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

by David DeCouto

  Far more important than the mutable whims of the critics, however, the creative team behind the disc were deeply satisfied with what they’d achieved. “For me, Captain Fantastic will always remain an entirely satisfying work,” Bernie said. “Possibly the only album we have ever made where every track fits into a cohesive pattern free of any corrupting elements…It’s time in a bottle, a potent capsulated snapshot of a crucial period in our lives that helps to remind me that nothing comes easy…[Elton’s] turn with a melodic phrase is unbeatable. When Elton’s on the ball, man, nobody writes melodies like Elton, and I’m proud to be the one who sticks the lyrics in there.”

  “Elton’s a spoiler,” Gus told Circus Raves’ John Tiven. “He really is a bloody nuisance. He writes these songs in twenty minutes, we do the track, and then he does the vocal track in about half an hour. Then I go in the studio with some other group that I’m working with and spend four or five hours on a vocal—which is quite normal—and I think, ‘Christ, these people are so slow’…When you work with people who aren’t quite that together, it makes you appreciate [Elton] even more.”

  Elton, for his part, was succinct. “I think [Captain Fantastic] wipes the floor with Yellow Brick Road.”

  Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy would go on to be nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year. Elton would also be nominated for Best Vocal, Male, for “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Beyond its unheralded success in England and America, the album would also land at—or near—the top of the charts in Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, Finland, France, New Zealand, Norway and Spain. It would eventually sell well in excess of ten-million copies globally.

  Chapter 24:

  Chameleon

  With his newest LP sitting pretty atop the charts, Elton finally began pulling a new band together. Having decided to keep guitarist Davey Johnstone and percussionist Ray Cooper, his first new acquisition was drummer Roger Pope. Roger was no stranger to Elton’s work, having played on the “Lady Samantha” single, as well as on sessions for Empty Sky, Tumbleweed Connection, and Madman Across the Water.

  Elton called Roger the day after he saw him drumming behind Kiki Dee on Top of the Pops.

  “I’m shutting Kiki’s band down,” he said. “Consider yourself out of work.”

  “Cheers, ya bastard. Thanks a fucking lot.”

  The pianist laughed. “Hang on, Rog. I’m putting a new band together and you’re gonna be in it. Come over to the office so we can talk about it.”

  Two hours later, Roger arrived at the Rocket Records headquarters in London. The office had a different feel to it, as Steve Brown, Elton’s longtime champion and project coordinator, had recently left the company. “John [Reid] and Steve were often having fights,” Stuart Epps said. “And though Steve was sort of meek and mild, he still wanted to run things. So there would be clashes. Eventually, Steve got fed up with that and more or less wanted to retire. He was a real sort of country guy—he liked country life and everything—and he just wanted to get out. And so he did…and John started running the show, which is what he always wanted to do, I suppose.”

  As Roger came crashing through Rocket’s front door, John Reid uncorked a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Johnnie Walker Blue and pulled out a vial of coke.

  Elton and Roger embraced.

  “So who do we want?” the pianist asked. “We can get anyone at all.”

  Roger shrugged. “Caleb, of course. He’s the greatest fucking guitarist in the world.”

  Elton placed a call to the guitarist, who had kept himself busy playing numerous high-level sessions, including one with Lou Reed on his self-titled post-Velvet Underground album.

  “I was living in Chicago at the time,” Caleb said. “I’d heard something about the other band breaking up. Something had exploded or they’d gotten fired. ‘What’s going on here?’ Then out of the blue I got a phone call from Elton, he told me that Nigel and Dee were always complaining, they were never satisfied with the way things were. And more to the point, Elton wanted a bigger band, and he wanted it to be more rock-oriented—to rock a little harder—and he said, ‘Popey’s in there already, and you’re the only guitar player in the world. It’s up to you.’ So I said, ‘Okay, fantastic.’ Of course I was freezing in Chicago, so that was great.” He let out an easy laugh. “Elton told me what he wanted to do—he wanted his band to be looser, funkier.”

  “So that’s it,” the pianist concluded. “You in?”

  “Sounds great. I’d love to do it, but on one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That we don’t play ‘Crocodile Rock.’”

  Elton groaned. “Fine.”

  “I hated that song, and he knew I hated it,” the guitarist said. “Too mainstream, too commercial. But he agreed to it, and that was that.”

  While having two lead guitarists in the same band could prove problematic, any potential rivalry between Caleb and Davey was diffused by the former’s easy-going personality and the latter’s magnanimous nature. More than anything, the Scotsman was glad to have Elton’s original fret man back in the fold. “Caleb’s one of my favorite guitar players,” he said. “He’s a brilliant player, capable of playing almost any kind of music.”

  Elton next decided that a synthesizer player was necessary to help flesh out the soundscapes he imagined his new band creating. “I needed the keyboard player to do Moog and things like that,” he said. “There’s a lot of orchestration-type stuff on [Captain] Fantastic, and I just can’t fiddle around with knobs and all that. I just want to stick to playing piano and singing.”

  The pianist turned to multi-keyboardist James Newton Howard, a highly sought session man who’d recorded with everyone from Art Garfunkel and Ringo Starr to Carly Simon and Melissa Manchester. “I didn’t play a note for Elton,” James said. “I just went up to his house and we sat on the couch together. We couldn’t talk—we were both very nervous—so instead he played me Captain Fantastic.”

  As the album ended, Elton turned to Howard and held out his hands.

  “You’ve got the gig if you want it,” he said. “We’re leaving for Amsterdam in four days. We’re gonna rehearse for two weeks, and then we have a concert at Wembley Stadium in front of 80,000 people, with the Eagles and the Beach Boys opening for us.”

  “Okay,” James said, stunned. “I’m in.”

  Elton wrote out a set list—James had three days to learn thirty-five songs.

  As he stumbled numbly toward the front door, a member of Elton’s management team stopped James and wrote down the figure he’d be earning as a member of the band.

  “It was like fifty-five-thousand times what I had ever made in my life,” James said. “I went outside and just screamed my heart out.”

  Last into the fold came bassist Kenny Passarelli. A classically trained trumpeter who had played fretless bass with Joe Walsh in Barnstorm, Kenny had co-written the 1973 hit “Rocky Mountain Way” with the perpetually-stoned future Eagle and keyboardist Rocke Grace.

  “One day Joe Walsh calls me up,” Kenny said, “and he tells me, ‘Hey man, Elton’s breaking up his original band and he wants you to be part of his new group.’ I liked Elton’s first album, and ‘Your Song’ and ‘Levon’—and I loved the Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album—but that was kind of it. But I wasn’t gonna turn that gig down. He was the biggest star on the planet. He was fucking huge. He was fucking everywhere.”

  Connie Pappas, Rocket Records’ Executive Vice President, called from their U.S. office and asked Kenny if he could come over to Paris to audition. “And she told me what I’d earn,” Kenny said. “It was some astronomical number. And I was on tour at the time with [guitarist] Joe Vitale, so I said, ‘Can Elton call me himself?’ ‘Cause you never know, man. But sure enough, Elton calls me the next day, and that was it. I left Vitale, who was really fucking pissed at me at the time. I just split. There were bad vibes. Someone even stole my bass. I just got out of there.”


  Arriving in Paris, Kenny got into Elton’s Corniche Rolls. “And I’ll never forget it, he kept playing that 10cc song, ‘I’m Not in Love’, just looping it, playing it over and over as we drove from Charles de Gaulle (Airport) out to the Château. And forty minutes later, there it was: the Honky Château. It was un-fucking-believable.” Kenny laughed. “So I’m sitting in the back of this Corniche and I’m going, ‘This is really far out’, and Elton doesn’t say a word. I swear to God, he was so shy.”

  When Elton’s Rolls pulled up the Château’s gravel drive, Kenny turned to him and asked how the audition process would go.

  Elton shrugged. “You know what? I’m jet-lagged. I’m gonna go to bed. Talk to the band.’”

  Davey Johnstone came over to the bewildered bassist.

  “You wouldn’t be here if there was an audition,” Davey said. “There’s not a problem here. You’re already in the band.’”

  Kenny was flabbergasted. “And then Davey said, ‘Elton John is bisexual.’ I looked at him kind of funny and I said, ‘Okay, well what does that mean? Am I gonna have to audition for him that way?’ I mean, I’d been around Stephen Stills and Joe Walsh, you couldn’t really get any more macho than the people I’d been around most of my life, all these rock ’n’ rollers. But Davey said, ‘Elton is cool, man. He’s got his own scene, he’s got his own entourage. He’s incredible, man, he’s the ultimate professional, you’re gonna love working with him, he’s fucking unbelievable. But that’s the scene and nobody knows about it, because the record company knows that he’s got such a huge audience of young girls that it’s not good business as far as that’s concerned.’ And I said, ‘I understand.’”

  Kenny was supposed to hear a playback of Captain Fantastic the next day before beginning work on a solo album for Davey. “And that was gonna be the first rehearsals with the new band, Davey’s solo record, breaking in the new band. But we had problems with the studio. We couldn’t even play Captain Fantastic. Bad Company had just recorded there and some bullshit stuff had gone down, so we ended up just canceling the session. That was it. Elton said, ‘Fuck this.’”

  Before the group left, Elton and Kenny jammed one-on-one on “Bennie and the Jets” and a couple other tunes. “I’m not gonna lie, I was pretty intimidated the whole time,” the bassist said. “But it was obvious there were no problems, and that’s how it started. He said, ‘You’re very heavy’, and that was it. I was in the band.”

  Elton put his new band through their paces in Amsterdam in early June. The entire ensemble—including backup singers Brian and Brenda Russell, and Donny Gerard—rehearsed for ten hours a day for two weeks straight, in a barren film studio hanger by a canal.

  The group meshed beautifully.

  “Practice went well,” Caleb said. “We all jelled from the first bar. It was a tight band.”

  “Things that Nigel used to do, I’ve kept in,” Roger said. “There’s a few drum parts he had worked out with Ray. It’s fairly logical, what you have to play. It all came pretty quickly.”

  Brenda Russell was particularly impressed with her new employer’s work habits. “We’re in this sort of arena,” she said, “and Elton came out into the rehearsal and started playing like there was 20,000 people in the arena. And that was the kind of energy he put into the rehearsal. And we were up-and-coming artists, and Elton is playing like there’s thousands of people in this arena, which was completely empty. And we looked at each other and went, ‘Shit. Is that what you have to do to be a star?’ We were blown away by his intensity. It was a great lesson, to be giving it up at all times.”

  Each night after rehearsals, the musicians would retire to the Amsterdam Hilton—infamous as the setting for John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “bed-in”—and partied with abandoned.

  “Davey and I just hung out and got high and learned all the tunes,” Kenny said. “I got to know Davey. I love Davey Johnstone. We had the greatest time. Partying like there was no tomorrow.”

  Two days in, Keith Moon—who had been best man at Roger Pope’s wedding—walked into the rehearsals unannounced with his girlfriend.

  “He sat himself down on Roger’s drums,” Caleb said, “and started doing this whole Who concert, top to bottom, just all by himself. He was going all over the place, bashing the hell out of everything. And then he just threw the sticks down and stood up. ‘Okay. That feels better,’ he said. And he and his girl just walked off.”

  Not to be outdone, Ringo Starr showed up the next day. “We were all on a three-day cocaine binge at the time,” Caleb said, “and I asked Ringo about Sgt. Pepper, and he was so stoned that he couldn’t even remember the album.”

  “Could I sit in on a few songs with you?” the ex-Beatle asked the band. “You guys sound great.”

  When everyone readily agreed, Ringo climbed behind Roger’s drum kit and picked up a pair of sticks. Before a single bar was played, he noticed that he was holding his own customized ‘Ringo Starr’ sticks.

  “Own up, you’re a fan,” Ringo said to Roger with a laugh. “Many thanks.”

  Roger simply chuckled.

  “I’d bought up all three-hundred pairs of Ringo Starr drumsticks from this music shop in London,” he later recalled. “Not because of Ringo, who was great—not a great drummer, but a great Beatle, if you know what I mean—but because I really liked the weight of his sticks. They were nice and heavy. Great heft. Great for bashing away.”

  With Ringo on traps, the band ran through “Pinball Wizard” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  “You know, I’m not doing anything at the moment,” the drummer said afterward. “How about I come on tour with you guys?”

  “We stayed up all night racking our brains as to what to do,” Caleb said. “Poor Roger was going totally crazy, figuring he might lose the gig to the world’s most famous drummer.”

  “How do you say no to the Beatles’ drummer without upsetting him?” Roger wondered. “It was a very strange situation.”

  In the end, it was left to John Reid to deliver the bad news to Ringo.

  “I remember,” said Nancy Lee Andrews, Ringo’s paramour, “the song that was famous then, ‘I’m Not in Love’. And we were up in Elton’s room that night, and all he did was play that song over and over and over. And I said, ‘Elton, you have a broken heart.’ And he said, “I do, man. I do. And this song just breaks my heart.’ And I said, ‘Who’s the lucky guy?’ And he said, ‘I’ll never tell.’ I remember then I got up and went into the bathroom to put on some lipstick, and Bernie Taupin walks in and slams the door says, ‘I’m so sick of that fucking song. It’s been going on for weeks.’ Elton had a lot of crushes that I think might’ve been unrequited.”

  Pleased with his revamped lineup, Elton silently celebrated. The heavier sounds his new band was managing to generate put to rest any lingering doubts he’d had about changing personnel in the first place. “It’s fulfilling one of my lifelong ambitions. This band chugs,” he said. “Technically, Caleb and Davey—and, to a certain extent, Ray—can play anything. And, what with Kenny and James, it’s worked out that I’m literally the worst musician in the band. I’ve got to work hard to keep up with them, which is going to make me play harder and better.”

  As for having his new band debut at Wembley in front of eighty-thousand people, the pianist said that “it’s really jumping in at the deep end, but we’re looking forward to it, nerves and all. Every detail must be right. Every note, every chord. When you are on top of the tree—and I suppose we are at the moment—you are always the target for cynics. But I will not give them the opportunity to tumble me.”

  On the day of the Wembley gig, June 21, the London Times labeled Elton “the most popular single performer in the ephemeral history of rock ’n’ roll. Britain’s true successor to the Beatles.” The paper, which also included a full-color 16” x 25” poster of the superstar in all his sequined glory, sold-out in an hour.

  That same day, Melody Maker feature
d an interview by Caroline Coon, who noted that Elton “was born with the ability to make sounds feel like an electronic fix of warm opium squirted directly into the pleasure center of the brain.”

  “Women fascinate me because they are harder to get to know than men,” Elton confessed to Coon as he stretched out on his king-sized bed at the Amsterdam Hilton in a dark blue tracksuit. “They are so confused, and that fascinates me. Kiki [Dee] and Bette [Midler] don’t seem to have had anybody who really believes in them, to sit down and talk to and really show an interest in what they want to do. Ladies are so messed up. You get the wrong person behind a lady and it ruins them. I can’t think of a female artist I’ve met who seems at all secure or confident. There is so much more to find out about women than men.”

  The superstar admitted to enjoying his unparalleled success, while at the same time blaming it for having created a backlash against his music. “In America I’ve got ‘Philadelphia Freedom’ going up the charts again. I wish the bloody thing would piss off. And ‘Pinball Wizard’ is being played to death. I can see why people get sick and tired of me. In America, I get sick and tired of hearing myself on AM radio. It’s embarrassing.”