Before taking his leave, Elton slipped a check for £2,000 into Edna’s hand.
“Get dad that car he’s wanted,” he said.
Stanley soon bought the auto in question—a Peugeot 504. Months later, however, with no explanation whatsoever, he quietly put it up for sale.
“I feel really sorry that we didn’t get closer,” Elton said soon after. “He has four kids now who he loves, but I don’t feel that he’s a shit. I just wish he could have loved me like that too.”
Elton had little time to dwell on misses familial connections. At his March 24 show at the Sundown Centre in Brixton—which began with the be-caped pianist being pulled across the stage in a silver cart by Bernie Taupin and John Reid—dozens of fainting girls had to be lifted over the heads of concertgoers to be carried off backstage for medical attention.
“It’s sort of disconcerting,” Elton said, “when you’re in the middle of ‘Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters’ and your eyes are closed and you can sense eighteen-ton ladies being lifted past you.”
Hardened concert-going critics were stunned by the sheer delirium Elton was now routinely generating. “I was counting the number of fainting chicks pulled up out of the audience,” Charles Shaar Murray wrote in his review of the concert. “After the thirty-eighth, I gave up. The main thing is that Elton John is now one of the very, very biggest acts in the country, and all those reports you’ve read of hysteria and madness are absolutely true. Here is a full-scale teenage idol, just like T. Rex and Slade and all them, and you better believe it. What’s more, he’s done it with better music.”
Rod Stewart appeared in leopard-skin pants toward the end of the Brixton show to present Elton with a dozen red roses, before the latter ended the show with a rollicking rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.”
“Ol’ Reg,” Rod laughed. “He doth rock the hardest.”
Following a sold-out gig at Coventry Theatre, Elton celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday with a massive booze-up, Partying on the river Thames aboard the “Sloop John D,” guests included Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood, Kenney Jones, Ringo Starr, and Harry Nilsson. The next day, the pianist—who had sent Marc Bolan a life-sized blow-up of himself naked but for a strategically placed briefcase for his birthday the September before—found a furniture-removal truck pulling up to his house. Inside were two items: the Silver record award for Bolan’s hit ‘Jeepster’, and a twenty-seven-foot-high cardboard blow-up of Bolan himself.
“It was too big for the house,” Elton said with a laugh. “So I kept it in the back garden.”
With Bolan’s image safely tucked away, Elton spent his between-gig downtime either methodically cataloging his latest vinyl acquisitions or disappearing into darkened movie theaters to escape into some fantastical alternate reality. One activity he never engaged in, however, was giving his own records a spin. “Once albums are finished, I can’t bear to listen to them,” he said. “I can’t listen to Don’t Shoot Me now, although I can play it onstage. The next one is always more important than the one I’ve just finished.”
Elton’s tour ended with a seven-date stand in Italy, for which Kiki Dee was brought along. “I did backup singing for him,” she said. “Just to get me in the feel of it.”
While in Italy, Nigel Olsson’s girlfriend, self-styled “super-groupie” Jozy Pollocky, read a local newspaper report which claimed that Elton favored the company of men. “I was reading the article and told him, ‘They’re talking about you being a homosexual.’ He said, ‘How would they know?’ And I said, ‘Come over to the mirror.’ [Elton] was wearing silver platform boots and some outrageous outfit, and I said, ‘Look in the mirror! How do you think they know?”
No ill repercussions were felt from the article. Before Elton’s April 12 show at the Palazzo Della Sport in Rome, in fact, several hundred frantic kids were so desperate to get near him that they overwhelmed his train coach, pleading for tickets to the sold-out show. To help calm the mob, the desperate, ticketless fans were allowed to join the ten-thousand already in attendance at the show that night.
With the successful completion of his tour, Elton’s next order of business was to organize a launch party for his nascent record label. Held on April 30 on the British Rail’s “Football Special”—a party train equipped with its own fully stocked bar car and discotheque—350 Rocket employees, friends and media members joined the chartered rail trip from Paddington Station to Moreton-in-the-Marsh, an idyllic village in Gloucestershire. Upon disembarking, a brass band greeted everyone with a whimsical rendition of “Hello, Dolly.” All and sundry were then led on a jovial march to an archaic banquet hall a mile down the road, where many bottles of Krug Clos d’Ambonnay were consumed as Longdancer blasted away from a makeshift stage. Key members of Rocket’s Board of Directors soon joined the band—Bernie banging arhythmically on a tambourine while Elton rocked out in a plaid safari shirt, a bottle of champagne screwed to his lips.
“A brilliant time was had by all,” the pianist said. “Mostly by me.”
The next morning, Elton found himself in an enthusiastic mood about Kiki Dee, despite the lingering effects of a champagne hangover. “We’re trying to write a special song for her,” he said. “We’ve never done that for anybody else, to try to get her off the ground, to try to get her publicity and everything. Bernie’s task is really hard because he’s got to write one as a girl. So he slips into Maxine’s dresses every morning.”
The results—“Lonnie & Josie” and “Supercool”—were featured on Kiki’s Rocket Records album, Loving and Free. Co-produced by Elton and Clive Franks, the former contributed piano to seven of the ten tracks.
“People have said that I’m risking my own reputation by writing and producing for acts who haven’t made it, but I reckon that the acts have a lot more to lose,” Elton said. “What I hope with someone like Kiki is that I can give her initial pushes, give her the benefit of my experience, help with the publicity and stand back and let her stand on her own two feet. If someone like Gamble and Huff or Burt Bacharach heard the album and said they’d like to do another one with Kiki, I’d be knocked out…Talent will always find a way in the end, but I think it criminal that so many artists have to be frustrated for so long waiting for the right break.”
Kiki was eternally grateful for the special attention Elton showered upon her. “It was his belief in me that got me started,” she said, while granting that her gratitude was perhaps enhanced by a small crush she harbored for him. “[Elton] was boy-next-door cute,” she said. “He wasn’t a sex symbol, but he had this persona and a presence about him.”
Elton and Bernie sat with esteemed pop journalist Paul Gambaccini for an in-depth interview one week before attempting a fresh attack on their new album sessions, which had failed so spectacularly in Jamaica. Gambaccini had secured the coveted interview in a unique manner—by following Elton into the men’s room during a Bee Gees concert at the Royal Festival Hall and accosting him at a urinal. “Of course, looking back now,” Gambaccini later told author David Buckley, “it’s beyond believability on the scale of rudeness. And he would have been forgiven if he had just whirled around in my direction. [But] he was a great gentleman and he looked at me and said, ‘Call Helen Walters at DJM, she’s in charge of things like that.’ We didn’t shake hands.”
Gambaccini found Elton in a much more expansive mood the actual day of the interview, which took place in his ornate, album-packed living room. Even so, the pianist did grow a bit defensive when Gambaccini mentioned a critic’s charge that certain of his records sounded overly similar to one another. “I get fucking pissed-off at people saying, ‘Their songs always sound the same,’” Elton said. “How can you say ‘Have Mercy on the Criminal’ sounds like ‘Daniel’? Or ‘Daniel’ sounds like ‘High Flying Bird’?”
As for L.A., the imminently quotable star noted: “It’s a great place to arrive in, and it’s a great place to leave.”
Speaking of their mu
tual friend Alice Cooper, Bernie noted that the Detroit-bred enfant terrible of rock ‘n’ roll was actually a “good lad” who could “really sink a few frosties.” Elton nodded in agreement. “I saw him at the Hollywood Bowl,” he said, “[and] it was incredible, with the helicopter, the shower of panties, the fireworks. It was the best-produced show I’ve ever seen. I was caught up in it myself, scrambling for a pair of panties. You can’t do anything like that in Britain. You’d get Jobsworths backstage, saying, ‘You can’t do that here. Who’s going to clean up the mess?’” He grinned. “[Alice] came down to the beach house the next day and his leg was all cut up where he had [a] fight. They really go into him. He must be a wreck.”
Elton was less impressed with past idol Jerry Lee Lewis. “They asked me to play on his album, but I said no,” he told Gambaccini. “He was so disappointing when I saw him at the Palladium, and as far as I’m concerned he was the best rock ‘n’ roll pianist ever. He could have wiped the audience out, but he just sat there and played country and western numbers as if to say, ‘Fuck you.’ And calling himself the Killer. I could kill more people with one finger than he did when I saw him.”
Of his imminent album sessions, Elton noted that “it’s going to be two albums released simultaneously, or a double album, whichever works out. If we could ever record an album as good as Abbey Road, I’d want to retire. Even though it’s not my favorite Beatles album, you hear ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and you want to fall down. Usually somebody has one good song on an album, but the Beatles had five or six mindblowers. So this is the way I feel about our next one. It’s strange, you can compare us against the Beatles: Revolver lifted them onto a higher plane, and I think Honky [Château] did that for us, and then Sgt. Pepper was their most popular and Don’t Shoot Me was ours, and then they had the White Album, and now we’ll have a double too.”
The interview ended with Elton, Bernie and Gambaccini deciding they were famished. Handing his lyricist a fistful of pound notes, Elton instructed him to drive down to the village for some take-out.
“Ten minutes later,” Gambaccini said, “we were all dining on cod and chips.”
Chapter 15:
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
John Reid officially took over exclusive management duties for both Elton and Bernie on May 10, as DJM’s contract expired. Noting that James held the copyrights to Elton and Bernie’s songs for the rest of their lives plus fifty years, Reid asked the cigar-chomping mogul if he would consider allowing the men who had actually created the copyrighted work to assume ownership. James, who was still feeling burnt by his interactions with the Beatles, rejected Reid’s request out of hand.
The impasse was yet another point of contention in an increasingly fractious relationship between Elton and James. Still, it did nothing to dampen the pianist’s confidence in Reid’s abilities. “He knows what’s best for me to do, and he also does extremely good business deals for me—very important, because I wouldn’t have a clue. I just need keeping under rein—I tend to go a bit haywire sometimes.”
Reid appreciated the vote of confidence, for his expanded management responsibilities were proving nerve-racking at best. “I was pretty scared,” he said, “because I’d had no management experience at all. But I learned as I went along, and eventually had enough knowledge to help Elton make some important decisions regarding his recording and songwriting career.”
Elton and his retinue soon reconvened at the familiar environs of the “Honky Château,” the facility having reopened its doors after finally resolving a legal dispute as to its true ownership.
“There was definitely the comfort of returning to a place that you really were familiar with,” Bernie said. “So we basically set up camp, and everything really went pretty swimmingly.” Davey shared the lyricist’s sunny feeling. “We were racking up the hits, and it was amazing,” he later said of those halcyon days. “Our musical inhibitions went away. Success became our drug, and I don’t just mean the financial rewards, I mean how great we felt when we played, and how we were received. The more successful we got, the better we played, and the easier it became to know what to play. It almost felt effortless.”
Recordings were coming with such ease, in fact, that twenty-two tracks would be completed in a mere twelve days. The genre-tripping music was earmarked for what would become Elton’s crowning achievement; tentatively called Vodka & Tonics, the album’s title would gestate during the course of the sessions into Silent Movies, Talking Pictures, in recognition of the widescreen sweep inherent in the new songs that were being laid down. Ultimately, however, Elton would decide that that title tied in too closely with the cinema on the cover of Don’t Shoot Me, and instead would christen his latest work after a favored ballad he and Bernie had recently written. Thus, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was born.
These latest sessions kicked off with the phantasmagoric one-two punch of “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding.”
“Gus Dudgeon had always said I should do an instrumental,” Elton said. “One day I was feeling really down and I said to myself, ‘What kind of music would I like to hear at my own funeral?’ I’m hung up on things like that. I really like tearful, plodding music.”
The entire eleven-minute-and-seven-second-long track was recorded in a single take, with only Nigel’s high-hat overdubbed afterward. “We rehearsed it a couple of times, but that was it,” Davey said. “Elton’s attention span—he’s very impatient. So as soon as we knew what the song was going to be, we went in and nailed it, played it straight through. I knew I would do some layering and overdubs, but still, the idea was to do as much as possible all at once. It was a lot of fun.” More for the guitarist than the lyric writer. “There’s a great deal of anger and torment in that song,” Bernie said about “Love Lies Bleeding,” which detailed the heavy toll a musical lifestyle could take on a love affair. “It’s a very real song to me…a statement of what touring and rock ‘n’ roll does to the family life.”
Though many would later surmise that “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” was composed as it had been recorded—as a single entity—in truth they were utterly distinct creations. “The two were written completely separately and we just put them together on the spur of the moment and it worked,” Elton told Robert Hilburn. “I like the instrumental better than the other one [‘Love Lies Bleeding’].” Davey, for his part, preferred “Love Lies Bleeding”—especially given the tasty, nouveau-retro power-pop guitar fills he’d infused into the manic outro. “I was going for a ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ type of thing,” he said. “That’s why the guitar has that Clapton-esque ‘waahh’ with lots of vibrato. And [Elton] emulated it [vocally] to make it like we are both crying at the end.”
Though the entire band did yeoman’s work on the track, it wouldn’t actually be completed until after the album sessions proper, during the mixing sessions back at Trident Studios in London, when Gus suddenly had an idea. “I said to [album engineer] David [Hentschel], ‘As it’s a double album, it’d be nice to have some sort of intro to the whole album. To make it a bit special.’” Originally the producer had wanted to use Alfred Newman’s iconic Twentieth Century Fox fanfare to make the whole thing a bit special, but quickly ran into licensing problems. Deciding that an overture would work just as well, he tasked Hentschel with creating a medley which blended prominent themes from “Candle in the Wind,” “The Ballad of Danny Bailey” and “I’ve Seen That Movie Too” into a seamless whole. Because the only synthesizer available was a modular, monophonic ARP 2500, each electronic voicing had to be recorded separately. The task took Hentschel the better part of a day—for a minute and nine seconds worth of music. Completing the overture, thirty-two seconds of macabre sound effects were then tacked onto the beginning. “We knew that the piece would segue into ‘Funeral for a Friend’ proper,” Hentschel said, “hence the wind and funereal tone of the early bars.”
Gus added a final element to the song—castanets�
��while he and Hentschel were creating the final mix-down. Though the song’s running time proved prohibitive for any consideration of a single release—45s could only hold a maximum of seven minutes of music per side before they suffered serious audio degradation—the epic track would go on to receive overwhelming radio-play on classic rock and album-oriented rock stations across America, quickly becoming one of Elton’s most popular songs and a live staple for decades to come.
“Candle in the Wind,” an introspective eulogy to doomed sex symbol Marilyn Monroe—who had died under shadowy circumstances eleven years prior—was also recorded that same day, May 7. Though the wistfully dramatic blend of music and lyrics was highly original, the title itself was not. “I had always loved the phrase,” Bernie said. “Solzhenitsyn had written a book called Candle in the Wind. Clive Davis had used it to describe Janis Joplin, and—for some reason—I just kept hearing this term. I thought, ‘What a great way of describing someone’s life.’”
The biggest misconception about the track was that the lyricist was a Marilyn Monroe fanatic. “It’s not that I didn’t have a respect for her, it’s just that the song could just as easily have been about James Dean or Jim Morrison…Sylvia Plath or Virginia Wolfe—basically any writer, actor, actress or musician who died young and became this iconic Picture of Dorian Gray…The point of the song was how the media distorts people’s lives…How we abuse the living, how we abuse the dead.”
Ironically, “Candle in the Wind” was cause for a rare moment of friction, however minor, between Elton and Davey. “When we first recorded it,” the guitarist said, “I did it with electric guitar. Elton’s feeling was, ‘I want this to have a bit of a tougher feel.’ In fact, he also had the idea for that guitar lick when he sings, ‘candle in the wind…’ When he sang the part to me, I went, ‘That’s so cheesy. You’re not serious. I’m not going to play that.’ It’s one of the few times we’ve had an argument like that in the studio. And he said, ‘Will you at least try it?’ And I went, ‘Ok.’ So…being the compatible guitar player that I am, the chorus came round and I played the thing—and it worked perfectly. I was like, ‘You bastard.’” Augmenting the track with a pair of revelatory acoustic guitar overdubs, Davey utilized open tuning to get the most evocative sound possible. “The song is in the key of E, so I tuned the guitar to E—it was a twelve-string, so it took forever—and came up with the arrangement.”
Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 27
