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

by David DeCouto

  Elton was eager to see what the studio had to offer; those at Caribou Ranch were equally as excited about the possibility of working with the world’s biggest star. “We heard that Elton John was thinking about recording at our place,” studio manager John Carsello said. “We already had Joe Walsh under our belt doing ‘Rocky Mountain Way’, and we had Chicago—who were a pretty mega act in their own right—but when we heard that Elton was coming, it was like, ‘Holy God!’ It was amazing. Because he was such a huge star. We were all blown away.”

  Carsello showed Elton around the studio. When he mentioned that ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Hoochie Koo’ had been recorded there, the pianist grinned.

  “That’s cool,” Elton said. “‘Cause that’s really the sound we’re going for.”

  Equally as impressive, there were three pianos for Elton to choose from—a 97-key Bösendorfer classic grand, a baby grand “rock ‘n’ roll” piano, and a mahogany 1910 Steinway from CBS Records which had an expansive history, having been used by everyone from the Benny Goodman Sextet with Charlie Christian on songs like the “The Sheik of Araby,” to Simon & Garfunkel, who utilized the instrument on “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

  Given that band members would be able to live in their own individual log cabins, Elton only had two stipulations before agreeing to book the studio: that Tannoy speakers be installed in the control room, and that the modular Olive board be replaced with a Neve 8016 recording console. Guercio and Carsello immediately agreed to both. Locating the speakers was easy, but the Neve board proved a bit more problematic. After scouring the globe, they were finally able to locate one at Abbey Road, through George Martin. “That thing was bulletproof,” John Carsello said. “It was in a big huge box in London, and they had to take it out of the box to fit it on a plane to get it flown over here. So we got it flown over and hooked it up in two days, and I called Gus and told him, ‘We’ve got a Neve, let’s go.’ And Gus booked the album for that coming January.”

  Elton was pleased—after the heavily orchestrated Trident years and the pop-flavored Château years, he felt the need to record in a fresh studio. “It was time for a change,” he said. “Even if we hadn’t gone to Caribou, we would still have changed studios…[Goodbye Yellow Brick Road] was the finish again. After it came out, I felt exactly like I did after Madman. I mean, they’re completely different sorts of albums, but they were both like curtains going down.”

  From Caribou Ranch, Elton flew to Hawaii for a mini-vacation, as well as a one-off concert at the Honolulu International Center on September 17. Though his opening band was not slated to travel with him, the pianist was adamant that they come along.

  “That was another cool thing about Elton,” Gavin Sutherland said. “We weren’t going to go with him to Hawaii—there was a financial element for us, ‘cause obviously we weren’t making the same kind of duff as Elton was. But he said, ‘No, no, no, you’re coming.’ And he made sure everything was cool. ‘The tour’s fixed together,’ he insisted. And we thought, ‘Nice one, Elton. It was very cool.”

  Sporting a slight tan from the Hawaiian sun, Elton played New York’s Madison Square Garden for the first time on September 23. Before the inevitable encores, Elton and Davey grabbed the stage-shy Bernie, who was standing in his normal spot in the wings, and dragged him onto stage. “I just stood there, absolutely petrified,” the lyricist said. “And then someone shoved a tambourine in my hand and I had to stay there and play with them through two encores. Looking back, I suppose it was quite funny, but at the time I was so nervous I almost turned and ran.”

  Critical reaction to the show—less Bernie’s percussive talents—was perhaps best summed up by critic Linda Solomon, who noted that it “was loaded with old and new material professionally executed with frequent casual and urbane conversational shticks which his ardent followers were lapping up as if it came from the Mount.”

  Despite his New York triumph, the ever-mercurial Elton boarded the Starship 1 the next day in a foul mood. Why? No one knew. Even Elton was clueless.

  “I’m a stranger to myself,” he said.

  When someone began playing “Crocodile Rock” on the plane’s organ at maximum volume, Elton had had enough.

  “Shut that organ the fuck up!” he screamed.

  Nigel Olsson came up and patted him on the shoulder.

  “C’mon back,” he said. “That cocktail organist is amazing. You’ve just gotta meet him.”

  “Fuck off, Nige!”

  The drummer was persistent, however, and was finally able to convince Elton to follow him toward the back of the plane.

  “He came out,” Nigel said, “and it was Stevie Wonder playing. On our jet. It was just insane.”

  Elton hung his head in shame as Stevie went into an energetic rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

  “Oh fuck,” the Brit muttered. “What an asshole [I am].”

  Stevie Wonder joined Elton during the encores on his Boston Gardens gig that night, the two performing energetic renditions of “Superstition,” “Higher Ground,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.”

  “So Stevie Wonder came up to do a few numbers,” Gavin Sutherland said. “So what’s he gonna use, what’s he gonna play? It had nothing to do with us, but we said, ‘Oh, Stevie’s gonna play with Elton, that’s a treat, we’ll have to check this out.’ And they decided that Stevie was gonna play our keyboard player’s Wurlitzer piano, so one of our road crew, Paul Hartley, set it up for him. And Stevie’s led out onto the stage, sits down—massive, massive applause from the audience, everyone’s got their cigarette lighters out—and he goes into ‘Superstition’. And he’s really hammering this thing. And Paul notices that, as Stevie’s playing, one of the legs of the piano is working loose. So Paul crawled across the stage, thinking that a million people watching couldn’t see him, then he gets under the piano and—for obvious reasons—Stevie doesn’t know he’s there. So Paul starts trying to tighten up the piano leg, but Stevie’s swinging his foot and leg around and he’s kicking Paul black and blue as he’s playing. ‘Cause Stevie didn’t know it was a person down there. And eventually Paul crawled back off the stage. And we were killing ourselves laughing, ‘cause it was hilarious. But Paul weathered the storm. Kicked around by Stevie Wonder. He said, ‘I'm black and blue. But it’s not so bad when it’s someone like Stevie Wonder.’ If you’re gonna be kicked, you wanna be kicked by a superstar, right?”

  The well-received performance also proved beneficial for Stevie Wonder, as it was his first appearance since a car accident had sent him into a coma months earlier. The Motown star would later credit that night as the beginning of his recovery.

  Elton’s September 30 show at the Baltimore Civic Center was slightly less cathartic. Trouble began when the pianist noticed several thick-armed security guards beating his fans with flashlights and pushing them roughly to the ground.

  “It was really tight security,” Elton said, “and this young girl came forward, just to take a photograph, and this huge guard picked her up and threw her like twenty feet in the air. And that was it.”

  Elton brought the show to an immediate halt.

  “You should be home minding your babies,” he snarled at the guards. “Now get the fuck outta here or the show’s over.”

  The guards stared up at him in disbelief.

  “Go!” Elton ordered. “Get the fuck out! Now!”

  The guards complied. Moments later, the stage was swarmed by hundreds of concertgoers.

  “Lesson learned,” he later laughed.

  The next day, Elton was banned from playing any Baltimore venues for the next seven years.

  Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was released on October 5. The album quickly shot to the top of the charts in both England and America—Elton’s second Number 1 album in a row in the U.K., and his third in a row in the States. Even in a chart filled with such future classics as the Who’s Quadrophenia, Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, and
the Steve Miller Band’s The Joker, Elton’s sprawling, double-vinyl set proved a true sensation, one that knocked the Stones’ Goats Head Soup out of the top spot in the U.S. and Canada, David Cassidy’s Dreams Are Nuthin’ More Than Wishes in the U.K., and Neil Diamond’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull in Australia.

  The cover of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was a work of art unto itself, featuring a surrealistic illustration by artist Ian Beck, after an earlier fine-art portrait of Elton by world-renowned painter Bryan Organ was deemed not commercial enough. Beck had caught the eye of the Rocket Records team through the cover art he’d created months earlier for Irish folk/rock singer Jonathan Kelly’s Wait Until They Change the Backdrop LP. “The design team at Rocket Records liked that cover,” Beck said, “and wanted something similar…I was invited to listen to the master tapes of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. So I spent a happy couple of hours listening to those then unknown songs—“Candle in the Wind,” “Bennie and the Jets,” and so on. I was given some typed lyrics and I went away to work on some ideas, to make some rough drawings. Time was of the essence, and there was a very tight schedule indeed. I think I had ten days from beginning to end to design and draw the three outer panels [for the album].” Using his friend and fashion illustrator Leslie Chapman to pose as Elton for some Polaroid reference pictures, Beck tapped into the recent revival of interest in 1930s America design and graphics. “Casablanca was re-released at this time,” he said, “and I tried to base what I was doing on a kind of dream of Los Angeles [as] the Dream Factory—the shadow of a palm tree, the bonnet of a 1930s car, etcetera.” At Elton’s request, Beck also included a Teddy Bear and a piano on the cover.

  Beck’s completed watercolor-over-pencil illustration (heightened with chalk pastel and colored pencil) ultimately showed Elton straddling the line between fantasy and reality as he steps confidently through a poster of Oz in shimmering ruby platforms and a pink silk jacket. Interestingly, a scrap of poster visible in the corner was, in fact, the “Now Showing” poster from the preceding album, Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player. “That was suggested by Elton’s management team,” Beck said. “He was moving on from the last album, onto even bigger and better things.”

  “I’ve worked with many artists,” art director David Larkham later said, “but [Beck’s] Yellow Brick Road is still one of my favorite covers.”

  The album’s triple gatefold packaging was equally as impressive, featuring as it did colorful illustrations by Michael Ross, David Larkham and David Scott which helped flesh out each song’s unique personality. Intriguingly, some of the imagery provided a link to both the past and the future: the drawing which accompanied “Dirty Little Girl,” for one, was based on an iconic Rolling Stone cover photograph of Janis Joplin, while the artwork for “I’ve Seen That Movie Too”—a pair of silhouetted lovers seated before a silver screen—would later serve as the inspiration for ‘90s cult TV favorite, Mystery Science Theater 3000.

  Calling the long-player a major pinnacle in his and Elton’s career, Bernie described Goodbye Yellow Brick Road as “the most important album we’ve put out, but every album is an important album. You have to keep establishing yourself. As soon as you let go your foothold you’re going to go down, and you can’t scramble back up again.” As for the work’s tour de force lyrics, he admitted that he had been much more rhythmic and straightforward in the way he put things down than he’d been in the past. “Whereas before—when I was a lot younger—I tried probably to make my stuff a little too arty-farty, and tried to make it not like a lyric because it didn’t impress me looking at it,” he said. “You have to make up your mind whether you’re going to write straight poetry or not, and if you want to write lyrics, [you have to] write very basically and make it rhyme and don’t try and be clever. But that’s the way I learnt, because my earlier stuff is diabolical. I mean, if you look at the stuff on the Elton John album—it’s so sterile, so cold, because it was written by somebody who was very young and rather naïve. But I’ve now become a lot looser, and the stuff I write now flows a lot easier. I don’t believe that everything’s been written, and I don’t believe it ever will be.” Despite the glossy production, most of the songs on the album dealt with the underside of human nature, a theme near and dear to the lyricist’s heart. “I’ve always been attracted to the dark side,” he admitted. “I love darkness, I love sex.”

  For his part, Elton was rightfully proud of the LP. “Yellow Brick Road is like the ultimate Elton John album,” he told journalist Eric Van Lustbader. “It’s got all my influences from the word go. It encompasses everything I ever wrote, everything I’ve ever sounded like…It’s the ultimate Elton John album.”

  Reviewers agreed, spilling a lake’s worth of ink praising the work. Record World labeled the work “a magnificent achievement. Two records of undisputedly brilliant songs and musicianship. Few albums surpass it in spirit and fewer still in intelligence,” while Phonograph Record’s Richard Cromelin enthused that “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road contains some of the most beautiful melodies and music Elton has ever made, particularly in ‘Harmony’, ‘Roy Rogers’, ‘Candle in the Wind’, ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ and the title song. He may be an incredible egotist, but with this album Elton John establishes himself as one of the leading geniuses of our pop generation. He has proven that he can do just about anything, and do it with a sense of humor and proportion.”

  Billboard deemed it “a superb set from the British artist who has not missed yet. As always, Elton John’s keyboard playing is superb, and his vocals range from the raucous rock he has often been associated with to extremely pretty ballad material….John seems able to sing almost any type of material, from rock to country to Jamaican-flavored tunes, and this double set exposes this even more. As usual, fine words from Bernie Taupin.”

  Reviewing the album for Circus, Janis Schacht noted that “Elton John is back and stronger than he’s been on record in many a blue moon. This lush two-record set moves from mood to mood with no apparent effort and a great sense of timing, class and style.” John Landau, meanwhile, reported that “Elton John bridges the gap between rock bands and solo acts. He could have gone in either direction but instead chose to go in both at the same time, throwing his version of contemporary vaudeville in for good measure. He has already out-distanced his most pretentious pretender to the throne, David Bowie, as the best of Britain’s self-conscious pop stars…Taken a side at a time, the four-sided Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is thoroughly enjoyable, the rockers moving out with more gusto than those of many bands that work exclusively in that genre, the panoramic ballads exploring his and lyricist Bernie Taupin’s inherent romanticism without apology. The production (by Gus Dudgeon) and arrangement (by Del Newman) touches are almost always interesting and often engagingly excessive. In fact, no matter how far afield he wanders, I always know Elton John is a rocker because he’s so damn brazen.”

  “Goodbye yellow brick road, and hello Elton John, all set to smash a path to the top of the album charts with this superb new collection of songs,” Melody Maker’s Chris Welch hurrahed. “He and lyricist Bernie Taupin have surpassed themselves with a double album that is bold, adventurous and vastly entertaining…Start shipping the Gold albums and special citations. It’s a corker!” Creem’s Wayne Robins heartily concurred. “It’s a Hollywood album, both superficially and in the grooves. It’s closer to the front and less presumptuous than the obsession with the American West that clearly marked John and Taupin as foreigners on their earliest albums…It figures that Elton and Bernie would choose Dorothy as their muse this time around. Lou Reed wishes he could relate to Dorothy, without invoking Garlands of self-pity; Bette [Midler] wishes she knew how. Elton knows The Wizard of Oz was a movie, and only becomes a lifestyle when you’ve blown all your options. While Reed couldn’t find his way to or from the yellow brick road unless you shot him up with sodium pentothal, Elton’s so far past that: just put on your platform shoes and let’s mostly rock.”

  Still
, not everyone was convinced. Robert Christgau deemed the album “at least three sides too long,” and graded it only a C+, while—with its seemingly oft misplaced disdain—Rolling Stone called the album an “exposition of unabashed fantasy, myth, wet dreams and cornball acts, an overproduced array of musical portraits and hard rock ‘n’ roll that always threatens to founder, too fat to float, artistically doomed by pretension but redeemed commercially by the presence of a couple of brilliant tracks out of a possible 18.” The spun-sugar cascade of “Candle in the Wind” was lambasted as “prettily solemn and unbelievably corny, a necrophilia erection for Marilyn Monroe,” while the magazine deemed “Bennie and the Jets” a “wimpy Sgt. Pepperish number.” As for the soaring title track? “Real wimpy too.” The review churlishly concluded, “What are we going to do with Elton John? He can sing, play, emote and lead a band, but he can’t get organized. This would have made a lovely, if slightly brittle, single LP. But the best tunes are obscured by drivel and peculiarly bad feelings. Not all fantasies are so rosy. Ugly ones mark a nice guy’s record.”

  Beyond the eloquent harmonies of the myriad hits eventually pulled off the disc, a host of album tracks would also become mainstays on progressive FM rock radio. “Grey Seal,” “All the Girls Love Alice,” “Harmony,” “The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1903-34),” and “Roy Rogers” in particular could be heard blasting forth from transistor radios from Maine to Maui, and likely would have all proven Top 10 singles, had they ever been released in that format.

  “I must say, I was sort of worried,” the pianist conceded. “Not that the stuff wasn’t good, but whether people would be ready for a double album from me. I was worried about the price.” He needn’t have concerned himself—Goodbye Yellow Brick Road would go Gold in its first week. Moreover, the LP would stay atop the American charts for two months, remaining in the Top 40 for forty-three weeks, and in the Billboard Top 200 for a staggering 108 weeks.