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

by David DeCouto

  Though the pianist battled fiercely, Gambaccini proved himself a worthy competitor—after four of the five balls had been played, he found himself well ahead.

  “I was thinking, ‘What do I do now? Dare I win? Dare I beat this guy on his own machine?’ It would have been Regicide.”

  But the journalist had no need to worry—Elton’s hypercompetitive nature came to the fore on the final ball. Proving that he truly was the undisputed pinball wizard, Elton won the game going away.

  “The guy just can’t stand to lose,” Gambaccini said.

  The band recorded the hard-hitting revenge fantasy “Shoulder Holster” the next day. The lurching track was notable for featuring a brusquely staccato brass arrangement from the influential Brecker Brothers, as well as solo flourishes from sax guru David Sanborn.

  Elton then revisited “Candle in the Wind” territory with “Cage the Songbird,” a ruminative, dulcimer-tinged requiem to French chanteuse Edith Piaf—known to fans as “The Little Sparrow”—who died in 1963 at the age of forty-seven. The bewitching acoustic number was a holdover from the Rock of the Westies sessions, co-written by Davey Johnstone. “I played [Elton] this little fingerpicking acoustic piece based on the ‘Skater’s Waltz’,” the guitarist said. “We were in need of some fresh air at around six a.m., so we went to the horse corral [at Caribou Ranch] and wrote the song ankle-deep in horse shit…[Elton] went, ‘That’s beautiful. Wait a minute…’ And he pulled out a sheet of lyrics and said, ‘Play it again’, which I did. He sang the lyrics, and literarily that was it.” David Crosby and Graham Nash, founding members of Crosby, Stills & Nash, were later brought in to provide appropriately rustic backing vocals on the track. “David and Graham are wonderful with phrasing and harmonies,” Davey said. “So we just let them go for it. It’s a lovely little song.”

  Another older song attempted at these sessions was “Chameleon,” the hallucinatory ode rejected by the Beach Boys a year earlier. Gus utilized seven background singers on the doleful track, slyly emulating the Californian band’s intricately lush harmonies.

  “Better than the real thing?” Elton teased. “Nasty, nasty. Who said that?”

  Toward the tail end of the sessions, Elton turned his attention to a set of lyrics that he had asked Bernie to write specifically with a feel similar to those featured in the songs of the American soul quartet, the Chi-Lites.

  “I love the Chi-Lites,” the pianist said, “and they had a record called ‘There Will Never Be Any Peace On Earth Till God is Seated at the Conference Table’…[So] I said to Taupin, ‘Let’s do a song like that, with a really tacky lyric, and see if we can get away with it.’ It is a ridiculous song, deliberately.”

  The track featured the Martyn Ford Orchestra, under the leadership of Richard Studt, who would soon go on to become the leader of the London Symphony Orchestra. Ford himself was particularly excited about the Buckmaster-arranged session, having been a huge fan of Elton’s since the release of his eponymous LP back in 1970. “I remember walking into a clothes store in the West End of London to buy a pair of jeans, and hearing the Elton John album on the sound system in the store,” he said, “and I was just rooted to the spot by ‘Your Song’ and the riffs on that album, all of Paul Buckmaster’s extraordinary arrangements. As an arranger who was into pop, this was the music I’d heard in my dreams. Orchestrations with rock music. I thought, ‘This is what I want to do.’ Elton was the talent, and of course Elton wrote the songs, and his vocals were fantastic, and he’s the best rock pianist there’s ever been, but Paul Buckmaster changed a great album into a milestone album. It’s still one of the greatest pop records ever made. It was life-changing. It was industry-changing. It was music-changing. And it certainly changed my life.”

  Ford was equally as enthralled to be working directly with producer Gus Dudgeon. “Gus had an amazing pair of ears,” he said. “He was the consummate professional—kind, generous, caring, sympathetic. His professionalism was extraordinary. He's probably the best record producer I’ve ever worked with, because I’ve worked with some record producers who couldn’t organize a fuck in a brothel. But Gus was just the best. Totally on the ball.”

  Elton and his band next lit into yet another lyrically suspect song, this one entitled “Snow Queen.” The acoustic, bongo-laced track was an unabashed critique of what Bernie—who was rumored to have briefly dated Cher back in ‘73—saw as her superficially self-constructed lifestyle.

  Fading out on a repeat of Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You, Babe”—with snatches of Cher’s solo track, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” thrown in for good measure—Elton hadn’t realized who the song was actually aimed at until he’d started recording his vocals.

  “‘Allo, allo’, I thought. ‘It’s Cher.’ It was so cutting, I had to tell her in advance and apologize in advance.”

  “Out of the Blue” was a Dadaist excursion of repetition and revelation which melded into a heady mix of bluesy jazz and primal garage rock. James Newton Howard’s friendship with electronic pioneer Bob Moog paid massive dividends, as the keyboardist was allowed to play one of the first polyphonic Moog synthesizers available at the time on the sinewy, jazz-rock instrumental.

  “Out of the Blue” led, in quick succession, to the gospel-infused “Where’s the Shoorah?”—an ambient, organ-accented homage to a sultry Argentinian woman—as well as the sleek “City of Blue” and samba-esque “The Man Who Loved to Dance” (the latter two destined to remain forever unreleased). Indeed, from one track to the next, Elton and his band were stretching ever further stylistically, mixing vintage Memphis soul with a plushly aggressive English-music-ball-by-way-of-NYC jazz-rock sensibility.

  With the group’s artistic muscles warm and pulsing, attentions were then turned to the deep-funk of the choir-drenched “Boogie Pilgrim,” which was borne out of an impromptu midnight jam. “The whole point [of the sessions] was that Elton said, ‘Let’s all perform as much as possible like a band. Let’s take ideas into the studio and see what we come up with,’” said Davey, who—alongside Caleb—would receive a co-writing credit for the raucous tune. “This was a great opportunity for everyone in the band to throw in their ideas and their tools and see what happened. And ‘Boogie Pilgrim’ was like that. It was a jam, and it came out great.”

  A slightly breathless Elton undertook the sorrowful suicide fantasy “Someone’s Final Song” next.

  “We’d walk to the studio every day, crossing this dual carriageway,” Roger said. “I don’t know why we didn’t just drive—Elton insisted we walk. He was trying to be as incognito as possible, in a tracksuit and with this giant bloody ice hockey mask.” The drummer laughed. “It actually worked for a few days, but then one day the kids figured it out and they just chased us down the street. We were all winded off our arses by the time we hit the studio. But I wasn’t playing on [“Someone’s Final Song”] anyway, so I didn’t mind.”

  A desperate cry for help, the devastating ballad featured one of Bernie’s bleakest lyrics yet, where his song’s narrator imagines himself succumbing to suicidal thoughts.

  “Although it was a very bad time,” Bernie later said, “I [personally] was never suicidal. There’s a fraction of me in the song, but when I’m writing I take my experiences and ideas and stretch them.”

  A haunting multi-tracked choir consisting of Bruce Johnston, Toni Tennille, Curt Becher, Clark Burroughs and Joe Chemay was later added over Elton’s desolate piano line, helping to cement the song’s aura of aching remorse. “When we heard the playback,” Toni Tennille said, “we just all looked at each other and smiled. It was just a wonderful sound, and really perfect for that song.”

  Jazz took center stage on “Idol,” a seductively pulsing number that concerned a blatantly Elvis-like figure who has fallen from grace. Roger traded in his sticks for brushes on the track, providing a sorrowfully sophisticated feel that was highlighted by a soaring David Sanborn sax solo.

  “[‘Idol’ was] one of our mo
st unusual songs ever,” Gus said. “A favorite, actually.”

  “Yeah, it [eventually] could be me,” Elton conceded of the track’s doom-laden lyrics. “Will I end up at the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn when I’m seventy-five in a fishtail coat, a cigarette hanging out of me mouth, singing ‘Idol’ in cabaret?”

  Technical problems reared their ugly head during the concluding days of the sessions. To help kill the downtime, Elton began messing around on an electric piano; soon enough, he came up with a pleasing F-major/C-major/B-flat chord sequence, as well as a title: “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”

  “Listen to this, Gus,” Elton said, playing the producer the basic melody while singing the line ‘Don’t go breaking my heart’ over and over again.

  The producer was confused. “Really? ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’? I hadn’t noticed a lyric with that title.”

  “That’s because Taupin hasn’t written it yet,” the pianist said with a grin. “Lazy sod, let’s ring him up.”

  Elton was speaking long-distance to Bernie minutes later. The lyricist, who had elected to remain in Barbados rather than taking direct part in the new sessions, was instructed to construct a duet lyric in the Motown mold of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.”

  “Something up-tempo, like a disco-soul thing,” Elton told his writing partner. “Our side’s counting on you.”

  Bernie set to work; five minutes later, he was finished.

  “It was great,” Bernie said. “It was just one of those things that sparked off immediately. As soon as he played it, I said, ‘Well, that’s gonna be the next single. That’s a hit.’”

  The band, who had thought that their work on the extended sessions had been completed, balked at having to learn and record yet another track. “‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’ was the last thing recorded at the Toronto sessions,” Roger said. “Elton told us that he’d just come up with another number. ‘Bloody hell, Elton, for fuck’s sake,’ I said. ‘We’ve been playing for weeks on end here already.’ He just stared me down. That fucker’s scary when he stares you down.”

  The band ultimately rose to the occasion, recording the track in a single take.

  Elton originally envisioned singing the duet with Dusty Springfield; due to an illness, however, she wasn’t available, and so Kiki Dee stepped in instead, laying down her vocals weeks later, after the producer had returned to England with the master tapes. “[Elton and I] actually did the song together in London,” she later told author Barry Toberman. “But for whatever reason, it was decided to stick with Elton’s Canadian vocal track.” Recognizing a golden opportunity, Kiki worked extremely hard on her parts. “I was secondary [on the song], in the sense that Elton had already stamped the song with his vocal. Which in a way is quite good, ‘cause it gives you a groundwork on how you’re gonna sing it. The precedent has already been set by him, and [by] the writing and production of the song.”

  Meanwhile, the song’s string arrangement (“Bloody good,” per Gus) traced its roots to the airily melodic riffs which graced such soul classics as the Temptations’ “My Girl” and “Just My Imagination.”

  When Gus played the completed track back, he knew instantly that it was a hit. “It gave me a buzz, because you could tell straight away that the song was really commercial. Really vibey and up.”

  Realizing they had a one-off, pre-album single set to go, the decision was made to have Kiki add prominent backing vocals onto “Snow Queen,” so that it could serve as a cohesive B-side.

  The sessions concluded with both the shortest and longest songs of the entire proceedings. “Theme From a Non-Existent TV Series,” a 1:19 electronic minuet, sprang out of a jam that Elton, Caleb and Roger engaged in while reminiscing about “The Dick Barton Theme (The Devil’s Gallup),” which they’d all recorded together years before as part of the Bread & Beer Band. The new tune would prove infinitely more successful than its forebear, earning Elton a prestigious Ivor Novello Award for Best Instrumental the following year.

  “Tonight” followed.

  One of Elton’s favorite tracks of all time, the tortured love song clocked in at a seemingly prohibitive 7:52. “He’d written the whole thing, top to bottom, [as] a complete piece,” Gus said. “The first time I heard it, Elton kept going on and on, one movement after another, and I just sat there thinking, ‘Well, okay, is he ever going to start singing?’ But I shouldn’t have worried. He knew what he was on about, he knew what he was doing.”

  Like many of these latest songs, “Tonight” was again about Bernie’s failed marriage. “It’s a very personal song,” the lyricist admitted. “The line about not fighting again, just going to sleep. It was very difficult for me to listen to.”

  “‘Tonight’ was written out of experience,” Elton concurred. “It’s very moving. I know what Taupin’s been through.”

  The track was recorded live a week and a half after the rest of the songs, back at Abbey Road Studios in London. Elton performed the song live with the London Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of James Newton Howard.

  After striking the final low D-1 note which ends the piece, Elton rested his forehead gently upon his piano.

  “Okay,” he sighed. “Enough.”

  Elton flew back to North America to participate in the Schaeffer Music Festival show at the Wollman Rink in New York’s Central Park on April 16, alongside Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, bluegrass artist David Bromberg and comedian Martin Mull. The pianist was particularly enthused about Raitt, whom he held in the highest regard. “[Bonnie is] one of the top three…white women vocalists in the world,” he said. “One of the nicest guitarists, certainly one of the nicest ladies, and one of the sexiest ladies that I’ve ever met.”

  Two weeks on, Elton found himself shepherding in yet another album. Here and There was his thirteenth long-player in six years, and his first live offering since 11/17/70 back in 1971. A charismatic pocket history of live staples, the disc dropped on April 30 in the U.K., and three days later in America.

  Comprised of selections from two 1974 concerts—Elton’s Royal Festival Hall show in London and his Madison Square Garden gig in New York City—Here and There was issued simply to fulfill the pianist’s contractual obligations to DJM. Displeased at having his hand forced, Elton labeled the album “a total fucking disaster.” “It was, ‘Either release this album or—if you don’t—we’ll put it out later anyway.’ Which would have meant them getting [my next album] as well.” He sighed. “It was silly because, unless you’re Peter Frampton, you don’t sell nearly as many copies of a live album as a studio one. And we’d never gone into live recording properly. [Here and There] was a business compromise.” Though Dick James had begged Elton to allow the use of John Lennon’s historic appearance on the album, he adamantly refused. “I wasn’t going to let them use any of that on Here and There. No way. It would have been taking advantage of John, who did the gig as a favor.”

  Melody Maker’s Chris Welch was more impressed with the recording than the artist himself. “Do not fear a rip-off,” he proclaimed, “for this is a worthy selection of live performances from two major concerts which will long serve as a reminder of the extraordinary career of one of modern music’s most successful performers…There is a tremendous presence about these recordings. An Elton John concert is one of the few in rock that can be usefully transferred to album, for here is the excitement and emotion that can never be created in a studio. Listening to these concerts, only a couple of years old now, is to be reminded how much has happened already in these baffling Seventies, how much music has been played, and, as Ginger Baker said the other day: ‘When’s it all gonna end?’”

  The taciturn Robert Christgau disagreed with Welch’s analysis, however. “I had a syllogism worked out on this one,” he wrote. “Went something like a) all boogie concerts rock on out, b) Elton is best when he rocks on out, c) therefore Elton’s concert LP will rank with his best. So if this sounds like
slop (concert-slop and Elton-slop both), blame Socrates—or find the false premise.”

  Regardless, Here and There easily made its way into the Top 10, reaching Number 6 in Britain and Number 4 in the States. It soon became Elton’s twelfth Gold album, remaining in the U.S. charts for nearly half a year.

  Chapter 29:

  Louder Than Concorde

  (But Not Quite As Pretty)

  As usual, Elton barely allowed himself time to celebrate, for his latest tour— a romp around the British Isles, and, unbelievably, his first major U.K. tour in three years—was slated to kick off on April 29. As with each of his previous outings, the first task was to pull together a proper set list. “It’s very important to pace an act,” he said. “We could go on stage and do twenty new numbers, but people don’t want to hear that. Critics sometimes do, but the audiences don’t.”

  After much deliberation, the pianist decided on a set which balanced rock-heavy recent tracks with a murders’ row of perennial standards. He and his band then rehearsed solidly for a week before heading out to play thirty dates in thirty-six days. Dubbed Louder Than Concorde (But Not Quite as Pretty), after a tongue-in-cheek remark Princess Margaret had made months earlier referencing the newly minted supersonic airliner, the tour hit many smaller towns and halls usually overlooked by the rock star elite. “There were no elegant suites with all-night room service,” Bernie said. “No spacious dressing rooms or any of the chauffeured convoys indigenous to American touring. It was back to brown ale and cheese sandwiches, small towns and 3,000-seater halls.”

  Elton still leapt about the stage as wildly as ever, hurling his piano stool with gusto and using his instrument like a piece of gym equipment, yet his sartorial splendor was noticeably scaled back. His elaborate feather-drenched ensembles were replaced by sweatpants, suspenders, and matador jackets.