The highpoint of the broadcast came when Everage performed her recent hit, “Every Mother Wants a Boy Like Elton.”
“Well, he would have to play the piano, or wear funny glasses when he comes for tea,” Everage sang as Elton appeared stage-left to complete the verse: “A great big dame like Edna fancies me.”
“Do you think Dame Edna has a career, Elton, as a pop singer?” Parkinson asked the pianist after the performance. “What would you advise her to do now?”
“Ummm…shall we skip that question?”
Parkinson nodded. “Well, how did she do today?”
Elton raised an eyebrow. “Let’s skip that one as well.”
The pianist had a giant banner placed above the entrance to Olympia Hall days later, where Rod Stewart was to give a concert in promotion of his latest album, Blondes Have More Fun:
Blondes have more fun, but brunettes have lots more money.
Happy Christmas.
Rod had the banner torn down, and a new one hung in its place:
Blondes may have more fun, but brunettes have more transplants.
After appearing at the Hammersmith Odeon for a charity show on Christmas Eve, along with Peter Gabriel and Tom Robinson, and pleased that he’d survived an unusually trying year, Elton flew down to Australia to help Ian “Molly” Meldrum—a leading music journalist whom the pianist had befriended during his first tour of Oz back in ‘71—review the top songs of the year on the December 10 episode of Meldrum’s Countdown show. After airing the third most popular song of the year—the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive”—Meldrum queried Elton as to why he had yet to ‘go disco’. “I like disco music,” the pianist allowed, “but I never consciously wanted to write disco music. I’d not be very good at it, I would think.”
“Did you like the Stones’ Some Girls?”
“I liked ‘Miss You’, I thought it was brilliant. I thought the rest of the album was abysmal, I thought they should give up. I mean, ‘Respectable’—really crass rubbish. I liked Charlie Watts on it, though.”
Meldrum changed the subject to Billy Joel’s latest album, 52nd Street.
Elton sighed. “Billy Joel, yeah. He’s pinched me like mad. ‘My life…’ Before, I always felt sorry for the bloke, ‘cause everyone always said, ‘Poor man’s Elton John,’ and I always thought that’s really rubbish, ‘cause the guy writes really great songs, and he’s made four or five good albums. This album—and it’s very weird how I heard it, because Billie Jean King came up to my hotel while I was doing interviews and said, ‘You’ve gotta listen to this album,’ and I said, ‘Well, it’s Billy Joel, I’ve heard a couple tracks.’ She said, ‘Well, listen to this whole album.’ I’ve never heard such blatant copying of my vocal style ever. ‘My life…’ You go back and listen to the way I pronounce ‘life’ in any of my songs. Life. And you listen to ‘Big Shot’—it’s ‘Bennie and the Jets’ backwards.”
Meldrum nodded. “What do you think about Linda Ronstadt? Do you like her?”
Elton hesitated.
“She’s very pretty,” he said with a sly grin.
Chapter 35:
To Russia…With Elton
As the clangorous cacophony of the punk revolution mutated into the more copacetic tunefulness of New Wave bands like Blondie, Talking Heads and the Police, Elton decided to dip his toe back into the touring waters. An ambitious 73-date two-man show was quickly set up. It would be a unique outing—no band, no extended entourage. Just Elton and his piano, and his longtime percussionist.
“I determined the only way to come back was just on my own, or at least only with Ray Cooper,” he said. “To play on my own and get my fear back, because I wasn’t afraid any more. I’d lost the whole fear thing. It was just routine. I’d lost my edge completely. It was too comfortable, I could’ve gone onstage and read poetry for an hour and they’d have applauded.”
The massive twelve-country tour, billed as Elton John: A Single Man in Concert with Ray Cooper, kicked off at the Concerthaus Hall in Stockholm, Sweden on February 5, and would wind its ways from Antwerp, Belgium to Wiesbaden, Berlin. The shows followed the same general pattern set by the two musicians’ weeklong stand at the Rainbow back in ’77. Elton would begin each night alone at the piano, reaching deep into his back catalogue to air out lesser known treasures such as “Come Down in Time” and “The Greatest Discovery.” The emotional intimacy of the gigs proved a real challenge for the pianist. “I never was nervous in the past with the band, but now I get physically sick with nerves every night.” Still, performing alone—or nearly alone—had a very definite upside, as it allowed Elton to appreciate the depth of his oeuvre more than ever before. “That’s when I realized that Bernie is one of the great lyric writers, because I suddenly got into those songs all over again. Some of the lyrics are timeless.”
Halfway through the shows, Elton would amble from his somber midnight black nine-foot grand over to an electric CP80 piano set up on the other side of the stage, where he’d perform Tumbleweed Connection’s haunting “Where to Now, St. Peter?,” as well as a pair of covers: Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go”—the song he’d performed at his failed audition for Liberty Records back in ‘67—and a raging ten-minute-plus version of the R&B classic, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”
Heading back to his grand piano, Elton would begin the second half of each show by launching into the familiar opening chords of “Funeral For a Friend” as a shell-like backdrop—glowing an ethereal orange—slowly rose to reveal a statue-like Ray Cooper standing behind a row of timpani, dry ice swirling about his stock-still frame.
“I come on in a very strange part of the show,” the percussionist said, “where everybody’s already had an hour and fifteen minutes, an hour and twenty minutes, of very much Elton and his piano, and Bernie’s lyrics, and the songs and everything else, which is wonderful, and there’s almost a feeling—perhaps one senses it backstage, and certainly I think if one’s in the audience one certainly feels it—that it’s either time to go home, having been totally fulfilled as an evening’s entertainment, or to switch over channels virtually to the next [level]. So I come on in a poof of smoke and produce what is perhaps a little bit extra, and it should be [experienced as something] totally different.”
Like some freshly animated creature out of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, Ray would prowl the stage like a demented civil servant each night, easily upstaging his superstar boss. “It could be Rubenstein playing the piano,” Ray noted philosophically. “Everybody will still be looking at the drummer.”
For his part, Elton appreciated the benefits of touring with someone who was not only attuned to him musically, but who also proved an intelligent, sympathetic traveling companion. “Ray and I work very well,” he said. “It’s really just like going on holiday when we go out on the road.”
Though their shows offered a seemingly effortless blend of hard-edged rock ‘n’ roll and old school theatricality, Elton and Ray in fact worked ceaselessly choreographing their performances.
“We have to,” Ray said. “Although within the songs [Elton] can do what he wants, and I’ll just float with him. If he wants to make ‘Rocket Man’ twenty minutes long, that’s fine. I’ll play a bit, wander off for a cup of tea, whatever.” Elton agreed, noting that “without a band you’re free to extemporize, whenever you want, and within certain limits when you’ve got Ray onstage with you. But there was no real framework [on this tour], and it was quite exciting. It also gave me my confidence back as a musician.”
That feeling of newfound liberation extended to Clive Franks, who was given a free artistic hand to mix the sound whichever way he thought best. “I could [finally] do my effects,” the sound engineer said, “which you could never hear in the past because the band covered it. My little reverbs and subtle effects and delays.”
The enthusiastic response which Elton’s two-man shows drew provided him with the confidence to take his show to countries he’d
never toured before, including France, Spain, Belgium, Israel, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. These virgin audiences provided unpredictable, and thus inherently valuable, reactions for the jaded star. In return, Elton began adding impromptu flourishes to his performances, as at his shows at the Theatre De Champs Elysées, when he seamlessly folded “Iles Amore” and “I Love Paris in the Springtime” into the set list. Appreciative Parisians gave him standing ovations every night—a far cry from the hot-dog-throwing reception he’d received as a lowly opening act at the start of the decade.
“Things are looking up,” Elton chuckled. “Sérgio who?”
Elton and Ray took their largest artistic gamble yet, heading behind the Iron Curtain on February 18 to play the Kongresshalle in East Berlin, a city the pianist found depressing and dark. “It seemed to have been left just as it was after the war,” he said with a shudder. “Really dire.”
Billy Joel and his band caught Elton’s show in the Netherlands days later. “The first time I saw Elton was in the lobby of a hotel in Amsterdam,” Liberty DeVitto said. “He went walking by in a flowing cape, and I thought, ‘Wow!’ Our lighting designer knew his manager, John Reid, but Elton rushed by so fast I only got to me John Reid. We—the band and Billy and I—went to see him at the Hague. He was great.”
As the tour rolled through cities both bleak and beautiful, London’s Capital Radio named Elton the Top British Singer for the third consecutive year, while a three-song EP of his transitional Seattle recordings, entitled The Thom Bell Sessions ‘77, was finally released—eighteen months after the sessions had transpired, and two months after Elton and Clive Franks had remixed the master tapes in London. “Are You Ready for Love” was concurrently issued as a single in the U.K. Backed by an extended, largely instrumental coda entitled “Are You Ready for Love (Part 2),” the song rose no higher than 42, becoming Elton’s worst-performing single ever in his homeland.
Things were at least a bit more positive on the pitch—Watford had won promotion, moving from the Third Division to the Second. An ecstatic Elton presented the club’s manager, Graham Taylor, with the Gold disc for A Single Man as a thank you gift before boarding a plane to Israel, where he was to become the first major pop star to ever perform in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
Critical reception for the gigs was overwhelming.
“At Elton John’s opening concert in Jerusalem,” reported The Jerusalem Post’s Natan Y. Shaw, “the atmosphere was electric and expectant, as before a cup-final. The lights went out and a tremendous roar rose up in the hall…For two-and-a-half hours, [Elton] played his brains out, paralyzing the audience. His voice was in tremendous form, the piano never sounded more percussive, and there was an all-around aura of celebration.”
“I know I must be getting old because I now think pop groups with red-dyed hair look ridiculous—and only five years ago I thought nothing of appearing with pink hair, fur stoles and eight-inch heels,” Elton said at a press conference held days later at the Tel Aviv Sheraton. “I was in a state of limbo before the opening night [in Jerusalem], didn’t know what to expect of an Israeli audience…I can honestly say I have never heard any audience at any concert I’ve ever given sing along with me so much. I couldn’t even see them—there were spotlights shining straight into my eyes—it was like playing to a vast black hole. But the audience participation was something absolutely incredible.”
Though the tour was met by an ecstatic response everywhere it touched down, the campaign wasn’t without the occasional mishap: During the March 4 show in Lausanne, Switzerland at the Theatre Di Beaulieu, Ray tripped and fell onto Elton’s piano during an encore of “Pinball Wizard,” breaking a rib. Weeks later, in the U.K., the unlucky percussionist came down with pneumonia. “I was wearing a three-piece suit and a tie on stage every performance,” he said. “I must have been crazy.”
Before his Edinburgh concert at the Odeon on March 19, Elton was introduced to members of the Bay City Rollers, the bubblegum-pop boy band who had scored chart successes with such sleekly prefab offerings as “Saturday Night” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Love Letter,” and had recently rechristened themselves as the Rollers.
“So we were taken backstage, and there stood Elton,” said Rollers bassist Duncan Faure. “And my girlfriend, Francine, she said, ‘He’s like a cartoon caricature coming to life.’ And was one of the funniest blokes I’ve ever met. It was incredible. I mean, it’s Elton John, you know? It’s like the Beatles—there can never be another Elton.”
As the tour progressed, Elton decided that he was ready to take the biggest artistic gamble of his entire career and play inside the Soviet Union. Given the bleak political climate, frosted over by a decades-old Cold War, a flamboyant—not to mention openly bisexual—rock star playing within the confines of the socially austere U.S.S.R. seemed an impossibility, however. Still, an attempt was made. John Reid invited Vladimir Kokonin, an official from the Soviet Ministry of Culture, to Elton’s April 17 show at the Oxford Theatre, to gauge the Russian’s impressions of the presentation.
Kokonin was dazzled.
“Is that the concert we will see?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s it,” Elton told him.
“Very well, then. Come.”
Kokonin set into motion the official paperwork which would allow Elton and Ray entry into the Soviet Union. “Even so,” the pianist admitted, “I think we all felt that someone somewhere would give us a ‘no’—or a nyet, as they say. Bennie and the Nyets.”
Initially, the Soviets asked for twenty concerts—ten each in Leningrad and Moscow. Reid made a counter-offer: four shows in each city. The pre-Glasnost Russians, starved for even the slightest taste of Western decadence, agreed without hesitation.
Bags packed and visas stamped, Elton boarded an Aeroflot plane bound for the Soviet Union on May 20. “I don’t know if they’ve heard of Watford in Russia, but they soon will. Mind you, this could be the last time you see me. If they don’t like you in Moscow, you end up down a salt mine.”
Arriving in Moscow in a blue satin shirt and baggy Cossack pants tucked into patent leather boots, his hair and sideburns longer than ever, Elton and his entourage were taken directly from the airport to a train station, where they boarded the midnight Red Arrow for the 500-mile trek to Leningrad. As to why they weren’t simply allowed to fly directly to the once and future St. Petersburg, Elton surmised, “We presume there was something they didn’t want us to see.”
Anticipation for the eight shows ran high. With ninety-five percent of the tickets going to military officers, city bureaucrats and top-ranking Communist Party members, nosebleed seats—priced at eight rubles, more than the average Soviet earned every two weeks—were trading on the black market for up to twenty-five times their face value.
As Elton’s group—which included his mother and step-father, John Reid, and assistant Bob Halley—settled into their muggy, un-air-conditioned hotel rooms, two eighteen-wheelers packed with thirteen tons of equipment—musical instruments, lighting systems, sound systems, carpets, drapes and wardrobe—were winding their way through Eastern Europe and into the barren Russian hinterlands. The trucks arrived the day before the first performance. Practiced English roadies set to work posthaste, stopping only for the occasional tea break, and had the entire stage set—drapes hung, lighting rig operational, Elton’s piano tuned—by the early afternoon of May 21.
The aura inside the 3,800-seat Bolshoi Oktyabrsky Concert Hall that night was unlike that in any Western arena. No Frisbees flew from the balconies, no beach balls bounced across the floor seats. Not even the minutest traces of marijuana could be detected wafting through the non-proletariat air. Instead, stolid Politburo wives of a certain age sat waiting grimly, hands folded impatiently on graying laps.
Backstage, Elton was unusually pensive. “Spaseeba is ‘thank you’. Dobriy vecher, somehow I’ll remember that…Nasdarovje is ‘cheers’. And Spakona noche—“no, spakona noche!”—that’s ‘goodnight�
�. Yeah, that’s alright.” He glanced furtively around his dressing room. “What is ‘help’?”
An announcer began reading brief biographies of Elton and Ray over the loudspeaker system at eight-twenty-five p.m., and at eight-thirty precisely, the house lights cut off and a pair of white spotlights picked out Elton entering from stage-left.
After a nervous bow, the show began with a solemn reading of “Your Song.”
“Dobriy vecher,” Elton said afterward to polite applause.
A barrier of wary culture shock clearly separated artist and audience; only when a fan came to the lip of the stage after “Daniel” and asked for an autograph did the barometric pressure in the hall drop noticeably.
“Here we go,” a visibly relieved Elton said, launching into a poignant rendition of Empty Sky’s signal ballad, “Skyline Pigeon.”
As usual, the performance truly caught fire with Ray Cooper’s emergence at the midway point. Dressed like an undertaker’s assistant in a dour pin-striped suit, the unsmiling percussionist cut a commanding figure the Soviets responded to with understated awe. “The concerts in Russia, unlike those in the United States, would not start with the audience screaming and shouting,” Ray said. “They wanted to see us, listen to us, and experience the music. I had experienced this response in the theater as an actor, but never at a rock ‘n’ roll concert. It was an exhilarating experience.”
After a stormy, snare-drum-laced “Better Off Dead,” a jubilant “Merry Month of May” suddenly burst into an eviscerating “Bennie and the Jets.” Aided by Ray’s fiercely rhythmic tambourine, the Muscovites began clapping along enthusiastically. Sparks flew, and the song was met by deafening applause.
Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 61
