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

by David DeCouto

  The pair quickly came up with the mesmerizing, vibe-soaked “It Ain’t Gonna Be Easy”—an initially twelve-minute-long track for which Elton felt he’d given his single best vocal performance to date—and the never-issued “I’ll Try,” a piano ballad which, like “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” before it, quivered with shadowy angst. “I can write that sort of melody every day,” Elton said. “I find it harder, because I’m a pianist, to write a good up-tempo song. When you play piano, the chord structures of songs are so much different. You tend to put in more chords, whereas when you’re on a guitar, a three-chord song on a guitar always sounds better than a three-chord song on a piano for some reason.” He shrugged. “It’s ludicrous. It has to do with the structure of the instrument.”

  Elton then wrote both the words and music for “Flintstone Boy,” a slyly subversive track about a failed love affair. Pleased with the way the song came out, the pianist briefly contemplated writing an entire album’s worth of lyrics, before finally deciding against the idea. “[My lyrics] might come out very raw and very crude. Also, I’m quite positive it would be extremely bitter. There have been periods in my life where—if I’d had the ability to write good lyrics and write them down—they would have been quite heavy statements for me to make, but I just couldn’t do it so I didn’t even bother to try. If I had, I would’ve probably ended up in jail with libel suits.”

  Elton’s burgeoning partnership with Gary Osborne not only proved productive, but it also gave him cause to rethink many of his long-held work patterns. “I’ve made the mistake of writing too many albums in the same key,” he said. “The wrong key for my ‘poofy little voice’, as Rod Stewart calls it. You spend half an hour on a song, then sing it in the key you wrote it in. It’s very easy to get into a rut.” With that in mind, he recorded his own version of “Shine on Through” lying prone on the studio floor as he sang the lyrics, to add a guttural depth to his vocals.

  “I remember sitting behind a drum kit with a pair of headphones on and Elton started to sing, and I couldn’t play,” Steve Holley said. “On ‘Shine on Through’, I started to play, and then I fumbled immediately, just because the sound of his voice and his piano just blew me away. I was like, ‘Oh Lord.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, let me try that again.’ It was just mind-blowing. I was just listening to him and I just blew my intro completely. Recording with Elton was a fantastic experience. It’s way up there on life’s spectrum of fun and frivolity.”

  After tracking the fist-pumping pop-rocker “Part-Time Love”—the only song of these sessions to feature Davey Johnstone—Elton interrupted his studio efforts to film a £40,000 promotional film for “Ego.” Premiering at the National Theater in Westwood, L.A. and the West End cinema in London, the mini-film was shown theatrically across Europe and America as a “short” before major motion picture offerings such as F.I.S.T and Pretty Baby.

  The clip itself—“slightly weird and spooky,” by the star’s own reckoning—featured a child actor posing as a youthful Elton trapped alone on the Circle Line subway, cleaning his little round National Health specs and scrawling Watford on the train wall. The film then cut to random vignettes of a sneering, gaunt-faced, fedora-wearing Elton holding court in some otherworldly pop empire, his right ear pierced by a sapphire stud. The effect was jarring—Elton looked like a darker, almost wholly unfamiliar personality.

  “It was a new experience,” he conceded. “That was the first time I’d ever consciously done any camera work. But what was really strange was performing without glasses on. I used to hide behind them so much. They were a real safeguard for me, so all of a sudden there was a brave new world out there, and I had to look it straight in the face with contact lenses on. That was very hard to do after hiding behind my defenses for so long.”

  The moment the film shoot wrapped, Elton headed back to Mill Studio to continue work on his new songs. In one brandy-and-cocaine-fueled session, he wrote and recorded a chaotic, timpani-laced rocker called “Madness.” An incandescent account of the London terrorism offensive waged by the IRA throughout the ‘70s, the frantically appregiated piano-line Elton devised for the track perfectly underscored the unrequited rage seething between each line of the lyrics. “I got a letter from a policeman from Dundee saying the song meant a lot to him, because he had attended the aftermath of a bomb blast,” Osborne later told author David Buckley, “The song meant a lot to him, and the letter meant a lot to me.”

  Elton laid “Shooting Star” the next day. A personal favorite of the pianist’s, the evanescent, sax-and-upright-bass-perfumed ballad had been inspired by a recent trip he’d taken with Rod Stewart to Rio de Janeiro for Carnivàle.

  Next came a fifty-two-second-long piano-and-ARP synth instrumental called “Reverie,” which Elton labeled “a very wistful death thing.”

  He smiled after the song was completed. Suddenly, and quite unintentionally, an album’s worth of material had begun to form.

  Far across the heaving Atlantic, Bernie was attending the Science Fiction Film Awards in Los Angeles. Introduced onto stage by actress Karen Black, the lyricist—drunk on vodka behind dark aviator shades and a frilly black tux—told those amassed before him: “I’m truly pleased…to present my ‘Rocket Man’ as interpreted by our host, William Shatner.”

  The camera’s cut to Star Trek’s Captain Kirk seated on a stool center stage, dragging on a cigarette and intoning the lyrics portentously.

  Utilizing crude ‘70s-era chroma-key video technology, Shatner was soon joined onstage by a second, more gleeful Shatner, who tunelessly warbled out the song’s chorus before a third Shatner joined in, dancing like a soul possessed. It was performance art on an epically loony scale, an indelible act that would be satirized for decades to come—from singer Beck’s video for “Where It’s At,” to Stewie’s pitch-perfect rendition on the animated show Family Guy.

  Elton himself quite appreciated the performance. “Wish I’d thought of doing it that way, I tell you,” he said with a knowing grin.

  After a brief hiatus for another hair transplant surgery, Elton was soon back in the studio, where he and Gary came up with the smartly crafted “Big Dipper,” a playful New Orleans-accented romp. “I said to Elton, ‘I am going to write you a poofy song about a sexual encounter on a Big Dipper’,” Gary later recalled. “And he said, ‘Oh that’s good, I’ll get the Watford football team to sing on it’…They loved it, because they loved him.”

  “Twenty-five players were at the session, including one or two excellent singers,” Clive said. “There was only one atrocious voice, but he was kept well away from a mic. Anyway, one out of twenty-five isn’t bad.” The song would also feature the vocal talents of the female staff from Rocket Records, later billed as the South Audley Street Girls’ Choir.

  A rare story-song, “Big Dipper” follows the fortunes of a lonely, fairground-bound man who takes a ride on a Big Dipper and receives head from a sailor while at the top of the tracks. “It had to be slightly disguised,” Osborne later said of the obtuse lyrics. “Because, firstly, it was 1978. And secondly, we wanted the Watford football team to sing on it and we couldn’t have them singing words that were…too poofy. I was trying to put a bit of Elton’s wicked sense of humor into his songs.”

  “Ego” was released as a single on March 21. Backed with “Flintstone Boy,” the disc charted at a disappointing Number 34 in both the U.K. and the U.S. Elton was stoic about its performance. “Ego was just something I had lying around and I wanted to release it for a long time,” he said. “Unfortunately, the time wasn’t right. It’s been disappointing. I really had hoped it would do well because I really liked it.” He grimaced. “There’s no getting away from it—my popularity has slumped, record-wise. But I realize it.”

  Not allowing ‘Ego’s relative failure to dampen his enthusiasm, Elton was soon working on “Love Sick,” a breezy track which intriguingly switched time from a steady 4/4 beat to a slinkier 5/4 during the chorus. Originally composed dur
ing the Blue Moves sessions, Bernie’s dour lyric referred, not surprisingly, to his split from Maxine.

  Though the song was completed in only two takes, the remaining sessions would stretch out for months on end. That was fine with Elton—he was determined to take his time and truly get things right. “You can have a really good song,” he told Billboard’s Timothy White, “but it sometimes loses it between the demo and the recording. Sometimes the way you record a song is not the best way a song should be recorded. And you find that that is a very frustrating thing. There are lots of songs that I’ve written that I think are as good as ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’, but they haven’t come out as well on record. It’s so important, the way you approach recording a thing, and fifty percent or sixty percent of the time you get it wrong.”

  The pianist next recorded one of his favorite new compositions, the marimba-accented “Return to Paradise,” an ironic account of never-pleased British vacationers. “They go abroad every year to find the sunshine, and a lot of them go to Spain,” he said. “When they get there [they’re unhappy]; they expect to eat English food, English beer.”

  As preparations were being made to record lead vocals on the track, Gary Osborne realized that the chorus melody Elton had come up with was an unconscious lift of Harry Belafonte’s 1957 hit, “Jamaica Farewell.” Quickly composing a different melody, the lyricist played it for Elton, who listened intently, headed into the vocal booth, and sang it perfectly, just as Osborne had dictated. “So on that song,” he later said, “I wrote the chorus melody as well as the actual [lyrics], which is fair enough, because quite a lot of the words I am credited with [on other songs] are [Elton’s] words, so it works both ways.”

  Jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther, who had worked with Bryan Ferry and Richard Thompson, amongst many others in his storied career, completed the recording with a forlorn solo.

  In one productive afternoon in early April, Elton knocked out the sparsely wrenching “I Cry at Night”—another older Bernie Taupin lyric from the Blue Moves sessions—a bouncy bit of throwaway fluff entitled “Hello Campers” (“Luckily it didn’t make it on the album,” said Stuart Epps), “Dreamboat” (co-written with guitarist Tim Renwick), and “I Don’t Care,” a vehement piano-driven rocker powered by Paul Buckmaster’s sweeping strings. “I’m amazed at the playing, at the precision of those very fast passages,” the arranger later reflected. “All these rapid flurries of machine-gun sixteenth-notes from the strings. Such precision. So in-the-pocket. It made me step back and say, ‘Wow, did I write that?’”

  The next evening, the team turned their sites onto “Georgia,” a Southern-gospel piece which saw Elton pulling triple duty on piano, harmonium and church organ. Pedal steel guitar for the track was provided by B.J. Cole, making his first appearance on an Elton John recording since 1971’s “Tiny Dancer.” While being duly impressed with Mill Studio, its opulence did prove a bit problematic for Cole. “The studio had a thick shag-pile carpet that—when I set my pedal steel upon it—the pedals disappeared down into the shag-pile,” he said. “So I had to set up on a piece of plywood. Total excess, you know. It wasn’t a big studio, but it was very nice.” As for Elton himself, Cole noted that “he had changed out of all recognition by that point. He’d just gone through all the excess of super-fame, and was a different person to me. Not unpleasant. Just a totally different person.”

  That same night, Elton tracked “Strangers,” a mournfully melodic meditation on the deterioration of a self-limiting love affair. Though the track was ultimately destined for lowly B-side status, both Heart’s Ann Wilson and ex-Eagle Randy Meisner would release successful cover versions in the coming years.

  “Randy’s [version] is good,” said Elton, who—with these sessions—was finally able to nail down his darker artistic impulses without sacrificing the dexterous melodicism which had long been his musical trademark. “I like what Ann did, too. So there you go.”

  Elton took a break in recording to create a stir at Britain’s prestigious Capital Radio Awards. After winning for Best Male Singer, he claimed that the award more rightfully belonged to newcomer Elvis Costello.

  “I really hadn’t done anything during that year to warrant it,” he said, “hadn’t put out any new product. I honestly felt that of all the people who had emerged, Elvis Costello was the most important—by far the best songwriter and the best record maker. It seemed a bit farcical for me to pick up the award. I was genuinely shocked.”

  Elton would also win for Best Concert of 1977, for his “farewell” gig at Wembley. The irony was hardly lost on him.

  “I ought to retire more often,” he said.

  “Most people have completely the wrong idea of me,” Elton told the Sunday Times on April 16. “They think I’m going to go on doing the same things in glittering clothes, going to Las Vegas till I’m 55. I turned down one offer of a million dollars to do a week in Vegas. I didn’t even think about it. No, I’m looked upon as one of the artists in this country who has the least credibility, and I think I have the most credibility.”

  While his validity was consistently undermined by the more studiously hip and politically reactionary corners of the music press, Elton was at least able to find continued refuge within Watford FC, which had quickly amassed a record seventy-one League points under Graham Taylor’s direction. The club’s crowning glory came when the team knocked Manchester United out of the League Cup and earned promotion to Division Three.

  Elton was ecstatic.

  “The feeling of promotion was better than having a record at Number One,” he said. “The last forty-five minutes [of the game against Manchester United] aged me by three or four years. Incredible.” Could he foresee a Cup Final for Watford? “I don’t think I’d make it. I’d have to be sedated.”

  Halting his recording sessions yet again, Elton flew off to America in mid-June to attend the world premiere of the film Grease, for which his ex-backing vocalist Cindy Bullens had contributed lead vocals on several songs. Elton partied the night away at Studio 54 with clothes designer Fleur Thiemeyer, Stockard Channing, and Olivia Newton-John; the next night, he was at the Xenon Disco with giddy blonde model Caspa and Roberta Flack. Soon after, the pianist found himself on a Concorde bound for France, for yet another hair transplant operation.

  With the pianist’s record output dwindling, his beleaguered scalp became a major focus of discussion in the media. So much so that a rare photograph of the superstar sans headgear would make headline news on the same July day that Bob Dylan’s much-hyped return to the U.K. concert stage at Blackbushe Aerodrome—alongside Eric Clapton and Graham Parsons—was relegated to a few lines buried on the back page. It was karmic payback, perhaps, for the critical crossfire that the mere mention of Elton’s name never failed to draw from London’s swiftly aging punk rock scene. “I get all the shit slung at me,” he said. “When people like Generation X or Sham 69 have a go at me, they don’t stop to think that maybe I’ve bought their records, enjoyed them, and have gone around telling other people how good they are.”

  With his sessions on extended hiatus—Clive Franks was away on holiday by the time Elton had re-entered Britain—and without the strictures of a firm work schedule to provide much-needed structure, the pianist found himself spending a significant portion of the summer of ‘78 alone in his house, working through a pint of scotch a day. There was also an ever-growing dependence on cocaine—which roused the truculent star’s darker impulses—and loads of spliffs, though, as Elton would later explain, “I only ever used dope to come down off coke.”

  Those around him began worrying about his increasingly compulsive behavior. “I honestly began to think he was in danger of turning into a recluse,” John Reid said. Yet no one dared say a word.

  Elton composed an eerie, largely instrumental samba in mid-August. “It’s about death,” he said of the cathartic requiem. “An optimistic death song, sort of like Close Encounters being an optimistic space movie…I like death
music, I don’t know why…The Enigma Variations, for example. You’ve only got to start playing [it] and I’m in floods of tears.”

  The next day, an overcast Sunday, the pianist headed to the studio to record the song.

  “Roll the tape,” he told Clive Franks as his fingers began playing a C-major chord, a Roland rhythm box keeping tempo as he played.

  Halfway through, Elton broke down in tears.

  Collecting himself, he began the song anew. When Clive went to rewind the recording tape, Elton stopped him. “Just keep going,” he instructed, playing the song a second time. Near the end, he made a mistake and immediately started over.

  His third attempt was flawless.

  Clive glanced nervously at Stuart Epps, who was engineering the session. Together they stared anxiously at the reel-to-reel console—the tape was about to run out, just as Elton was finishing up the pivotal track.

  “The tape is getting thinner and thinner,” Clive recounted to East End Lights’ Tom Stanton and James Turano. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh please, please…’”

  “[Clive and I] were nearly dying, we’re having heart attacks all over the place,” Stuart said. “And it’s no word of a lie, as Elton finished the last chord—as the last chord died away—the tape ran out. And Clive and I sort of collapsed on the floor, thanking God and everything else for what had happened. And then Clive said, ‘Oh yeah, we got it Elton, come in and have a listen.’ And we never told him what murders we’d been through, because by then he was relieved to have got through the song. So we didn’t bother telling him that we nearly lost it.”

  Ray Cooper added a wind chime and shaker to the swirling dreamscape the next day, and Clive added bass. “Then I had this idea for doubling the bass,” he said, “putting it marginally out-of-tune for this odd effect. It’s hard to hear. If you play it in headphones, you can hear that there are two basses. Over stereo, it gels into one.”