Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll

by Ben Fong-Torres

  They are missing some show. And not just the music, which is performed well, and is staged, lit, and amplified swell. There's this parade of young girls hurtling up onto the stage, or being tossed up, and they land right in front of Elton and his equally glitter-dressed Steinway. From there, they are led, pulled, or carried into the backstage area by blue-shirted security cops. If they jump onstage, they are hustled out the back door, banished from the concert. The others are casualties and are placed in the firstaid room, where two nurses attend to them. By the end of fifteen songs, one of the nurses says that they've seen maybe twenty-four girls, mostly the victims of "festival seating," of pushing and shoving by people behind them. Also, several faintings from excitement and a couple of drug overloads-"But not nearly as much as we get for the teenybop concerts here-Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, or, you know, the Moody Blues.

  "What kind of drugs at those concerts? Oh, mostly LSD."

  Peter Greenberg beamed. Looking conspiratorial, he pulled me aside and told how his cameraman was able to cop 3 64 feet of film-approximately eight minutes. "Simone was standing there with his watch, ready to time us and hurrying us to set up our cameras, and my man is futzing around with his meters and shit, and all the time his camera was running. I mean, I didn't even know!"

  A week later, I called Greenberg to find out when all America might see his work. He had scored a minute-and-a-half interview with John on the rented 707, called the Starship, on its way back from San Diego to L.A. that night, and before the trip to San Diego, he had shot some interiors of this rock-tour plane. "You know what I call this"" he asked, inviting consideration of the plane's garishly decorated compartments: a tiny bedroom with Plexiglas nightstands and hideaway bed (for certain rock groups, a waterbed is installed), and a standard airplane john, but also a shower and a sink with an orange bowl. Next door, a parlor with contempo pillows and fireplace with artificial, day and night-glo "fire." In the main cabin area, a long bar, flanked in mirrors and Mylar, gold and orange foil. Greenberg had a phrase for all of this: "2001: Levitz."

  Anyway, so he was all set, right?

  "Well," he said. "Funny thing. It's not going to be aired. Because of the position they put us in, we got unusable film, even though we stole stuff."

  But up in Sacramento, it's full speed ahead for Johnny Hyde and his project. "The film looks good," he said. "We're editing it now." Hyde's camera operator also had been given twenty seconds originally. "Then they said two minutes." He smiled. "We ended up with a good three minutes."

  In San Diego, Hyde had fumed at Simone's anti-publicity stance; had gnawed at a roast beef sandwich in a dressing room and wondered out loud why radio and TV were being treated so bad. He'd had to go past Simone and strongarm Elton's manager before being allowed to do this fluffy piece of business for the Today show, he said, essentially free promotion of Elton John to a large audience unfamiliar with him. "Until these last eighteen months," said the 40-year-old Hyde, "the mass media had treated rock stars as second-class citizens. Only in the last eighteen months was rock recognized as a legitimate form of entertainment and a legitimate business. Broadcasters have always been supposed to serve the public, and now that we're opening our arms to the younger, progressive artists, they've gotten to the point where they think they don't need media."

  Hyde and crew had to stay with the tour up to San Francisco and wait through two more postponements, before getting John for an eleven-minute interview at 1 A.M. on Friday morning, Elton pale and weak but patient, after the show in Oakland, on a day Elton will not soon forget.

  For a whole week, the station had been up and screaming about his appearance there-"E.J. the DJ!" It was a juicy plum for KFRC. The other AM rocker in town, KYA, had been graced with a 15-minute phone call from Elton John two days before. But Elton in San Francisco, at the KFRC mike, picking his own records, reading his own spots - never in his 11-year radio career had Michael Spears, the station's new, 27year-old program director, come up with such a coup. He put out the word, every ten minutes for a week, it seemed: Elton John, Thursday, for a three-hour show from 3 to 6 P.M., just before the concert at the Oakland Coliseum.

  When Thursday came around and it was time for the countdown, KFRC was near hysteria. A half-hour before, the announcer shiver-shouted, `Any minute now, Elton John will walk through that door and be a disc jockey on KFRC! I'm so ex-cited!"

  Finally at three o'clock-"Good afternoon, this is Michael Spears, I'm the program director of KFRC. About five minutes ago on a day when we've probably had the bestor worst luck than we've ever had before, we got a telephone call from one of our people with the Elton John tour. And, uh, it is not confirmed yet but apparently Elton John ate something last night that did not agree with him and he has food poisoning. We are not sure of anything more than that at this point except that, temporarily, his show this afternoon has been postponed-uh, there's some word that perhaps his concert, too, tonight and we are checking on that. A doctor is with Elton right now, he's lying down, and we'll check for some more details and bring you all the information as we get it."

  Phones begin buzzing at KFRC. Bill Graham is on the line to read the station out for implying that the concert might be canceled. Connie Pappas is on the line, to refute the food poisoning rumor. She had told KFRC's man at the Fairmont of Elton's disagreeable meal; somewhere in the relay, Michael Spears got poison on his mind. "That station," she will mutter later. `As if all that wasn't enough," said Pappas, "they tell everyone that he's at the Fairmont. We had to cut our lines and not take any calls."

  KYA had to do it, and at 4 P.M., they did it: "This is Roger W. Morgan, program director of KYA. There is a rumor circulating around the Bay Area that Elton John will not be able to make his performance at the Oakland Coliseum tonight. According to sources at FM Productions, and Bill Graham, who is presenting the show, this is simply a rumor and, fortunately, not a true one at all. Elton John is definitely scheduled to go onstage tonight. The show will go on, and we're also very happy to announce that KYA will be presenting the Elton John interview at 6 P.M. tonight-on the Rock of the Bay. The station that comes through in San Francisco."

  Ouch! In fact, ouch and a half, as KYA followed up with the Billy Preston hit, "Nothing from Nothing."

  "It was the lowest moment in my life," said Michael Spears a week after that horrible Thursday. Still, he was feeling victorious. On Saturday, just before heading for the airport to board his Starship for dates in Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland, Elton called KFRC and ended up answering questions from the audience for an hour. KFRC canceled all ads and records for this face-saving hour.

  (Elton really did get ill-either from a room-service dinner or a crab omelet that afternoon. At the show in Oakland that night he was pale and queasy through the first couple of numbers, but proceeded to do his usual.)

  The real kicker, for Spears, was that he hadn't even done anything to get Elton. John's people had called KFRC. Their boy still had these fantasies, see. Rock star wasn't enough. Record collector wasn't enough. In L.A. he'd done stints on KMET-FM and on KHJ. And so, for San Francisco, he was asking if he might get on the respective sister stations, KSAN-FM and KFRC.

  From the first, Elton John has been almost suspiciously accessible to the press, to media exploitation. With reporters he's been consistently open and apparently candid. In the role of pop star, he is happy to make a fool of himself, with his Christmas-treeon-Sesame-Street fashions, to please the audience. For the same reason, he is happy to pound his piano so hard that his fingers are bleeding and yell out to the crowd: "I'll play for you even if I've only got one finger left!" (This year, he's carrying with him the bowler's best friend, Nu-skin lotion, which coats fingers with a protective plastic film.) And for the same reason, he understands media as a channel to further reach the fans who love him-and who pay his way.

  But somewhere between him and the outside, there are forces which don't seem to understand the nature of Elton John, and the nature of his success. Plastic protect
ion. At KFRC, Michael Spears accepts John. "He's straight-ahead, I know that. But I don't know about the people around him. It's like Nixon, with people insulating him, not letting him know what's going on, telling him everything's OK when it's not." Another man, an artists' manager who has spent time with John, says "Elton is hard to talk to when anybody's around. By himself, he'll talk."

  The first time John worked L.A. he stayed at the Continental Hyatt, modest rates for modest rooms. Nowadays, when he's in town, which is about four months out of each year, he stays at a rented house high up in Beverly Hills.

  The house is a neat Tudor-styled six-bedroomer and comes complete with patio, back lawn, pool, and a staff of four keepers. The furnishings are a mixture of W&J Sloane's and Museum Deco, with stagey floor-to-ceiling drapes in almost every room and plenty of couches and wingbacks and Mediterranean cabinets and bars. Elton John thinks it's all "horrible," and wherever he can he adds his own touches.

  Like in the circular foyer that greets you, an airy space lit by a graceful chandelier, the hallway to the left flanked by two pots of dried flowers set on ceramic columns. Elton has placed a Rockola jukebox there, a flashy computer-like holder of eighty tunes, stocked, of course, by Elton, with only one Elton John single: "The Bitch Is Back."

  Other touches. In the study, accoutrements of the biz: a TV and videocassette unit blocking the fireplace; record albums stacked neatly on the floor against the bookshelf, a Victorian desk littered with trade magazines and a bag of five hundred Qualatex balloons imprinted with the insignia of the current tour, an almost skinheaded Elton John inside a circular piano keyboard. In the living room, on the Steinway, there are picture books on Maxfield Parrish, Dali, and Disney. A composition is in progress: a set of lyrics, signed by Taupin, called "Desperation." Atop a small JBL speaker across the room, there is a neon sign that reads TALKIES. And on the coffee table, inside an ashtray, a lapel button urges: START SOMETHING.

  IT'S A SUNNY DAY, ten in the morning. Few of the five house guests are up; they're padding around in robes, taking breakfast in the patio, doing chores. There are only men-assistants, friends, and manager John Reid.

  Elton John is also in a bathrobe, conservative blue-on-white terrycloth, and rosetinted glasses with little red palm trees along the outer rims. He walks into the living room, where Reid in a bright red robe is seated on a couch talking to the road manager. Elton rolls off the latest trade news of their Rocket Records artists' singles. Kiki Dee is the two-year-old label's first big hit, and Neil Sedaka, just signed, has entered the charts and looks promising. Elton rattles off numbers, bullets and magazines, then turns to leave.

  "What about your own record?" Reid asks.

  "Oh," says John. "I thought you'd never ask." He consults a scrap of paper from out of his pocket. Oh yes. He is still at the top of the charts, all trades, and the second single from Caribou, "The Bitch Is Back," is Number 12 with a bullet. And Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, exactly a year since its release, is still in the healthy middle of the charts.

  In the study, by himself, John talks. "I still basically get my kicks from the same things," he says, "from listening to records and making records. I'm still a fan. Twice in the last week I've been at Tower Records at eight in the morning; they opened it for me so I could have a look in peace and look thoroughly through the racks." This time, he said, "I bought some great spoken word records.

  "I'm crazy. I've absolutely got this vision of having-I've got a great library and I just like looking around to add things to it."

  His latest major addition is a collection of thirty thousand singles, purchased for some $8,000 from a former BBC producer. "It's every single that's been released in England for the last fifteen years or something. I haven't got 'em yet. I don't know where to put them. When I move in England, when I buy a new house, my mother is going to catalog them for me-because it makes me feel a bit uneasy that they're not. I feel that inanimate objects have feelings. I hate having my records strewn around the floor, I won't lend my records to anybody."

  John is saying that he hasn't changed. Available evidence supports the claim. But there are these questions about "the people around him."

  When Rocket was first started by Reid and John, Elton told a pop paper: "What we are offering is undivided love and devotion, a fucking good royalty for the artist and a company that works its balls off." But, said one former early employee, the first artists on Rocket were mismanaged, paid a retainer, and "no one was trying to get them any work." In answering these criticisms, Reid said he never managed anyone but Kiki and Elton, that in fact he did arrange a U.S. tour for Mike Silver, one of the failed Rocket acts, and that the other, Longdancer, was managed by another man.

  Elton John himself will say this much: "Our ideals still haven't changed, it's just the first year was a nightmare, really, because we made so many mistakes. We signed a few acts that we shouldn't have signed and we-see, we thought it was going to be easy, and it's so difficult."

  John Reid was head of Tamla/Motown's English operation in the late sixties. At age 25, he has Elton John and Kiki Dee under management, with separate offices in L.A. for Rocket and for his John Reid Enterprises. He was the man behind the reissue and resurgence of a number of Motown records in England five years ago "when," he said, "we were having a dry spell." In America for a Motown meeting in 1970, he saw Elton in performance-it was the week after the legendary Troubadour date-and went after him.

  Reid is small and short fused. And he lights up especially quickly around Elton John. Said one former employee: "They're very close. John knows every whim of Elton. He's the epitome of a personal manager. He will kill for Elton." Another ex: "He's diminutive, but he's a killer. He'll punch anyone." Besides the celebrated incidents in New Zealand last spring-he tossed a glass of champagne at a man for not having enough liquor at a reception for Elton; slapped a woman journalist who scolded him and reportedly called him a "poof " (meaning a gay); and he beat and kicked another journalist whom he said he heard had threatened Elton. He paid a $2,500 settlement to the woman and was convicted on an assault charge for the beating.

  John Reid does not think he's particularly short-tempered. "They're isolated incidents," he said. "I don't make excuses, I'm not particularly proud of it, but any time anything like this has happened, it's been in defense of Elton or Bernie, not for personal reasons."

  In talks with friends, enemies, and associates of John and Reid, invariably there is an insinuating reminder that they share a house in Surrey.

  "No," said Elton. "He's just my manager. I have a close circle of friends who just aren't in the public-sort of like Elvis and his... motorbike people. They were the people who first gave Bernie and me encouragement. It's very much a family. That's why it's so incestuous sometimes. We've still got the same roadies, and the guy who mixes our sound, and our agent Howard Rose and Connie, and I like it that way. I'm sort of likenot Godfather"-John laughed, perishing the thought-"but everything around us is incestuous, and that's probably why there might be a lot of talk about us. There's hardly ever a change in our lineup."

  But Howard Rose was not Elton's first agent; Connie Pappas, a bright 2 5-year-old, streaked from a secretarial job with Rose to head of the U.S. Rocket to partner and vice president in John Reid Enterprises. Reid wasn't Elton's first manager; and Simone is his fifth publicist in four years ("Our problem with PR," said Pappas, "is that they all got overbearing and thinking they were the reason for the act's success. You ended up policing them.").

  Elton John said once, "The only thing that depresses me is the business side of things." That has not changed, he said, and he tries to keep out of the way. Reid, after all, did take care of business this summer, negotiating the largest record contract ever for Elton with MCA: A five-year deal calling for six albums in that period and guaranteeing John $8 million for those albums.

  `Actually," said Elton, "the deal is worth more, because of the higher percentage royalty rate. I'm getting 20 or over 20 percent." The arrangeme
nt begins next year.

  Reid and John chose to stay with MCA after hearing offers from "every conceivable record company-even Motown," in John's words. But MCA, stung badly by the loss of Neil Diamond to Columbia, was expected to fight hard to keep Elton. "They came after us-and Mike Maitland [MCA president] just came out-obviously he had orders from the top, I think, `Get him at all costs,' and they did."

  "It's a great deal," he said. "It gives me more flexibility, and there won't be so much product coming out. But it will give the public and me a chance to get used to the fact that I won't be around so much. I want to do other things."

  The desire to stretch out-or at least be able to show that he's stretchable-is a recurring theme and possibly a fixation with John.

  "When I was a kid," he says, "the ambition was to someday be successful. At that point, I just wanted to be a pianist with a band. So everything that's happened to me has come as a total shock. Now, I just have ambitions, just to do things. I've done it musically, but I'd like to do something that would surprise people, to show that I do have another side to my talent than just writing songs and playing piano. I've always said I don't want to be around in ten years still playing the same set I played last night, 'cause that'd become depressing for me. 'Cause then I'd be something I set out not to be."

  TV and films are obvious next steps. John has the role of the Pinball Wizard in Ken Russell's Tommy. "I'm only in it two-and-a-half minutes; I just sing `Pinball.' I'd love to be a film star, but not just relying on...there's another side to me, apart from the music," he says. "I'd like to be in comedy films. A film like Blazing Saddles, where you could laugh all the time. I've got a very sort of Monty Python-ish humor and don't know if it'd catch on in America. It's a little bit avant-garde."