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

by David DeCouto

  By February, the Associated Press estimated that the public had purchased more than sixty million dollars’ worth of Elton John concert tickets and albums, making him the highest-earning performer in entertainment history, easily outdistancing Sinatra, Elvis and the Beatles.

  For his peerless efforts, Elton was awarded the honor of becoming the first pop singer since the Beatles to be immortalized at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Baker Street, London on March 7. The pianist, who often visited the museum on Saturday mornings while a student at the Royal Academy of Music, was thrilled by the honor.

  Dick James attempted to place several congratulatory calls to Elton, but his one-time protégé resolutely failed to pick up the phone. Realizing that his golden goose had well and truly flown the coop, James ordered DJM to raid the vaults. The result was Elton’s two-year-old recording of “Pinball Wizard” being released as a single. Backed with the three-year-old “Harmony,” the disc quickly soared to Number 7, becoming Elton’s first U.K. Top 10 single since “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” a year earlier.

  While DJM was looking backward, Elton himself had his sights set very firmly on the future. Entering Eastern Sound Studios in Toronto—the first Canadian studio to feature 24-track technology—the pianist began recording his much-anticipated follow-up to Rock of the Westies in early March.

  “We had to go to Toronto for the next record because of Elton’s tax situation,” Kenny said. “He could only be in America for 180 days a year—and he already had an American tour planned—so he had to be out of the States. And knowing John Reid, he probably got a super deal on the studio, ‘cause he was an amazing manager. There was Irving Azoff and then there’s John Reid—they were kind of the same, in many ways. They’re super loyal to their guys, and they’ll just basically beat people up for their guys. I mean, Reid was a bad little fuck. A crazy son of a bitch. But he had vision. He was a brilliant guy, and he really was in Elton’s corner. It was full-blown, all cylinders going off. He catered to Elton, he would do anything to keep him happy.”

  As far as the new sessions were concerned, the bassist was determined to do whatever was in his power to not repeat the endless post-session work that had marred his Rock of the Westies experience. To that end, he forewent his trademark fretless style and instead bought the most expensive Olympic bass he could find. “I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not gonna deal with overdubbing’. And I didn’t have to. The thing is, the band rebelled. I didn’t, ‘cause I was the only American. Well, me and James Newton. But Caleb, he and Davey did rebel. They said to Gus, ‘Enough of this overdubbing stuff, let’s make this new one a very live record.’ And they really bullied him to the point where we did it that way. As we laid it down it became a very live record, all those tracks were recorded very much live. Which was good, ‘cause I felt like Gus kind of had it in for me. He loved Dee [Murray]. I did too—I’d met Dee when we were in London for the Wembley gig, and I felt bad, because Dee was really, really hurt that he was out of the picture, but he was really kind to me, and he was a fantastic player, really tasteful—but, y’know, I wasn’t the one who let him go. Anyway, that’s how it happened. That’s why those Toronto sessions were all very live.”

  Realizing the new sessions were imminent, Bernie had locked himself away and written two-dozen lyrics in three weeks’ time.

  “Basically, I’m a very lazy writer,” he said. “Usually I only write when the time approaches to make an album. I don’t normally find myself sitting somewhere and finally say, ‘Ah, a song has come to me.’ I normally write under pressure. I get ideas and I jot them down, but I don’t put them together until the time comes to do an album.” As for the intricacies of the creative process itself, not much had changed from 1967. “I’ll think of something that I like the sound of and work from there. Then sometimes I’ll get a line or something that I particularly like and I’ll work around that. But otherwise I never just sit around and say, ‘I’d like to write a song about such-and-such or so-and-so.’ It’s usually the title or a certain line that comes to me first.”

  “He’s a lazy sod, but he comes through in the end, old Taupin,” Elton agreed, going on to explain one of the key ingredients to his long-lasting partnership with the lyricist: “If Bernie was musical and I was into writing lyrics, we’d be getting on each other’s nerves so much, saying, ‘Well, how about doing this, then,’ and he’d say, ‘How about this chord here?’ It wouldn’t work at all. But since we know nothing about each other’s respective field, it does work.”

  The first new lyric that Elton chose to compose to was “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance),” an urgent number which urged the listener to “move that muscle and shake that fat.” A single take was attempted, but—as it was the first of the entire sessions—there were technical glitches to overcome, including an enormous amount of hiss on the master tapes.

  The pianist walked into the control room, grinning wildly. “That’s it. It’s a hit.”

  Gus genuflected. “Hang on, that’s not a final take. I’m still sorting out the sound here.”

  “Oh, rubbish. Give it a listen.”

  The producer played it back, he and Elton sitting stoically as the song came pounding out of enormous wall-mounted monitors.

  “Alright!” Elton shouted gleefully as the song ended. “That’s a Number One!”

  “Elton was insistent,” Caleb said. “He refused to do it again. It was unusual behavior for him. He was always the consummate professional, but the strain he was under was beginning to show itself. It was the beginning of the end, in many ways.”

  Gus would later bring in the Cornerstone Institutional Baptist and Southern Californian Choir, directed by Rev. James Cleveland, to add soulful backing vocals over Ray’s manic congas and Davey’s blues-injected slide guitar. Interestingly, “Bite Your Lip” would prove the only instance during the twenty-one-track sessions where a Davey Johnstone solo was featured; Caleb Quaye’s lead fret efforts would be chosen in favor of the Scotsman’s every other time.

  “Gus used my solos for whatever reason,” Caleb said. “I was at a point where I was just starting to mature in quite a few ways, and it just seemed to work. Gus and everybody seemed to love what I was doing. And Davey at that point was doing a lot of great acoustic work, and mandolin. Davey’s a great mandolin player. My style of playing was different from Davey’s. I was more from a jazz/funk/rock place, where Davey came from an acoustic folk background. And somehow, between the two of us coming from these polarized differences, it seemed to work.”

  Davey, for his part, was more succinct on the entire matter. “No comment,” the guitarist said with a laugh. “Mongo only pawn in game of life.”

  With the proposed leadoff single in the can, the bulk of the sessions for the new album began in earnest, with Elton tackling what was to become the session’s signature ballad, “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word.” Recorded largely alone, on March 22, with only vibraphone, accordion and bass accompaniment, the plaintive track was a rarity in Elton’s catalogue—the majority of the sentiments having been provided by the pianist himself. “Most of the lyrics on ‘Sorry’ are mine,” he told Sounds magazine. “I was totally infatuated with someone in Los Angeles and it wasn’t reciprocal…I was sitting out there in Los Angeles and out it came: What have I got to do to make you love me?” He let out a bittersweet laugh. “I’ve fallen in love with the wrong people so many times. I used to go to clubs and I’d see people at the bar, and by the time I managed to get to talk to them, I had already planned our entire lives together.”

  The evocative paean’s dramatic, descending half-tone progression guaranteed that it would become a future standard. Yet the bleak track also hinted at an underlying internal tension, as both Bernie and Elton began to share a sixth sense that they had nowhere to go but down. “We had done everything,” the lyricist said. “There was no mountain to scale or to conquer anymore. We had filled the biggest stadiums. There weren’t any places that were bigger. W
e had seven consecutive Number One albums…You suddenly realize that there’s no other place to go but down…For the first time, when we began work I found myself thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’ve got it in me. I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.’”

  Not helping matters, Bernie—caught in a depression over his failed marriage—was abusing alcohol at Olympian levels. “The first thing I’d do [in the morning] would be to reach over to the refrigerator by my bed,” he said. “I’d take out a beer, empty half of it away, then fill it up with vodka. I’d drink that every morning before I got up. When I went anywhere in a limo, I’d take a gallon jug full of vodka and orange juice.” He also admitted to abusing drugs—especially cocaine, magic mushrooms and heroin. “But not through a needle. Always ingesting it. It was a black-cloud period.”

  Bernie’s latest batch of lyrics certainly reflected his chemical-fueled despondency—from suicidal fantasies to tales of brokenhearted melancholia, his work had turned dark and despairing, even by his own austere standards. The lyricist’s desolation reached such a point that Elton—his most steadfast champion over the years—was notably put-off. “I never rejected one of his lyrics before,” he said, “but some of the stuff he did for [the new sessions]…I said, ‘Taupin, for Christ’s sake, I can’t sing that.’ They were just plain hateful, three or four of them.”

  Much as he had with Caribou, Gus would bring in a phalanx of top-drawer session musicians to augment Elton’s band. Guests this time included the Brecker Brothers horn-section and saxophonist David Sanborn, while background vocals were supplied by Toni Tennille, Beach Boy Bruce Johnstone, and the founding member of the psychedelic supergroup the Millennium, Curt Becher.

  The first track to take full advantage of this stellar lineup was the rollicking “Crazy Water.” Ostensibly inspired by the 1974 disappearance of the trawler MV Gaul in an artic storm in the North Sea, “Crazy Water” became yet another subtext-veiled look at Bernie and Maxine’s failed marriage.

  The dynamic track quickly became one of Gus Dudgeon’s favorites, though at first he was unsure how to proceed with the background vocal arrangement. “Bruce [Johnstone] said, ‘You know, Daryl [Dragon, the Captain of Captain & Tennille] is really good with backing vocals,’” the producer said. “Daryl came in with this idea that was fucking mad. And I loved it. In the first run-through he was going, ‘Hoo-hah-hoodly-doo’ and all this stuff…What I do in those situations is I don’t say anything. I just sit back…because it might be brilliant or it might be crap, or it might trigger another thought from another direction…Well, we had these guys singing these parts and they were absolutely stunning. Once I understood what he was trying to do and I could remember what it was—because it was so bloody complicated—we then worked on it together.”

  “We had a fabulous bass singer, Gene Morford, on ‘Crazy Water,’” Toni Tennille said. “I love that song.”

  To further assist the team’s efforts, Paul Buckmaster was brought back into the fold for the first time since the 1972 sessions for Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player. The arranger’s first task was to provide a pounding orchestral undercurrent on “Crazy Water.” “I love it,” he said. “Gus did a fabulous job producing [that song]. And those crazy background voices had me in stints of laughter. That reflects [Gus’] sense of humor, which we shared. The same kind of sense of humor—wacked out.”

  Buckmaster then turned his attention to the darkly atmospheric, tempo-shifting “One Horse Town,” for which James Newton Howard received a co-writing credit for his yearning electric piano introduction. The song was a perfect amalgam of delicately nuanced electric keyboard work and adrenaline-pumping rock ‘n’ roll, which climaxed with Caleb’s hard-charging guitar solo, introduced by Elton’s hectic cry of the seemingly nonsensical “Gonzales!”

  “He’d say stuff like that,” Caleb said. “He didn’t call me Gonzalez, but it was at that point in the song where it was time for a ripping solo, so he’d just shout out something like that, it was like Speedy Gonzalez: ‘Here we go!’”

  The eventual album opener, “Your Starter For…,” was a brief scale-based tune Caleb Quaye had written on acoustic guitar several years earlier as a pre-concert limbering-up exercise. “Elton said that he wanted an instrumental to start the album,” the guitarist said. “So I played it for him in the studio and I said, ‘What do you think of this?’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s great. Let’s do it.’” As for the song’s odd title, it was actually a catchphrase from a British quiz show. “We were joking at the time about this guy in England, Bamber Gascoigne, who hosed University Challenge,” Caleb said. “[Gascoigne] would always say, ‘Your starter for…ten points,’ for instance. That’s where we got the title.”

  After cutting the tune live in two takes, the band turned their attentions to the angular “Between Seventeen and Twenty,” an unblinking study of the strains a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle can take on a marriage—a theme earlier explored on “Love Lies Bleeding.” This track, however, proved even more painfully autobiographical, the title directly referencing Maxine and Bernie’s respective ages when they’d first met five-and-a-half years prior.

  The song was a less-than-subtle commentary on Maxine’s tryst with bassist Kenny Passarelli, who had become—ironically—Bernie’s closest comrade within the new band.

  “Bernie’s life was not in a good place at the time and it was reflected in that lyric,” Roger said. “But Elton was able to spin it into gold. To get the musicians to be so involved and sensitive to the songs was equally amazing. I was playing the song and I’m thinking, ‘Cor, Bernie must be seriously fucked-up.’ And then I realized that Kenny had gone off with his wife. It was tense.”

  It was a strain that Kenny felt particularly deeply. “That was a heavy time, playing the bass during that song especially,” he said. “I knew how upset Bernie was. He was completely fucked-up about it all. His marriage had fallen apart, and at first he didn’t know that I was there on the other side. It was incredibly emotional, just a really heavy time. You can hear it in that song.”

  Compounding matters, others within Elton’s camp secretly expected the pianist to bring the axe down on the bassist’s neck. “No one ever talked about it in any kind of direct way,” David Larkham said. “One afternoon I tried drawing Elton [out], ‘So what do you think of Kenny anyway?’—that sort of thing. He just looked me dead in the eyes, with tremendous seriousness, and he said, ‘Kenny is a great fucking bass player, and I’m not changing this lineup.’ And that was it.”

  Standing well outside the marital melodrama, Gus was pleased with the way the song had come out, viewing it as proof that the initially wrong-footed sessions were finally progressing apace. Thus reassured, his enthusiasm for the entire project blossomed. “There’s a lot more instrumental space all the way around,” he said. “Loads of long passages, of just music. But they are arranged passages. None of that six-minute bullshit, where somebody plays a self-indulgent guitar solo. And I’m talking about proper sections, which have been entirely worked out. Much like what we did with the first [Elton John] album. Only much more open and diversified than we did back then. I suppose that you could say we’ve brought to flower here the promise of much better things to come than one got from Rock of the Westies. I really think it comes true on [these new sessions].”

  One of the more unusual songs recorded at Eastern Studios began life as a jam in Caleb’s hotel room at the Park Hyatt between himself, Davey and James. Caleb had been experimenting with Indian tuning on his twelve-string acoustic when he came up with a pleasingly Hindustani chordal foundation. Davey then added a sitar line, while James pulled it all together with moody modulations on a polyphonic synth.

  “We just brought it into the studio the next day,” Caleb said, “and [we told Elton], ‘We wrote this last night, what do you think of this?’”

  “I think I’ve got some lyrics for that,” the pianist said, pulling out a sheet of Bernie’s lyrics entitled “The Wide-Ey
ed and Laughing.” He sang a melodic line over the instrumental track and found that it fit perfectly.

  “We’ve always been a real band,” Davey said, “so if someone had an idea, Elton was keen to try it. And Bernie’s lyrics are always so amazing. The whole imagery and passion he delivers on a page is remarkable.”

  Roger agreed. “[Elton had] put us together so we could give him our input as a group. He didn’t just want ‘yes men’, as perhaps he’d had before. He’d always mutter how he was the worst musician of us all, but it wasn’t true. He was a bloody fantastic pianist, and a truly great guy. A pain in the arse sometimes, but a great guy.”

  “The Wide-Eyed and Laughing,” accentuated by Ray’s rototoms, was laid in a single take. The music came as easily as the lyrics, which were allegedly based on Bernie’s brief love affair with Wendy Adler, daughter of famed virtuoso harmonic player Larry Adler, which had begun over a tennis match in Barbados. “I remember thinking that song was amazing,” Adler’s daughter, Emma Snowdon-Jones, recalled years later. “That’s me, I’m the last line in the song. I know my mom broke Bernie’s heart, and I know she broke mine. My mother was magical. And when her attention was turned on you, it was like the sun shining on you after being in an air-conditioned room for a long time. Of all my mom’s boyfriends, Bernie was the greatest. So shy, so lovely. One time he took me into FAO Schwartz and said, ‘You can have anything you want’. I loved him, and I still do.”

  After the session for “The Wide-Eyed and Laughing,” journalist Paul Gambaccini visited Elton in his hotel room, where a prototype of the Captain Fantastic four-player pinball machine sat flashing in a corner.

  “Let’s have a game,” Elton said, adjusting the sleeve of his crimson Canadian hockey jersey. “C’mon now, Paul.”