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

by David DeCouto

  “One thing I’ve noticed about you,” Forbes said, “[is] that you don’t sort of talk the jargon very much.”

  The pianist shook his head in disgust. "Oh, I can’t stand all that. Well, there is a jargon in pop music, and it goes sort of similar like, ‘Oh man, I really dig your records. I really got spacey all night and stoned, man, and what a trip, man. And then I went round to the supermarket and what a bummer man, all those straights there really getting themselves together, trying to hustle some bread together for the weekend.’ And that’s the jargon, and I can’t stand that. ‘Spaced out, man. I really feel spaced out.’ We’ve got our own language in the band anyway, I suppose.” He laughed. “It’s call bad language."

  When asked which groups he most looked up to, Elton immediately named the Beatles, for all that they’d been through. “I think they got conned and ripped-off like nobody else should have done in their position, because they’re such immensely talented people,” he said. “And I admire the Rolling Stones because they’ve been through hell and firewater as well, and they’re still together. [They’re] the two groups that I admire most.”

  As candid as Elton was, however, some of the most enlightening statements in the film were made by those closest to him. “He’s had darker moods since he made it in the pop world than he ever did before,” his mother confessed. “I know when he’s in a mood, but I never expect him to be over the moon any time. He’s just not that nature.” Dick James, meanwhile, noted with a wry grin, “The artist on his way up lives with failure magnificently. I’ve never yet met one who could live with success.”

  The documentary aired that December on the BBC, flickering across more than half the sets in Britain. A longer version was cut for the American market and broadcast the following May, on ABC-TV.

  Not surprisingly, fans on both sides of the Atlantic proved more appreciative than the critics. “Mr. Forbes seems to be convinced that he is reporting the Second Coming,” sniffed John J. O’Connor in the New York Times. Of the star subject, however, O’Connor reluctantly conceded that Elton was “refreshingly free of trade jargon,” and “a talented composer and a marvelous pianist.” Critic Tony Palmer noted, “I suspect the real Elton John is neither the glittering dummy, beloved of the fashion magazines, nor a songwriting machine with a noble heart and lofty aspirations,” while another reviewer opined, “One gathered little about Elton John himself—reality seemed barely discernible. Yet this young pianist singer…is skeptical enough to send up not only himself but everybody else, including Mr. Forbes.”

  As the year came to a close, Elton booked himself into the Hammersmith Odeon for a string of Christmas concerts, much in the spirit of the Beatles holiday shows a decade earlier. Ticket demand was so great, Elton was forced to add an additional afternoon matinee performance to the schedule. The public’s interest was justified—these shows were unique events, from the set list down to the staging, which featured a fully trimmed Christmas tree, special lighting, and a prominent neon sign that proclaimed WATFORD beside Nigel’s sequined crimson drum dais.

  Musically, Elton treated the crowd to seldom-played deep cuts such as “The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-34)” and “I’ve Seen That Movie Too”—along with a spirited instrumental take on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

  “I’m available for weddings, Christmas parties, everything—ten pounds an hour,” he joked.

  When a desperate roadie desperately attempted to restring Davey’s guitar halfway through the final show, Elton launched into an unscheduled solo rendition of “This Song Has No Title.” During the last encore, polystyrene snow began falling from the rafters, jamming up the pianist’s keyboard and rendering his instrument useless. By that point in the evening, no one in the ecstatic crowd cared.

  Charles Shaar Murray noted in his review that Elton “never fails to put on a great show. Young girls adore him, probably because he reminds them of their last teddy bear. What he loses in sinuous attraction/repulsion he makes up in sheer solid lovableness.” Critic Simon Frodsham, meanwhile, wrote that “not only did the concert give the audience a memorable evening of entertainment which would be virtually impossible to equal at another rock concert, but it also reaffirmed Elton John as the country’s most valuable asset since the Beatles. Long may he continue.”

  The feeling was universal. Not only was Elton the top concert draw in the civilized world, but by the end of the year all three major American music trades—Billboard, Cashbox and Record World—had designated him as their top singles and albums artist as well. His December 22 show alone resulted in six separate bootleg albums: Saturday Night’s Alright, Christmas Concert, (No Title), Elderberry Wine, B-B-B-Benny, and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, all of which sold out by New Year’s Eve.

  King John had indeed well and truly arrived.

  Part Three:

  Ol’ Pink Eyes is Back

  Chapter 18:

  Caribou

  Elton and his band flew back to the States on January 4 to begin work on the follow-up to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. Bernie already had a title set: Stinker. That ironic moniker would soon be dropped in favor of Ol’ Pink Eyes is Back, with a proposed album cover featuring Elton as Sinatra, complete with a fedora and a glass of scotch, a dinner jacket flung casually over his shoulder. Other titles for the as-yet-unrecorded work were considered as well, though—as the pianist noted—“Charlie Watts’ wife had the best one. She wanted to call it Ol’ Four-Eyes is Back.” Ultimately, on the advice of no less than Ringo Starr, Elton would ultimately style his latest LP after the studio at which it was birthed: Caribou.

  While Elton was enthused about working at Caribou Ranch, the band had mixed feelings about their new environs. While Dee and Davey preferred the sun-drenched Château, at least initially, Nigel immediately favored Caribou, as its extreme altitude allowed for Herculean vocal efforts. “We found that on background vocals we could sing whole octaves higher,” the drummer said. “And we didn’t realize that until we came down and tried to perform these songs on stage. And it was, ‘Shit, I can’t hit that note. What happened?’”

  These sessions not only marked Elton’s first album work on U.S. soil, they were also Ray Cooper’s first outing as a fulltime member of the band. While most any other musician on the planet would have been eager to have counted themselves as one of Elton’s band mates, the percussionist was a bit more circumspect. “Ray kept saying all the way through, ‘I’m not really in the band, you know. I’m not actually in it. I’m just here,’” Gus said. “‘Don’t assume that because I’m here, I’m in the band.’”

  Whether officially a band member or not, Ray immediately made his impact felt via a myriad of percussive instruments that included congas, tambourines, whistles, vibes, snare drums and castanets bells. “It’s not very difficult to determine what you do with Elton’s music,” he said. “It’s very lyrical. Certain lyrical aspects suggest musical sounds.”

  After the musical feast that was Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, these new sessions were meant to serve as a palate cleanser of sorts. “I’m trying to get things simpler all the time,” Elton said. “To get away from arrangements and make things looser. Not as loose as the Stones or the Faces. More like Joni Mitchell.”

  Even with a self-imposed mandate of a more easygoing process in place, the pressure Elton found himself under was greater than ever—for he and his band had only ten days to write and record an entire LP’s worth of new material before jetting off to play sold-out dates in Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Following that excursion, back-to-back tours of Britain and Europe were already booked for early spring. Losing several days to technical glitches—the team had considerable trouble adjusting to Caribou’s monitoring system, which was flat and non-dynamic compared to that at the Château—left only two days to write fourteen songs, and just four days to record them all.

  “Our mistake,” Gus said, “was to turn Caribou into an English recording studio.”

  Elton n
odded. “I never thought we’d get an album out of it,” he said.

  Elton was of two minds as the sessions began. While he loved the challenge a new album represented, he was at the same time put-off by the fact that he was back in a studio again already, his contractual hand having been forced by Dick James’ ungracious refusal to accept Goodbye Yellow Brick Road as two albums. The situation caused the pianist’s occasional black moods to worsen dramatically. His ever-increasing alcohol consumption didn’t help matters either.

  “I started drinking 100-proof liquor and getting really out of it, for no reason,” he said. “I used to obliterate myself…There was whisky floating all around my body.”

  Aiding in Elton’s musical efforts this time around were the famed Tower of Power horn section, which added a fierce R&B kick to the first track attempted, a glistening tango rocker entitled “You’re So Static” which Elton called “a send-up of groovy, trendy American ladies.”

  “We thought brass would be really nifty for ‘You’re So Static’,” Gus said. “Somehow or another I came up with the idea of the Tower of Power people. I met them and I talked to Greg Adams, the lead trumpeter and arranger. I said, ‘I want you to bring the band up to the office and have them play the parts to me over a backing track.’ So about a week later these guys showed up. They get their horns out and I ran the track. I thought, ‘Well, I’d better play it fairly loud,’ because six of them stood there. I played the track really loud. I mean, the speakers were jumping off the bloody wall. And they hit the first thing and completely drowned the tape out. I’d never heard anybody play that loud or that tight [before]. It was just unbelievable.’”

  Pleased by the way “You’re So Static” came out, Elton considered the track one of his strongest musical accomplishments to date. “I think [‘You’re So Static’] could have even made it as a single,” he said. “It sounds like a Boots Randolph song.”

  Tower of Power’s sax player Lenny Pickett lent his solo chops to the next two tracks as well, bringing a piquant wistfulness to the bright country ode “Dixie Lilly” and, more significantly, contributing a sizzling solo to the most unabashedly hard-edged track Elton had ever attempted, an E-flat rocker called “The Bitch is Back.”

  Far from being a slam of Elton’s rock contemporaries, as many critics would later posit, the cacophonous yet crisply melodic song was actually a tongue-in-cheek dig at himself. The title phrase, in fact, originated from an offhand comment Maxine Taupin made the November before, when Elton stormed into their living room in a foul mood: “Oh God,” she’d sighed. “The bitch is back.”

  “‘The Bitch is Back’ is a real raunchy rock ‘n’ roll number,” the pianist said. “That’s one of my favorite tracks…It’s one of the best rock ‘n’ roll things we’ve ever done. We were even going to call the album The Bitch is Back, but we thought it was a bit too passé to call it that. It doesn’t really sum up what the album is about.”

  The hard-hitting track was also a favorite of Davey’s, who featured heavily on it. “I loved playing with out-of-phase sounds,” he said. “On ‘The Bitch Is Back’, there are two direct guitars in the out-of-phase setting, and they’re tuned to an open-G chord. Then you mix those with two Flying Vs, and it’s a great sound, the humbuckers with the single-coils. You get that bite with the attack.”

  Dee’s “pignose bass”—in actuality a standard bass run through a phased low-end Hog 30 amp, a gift Gus had given Davey—added an additionally strident element, while backing vocals from Dusty Springfield, Jessie Mae Smith, Sherlie Matthews and Clydie King—recorded later in an L.A. studio—helped solidify the wickedly bawdy romp. The vocals proved a bit of a challenge for at least one of the singers.

  “At the time, I was very spiritual,” Sherlie Matthews later recalled. “I didn’t curse, and all that stuff. And Clydie was the one who contracted the session. So when we got ready to sing the song, she looked at me all apologetically and said, ‘Sherlie, I didn’t know we were gonna say the word ‘bitch’ so much,’ and I said, ‘It’s okay, Clydie.’” She laughed. “We were all in long dressed all the way down to the floor and it was the funniest thing, we really got into the song, jumping up and down and moving to the music.”

  “The music was wonderful and Elton was a wonderful person to work with,” Clydie King agreed. “He was all man. He is a man, he knows how to treat a woman. He handed us red roses when we finished singing. I was in heaven. Elton was the gentleman of gentlemen.”

  “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me,” the session’s signature ballad, came next.

  “Elton was just unbelievable,” John Carsello said. “My office was off the main cabin that he stayed in. There was his house and then a connecting door that locked, but we kept things open most of the time, and between my office and his house was just a tiny laundry room. So I’d open the door, and I could hear him writing songs. Bernie would show up with the lyrics, just written on notebook paper, and Elton would put them to music. And I could hear him working out songs on his piano, a 1925 Knabe baby grand. And he was cool, you could walk in there and chat. I could hear him singing songs on the piano in there like ‘The Bitch is Back’ or ‘Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me’, which were just amazing, though of course I didn’t know at the time what they were going to be.”

  Nigel’s senses were more finely attuned to future classics than the studio manager’s senses were. “It was early morning and I was upstairs in my room, half awake,” he said, “and I could hear Elton downstairs…sort of plunking out the first few verses [of ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’]. He seemed to be struggling with the first line of the chorus, when all of a sudden he got it and the whole chorus started to come out.”

  The drummer ran downstairs and stood beside Elton’s piano.

  “That’s going to be a Number One,” he said.

  “Stop it, now,” the pianist said, blushing.

  Nigel repeated his comment, excited at the prospect of recording a song with such obvious potential. “I knew exactly what I was going to play,” he said. “I could hear the finished record when he was writing it.”

  Bernie was also thrilled by the heartrending ballad, which had perfectly fulfilled its brief. “[Elton and I] wanted to write something big,” he said. “I mean big in that dramatic Spector-y style, like ‘You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling’. Hopefully being powerful without being pompous. I’m not sure, with this in mind, it made me fashion the lyrics any differently, although…they do seem to have a slightly more Brill Building flare to them, so it’s entirely possible that I did.”

  As the band was cutting the track later that same afternoon, Gus happened upon a uniquely inventive method of adding ambience to Nigel’s drumming. “He was playing the straight cymbal [at the start of the song],” the producer said, “[and] I wanted to get this thing where I heard the up-close sound but also the sound I hear when I’m down the other end of the room, which is this slight delay bouncing off the walls. So I put a mic down there, cranked the mic up, and it sounded really great. But it wasn’t as long a delay as I wanted. Eventually, I climbed a ladder and put the mic in the corner as far as I could away from the drums.”

  “The Nigel Olsson Signature Sound is basically Gus,” Nigel said. “The key to my drum sound is the close-micing and the faraway-micing. Gus and I spent days and days on where the microphones should be, how high and far away [to create the proper delay effect]. The cymbal sound is also the delay you get. People ask me how you get that high-hat sound. It’s just the way that high-hate would go with the cymbal.”

  “It’s [also] the way [Nigel] played,” Davey added.

  Gus then brought in Del Newman (“Del was one of the finest—[a] genius arranger and a good guy”) to add a noble brass arrangement to the track.

  Newman was pleased to have been asked back, being a huge fan of not only Elton’s, but of his producer as well. “[Gus] was an absolute gentleman. He reminded me of an overgrown public school boy, and he always calle
d me ‘squire’. He worked quietly and was very professional in the way he approached the challenges that were presented to him.” The arranger was particularly enthused for this assignment, as he felt that “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” was one of Elton’s very best efforts to date. “It had a grandiose dimension to it, although its roots came from the southern states of America,” he said. “The brass gave it weight, and this helped to build the momentum coming in late in the song and adding to the glorious finale…I take my hat off to Gus Dudgeon, for it was one of the best productions to come out of the Seventies.”

  “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” would prove more of a challenge vocally than it did instrumentally, with the original background vocals—consisting of Billy Preston, Cat Stevens, Brian Wilson and Dusty Springfield—being scrapped after Gus had deemed them “too discordant.” New backing vocals were then rerecorded with the Beach Boys’ Carl Wilson and Bruce Johnstone, Billy Hinsche, as well as the Captain & Tennille’s Toni Tennille. “The thing that was kind of amazing,” she said years later, “was that when Daryl [Dragon] and I worked in clubs and tried to make our way and tried to get noticed by the record companies, we played in some dumps. We were your friendly Top 40 band, and we did a ton of Elton songs. ‘Honky Cat’, a ton of them. So it was a very interesting feeling, and exciting, to sing backgrounds on a real Elton John recording.”

  The spectral results, arranged by Bruce Johnstone and Daryl Dragon, were much more in line with what the producer had originally envisioned for the track. But nailing the lead vocals proved an even more arduous task.

  “When Elton sang the vocal track, he was in a filthy mood,” Gus said. “On some takes, he’d scream it, on others he’d mumble it. Or he’d just stand there, staring at the control room.”

  “I can’t fucking get this!” the pianist wailed. “My fucking voice is getting blow-out up here [so high above sea level]!”