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

by David DeCouto

  After having succeeded so well in Great Britain, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” was released in America on June 10. The harmony-soaked ballad bettered its performance in England, peaking at Number 2. Another Gold single for Elton, the mellifluent ballad would also earn another him a pair of Grammy nominations, for Pop Vocalist of the Year, Male, and Record of the Year.

  The single’s mothership, Caribou, was issued in America two weeks later. The album proved that the public’s appetite for all things Elton had only grown more voracious in the interceding months since his last long-playing release had debuted. Caribou entered the charts at Number 5 on Billboard’s Top 200, only the fifth album to ever make so high a debut. Four days later, the disc was released in Elton’s homeland. It quickly reached the coveted Number 1 spot in both countries, and would remain in the charts for well over a year. Caribou would also prove popular across the globe, reaching the Top 20 in Japan and New Zealand, Number 6 in Italy and Norway, Number 5 in Yugoslavia, and Number 1 in Australia, Canada and Denmark.

  The album featured the most striking cover yet, with a photograph of Elton—taken in a miniscule studio office above a Chinese laundry off of 3rd and Sycamore in L.A.—posing jauntily before a stylized Maxfield Parrish-esque backdrop in black, red-trimmed trousers, his tiger-skin bomber jacket, six-inch platform heels and oversized pink-tinted glasses. Inside was a pull-out sleeve with the lyrics printed on one side and a hand-tinted black-and-white portrait of the star on the other. Taken by Ed Caraeff, the pin-up-like photograph was the result of serendipity. “When the [photo] session finished,” album art designer David Larkham said, “Ed and I followed [Elton] out to his car. And as he got into the back seat, Ed said, ‘Elton’, and Elton looked up just as Ed pressed the button for the last shot of the day.”

  Critical reaction to the album, while mostly positive, was not quite as glowing as it had been for its predecessor. “I give up,” Robert Christgau wrote in the Village Voice. “Of course [Elton’s] a machine, but haven’t you ever loved a machine so much it took on its own personality? I was reminded of my first car, a ‘50 Plymouth. Then I decided Elton was more like a brand-new Impala I once rented on a magazine’s money. Then I remembered that I ended up paying for that car myself. Yes, I hate the way he said ‘don’t diszgard me’ too, but ‘The Bitch is Back’ is my most favorite song. B+.”

  “Is it as good as Yellow Brick Road?” Melody Maker’s Chris Welch asked. “Well, it’s different. An entertaining selection of hot ditties…Overall, an excellent compilation which shows the old firm haven’t lost their ability to push forward the boundaries of the pop song, and keep close to the path of good rockin’ music.” Writing in Phonograph Record, Bud Scoppa gave the record passing marks. “For an artist with distinct limitations—vocal, compositional, and stylistic—Elton John makes awfully good records. Like the three albums before it, Caribou is constantly listenable, and while it places no demands on the casual listener, there’s still some meat under the surface for those looking for meaning or structure. Elton pulls off a difficult stunt: he manages to be both intelligent and lighter than air.”

  NME’s Charles Shaar Murray was considerably less impressed, however. “Caribou had ‘product’ stamped all over it; it came on thin and forced, with only ‘The Bitch is Back’ displaying the full-tilt rock ‘n’ roll naiveté that has characterized most of Elton’s best work.”

  Even Gus had to agree with Murray’s assessment. “Caribou is a piece of crap,” he said. “The sound is the worst, the songs are nowhere, the sleeve came out wrong, the lyrics weren’t that good, the singing wasn’t all there, the playing wasn’t great, the production is just plain lousy. When I got nominated for Best Produced Single/Album of the Year, I couldn’t stop laughing. I thought it was ridiculous that I could be nominated for an award for the worst thing I’d ever done.”

  Elton, for his part, was hardly surprised by the mixed reactions his latest offering had drawn. “I’m the big cheese at the moment,” he said, “so everyone feels bound to have a go at me. I read a good piece by John Tobler in ZigZag which said the reviews of Caribou were probably written before it even came out. Anyway, so what? Reviews don’t mean that much, they don’t really sink in. You never remember them two weeks later.”

  More to the point, those close to Elton realized that with his popularity at an all-time high, critical resentment was a foregone inevitability.

  “Credible artists were those who audibly suffered or were rebellious,” journalist Paul Gambaccini said. “And he was neither.”

  Chapter 20:

  Whatever Gets You Thru the Night

  Understanding just how fickle the glittering hand of fame could be, Elton and Bernie wasted no time in turning their attentions toward their next album.

  “We came up with a science fiction concept,” the lyricist said, “but we thought, ‘No, people have done that, David Bowie…yawn, yawn…’”

  Instead, they opted to tell their own story.

  “I thought we might be accused of being conceited because writing about yourself is a bit off,” Elton said, “but I just wanted people to get the idea of what really happened. [Bernie and I] are human beings. We’re not machines, like everyone else thinks we are.”

  Bernie thus set to work on a set of highly autobiographical lyrics which detailed the duo’s early lives up through the recording of their first album, Empty Sky. “It was very interesting to write about real incidents, and it was a good lesson because, when I write very quickly, it rolls out,” the lyricist said. “With this, I took much more time. I would write something then I’d go on to something else, then go back and work some more on what I’d done previously. It was a new exercise, and I think it really paid off.”

  Bernie presented his work to Elton on July 20, the night before their scheduled transatlantic voyage to America. The green-haired pianist and his musicians were camped out at his house—his band getting stoned in the games room and Bernie and Maxine arguing in the kitchen, while he sat cross-legged in the living room, happily alphabetizing his latest album purchases.

  Just after midnight, a furious pounding sounded at the door. John Reid answered to find Keith Moon and Ringo Starr standing there in their pajamas, freezing their bollocks off.

  “Christ, look at you two,” Reid said. “Tonight’s not a good night. A bus is coming to take us to the Southampton dock in a few hours.”

  “Dear boy,” Moon said, pushing his way inside, “you told us to drop in anytime.”

  The two drummers spent the balance of the night sitting before Elton’s jukebox, drinking brandy while miming to ‘50s rock classics like “Johnnie B. Goode” and “Jailhouse Rock.”

  “An all time was had by good,” Moon noted with a wry grin.

  Elton and his vacant-eyed crew—along with traveling mates Julian and Cynthia Lennon—boarded the SS France early the next morning. As they prepared to sail toward the westerly horizon, a brass band stood on the docks playing them off with a spirited rendition of “Yellow Submarine.”

  The five-day voyage passed pleasantly enough, Elton sneaking a few cursory looks at Bernie’s latest batch of lyrics as the open sea unfolded itself below. “I can’t write a single note without his lyrics,” he admitted. “They really get me going. The energy starts flowing and I can rip off songs as fast as he can deliver the lyrics.”

  Though the pianist was champing at the bit to finally set to work, an opera singer had booked the music room for the entire trip, monopolizing the ship’s sole piano from dawn till dusk—except for her midday breaks, when she’d head to the dining room to scarf her doubtlessly outsized lunches. “So every two hours at lunchtime I used to go in there and nip out to the piano,” Elton said. “It felt so good to be writing songs that I not only understood the lyrics to, but was a complete part of.”

  Davey Johnstone joined Elton for several of these onboard writing sessions. “I had my trusty old Yamaha acoustic guitar with me,” he said. “And I cam
e up with that riff [on ‘Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy’], which was to be the first thing you hear on the record. Elton said to me, ‘I need an intro,’ and it was the first thing that I came up with as he was playing a G chord to an E-minor chord in kind of a lazy, country vibe. Which is just the way we do things.”

  Elton purposefully composed the music in chronological order, just as Bernie had presented them. “That made it easy to write in a way, because you had a link,” the pianist said. “You could visualize what song was going to finish and when the next one was going to start.”

  During the brief trip, Elton managed to compose the music for not only “Captain Fantastic” but also “Tower of Babel,” “Bitter Fingers” (“An up-tempo number, as most of the songs so far are slowsy,” Elton noted in his diary. “Very pleased with it...”), “Tell Me When the Whistle Blows” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.”

  When not writing future classics, the restless superstar busied himself with highly competitive games of backgammon and squash, while simultaneously monitoring the sales of Caribou through a ship-to-shore telephone. “You get excited by your own success,” he said. “I know a lot of artists say they never look at a sales chart, but that’s nonsense. They’re on the phone all the time. What’s the point of recording something if you don’t want to know how it’s going? It’s great having a Number One record, don’t let anybody tell you that it isn’t.”

  Elton was chuffed by Caribou’s performance; so much so that he decided to break his recently self-imposed no-carbs rule and treat himself to a warm pretzel and a glass of Mumm at the Riviera Bar with the ship’s captain. “The Chief Purser is extremely nice, but the rest of the crowd is extremely Gucci-Pucci and definitely disapproves of us,” Elton later noted in his diary. “Someone says in a rather grand voice, ‘That man over there is Elton John—he is very famous, but I have never heard of him.’”

  Arriving in New York, Elton’s entourage was met at the New York Port Authority by John Lennon.

  “Julian was a dream,” Elton told the ex-Beatle. “He waited for us outside our staterooms, escorted us to the dining room, [and] always made sure we had good seats at all the events onboard.”

  “Julian was brilliant,” Davey agreed. “He was this little guy who always had a deal going. He always had stuff in his pockets.”

  A couple nights later, on July 31, Elton stopped by the Record Plant studios on West 44th Street, where Lennon was recording tracks for what was to become his Walls and Bridges album.

  “I was fiddling about one night,” Lennon said. “I’d done three-quarters of [‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’]. ‘Now what do we do? Should we put a camel on it or a xylophone?’ That sort of thing. And [Elton] came in and said, ‘Hey, I’ll play some piano’…I knew him, but I’d never seen him play.”

  For Elton, the chance to work with the founder of the Beatles was too good an opportunity to pass up. “Lennon is the only person in this business that I’ve ever looked up to,” he said. “The only person. I’ve met people who are great, like Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend, whom I admire tremendously, but they are not in the same league. I’m sorry. He is the only person in this business who is one-hundred percent sacred to me.”

  After listening to a song called “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night,” Elton effortlessly laid a driving piano part that brought the track to life.

  “John was so impressed, all [Elton] had to do was hear it once and he knew what he wanted to put down,” May Pang said. “John stared at Elton’s hands while Elton played.”

  “I’d like to play as fast as that,” Lennon said. “Elton’s a fine musician, [a] great piano player…I was amazed at his ability.”

  It then came time to record lead vocals. The two icons huddled together and sang a duet around a single microphone.

  “The harmony came very easily to them,” May said. “Instantly, a new singing team was formed as John and Elton ripped through the vocal a couple times, getting looser each time they sang it.”

  When they were done, a smiling Lennon told his girlfriend, “I’d like Elton to sing harmony on ‘Surprise, Surprise’.”

  “He knew how thrilled I’d be to have Elton perform on the song John had written for me,” May said.

  Elton nodded his ascent. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  Adding co-lead vocals to “Surprise, Surprise (Sweet Bird of Paradox)” proved a bit more tricky than “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” had been. “[Lennon] put the vocal down first and I had to sing…double-tracked, to someone else’s phrasing. Now, I’m very quick, but that took a long time because Lennon’s phrasing was so weird. It was fantastic, but you start to understand why he was a one-off…It was quite nerve-wracking.”

  “For whatever reason,” May said, “it didn’t work out. No reflection. Some things work and some things don’t…[But] John was overwhelmed by Elton’s efforts.”

  Soon after, at an album playback session, the pianist was particularly impressed by the way “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” had turned out.

  “It’s gonna be a Number One,” he said.

  Lennon, who hadn’t even sniffed the Top 10 since “Imagine” four years earlier, had his doubts. “Ahhh, I don’t think so, Elt.”

  “I bet you it will,” Elton insisted. “And if it is, you’re gonna come on [stage] and sing it with me.”

  The famously reclusive—and painfully stage-shy—Lennon nodded. “Sure, okay,” he said. “You got a bet.”

  Despite the problems Elton and his team had faced at Caribou Ranch in January, he decided to utilize the studio again for his latest sessions. Unlike Caribou’s hurried efforts, however, the decision was taken to devote a full month to recording this time. Having acclimated himself to Caribou’s monitoring systems, Gus wisely chose to record these new sessions flat, without any reverb or effects added—opting instead to do all the work later in the mix. Moreover, Ray Cooper’s second outing as an official band member afforded him the room to stretch out more than before. “As a percussionist, I have before me an incredible range of sound color to orchestrate or illuminate lyrics or certain nuances of music. I can, therefore, generally be more liberated than a kit drummer,” he told author David Buckley. “Gus Dudgeon realized and understood this and gave me the freedom to punctuate, color and embellish many of Elton and Bernie’s songs. Gus gave the percussion sounds ‘air, space and dignity’. I’ll always be grateful to him for that.”

  As the album had been written, so it was recorded: in running order. The sessions thus began with the title track, a bucolic rocker which recast Elton and Bernie as a pair of comic book heroes—Elton as “The Captain” and Bernie as “The Brown Dirt Cowboy.” Detailing their early formative years through a gentle electric piano-accented country motif, the song shifts into hard rock overdrive for the chorus, as the duo partner up to do battle against the monolithic music industry. Though doomed to never see release as a single, “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” would eventually receive enough radio-play to easily have secured a spot in Billboard’s Top 10.

  “Tower of Babel” followed. A steely piano ballad in A-minor, the track likened the London music scene to the Biblical Tower of Babel, a debauched world of sordid degeneracy where every whim is catered to, and every warped appetite indulged to excess.

  “It’s about sharks in the doorway,” Bernie said. “Nipping at our heels, looking for blood.”

  Like much of the music created during these sessions, the song’s instrumental break, which hits—unusually—right after the first chorus, came about in a completely holistic way. “When the guitar part comes in, that was unsaid. It was just like, ‘This is what’s going to happen here,’” Davey said. “I came up with the guitar parts and the solo, and then we tracked it and I overdubbed an octave on it.” Pre-arranged empty spaces were, in fact, worked into the entirety of the arrangement, allowing the music to breathe. “Instead of having the same amount of shit on every trac
k,” Davey said, “we would instinctively know, ‘Okay, I drop out there. It just doesn’t need it.’”

  Next came a cutting indictment on the churn-and-burn mentality of Denmark Street’s music publishers called “Bitter Fingers.” The track was a particularly painful one for Elton. “This is a song about having to write songs for people you don’t really want to write songs for,” he said. “This song is about having to write with bitter fingers. What [Bernie and I] went through when we were writing all the shit we had to write before we eventually started making records that we wanted to make. I’m glad that happened, though. Because without the struggle, you don’t appreciate anything.”

  Gus double-tracked Elton’s introductory piano triplets on the track, vari-speeding the tape to achieve an otherworldly harmonized effect. “[Elton’s] so exact when he plays,” Davey said, “that he can double-track and it just sounds like one piano.” Gus then ran Elton’s piano through an Eventide Harmonizer and a rotating Lesley cabinet, which was a setup that B-3 organs were usually fed through. “Anyway, it worked,” said Davey, who got in on the studio wizadry himself by manipulating his guitar’s pickup selector switch and tone controls to add a pipey, trumpet-like guitar sound to the song. “And then [we] double-tracked that,” he said. “In actual fact, there’s very little going on.”

  After Elton recorded his lead vocals, Gus double-tracked a second lean line over the song’s choruses. It was a practice they were using more and more often, to great effect. “[Double-tracking] makes the vocals pop,” the producer said. “Helps it pop through the clutter.” Davey felt the same. “Ours were more like Beatles overdubs. They were a bit rough and ready, but they worked better that way. That’s the vibe you want. When you double-track something, the secret is you’ll get something that’s slightly different. That’s what creates that magic.”