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

by David DeCouto

  With Ray onboard, Elton booked the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, North London, for a string of shows the first week of May. Writing out a list of songs he wanted to perform, Elton decided that lesser known tracks such as “Ticking,” “Solar Prestige a Gammon” and “Crazy Water” would finally get their day in court, while more familiar fare would be performed in largely altered states. “Funeral For a Friend” would be given a dramatically sparse reading that would segue not into “Love Lies Bleeding,” as it always had before, but rather into Blue Moves’ towering ballad, “Tonight.” The rollicking band romp “Dan Dare (Pilot of the Future)” would be recast as an exuberant solo piano boogie, while “Where to Now, St. Peter?” metamorphosized from a broodingly melodic rocker into an effervescent, Rhodes-soaked daydream.

  Rehearsals began in earnest in late April.

  “The satisfaction of hearing our songs stripped down in their rawest state was very exciting,” the pianist admitted.

  Ray grinned at Elton over an assemblage of timpani as they routined an inventively galvanizing reading of Captain Fantastic’s “Better Off Dead.”

  “Rock on, Mr. John,” the flamboyant percussionist urged. “Rock on.”

  Elton took to the stage for the first of six sold-out shows just after eight p.m., May 2, in a checkered jacket, green football jersey and dark blue sweatpants. As this opening night performance was a charity gig for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Appeal, Princess Alexandra and Angus Ogilvy could be seen perched rigidly in the Royal Box. Below them—sitting expectantly in the cheap seats—mixed members of Queen and the Eagles, as well as singers Lorna Luft and Lynsey De Paul.

  “Your Royal Highnesses, ladies and gentlemen, and Moss Brothers…good evening,” Elton said, teasing the well-heeled crowd with a playful reference to the high-end tuxedo rental shop. “Thank you for splashing out an awful lot of money to see a receding-hair-lined player in a ridiculous jacket. I hope you’ve brought your choc ices with you, it’s a long program.”

  The show then commenced with Elton alone at the piano, singing ethereal ballads such as “Candle in the Wind” and “Cage the Songbird” to maximum effect.

  An hour and twenty minutes in, Ray Cooper shattered the calm, bashing away like a lunatic on a litany of tuned percussive instruments during “Funeral For a Friend/Tonight.” After a vaporously romantic “I Feel Like a Bullet (In the Gun of Robert Ford)”—which featured Ray’s melodic accompaniment on the vibraphone—Elton wiped at his nose and gave a sly grin to the front row. “This one’s for Charlie. He’s doing well tonight.” Moments later he launched into an energetic, marimba-suffused “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” that had the thousands in attendance on their feet.

  The evening then ended much as it began, with Elton alone at the piano.

  “Thank you, you’re incredible. Amazing,” he told the cheering audience. “Gonna leave you with a song, very appropriate…from the Madman Across the Water album. It’s called ‘Goodbye’…”

  With bootleggers already busy pressing recordings of the performance (pirated discs would appear days later under the titles Rocket Man Over the Rainbow and Rainbow Rock), Princess Alexandra asked Elton at an after-show party if he self-medicated before taking the stage.

  “You mentioned ‘Charlie’,” she said. “Surely, you meant cocaine.”

  “I was so stunned,” the singer confided to a reporter from The Sun. “I’m not sure what I replied. She asked me how I could play for two-and-a-half hours at a stretch. Did I take some sort of drug? Did I take cocaine? I couldn’t believe it.”

  The next day, Britain’s myriad daily papers splashed the story across their front pages. The Royals were decidedly not amused. Word quickly reached Elton, who held a makeshift press conference to handle damage control.

  “I very much hope I have not embarrassed the Princess,” he said contritely. “I thought [her story] was very amusing, and this is why I repeated it. Of course I do not take cocaine. It was only meant as a light-hearted comment.”

  Elton turned to John Reid.

  “Get me the fuck out of here,” he whispered.

  Elton’s mea culpa was apparently enough to satisfy any ruffled feathers, for on May 28 Britain’s First Family invited him to take part in the Royal Windsor Big Top Show from Billy Smart’s Circus at Home Park, Windsor. Her Majesty and Prince Philip were the guests of honor for the in-the-round performance, which offered such diverse acts as Olivia Newton-John, Leo Sayer, trapeze artists and tightrope walkers. Elton’s set was widely agreed to be the highlight of the show, which aired on BBC-TV the next night to a record audience.

  The broadcast was perfectly timed, allowing Elton to maximize promotional efforts for his latest single, “Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance),” which—backed by a jazz-ballad double A-side offering from Kiki Dee entitled “Chicago”—was released on June 3. Despite a punchy remix by famed New York producer Tom Moulton, who brought the 6:37-long album track down to a more palatable 3:38, “Bite Your Lip” only managed to reach Number 28 in both England and America. For any other artist, a Top 40 showing would be considered a smashing success, possibly even a career-defining apex. For Elton John, however, it was seen as an abject failure which portended even more ominous things to come.

  With the pianist holed up in rain-swept London, fretting over his latest single’s chart performance, his erstwhile lyricist was standing beneath the sharp Los Angeles sunshine, fighting lethargy and desolation.

  “There was nothing to do,” Bernie lamented. “I was bored and depressed.” A hastily arranged trip to Albuquerque didn’t help matters, as he found himself drunkenly wrecking his hotel room and firing a .45 magnum at John Wayne as The Barbarian and the Geisha played on the television. Despite the reckless behavior, no amount of vodka or beer could provoke Bernie beyond a certain point of carelessness. “It takes flair to drive a car into a swimming pool,” he conceded. With the songwriting duo orbiting in such vastly different—yet equally ponderous—universes, it didn’t seem beyond the realm of possibility that “Bite Your Lip” might be the final John/Taupin platter ever released.

  “Continental drift had set in,” Bernie said. “I wasn’t holding my breath.”

  Any hope for an immediate reconciliation of the star songwriting duo’s old work habits was squashed when Bernie—fresh from an appearance on The Hardy Boys, where he made his acting debut as guitar-strumming pop singer Tim Carstairs—accepted an offer from drinking buddy Alice Cooper to help write his next album, tentatively titled From the Inside.

  “Alice and I were inseparable,” the lyricist said. “Alice was my best friend. After the Elton thing, Alice and I were basically living together up in his house. It was a messed-up, fucked-up time.” The two would often watch Monday Night Football together while playing pool and trying to out-drink each other.

  One night after the Washington Redskins had bested the Green Bay Packers 10 to 9, Bernie and Alice ended up at the ‘On the Rox’ club, both so obliterated that they ended up filling one another’s cowboy boots with tequila. “We spent so much time together that making [From the Inside] was just a natural extension of our relationship.”

  “I think I may be one of the only lyricists that ever collaborated with Bernie,” Alice later said. “He was one of my blood brothers during the L.A. years…From the Inside [was] about an insane asylum. We were certainly qualified for that.”

  Feeling secretly betrayed by Bernie’s creative philandering, Elton would only later admit to feeling hurt. “We were doing a lot of drugs and drinking heavily,” he said, “and [Bernie] was beginning to write with other people, which made me a little jealous, but I decided I’d write with some other people [too]…We both had the resilience and the intelligence to know that if we didn’t let each other write with other people, it would be the end of our relationship.”

  The pianist attempted to fill the artistic void in his life by turning to Gary Osborne, a TV jingle writer and lyricist who had composed the Engl
ish words for Kiki Dee’s 1973 hit “Amoureuse,” which Elton had coproduced with Clive Franks.

  Their association blossomed over nightly games of poker. “I was a unique friend in the respect that I was neither a colleague nor was I gay,” Osborne said. “A lot of his friends didn’t understand that. We just liked each other’s company.”

  Elton became particularly close to Osborne’s wife, Jen. He thus soon found himself spending more and more time at their modest Tudor in Hampstead—sipping tea with Jen in the living room, or chugging scotch with Gary in the basement, which had been turned into a mock beach, complete with sand-covered floor, sky-blue ceilings and a fully-stocked tiki bar.

  Other times, the Osbornes would head over to Elton’s manse. The three got on incredibly well.

  “We just hung out as mates,” the lyricist told the BBC years later. “We would go to his house, we’d play cards, we’d play backgammon, we’d watch the telly. He seemed very happy. He was optimistic. We did just all the kind of things that regular mates do. And having a good time. Because he had been on a treadmill. He’d disbanded the band, he had no plans for recording. He said, ‘I’m just going to concentrate on Watford Football Club and Rocket Records. I’m going to produce Kiki, and I’m going to take a break.’”

  Elton’s professional involvement with Gary began one humid day in early June, at Chez Osborne. “[Jen and I] had some beautiful red wine,” Osborne said, “the most expensive wine I’d ever seen, Mouteau something-or-other, and I had a great big grand piano that was left over from when my father had the house, and [Elton] was playing around and he said, ‘Listen to this.’” A somber new melody bled forth from the piano, a heartrending E-flat ballad cut from a cloth similar to “Your Song.”

  “Well, that’s lovely, that’s gorgeous,” Osborne said.

  “Fancy writing a lyric to it?”

  “Hold on—what would Bernie say about that?”

  Elton shrugged. “I’ve played it to Bernie. He’s over in L.A., working with Alice Cooper. He’s already had a go at it, and hasn’t come up with anything.”

  Osborne did his best to hide his excitement.

  “If you insist,” he said mildly, grabbing a cassette recorder and placing it on the piano. “Play it again.”

  Elton ran through the song a second time before turning back to the wine.

  “And when he left,” Osborne said, “at about two in the morning, I immediately got my notebook out and got the cassette back out and started to see if I could get a few ideas going on it.”

  Osborne spent two full days working on the song. Refining it, trying to make it as perfect as possible. That next weekend, he invited Elton back to the house.

  “I’ve got a lyric for that tune of yours,” he told Elton as nonchalantly as possible. He presented him with a set of words called “Smile That Smile.” Elton was impressed. After providing a few suggestions, Osborne reworked the lyric, rechristening it “Shine on Through.” “And I actually kind of expected that that would be the end of my writing with Elton,” he told the Times’ Peter Paphides. “I mean, what a wonderful thing to have on my CV: ‘I wrote a song with Elton John.’”

  Briefly setting “Shine on Through” aside, Elton jammed onstage with the Eagles on the final night of their four-night stand at the Empire Pool before pulling a few of his more flamboyant costumes out of mothballs for a June 15 guest shot on The Muppet Show.

  “The idea of having Elton on the show doing all that crazy stuff with those flamboyant costumes, the big crazy glasses and feathers everywhere, particularly excited the Muppets,” said Brian Henson, son of Muppets’ creator Jim Henson. “So this whole episode is about the Muppets really wanting him to do that flamboyant crazy look, and him not wanting to. But as always, the Muppets always sort of win out in the end.”

  Highlights of the program included Elton’s performance of “Crocodile Rock” alongside Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem band while sitting in a colorful swamp full of be-furred reptiles, and a comic duet with Miss Piggy on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”

  “I had to do eleven takes before I could even stop laughing,” Elton said. “At one point I broke down again and [Miss Piggy] looked at me and said, ‘I am not used to working with amateurs,’ and stormed off, and it was wonderful.”

  At the end of the show, Elton arrived onstage in a conservative tweed suit, while the Muppets had done themselves up much like the superstar had been during his mid-70s outrageous peak.

  “Boy, Elton,” Scooter exclaimed, “you look weird!”

  The pianist grinned. “Well, you guys are all dressed like stolen cars.”

  Airing the following February, the episode would become the highest-rated program of the entire series, earning an Emmy nomination—a first for the show—for “Outstanding Directing for a Comedy-Variety of Music Series.”

  Forty-eight hours on, Elton performed one of the more unique gigs of his career, at Shoreditch College Chapel in Egham, South London. As fate would have it, the scheduled musical performer for the school’s Valedictory Ball—American soul singer Jimmy Helms—had canceled out at the last minute.

  “A bunch of us were sitting around and somebody mentioned that Elton John lived nearby,” former student Paul Davies recounted to Q magazine decades later. “We didn’t really think he’d play, but it was worth a try.”

  Davies and a handful of students headed over to Elton’s house, only to find his massive iron gates locked. One of the more enterprising members of their group got on the intercom and was soon chatting with the pianist’s housekeeper. “Elton was apparently lying on his bed watching the tennis,” Davies said. “It was Wimbledon week.”

  “What time will he have to appear?” Elton’s housekeeper inquired.

  “9:30.”

  There was a long pause as the pianist mulled it over.

  “I wasn’t doing anything that night,” Elton said. “So I thought, ‘Why not?’ I admired their nerve.”

  The housekeeper got back on the intercom.

  “Elton will do it,” she told the students. “But please don’t tell the press.”

  “That’s tremendous.”

  “And make sure you have a grand piano.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Good for his word, Elton arrived at the school’s chapel on time, a set list scribbled on the back of a Barclays Bank checkbook. After rehearsing for twenty minutes in an antechamber, he was taken into the sacristy and announced to the crowd through a Marshall 100 watt PA borrowed from the local Birdcage disco down the lane.

  “Even then, we still thought it must be a joke,” said Tom Watson, another former student. “I really expected somebody to come in dressed up as Elton John. But then he came in through the side door. We were no more than ten feet from him…He didn’t ask for a penny, although I gather he could get about £70,000 for Madison Square Garden at the time.”

  Elton played an enthusiastic solo set—a decade to the day after having first spied the Liberty advertisement in NME which had, in so many ways, helped kick start his entire career.

  A group of students brought Elton a cut-glass goblet with the school’s colors inscribed on it the next afternoon, along with a couple bottles of wine.

  “We could see him over the other side of the garden, fiddling with the lawnmower,” Davies said. “The housekeeper thanked us and took [the gifts] in for him.”

  Things went less fortuitously for Rocket Records signee Maldwyn Pope; with Gus having departed the label, his half-completed album was left in limbo.

  “My career was completely on hold [at that point],” he said. “So I wrote to Elton directly and I said, ‘I feel like I’m a sixteen-year-old failure.’ And it was funny, it was Christmas time, I was in a school production of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and I was waiting for a bus to go home—it’s nine o'clock at night—and suddenly my dad and my brother arrive in a car, and they said, ‘Quick! Get in!’ And I’m thinking, ‘My grandmother�
�s dead, my mother’s dead.’ But they said, ‘Hurry! Elton’s rung and he’s going to ring back in twenty minutes!’ And he did. He spent half an hour on the phone saying, ‘I'm going to take control of your career, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that.’ That was in January, but we didn’t get to the sessions till July, because he was so incredibly busy.”

  Arriving early for the session, which were being held at Abbey Road, Pope witnessed Elton—dressed in full Watford regalia—recording an infectious, piano-driven charity single entitled “The Goaldiggers Song,” the aim of which was to help raise funds for the construction of soccer pitches for underprivileged children across the U.K. “And as I walked into the room,” Pope said, “there was Brian Moore and Eric Morecambe—Morecambe & Wise were enormous, they were the Martin & Lewis of Britain—so it was just incredible.”

  After recording the track, Elton listened back.

  “I don’t know if I really like it,” he said, shaking his head dubiously.

  “But it’s really catchy,” Brian Moore said.

  Elton shrugged. “Well, so is chicken pox.”

  Bidding Brian Moore and Eric Morecambe adieu, Elton arched an eyebrow in Maldwyn Pope’s direction.

  “Alright then,” he said. “Shall we start with ‘How It Hurts’?”

  Nodding his ascent, the teenager situated himself behind the studio’s grand piano. “So I’m playing the piano and I'm singing my song at the same time as well,” he later recalled, “and obviously my voice is starting to spill over on the piano tracks, so Elton said, ‘You concentrate on playing the piano and I’ll sing.’ That’s just bizarre, isn't it? So he’s singing my song as a guide vocal. The next day we started doing backing vocals, and I kept on saying, ‘I can't do this, can you do it?’ ‘Cause I just wanted him on the record. Even at whatever age I was then—sixteen, I think—I knew that I had to somewhere put Elton on one of my records. And he did the backing vocals, and it’s there for all time. He was my hero. And he still is."