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

by David DeCouto

  While pleased with the album’s commercial success, Caleb, for one, was disappointed with the final musical results, feeling that Gus had denuded the band’s high-octane sound. “Gus Dudgeon was a fantastic producer,” the guitarist said, “but he mixed the guitars too low on that album. Even the basic tracks would’ve knocked the walls down, but to me the final mix sounded thin. We kicked much harder live than what you ever heard on the records.”

  While understanding Caleb’s complaint, Gus nonetheless stood by his production decisions. “When you’re mixing piano in with a lot of heavy guitars, it can be a challenge,” he said, “because the instruments tend to live in the same mid-spectrum range. Now, loud drums and bass will work with a piano, but not guitar. It’s an either/or. If you have them both, things get muddy. It doesn’t come together.”

  The critic’s concurred. Under the churlish heading: “Elton John: The Little Hooker That Could,” the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau contended that “despite his considerable commercial skill and fabulous commercial success, John does not suit my (rather permissive) notions about how an artist should behave, and although (or perhaps because) he is five years younger than me, he is not a child of the ‘60s the way I am. He threatens me, and like most people I know I tend to fear and distrust him, so I write him off all the time.” To his credit, Christgau went on to explain how he laid down in a bad mood one night and read along with the lyrics as he listened to Rock of the Westies. “The next day, you guessed it, I found myself singing not one but three or four of the tunes—the “Take Me to the Pilot” effect, in a way, although rather than leading me to gibberish, the music was, in effect, the gibberish itself. ‘I’ll shake this off,’ I said to myself, but I could not resist playing the record again…and again. Both sides. Hooked again.”

  Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden began his review on an unmistakably smarmy note: “Already the most commercially successful solo rock act since Elvis, Elton John continues to grow in popularity and there’s no end in sight.” Observing that Elton was a “great live entertainer, his records, while commercially essential to his career strategy, have come to seem more and more artistically inconsequential.” Labeling Elton’s sound “seamlessly mechanistic,” Holden concluded that the superstar’s “only work that is likely to last is Honky Château and a handful of singles.”

  The L.A. Times Robert Hilburn, meanwhile, found the album “as festive and well-designed instrumentally as anything else John has done. It’s simply good-time rock ‘n’ roll: highly infectious and fervently energetic.” Hilburn also noted that the pianist’s new band “not only sharpens the texture of Elton’s music, but also helps expand its boundaries. Despite the album’s slick professionalism, it is an adventurous work musically. One can sense the exploration and interchange between musicians.”

  “It’s more an album of good licks than good songs,” declared Ben Edmonds in Phonograph Record. “It’s not that the members of the band are outstanding soloists—though you know they are if you’ve seen Elton on his current tour—but how smoothly they hold together as a unit…The album’s best power songs, ‘Street Kids’ and ‘Billy Bones’, point in a direction worth developing heavy-duty expectations for. Rock of the Westies should be taken as a good first album from a new band. I can’t wait to hear what they’re capable of after they’ve played an entire tour together; I suspect that it will only please.”

  Not every review was quite as florid. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin—then married to critic and producer Jon Landau—called the album “an embarrassingly flat and slipshod quickie, flailing in the wake of the relatively interesting Captain Fantastic,” while rating the disc only one star, “strictly for the whooooosh! noise on ‘Island Girl’, the title spoonerism, and old times’ sake.” NME’s Charles Shaar Murray voiced similar disdain. “Elton has been making an awful lot of records recently. The last couple have shown severe signs of strain, and Rock of the Westies, which will undoubtedly be Number One in every available chart by the time you’ve turned round three times and counted to a hundred, is so rickety it’d collapse if you breathed heavy on it.” Allowing that “everybody’s playing superbly, including E.J. himself,” Murray went on to say, “unfortunately, Rock of the Westies sounds like it was made to meet a quota; just another Elton John album. Which is cool; lotsa people like Elton John albums. I’ve been known to dig a few of ‘em myself, and hopefully I will again. But this one…simply doesn’t do the man justice.”

  Sensing a lockstep unfairness in many of the notices that Rock of the Westies was garnering, ZigZag’s John Tobler took it upon himself to mount a one-man defense of the LP. “Several reviews have numbered this album on the grounds that it’s not well thought out, rushed, substandard and various other uncomplimentary things,” he wrote. “I wonder, I really wonder, if those people really listened to the album, or instead prepared a review on non-aural evidence, because I have to tell you that I do indeed like this album, and in fact I like it better on a similar number of hearings than I liked Captain Fantastic…Don’t believe the doubters, check it out with your own ears. In the case of an obscure record, a review is often the only way to find out what’s what, but where someone of the stature of Elton is concerned, you owe it to yourself to find out for yourself. Go on, before they’re sold out.”

  Chapter 27:

  Dodger Stadium

  In a year marked by oversized events, perhaps none proved larger than Elton’s tour-closing gigs, a two-day stand at L.A.’s Dodger Stadium on October 25 and 26. The shows caused a box office frenzy, with 110,000 seats being snapped up in just an hour-and-five minutes. “He could’ve probably sold it out twenty days running,” a bemused Ticketron official said. “He’s the biggest draw in the world, it’s not even close.”

  To help Elton share in this milestone triumph, he paid £50,000 to charter an international Boeing 707—dubbed The Rock of the Westies Express—to fly 130 family members, friends, journalists and Rocket Record employees from Heathrow to LAX to witness the shows firsthand. Nannette Newman and Bryan Forbes, who were already in a celebratory mood—the latter having just directed the hit film The Stepford Wives—were also part of the extended entourage.

  The large group of Brits was divided into two. One group would attend the show on one night, while the other group was given VIP treatment at Disneyland—much as Elton had been back on his maiden trip to L.A. The next day, they would swap roles. And all of them were treated to an extravagant party on John Reid’s luxury yacht. A birthday gift from Elton—along with an Appaloosa racehorse—the 60-foot boat had been christened, appropriately enough, Madman. It was a lavish gift, especially in light of the fact that the pianist had little use for boats. “I’d rather play tennis,” he said. “After five minutes, I say, ‘Well, what else does it do?” He smiled enigmatically. “I’m very restless.”

  Despite the red carpet treatment that Elton’s guests received, none of them were left half as impressed as Dodgers’ president Peter O’Malley. “Elton John is a very special act,” said O’Malley, who had disallowed any rock acts from playing Dodger Stadium since the Beatles back in ‘66. “I doubt if we’re going to find many who can match his standards. When someone else comes along like the Beatles or Elton John, we might do it again. But we want to hold it at that level. Dodger Stadium was built for baseball.”

  In advance of the shows, “Elton John Week” was officially declared by L.A.’s mayor, Tom Bradley. The festivities culminated with the pianist receiving his own star on Hollywood’s vaunted Walk of Fame on October 23, alongside the likes of Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne.

  A record-setting crowd of more than 6,000 turned out for the event, necessitating Hollywood Boulevard be completely shut down—a first in the 1,662 ceremonies that had been held at the site.

  Elton appeared at high noon in a golden golf cart replete with bowtie headlights and metallic lapel mudguards. Wearing a lime-green satin suit covered with its own Walk of Star
s, and a matching Clockwork Orange-esque bowler, the pianist seemed unnaturally subdued.

  “I now declare this supermarket open. Oh sorry, wrong place. This is more nerve-wracking than doing a concert.” Taking to one knee, the man of the hour posed dutifully beside his star. “It’s hard to think of things to say to the bloody pavement,” he mused.

  Minutes later, Elton disappeared into a waiting Rolls, as helplessly enamored throngs screamed and waved at the idol they all felt they understood so well.

  “Everyone knows everything about me,” he sighed. “And everyone knows nothing.”

  His star now forever agleam outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, Elton John had truly been embraced as the legend he’d always wished to become. The adulation, however, did little to help close the growing chasm of darkness inside of him.

  “I felt lonely,” he said. “There was an incredible drive and passion, but all I had in my life was my music. Not a bad thing to have, but there was a loneliness.” As for any praise he’d received in the press—that was to be taken with a massive grain of salt, as the pundits clearly had no idea what defined the true parameters of his existence. “There’s one guy who writes for The Daily Express, he’s got a gossip column,” Elton said. “He’s printed a couple things about me—they’ve not been nasty or anything, they’ve just been absolute rubbish. When Evel Knievel was supposed to jump that canyon in the rocket, I was supposedly by his side, singing the National Anthem. And I’m in my house, going ‘Oh yeah?’…[and] The National Star wrote that I’d become an egomaniac when I broke up the band and said I believed after my role in Tommy that I was the world’s biggest film star. At that time, I was hiding behind the walls of my Hollywood mansion. Not even my servants knew where I was.”

  There was little doubt that Elton’s meteoric rise had taken him from an emotionally excitable aspirant to an erratically volatile superstar. Rocket Records’ Sharon Lawrence had seen the same danger signs years earlier with Jimi Hendrix. “I remembered this person who was mildly temperamental, who could be a bit neurotic and difficult, but who was basically happy and organized,” she told author Philip Norman. “Now [Elton] looked ghastly, he was incredibly strung up, anxious and panicky. In the few months since I’d seen him, he seemed to have become a complete wreck…He put [Rock of the Westies] on at full volume and sat there staring at me, waiting for me to say it was brilliant…I said it was, because he seemed to need that so desperately.”

  Elton’s private agony led him to drop eighty ten-strength Valium later that same afternoon.

  “Well, that’s it,” he said, stumbling out to the pool, where his family sat basking in the sunshine. “I’ve ended it all. I shall die within the hour.”

  The superstar’s seventy-five-year-old grandmother Ivy shook her head in disbelief.

  “I suppose we’ve all got to go home now.”

  “I regret what I did,” Elton was to later reflect. “It was a very selfish thing to do…I was an immature little schoolboy craving attention on a totally different level than I was getting as Elton John. I was very, very untogether.”

  “It was a terrible, terrible time, those days,” Elton’s mother, Sheila, admitted years later in the David Furnish-directed documentary, Tantrums & Tiaras. “It’s an awful thing to see someone you love unhappy. I couldn’t get near him at all. It was a different lifestyle and he’d got in with a different crowd of people. There were drugs, which he denied frantically, but I’m not daft…He looked terrible. I thought he was going to die.”

  “This was a total shock,” Caleb said of Elton’s latest suicide attempt. “Everything [he] touched turned to gold. The gigs were going great. We didn’t have bad gigs. It was all stadium stuff. He seemed really pleased with the band, musically everything was gelling nicely. So from my perspective, I didn’t see it coming. The medics came and pumped his stomach.”

  Elton was rushed to the hospital, where he spent the night in a coma.

  “He was in and out of consciousness all night,” Caleb said. “We sat up all night with John Reid, we were all in shock, going, ‘Okay, what are we going to do? Is he going to make it? If he doesn’t make it, what in the world are we going to do?’ It was an incredibly emotional night. We didn’t know what was going to happen. It was eleventh-hour stuff. It was all very intense.”

  “My fantasies about being a rock ‘n’ roll star were broken after seeing how difficult life could be for Elton,” backup singer Cindy Bullens admitted to journalist Miquel Sala.

  Miraculously, Elton showed few ill effects from his actions. Twenty-four hours after coming out of his coma, he was preparing to take the stage for the first of two Dodger Stadium concerts. Shunning the pre-show glamor of showbiz well-wishers like Hollywood leading man Cary Grant and comedian Charles Nelson Reilly, a red-jumpsuited Elton opted to instead sit by himself in his trailer, a terse handwritten note outside his door warning: Absolutely no one but Elton.

  Security personnel at Dodger Stadium began allowing fans in three-and-a-half-hours earlier than the scheduled 10 A.M. gate opening, to accommodate the tens of thousands waiting impatiently outside as they chanted: “One, two, three four: Open up the fucking door! Five, six, seven, eight: Open up the fucking gate!” As soon as they were let in, fans stampeded across the Dodger Stadium infield, jockeying for position before the stage, which was situated in deep centerfield between two giant electric scoreboards which displayed the names of Elton’s band members. Even hours before the show, the crowd was already in a frenzy—dancing in their seats, making-out in the shadows, blanket-tossing each other high into the cloudless sky.

  Dealers, executives, high school kids, jugglers, acid freaks and millionaires all joined together in a feeling of communal anticipation, a true sense of occasion permeating the ganja-filled air. Onstage, Cecil, a lion from the Los Angeles Zoo prowled the stage alongside local car dealer Calvin Coolidge Worthington. After several laps around the stage, Cecil was taken back to his cage—and promptly escaped. “At one point, these roadies start running around, screaming that the lion had somehow escaped his cage and was roaming free,” Caleb said. “I was in my trailer, completely out of my mind, just falling about, rolling hysterically on the floor. They finally cornered the lion and got him back into his cage.” The guitarist smirked. “That was the Seventies.”

  Country-pop singer Emmylou Harris took to the stage at one o’clock. Backed by her Hot Band—which included guitarist James Burton, as well as Elvis’ pianist, Glen D. Hardin—Harris played a forty-five-minute set. Joe Walsh went on after her. The audience reacted to both artists with polite indifference, as beach balls bounced across the giant cement bowl like so much popcorn. Neither artist was called back for even a single encore.

  Elton’s mother, who was watching from the upper deck along with Derf, smiled benignly at the spectacle. “I have butterflies,” she told documentarian Russell Harty, “but then I know that [Elton] doesn’t worry about anything. If I thought that he was nervous, then I would be a bundle of nerves. But…let’s face it, he loves what he’s doing, he doesn’t have to worry about it.”

  Moments later, a deafening roar erupted as white curtains parted to reveal Elton at his grand piano—covered in silver Mylar for the occasion, gleaming like a sacred dagger. As he rolled toward the massive crowd, the first delicate notes of “Your Song” came tinkling down over the stadium like silver rain. Any demons that may have haunted Elton days before were abandoned as fifty-five thousand hysterical voices screamed out their worshipful commendation.

  “It’s a little bit funny, this feeling inside,” he sang, in fine voice. “I’m not one of those who can easily hide…”

  He raised his left first in triumph, causing the frantic crowd to break into a fresh roar of cheers.

  “It must have been an amazing feeling for Elton…and the band, because it was an unbelievable feeling for me, and I was just the photographer,” Terry O’Neill later recalled in Two Days That Rocked the World. Stationed on Ray Coo
per’s percussion podium, O’Neill was on hand to snap epochal images of the pianist as he held court before the massive hordes. “He was like Elvis at the height of his career. It is impossible to try to explain to people today what it was like.”

  “How are ya?” Elton asked the hysterical throng. “We’re gonna play as long as you want us to play for, all right?”

  After an artfully delicate “I Need You to Turn To,” the band joined in on “Border Song.” From that point on, there was no looking back. The concert was a release of pure emotion, a cathartic exorcism on pop’s biggest stage. “It was surreal,” Caleb said. “Such a rush of emotions. Every emotion: happiness, relief, anger—you name it. To be onstage there, the crowd’s just roaring and we can’t hear ourselves. We really had to know those songs, because once the crowd got going, the massive cheers from all angles, we couldn’t say, ‘What key are we in?’ We were screaming at each other just to hear ourselves talk. It was surreal. A highly adrenalized experience.”

  Kenny agreed. “When there are 55,000 people…singing the lyrics of [an] entire song, it’s a pretty amazing experience.”

  Elton had streamlined his vestiary dynamism, performing in rhinestone-studded overalls and a mirrored shirt, while a bejeweled bowler hat twinkled on his head. After a white-knuckled ten-minute jam on “Empty Sky,” he chucked his hat into the crowd before leaving the stage for a brief intermission.

  Twenty minutes later, Elton reemerged wearing a silver-and-blue Dodgers uniform—a Bob Mackie original that had cost over two-thousand dollars. (“But that’s just a ballpark figure,” Elton quipped to Time magazine.) Across the back, it read, simply: Elton, 1. Grabbing a silver baseball bat, he wacked a few tennis balls deep into the crowd as the riotous synth intro to “Funeral For a Friend” blared.