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

by David DeCouto

  The New York Times’ John Rockwell gave Elton’s opening Garden gig a predictably derisive review, labeling the event “a smooth show that offered wallpaper music of the most banal sort.” While admitting that Elton’s music “provokes an indifference in this listener so complete as to preclude any trace of hostility,” Rockwell went on to dubiously explain that “those of us who write about the arts are used to dealing with popular performers who aren’t particularly popular with us. We treat them as fairly as we can, delineating their strengths and weaknesses as we see them, report on the crowd’s reaction and call it a day.”

  Elton appeared on Scott Muni’s radio program on WNEW-FM a couple days after the review appeared. Full of righteous indignation and Dom Pérignon, Elton let his displeasure with Rockwell be known.

  “If you are listening now, you asshole,” he taunted, “come down here and I’ll destroy you. I’ll rip you to bits on the air.”

  “I doubt if John Rockwell was even at the concert,” Elton later reflected. “It was the most piss-elegant review I’ve seen. ‘Performers come and go but we rock critics have to deal with them.’ Who the fuck is this John Rockwell?” He grimaced. “I don’t mind bad reviews at all. I always get them. In fact, I’m used to them. But [Rockwell’s review] was more like an edict: ‘You mustn’t like Elton John, because I don’t think he’s very good. Everyone at the concert should have been home listening to Linda Ronstadt’s albums.’ It was very condescending.”

  Ken Tucker, in his Rolling Stone review, wasn’t much kinder than Rockwell had been. “Elton’s a garish, tuneless shuck and decidedly out of fashion since about the time of Rock of the Westies,” he proclaimed. “His was ultimately a tedious concert: cold-bloodedly entertaining, artless, and other than hopping off the piano, no chances were taken.”

  “I’m the person rock critics love to hate,” Elton said. “You see, there is currently a trend among rock critics: Only if you are genuinely bad will they love you.”

  On the penultimate night of Elton’s Garden stand—mere minutes before hitting the stage—John Reid corralled the band into a hospitality suite behind the stage.

  “Tomorrow night’s the last [gig],” he told them. “Elton’s taking a year off for tax reasons. He’s gonna pay you all for the next year, but tomorrow’s gonna be the last show for a bit.”

  The band members were stunned.

  “It was tough,” Caleb said. “That was a massive downer. And only twenty minutes before show time: ‘Here’s your pink slip.’ We were at the top of the tree at that time, so that was a tough one. And all of a sudden, it’s all over.”

  “Okay, lads,” Reid chortled, clapping his hands while the band stood wordlessly around him. “Let’s have a good show then, eh?”

  Roger glared at Elton from behind his drum kit all night long. “Instead of playing all these subtle accents on ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ or whatever, like I usually did, it was just Bam! Bam! Bam! [I was] hitting those cymbals as hard as I could. I didn’t give a fuck if there was twenty-thousand people in the place or not.”

  After the show, the drummer headed straight back to the Waldorf Astoria, opened a bottle of Four Roses, and took out his frustrations on his hotel room. “I went a bit mental that night,” he confessed. “I wrecked that room like a true rock star. I just couldn’t get my head around any of it. It was completely handled the wrong way, if you know what I mean.”

  Ray Cooper poked his head into Roger’s room to see what all the commotion was about.

  “It’s okay, Rog,” he soothed. “Just relax.”

  “Fuck that!” Roger screamed, heaving a brass lamp through a television set.

  Ray disappeared down the hall and knocked on Elton’s door.

  “Rog has gone mental,” he said. “You might want to sort this out somehow.”

  To placate the drummer, Elton authorized John Reid to give each band member a bonus royalty point for their upcoming album. Though generous, the gesture meant little to Roger.

  “[The whole thing] just fucked me up completely,” he said.

  “We were all brought down,” Kenny Passarelli later said, “but especially Roger. That was it for him. If anything brought Roger down—besides obviously his alcoholism—that was it. It was terrible. Even when he and I and Caleb joined Hall & Oates later, he’d always get hammered and talk about, ‘Why did Elton do that? Why’d that fucking happen?’”

  “Poor Roger had flown his mom out for the gig, to witness his success for the first time, and the carpet gets pulled out,” Caleb said. “Even though Hall & Oates were hot just then, their music was sort of pseudo-soul to us, and we weren’t that excited about it, especially after being with the biggest artist on the planet. Poor Popey never really got over it.”

  “Kenny and Caleb were right,” Roger’s widow, Sue, said years later. “Rog never did get over it. It destroyed him. It led to him drowning his sorrows in the time-honored rock and roll way.”

  At the time, Elton, for his part, wasn’t even entirely sure of his decision—or of much else, for that matter. “I was very mentally tired, mentally fed up with myself as a person,” he said. “I love performing, but if you go onstage and you suddenly start thinking ‘What time’s the plane tomorrow?’ [or] ‘What am I gonna wear?’, and you’re halfway through a song and then you panic—‘Oh, what’s the next word?’—then it’s time to stop. Because you can’t cheat on a live performance. You can cheat when you make a record, because you can go over and over and over and do it again, but with a live performance, you can’t cheat. And I think that’s why people like live performances. But I was very bored with playing live. But the ego is such that you think, ‘Someone is going to take over my crown.’ In fact, my crown had already slipped. You can only have the crown for two years tops, probably. There are always bridges to cross, and as a musician there are always other fields to conquer. But you have to stop and refresh yourself and build up your passion again.”

  During Elton’s final concert, a peculiar energy filled Madison Square Garden. “It was a pretty weird night, a very sad occasion,” he said. “It came to the point where I sang ‘Yellow Brick Road’ and I thought, ‘I don’t have to sing this anymore,’ and it made me quite happy inside. Yeah, it could be the last gig forever.”

  Ray channeled his inner Keith Moon during “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” attacking his kettle drums with manic relish, slinging his tambourine to the dark recesses and bringing his tubular bells crashing to the floor with an atonal explosion.

  “Come on, New York!” he roared. “Come on!”

  Elton attempted to get in on the action by pushing his piano off the stage; fortuitously, the instrument proved too heavy to move more than a few feet.

  The crowd cheered the band’s efforts madly, compelling the exhausted musicians on. “It was a crazy tour, it was grueling,” Cindy Bullens said. “Elton worked his butt off every night, whether he was feeling up to it or not. He was the consummate showman.”

  To help curb the fatigue, the superstar Brit playfully reneged on a long-held vow. “All the time I’d been back with Elton,” Caleb said, “he’d stuck to his promise not to play ‘Crocodile Rock’. But at the final gig at Madison Square Garden, he had a meltdown, he was going into retirement, and at the very end of the set he throws in ‘Crocodile Rock’. That was his way of giving the finger to me and everybody.”

  “We were dead in the middle of a number, so there wasn’t anything we could do but go along with it,” Roger said years later. “I really hated that bastard. But [I] loved him too. And I still do.”

  Before launching into his final encore, Elton told the audience with an unmistakable note of regret in his ragged voice, “You won’t see me for a while, but I’ll be back…someday.”

  True to his word, it would be the last time an American audience would see Elton John perform live with a full band that decade.

  Chapter 30:

  The Token Queen of Rock


  The day after the final show, an exhausted Elton granted an interview with Rolling Stone reporter Cliff Jahr. The tête-à-tête was held in the Briton’s seven-room faux-Louis XIV suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel.

  Elton greeted Jahr, and photographer Ron Pownall, with a bone-shattering handshake. Throwing himself onto an enormous white sofa, he glanced out the window at a panoramic view of Fifth Avenue and Central Park while Jahr set up a tape recorder.

  “My life in the last six years has been a Disney film,” the pianist said, “and now I have to have a person in my life…I mean, who wants to be a forty-two-year-old entertainer in Las Vegas like Elvis?”

  When Jahr asked about his cynical forebodings, Elton was brutally honest. “I get depressed very easily, very bad moods,” he said, his voice dipping low. “I don’t think anyone knows the real me. I don’t even think I do. I don’t know what I want to be, exactly.”

  Did he suffer from a lack of love?

  The superstar considered the question thoughtfully.

  “I suppose I have a certain amount of love and affection, as far as love and affection go, from friends and stuff,” he answered, hardly making eye contact with Jahr. “But my sexual life…um…I haven’t met anybody I would like to have any big scenes with. It’s strange that I haven’t. I know everyone should have a certain amount of sex, and I do, but that’s it, and I desperately would like to have an affair. I crave to be loved. [But] as soon as anyone tries to find out about me or to get to know me, I turn off. I’m afraid of getting hurt. I was hurt so much as a kid, I’m afraid of plunging into something that’s going to fuck me up.”

  Jahr nodded.

  “I’d rather fall in love with a woman eventually,” Elton continued, “because I think a woman probably lasts longer than a man. But I really don’t know. I’ve never talked about this before, but I’m not going to turn off the tape. I haven’t met anybody that I would like to settle down with—of either sex.”

  “You’re bisexual?”

  Elton rubbed at his face. “There’s nothing wrong with going to bed with someone of the same sex. I think everybody’s bisexual to a certain degree. I don’t think it’s just me…I just think people should be very free with sex. They should draw the line at goats.”

  Thinking nothing more of the interview, Elton headed back to England the next day to mull over potential projects. The two leading contenders were a feature-length cartoon based on the Captain Fantastic album, and the title role in a planned film version of the 1956 Broadway musical Candide. He’d soon pass on both.

  The singer hadn’t been home a week before David Bowie had a go at him in Playboy.

  “I consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretensions,” Bowie said coyly. “They know who they are. Don’t you, Elton?”

  “[Bowie] was obviously a little high when he did [the interview],” Elton countered. “David’s one of those people of the moment. I mean, ‘What is the fashion this week? What’s it going to be next week?’ His insults to me go by the board. I think he’s a silly boy.”

  Playboy later followed up with Bowie to ask how his relationship with Elton was going.

  “He sent me a very nice telegram the other day,” Bowie answered.

  “Didn’t you describe him as ‘the Liberace, the token queen of rock’?”

  Bowie blushed. “Yes, well, that was before the telegram. I’d much rather listen to him on the radio than talk about him.”

  While Bowie was walking back his impolitic remarks, “Bennie and the Jets” was stumbling up the U.K. charts. The belated release of the three-year-old track—another older release from DJM—only managed a paltry Number 37, as the song, backed with 1970’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Madonna,” had long been in most fans’ collections by that point.

  Elton hardly gave a toss; his concentration was firmly fixed on his final concert obligation of the year—a long-planned solo gig at the Edinburgh Playhouse in Scotland. The performance, held on September 17, was the culmination of Edinburgh’s annual arts festival. Organized by John Reid and David Evans, several of the top-tier groups that played in the month-long “Festival of Rock” included Queen, Soft Machine, and Crosby & Nash.

  After an opening set by Billy Barkley, Elton made his entrance from below the theatre, miming a fanfare on the venue’s one-of-a-kind house organ. Dressed in a green-and-white checked suit and heavy white frames, Elton crossed the white sheepskin-carpeted stage—which featured a grandfather clock, a stuffed dog and a fully-stocked liquor cabinet—and bowed nervously.

  Visibly nervous—the show was being live-simulcast over both radio and television across Europe—an already drunken Elton proceeded to get plastered.

  “I don’t want the people out there to think I’m an alcoholic,” he said, pouring himself a Bloody Mary. “I want them to know I’m an alcoholic.” He took a healthy drink. “Tonight I feel a bit lost because I’ve only ever done one or two of these things before, and it’s always been before an absolutely alcoholically pissed audience. So if I forget any of the words, it’s absolutely due to the fact that I’m so nervous.” He grinned. “Five minutes on TV and I haven’t sung anything yet.”

  With that, he launched into a reflective reading of “Skyline Pigeon.”

  The pianist nodded gratefully to the 3,200 in attendance as the well-received song ended. “There’s gonna be a lot of help needed from you tonight, I tell you, in singing and things like that,” he confided. “I’d like to extend a warm welcome to everybody listening on the radio, because it’s the first time that Radio Forth and Radio Clyde have linked up, and I think that should happen a lot more often. More live concerts, y’know? If people did some concerts broadcast live—like they do in America—I think it’d be a lot better for British radio. It couldn’t be any worse, could it?”

  “What was very special about this is this was the first pan-global satellite solo concert to go right around the world,” video archivist Henry Scott-Irvine told journalist John F. Higgins. “I mean, the Beatles did it famously in 1967 with ‘All You Need is Love’ from Abbey Road studios, but this was the first color, live, solo concert to go around the world as it happened…It was a big thing.”

  After playing particularly heartfelt renditions of “I Need You to Turn To” and “Sixty Years On,” Elton premiered a new composition. “This is a song which we wrote about a year ago in Colorado,” he said, “and it’s a song called ‘Tonight’. And I’m playing it tonight. And this is the first time I’ve played it. And it has a very long piano intro.”

  “I like it!” someone called out from the rafters before a note had been struck.

  Elton grinned. “You like it already? I’m onto a winning thing. Actually, it resembles ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ by the Brotherhood of Man. Do you know that?” The audience jeered blithely. “Now, now, now—it did win the Eurovision Song Contest. And it is rubbish, but never mind.”

  Despite his reckless imbibing, the pianist gave a commanding performance.

  “This is a song you’ll have to help me out on,” he said after his third standing ovation of the night, “because I usually play it with the band and it needs a lot of rhythmic accompaniment. Anyway, I’m gonna try it, ‘cause you can only sing so many down songs, otherwise people nod off. You know what I mean?” A moment later, a familiar B-minor-over-G-major-7 chord sounded.

  The audience reacted with a deluge of unchecked emotion.

  “Al-right Ed-in-burgh, get it on!” Elton cried out rhythmically as “Bennie and the Jets” swung into an extended call-and-response coda.

  “Where’s Kiki?” someone yelled afterward.

  Elton shrugged. “Kiki Dee is not here tonight, let me say. She’s in Hyde Park. Well, she’s not in Hyde Park at the moment. If she was, I’d want to know what she’s doing—and who she’s doing it with. I’ve got a fair idea who she’s doing it with—and let’s face it, it’s not Freddie Mercury.”

  Before launching into th
e musical triumvirate of “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself,” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” and “Better Off Dead,” the pianist noted with a self-deprecatory grin that, “on reflection, the next three numbers are very suicidal, so all you manic-depressives better take your uppers now.”

  A storm of applause greeted Elton as he shook out his hands after “Better Off Dead” ended.

  “Cor! Me fingers caught fire on that one, tell you what.” He laughed. “We’re gonna do a song—‘We’re gonna do…’ See? That’s habit—me and the piano are gonna do a song for a lady who came all the way up from London. She’s a blind lady called Catherine, and I’d like to dedicate this next song to her because I think that’s incredible to come all the way up from London and be so loyal. Well done.” He grimaced. “I made a statement in the press—or in the Melody Maker, ha, sorry about that—saying about [how] you do lose touch about things. And for someone to come up from London—when you think about it, to take all that trouble—is incredible. And you sometimes take it for granted…and that’s one of the reasons why I think a lot of us need bringing down to earth and coming back off the road, as it were, to reevaluate things. I said in the Melody Maker this week, ‘It needs four phone calls to get even close to me.’ And that’s sort of infuriating sometimes. So Catherine, you did a really nice job for coming up for me, and that’s very important. I’m not bloody well giving you the fare to go back, though. No, seriously, this is a new song from the new album, and it’s called ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’. Alright.” He began the delicate, descending-chord intro with a knowing smirk. “It's not a twist number,” he joked.