “by far the best thing Elton John has ever done—it’s quite superb…this band is great, the song is great, Bernie Taupin’s lyrics are great and if the Honky Château LP is going to be like this you’re going to have to listen to it in little doses or you’ll go mad. After two hearings I was so busy singing along that I couldn’t get myself organized into taking notes about the structure of the record. Consumer, not critic, that’s me, and I can consume music like this for evermore.”

  Elton was relieved by the song’s acceptance. “We were all praying it would do well,” he said. “I was proud of it because it was the best single I’d ever released.”

  “Rocket Man” would orbit the upper reaches of the charts for fifteen weeks, ultimately soaring up to Number 6 in the U.S.—Elton’s first Top 10 single since “Your Song.” In England, the track was released as a maxi-single, along with a double B-side offering of “Holiday Inn” and “Goodbye.” All 50,000 copies of the disc’s initial printing—which incorporated a mini-LP sleeve—sold out in a matter of days. Standard printings did equally as well, powering the single to the Number 2 spot on the U.K. charts.

  “[“Rocket Man”] was the stepping stone, that [song] changed everything,” Elton later said. “It had an acoustic guitar on it, it was a different song for me. It
was a simple sound…I was becoming successful. I was so confident, musically.”

  Elton flew off to the States in late April to begin yet another American tour, his fifth in less than two years. Unmoved by the attention he was lavishing on the country, customs agents at LAX tore through four pairs of the pianist’s stacked-heeled boots, convinced they must contain secret drug-smuggling compartments.

  After none were found, disingenuous apologies were made and Elton was allowed through.

  “There you go,” he said, running his hand through a prismatic thatch of orange and green. “Now [that] they’ve naused-up me footwear. Unbelievable.”

  Elton’s latest jaunt—which opened with an earnest “Tiny Dancer” and a menacingly funky “Susie (Dramas)”—saw Elton finally traveling with his own piano, a thousand-pound Steinway model “D” Concert Grand. The instrument had been customized by Elton’s piano technicians—the action lightened and the hammers hardened—so that the keys responded much closer to an electric piano than to a standard acoustic piano, allowing Elton to pound away more manically than ever before.

  Though the customized keyboard proved perfect for the Briton’s jackhammer style, matters proved a bit less responsive offstage—at least before a May 4 gig at Jenison Fieldhouse in East Lansing, Michigan. “We had just arrived at a hotel,” Clive Franks later recalled to Radio New Zealand’s Jesse Mulligan. “It was Greyhound buses. A special charter. We were picked up at the airport, as we did each time we came into town. It was quite a drive. A couple of guys in the band were getting hungry. And Elton didn’t want to stop. An insurrection broke out. They finally stopped at a McDonald’s, I think. Elton was in a foul mood.”