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

by David DeCouto

  The session’s signature ballad came in the form of “I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford).” The seemingly straightforward track would prove one of the more difficult ones attempted. “Just because of the sensitivity, and the dynamics in the music,” Caleb said, referencing the song’s tonal shifts, which moved from open G-major verses to sweepingly cinematic F-minor choruses. “It required a bit more concentration.”

  Lyrically, the allegorical track (“A knife-in-the-back love song,” as Bernie said) drew parallels between Robert Newton Ford—the notorious coward who shot outlaw Jesse James in the back while hanging a picture in his living room—and a guilt-ridden man dealing with the aftermath of a failed love affair.

  After the session was over, Gus and Sheila took one of the studio’s Chevy Blazers into town for dinner. They came tearing back through the complex a couple hours later, sliding wildly around the corners, stones flying everywhere.

  “Holy shit!” Ray Cooper said, leaping out of the car’s path. The percussionist was not amused—his wife and new baby were with him at the Ranch. “Gus is gonna kill himself, or someone else.”

  Responsible for the entire studio complex, John Carsello was having none of it. “I freaked out,” he said. “Gus drove like a racecar driver. He was a wild man. So I called Gus’ cabin and I said, ‘I don’t give a shit who you are, or who you’re here with—you either slow down or you’re not driving here anymore!’ I was screaming. ‘You've gotta stop this, Gus! You’re driving like a maniac and that ends now!’ And he didn't say anything. After we hung up I see him walking up to my office, and I thought, ‘Oh-oh, this is it. This is where he goes, “Who do you think you are, talking to me like that?”’ And so I started talking first. I said, ‘Gus, first of all I wanna apologize for yelling at you, I really don't do that, but I freaked out when I saw you flying past in the car.’ But he said, ‘Nope, John, I deserved it. And I just came up here personally to apologize. And I will never drive like that around here again. You were doing your job, you did the right thing. And I’m really sorry.’”

  Elton would record only one more ballad at these sessions. On “Sugar on the Floor,” a song penned by Kiki Dee, the pianist channeled his inner Ray Charles. The spare breakup track, which told a tale of swirling emotion and striking depth—featured only acoustic piano, lead vocals, and elegiac electric guitar flourishes courtesy of Davey Johnstone, who understood—as all accomplished musicians do—that, oftentimes, less was more.

  After laying down the jazzy, vibes-driven heroin addiction serenade “Feed Me”—which featured James Newton Howard, and not Elton, on lead electric piano—Elton briefly halted the sessions to helicopter over to Fort Collins, where he was to join the Rolling Stones onstage for their July 20 show at Hughes Stadium. Accompanying him were Gus, Roger, Kenny and Caleb.

  The pianist was excited to play with his compatriots. “They’re perfect,” he said. “I mean, Jagger is the perfect pop star, there’s nobody more perfect than Jagger. He’s rude, he’s ugly, attractive, he’s brilliant. The Stones are the perfect pop group, they’ve got it all tied up.”

  The feeling, at least that afternoon, proved to be anything but mutual.

  “The Stones were treating [Elton] like shit,” Roger said. Watching the show alongside Gus high above the back of the stage, the drummer was disgusted by the shabby treatment his boss was receiving at the hands of the Stones. “Belittling him, everything. Fuckers. He was the biggest star in the world—bigger than they were by that point, and they couldn’t handle it.”

  A mascara-heavy Mick Jagger introduced Elton, who was dressed casually for the event in a cowboy hat and blue L.A. Dodgers windbreaker, as “Reg from Pinner.” It was a subtle dig which Elton gamely ignored as he and the Stone tore through a raggedly unbridled “Honky Tonk Women,” his impassioned backing vocals soaring over Jagger’s strained warble.

  After the song ended, Elton waved to the crowd and gambled off stage. Not long after, a roadie told him and that Billy Preston, the Stones’ keyboardist for the tour, wanted him to come back on and play some more. Happy to oblige, Elton was soon jamming away on superior readings of “Tumbling Dice,” “Brown Sugar” and “It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It).”

  With the pianist commanding the crowd’s attention, several of the Stones quickly became less than pleased.

  “It was a little odd,” Caleb said. “There was some drama going on back there. And on that particular gig, I remember watching the Stones and they weren’t that hot. They weren’t having a good day for whatever reason.”

  After a smoldering “Midnight Rambler,” Elton bid the crowd adieu for good to rapturous applause and cries of “Don’t go! Don’t go!”

  “We should have kicked him off the stage,” Jagger later said, “but we didn’t. It’s because we’re both English.”

  “Elton was just sitting in,” Kenny said. “But he was such a big star that Jagger and Richards got pissed. Elton was laidback, and he was just sitting there playing piano. They said he overstayed his welcome, but he wasn’t taking the limelight at all. But the Stones were pissed-off. What I found out later was—‘cause I was getting high with [Keith] Richards and we were backstage and this chick was taking pictures, and I said, ‘Who the fuck is taking pictures of us?’ And Keith said, ‘Don’t worry about it, she’s with us.’ And it was Annie Leibovitz, she’s probably got a whole volume worth of people getting high in her collection—and we went back to say hello, and Mick Jagger was really nervous [because] it was one of Ronnie Woods’ first gigs. Richards wasn’t nervous, but apparently Jagger was. He was afraid that Elton was throwing Woods off-balance, so they kicked everybody out. We’re backstage and next thing I know they say, ‘Anyone to do with Caribou Ranch, please leave now!’”

  Elton threw himself dejectedly into the back of a stretch limousine.

  “I get in a limo with Davey and Elton,” Kenny said, “and Elton was really depressed. He just sat there and he didn’t say a fucking word. And [Atlantic Records label head] Ahmet Ertegun and all these people were scheduled to have a big barbecue at Caribou the next day with everybody, and it was all cancelled. The Stones said, ‘We’re not going up there anymore, fuck Elton.’ And it was really a drag. Elton didn’t do anything, man. But he took it really hard.”

  Arriving back at Caribou Ranch, Elton was despondent. “He comes out of the bathroom of his cabin and he’s got a mouthful of Valium,” Kenny said. “Davey and I wrestle him to the ground, but Elton, man—that fucker was strong, we could barely get him down, the two of us. But we finally did, and we’re pulling pills out of his mouth. It was fucked-up. It was crazy, crazy stuff.”

  A day after his second suicide bid, Elton effortlessly knocked out the Hawaiian-flavored “Island Girl.” Highlighted by Davey’s open B-flat acoustic chords, as well as Caribbean-accented percussive flourishes from Ray, the song followed the exploits of a six-foot-three Jamaican whore in New York City.

  Bernie was unusually confident of his work on this track. “I knew I’d written a hit even before I heard the melody,” he said.

  Patti LaBelle, who’d recently scored a massive hit with the slinky party anthem “Lady Marmalade,” was brought into the sessions—along with partners Nona Hendryx and Sarah Dash—to provide backing vocals on several tracks, including “Medley (Yell Help, Wednesday Night, Ugly),” a synthesis of three short songs co-composed by Davey Johnstone. “‘Medley’ was written in Elton’s cabin during a night of complete drunken/substance abuse and was based on my love of the great J.J. Cale,” the guitarist said, referring to the influential groove-based rocker. “Elton really loved what I was playing, and we found the lyric in Bernie’s stack of papers.”

  The tune, which exchanged pop niceties for maximalized guitar thunder, wouldn’t truly come to life, however, until band rehearsals, when Roger impulsively reversed the beat. “We all just looked at each other,” Kenny said, “and we were like, ‘What the hell is that?’ Just fucking fantasti
c. He completely changed the beat around, turn it inside out. Just by feel. Roger was the best drummer on the planet.”

  While LaBelle, Hendryx and Dash provided soulful backing vocals on the track, it wasn’t until they’d left the studio for good that Gus realized he’d made an uncharacteristic oversight and forgotten to record the trio on the final chorus.

  “So I made myself an enormous joint, walked into the studio and imitated LaBelle,” Gus said. “Nobody’s spotted it—not even Elton.”

  Elton revisited a year-old song with the driving “Hard Luck Story,” which he and Bernie had originally written for Kiki Dee under the pseudonym “Ann Orson/Carte Blanche”—the names a pun on “a horse and cart.”

  Kenny’s driving bass anchored the song, while Elton’s keyboard work lifted it into the funkified stratosphere. “His piano playing was always phenomenal,” James Newton Howard said. “He’s one of the finest pianists I’ve ever worked with, and I didn’t know how good he was till I worked with him. His playing was always underplayed a little in the mixes, I think intentionally so. Gus Dudgeon made him another member of the band, rather than the featured soloist.”

  Deciding to forego the five-star cuisine offered at the Ranch that night, Elton announced that he was in the mood for some burgers. “So we went down to Boulder in this 33-foot GMC motorhome we had,” John Carsello said. “Me and Elton and Kenny and Davey and Jeff Guercio. And we pulled into the parking lot of Red Barn—it was a hamburger stand like McDonald’s almost, but in a barn, a Colorado fast food chain. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll go in and order burgers,’ and Elton goes, ‘No, I’ll go in.’ So Elton takes everybody’s order and then he goes in there by himself. And we’re all watching through the window. And nobody noticed him right away. But then people started freaking out in there. He signed autographs for a long time, and then he brought out all the burgers. He loved it. He was that kind of guy.”

  That night, Elton and his band feasted on their greasy fast food while enjoying a private screening of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. “Elton had a lot of pull with movie companies like United Artist,” Carsello said, “and we could convert the studio room into a private theater. We had a screen that would electrically come down, and we had two 35mm cameras. So Elton called up United Artists, and I’d gone down to Denver just the day before and picked up a 35mm print of Jaws. We ran it in the studio, we had everybody in there—even Guercio's parents were there, there were like 30 people in there, everybody laying around the floor—and it was great. We were all screaming.”

  Stevie Wonder stopped by the studio the next day to socialize with the band.

  “I loved your horn arrangement on ‘Honky Cat’,” the Motown wunderkind told Gus, who was moved by the kind words, particularly considering that Stevie had recently released the funk-fueled “Superstition.”

  Stevie brought along an analogue tape which held several tracks that were under consideration for his masterwork-in-progress, Songs in the Key of Life. “He came and played me some stuff that was just unreal,” Elton said. “I don’t think there’s any of it on the album, though.”

  The highlight of Stevie’s visit, however, was nonmusical in nature. Jim Guercio was driving him around the Ranch in a restored four-wheel drive military Jeep, along with Larry Fitzgerald, Chicago’s manager. “They were going down to Bernie’s cabin,” Carsello said. “So they put Stevie behind the wheel. Jimmy sat next to him, and he had a stick that he used to work the gas pedal, and he was steering under the dashboard, operating the bottom of the steering wheel, and Stevie was pretending to be driving. So they drove past Bernie, and Bernie was like, ‘Whoa! What’s going on?' It totally blew his mind. He truly thought Stevie was driving.”

  After Stevie’s departure, the sessions concluded with the searing squall of “Street Kids,” a raging lament about British punks in an East End gang.

  The bluesy barrelhouse piano Elton played on this track was influenced by Little Feat’s Bill Payne, whom the Brit considered one of the finest rock pianists ever. Attempting to live up to Payne’s corrosively elegant style brought out Elton’s competitive best. “There was a piano riff in triads starting up on an A-D-F and going down in sixteenth notes, all the way to the bottom of the piano,” James said. “[Elton] developed the riff, then turned around at the piano, looked at me, and said something like, ‘Check that one out.’”

  “Street Kids” also housed a flamethrower guitar solo, the longest ever featured on an Elton John recording. “We stretched that out,” Caleb said. “That was done live, it wasn’t an overdub. That track is a good example of the tightness of the band. It flew.”

  The sessions were completed ten short days after they began—or so Kenny Passarelli thought.

  “We finish recording all the songs,” he said, “and I’m ready to get out of there and party, and Gus pulls me aside and tells me that he couldn’t get a decent sound off my fretless bass, and that I’m gonna have to replay the entire thing, overdub the entire thing. I could not fucking believe it. It burst the bubble for me. I loved playing fretless, that real clean sound you got from it.

  But Gus was adamant.

  “What am I gonna do, man?” Kenny asked.

  The producer grimaced. “Well, don’t you have any other basses?”

  “No.”

  At a loss, Kenny looked around and grabbed a few basses from his friends—including Paul McCartney’s Hofner, which Paul had given to Jim Guercio in gratitude for Guercio’s having mixed his Ram album.

  “I brought everything I had to the studio,” Kenny said, “and I’ll be damned, the hardest one to play—and the only one that Gus could get a sound on—was the Hofner. The action on it was horrible. But Gus kept insisting. I just fucking hated his guts. I just could not believe what this guy was doing to me, ‘cause I just know how great those live tracks were. As a matter of fact, there were only two songs Gus kept that have fretless bass on them that were the live bass tracks—‘Feed Me’ and ‘Street Kids’. If you listen to those two real close, you can hear that it’s a fretless bass. Anyway, we got it done. And I was just so pissed-off.”

  Chapter 26:

  ‘Elton Could Shit Bricks and People Would

  Go Out and Buy Them’

  With the sessions thus completed, a black-bereted Elton—who was subsisting on a diet of avocados and Diet Dr. Pepper—joined the Doobie Brothers and the Eagles at their joint concert at the Oakland Coliseum. Pounding a dented black grand, Elton added his chops to the Doobies’ “Listen to the Music,” as well as to a spirited cover of Chuck Berry’s “Carol” with the Eagles.

  Gus, meanwhile, took the master tapes from the recently finished sessions back to England to mix and master them for an album release. Though such a large band could have easily gotten cluttered in the surging soundscape, Gus was able to carve out a space for each individual musician within the larger whole.

  While such exacting efforts could take its toll on one’s senses, the producer had a self-prescribed cure for such matters. “[Gus] used to ring me up, as he liked smoking a bit of dope and in those days I knew every dealer on every street corner,” Freddy Gandy—one of Bluesology’s ex-bassists—told author Keith Hayward. “So whenever Gus came back from America, he would go straight into the studio—because he just loved getting back to the tapes—give me a call, and I would go and meet his with some stuff…We’d spend time together rolling joints and playing music. When [the new Caribou Ranch tracks were] finished, Gus turned to me and said, ‘This is going to go straight to Number One in the album charts in a couple of months’ time’…Gus made the sound of Elton John…He knew his stuff, and how to get the best out of the sounds.”

  When Kenny Passarelli heard the finished tracks, he began to better understand Gus’ methodology. “When he brought those mixed tracks back, they sounded so incredible. I mean to this day, people say, ‘Man, that bass, it sounds fucking unbelievable, it’s so forward.’ And so I had to say to Gus afterwards, ‘Man, I gotta tell
you, I was really pissed-off with what happened, but man, the record sounds unbelievable.’ Gus was a brilliant engineer and producer.”

  After the songs were properly mixed and mastered, the long struggle to properly sequence an album began. It was an indispensable step often overlooked by other recording acts. “I can’t believe how many people put two similar tracks next to each other [on an album],” Gus later told East End Lights’ John F. Higgins. “In the same key, with the same tempo and the same sort of instruments. I guess that’s actually probably the secret for me: I always used to try to go, ‘Okay, so here’s the first song...’ And you get a vibe off it. And then you shouldn’t know what to expect when the next thing happens. Hopefully, it will either be a surprise or it will be a logical thing…There is the odd track that you think, ‘Well, this is not a great track.’ The classic ‘elephant’s graveyard,’ as we used to call it, was usually the second-to-last cut on one of the sides. Either second-to-last or third-to-last on, usually, side two…[though] I rarely found myself in that situation [with Elton]. It’s very rare that I recorded something that I felt that uncomfortable about.”

  A song that the producer may have felt less than completely satisfied with, however, was a comic record by Clive Baldwin entitled “Now It’s Paul McCartney Stevie Wonder Alice Cooper Elton John.” In an era where oddball records like “Mr. Jaws,” “Junk-Food Junkie” and “Disco Duck” flourished, Baldwin’s single imagined vaudeville singer Al Jolson awakening from a state of suspended animation to learn that the music of his time has been irrevocably displaced.