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

by David DeCouto

  After three nights in Glasgow, the band drove off to Brodick Island of Arran for several gigs. “We stayed at a small hotel in Lamlash,” O’Flaherty said. “During the day, on the hotel’s rundown tennis court, we played knockabout tennis, or kicked a football around. Elton was a keen Watford fan even way back then.”

  The tour then took in nearly a dozen more cities, including Forte William, Inverness, Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

  “When it was time for Elton to leave the band and Eric [to] return,” O’Flaherty said, “Elton John asked us and our manager if he could stay with us. We had all become good friends with Elton and would have preferred it if Elton had stayed, but our manager said we had to take Eric back. In retrospect, this was for the best—Reg Dwight may have never become Elton John.”

  Responding to Ray Williams’ off-handed comment that he should pop in to discuss his lyrics when he next “happened to be” in Mayfair, Bernie Taupin arrived unannounced in London a month later, a battered cardboard suitcase in hand. “I just turned up on the doorstep looking like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz,” he said, “and I probably felt like it too.” An astonished Ray Williams took the elfin lyricist to the DJM offices at 71-75 New Oxford Street. Reg was in the middle of a demo session for the Hollies when Bernie appeared. The lyricist waited anxiously in the control room, nervously picking at the sleeve of a moth-eaten jacket.

  “One day this young man shows up,” Caleb said, “and he’s wearing sunglasses and a jacket a size or two too small for him. Straight off the farm. Reg was playing keyboards on a session when they came in. I said, ‘Is he supposed to be in here?’”

  “I was almost thrown out several times because they didn’t know why this little hick was there,” Bernie said.

  Finally, Reg appeared.

  “Are you the lyricist?” he asked.

  “I am,” Bernie meekly admitted.

  “Fantastic. Come on…”

  Bernie followed Reg around the corner to the Lancaster Grill on Tottenham Court Road for a cup of coffee. They immediately hit it off, finding a natural affinity in their shared love of pop music. To Bernie, Reg seemed like a competent professional plugged into the music scene. To Reg, Bernie—who sported a small gold hoop in his right ear after having pierced it with an icepick the year before—looked almost angelic. “I just adored him, like a brother,” the pianist said. “I was in love with him, but not in a physical way. He was the soul-mate I’d been looking for all my life.”

  The two decided to partner up and make a go of it.

  “We were both swimming in deep water and basically trying to find something to hang on to,” Bernie said. “And we found each other.” Indeed, the fledgling lyricist was grateful for the opportunity a partnership with Reg represented, especially given his highly checkered work history. “I got thrown out of one job after another,” he said. “I was insubordinate, the typical rebellious teenager. I did work as a printer, I worked in a factory…one of those horrible Northern factory-type machine rooms with very high sky-lifts, very dark and gloomy, and little men walking around asking for their sixpence a week to join the union. I worked as an apprentice. But they said you had to be an apprentice until you’re twenty-one, and when you’re only like fifteen or sixteen years old, it seemed like an entire lifetime. Fuck that.”

  From the beginning, Bernie’s partnership with Reg had an air of the inevitable about it. The fact that his lyrics had even found their way into Reg’s hands at all smacked of destiny. For after happening upon the NME ad, writing a letter and stuffing an envelope full of lyrics, Bernie had gotten cold feet and promptly stuck the whole thing on the mantelpiece behind an old clock. One day soon after, it disappeared. Bernie’s mother had posted it, thinking he’d forgotten to mail it.

  “Her innocent gesture both saved and changed my life,” the lyricist later reflected.

  Bernie headed back to Owmby-by-Spital and began mailing off lyrics to his new songwriting partner in earnest. Reg quickly set them all to music, despite the chaotic form they often took. “Bernie’s lyrics, if you saw them, they weren’t iambic pentameter at its best,” he said. “There’d just be 115 lines and I’d say, ‘Where the fuck do I start?’ But it didn’t seem that difficult, once I’d got used to it.”

  In short order, Reg and Bernie came up with a slew of new songs, including “A Dandelion Dies in the Wind,” “The Tide Will Turn for Rebecca” (“A real John Hanson-type number”), “Mr. Lighting Strikerman,” “Reminds Me of You,” “When the First Tear Shows,” and the reflectively oblique “Season of the Rain,” which—like most of their early efforts—evoked a general mood more than making any kind of literal sense.

  “Total rubbish,” Elton later said with a laugh.

  The first Dwight/Taupin song committed to recording tape was a poignant piano ballad entitled “Scarecrow.” Bernie proudly took an acetate of the piano-and-vocal demo back to his parents’ house the same chilly October weekend it had been recorded. “I just played it over and over again, thinking, ‘Wow, this is living, man. This is really what it’s all about.’ Just to see a record going around on a turntable was a big buzz, and actually your first song going around on an acetate, ‘Scarecrow’, that’s amazing. So exciting.”

  Reg’s focus on his partnership with Bernie helped sever ties with Niraki, thus making him no longer eligible to utilize DJM’s recording facilities. But Caleb would sneak him in afterhours to record demos of the songs he was writing with Bernie. It was a perfect setup—at least until DJM’s office manager, a straight-laced company man named Ronnie Brohn, happened to be driving past the building one rainy Sunday evening and noticed all the lights were on.

  “We were recording late at night when Ronnie Brohn shows up in the doorway,” Caleb said. “Brohn was this humorless old-guard business manager. Everybody sort of froze. ‘What are you lot doing here so late?’ he yells. ‘Does Dick know about this? Well, he’s gonna hear about it!’

  The following morning, Caleb got called into Dick’s office.

  “I figured that this is it for me,” Caleb said. “I’m about to lose my job. Just harrowing. But Dick was okay. He asked about the sessions and at first he said, ‘I’m throwing them all out. The party’s over,’ that kind of thing. It became known as the Great Purge. And I said, ‘You can throw them out, you can even sack me if you feel like it, but first you’ve got to hear these two guys, you’ve gotta listen to their stuff.’ So I went and got tapes of Elton and Bernie’s songs, and I played him ‘When I Was Tealby Abbey’ and ‘Watching the Planes Go By’ and four or five others.”

  “I don’t think [Dick] was very impressed,” Elton later said, “but…Caleb, who was his blue-eyed boy, said he thought it was good.”

  James immediately demanded to meet Reg and Bernie for himself.

  “I remember them both sitting outside Dick’s office,” Caleb said. “Dead scared because they thought they were going to be hauled over the coals.”

  Reg and Bernie were thus astounded when, instead of castigating them, James offered them a contract instead. “To actually be given money for writing songs—I couldn’t believe they were really serious,” Bernie said. “We fell upon [the contract] like thieves. I was freer and happier than I’d ever been in my entire life.”

  Reg and Bernie signed with DJM on November 7, 1967, for the princely sum of £10 a week each as a guarantee against future royalties, along with a £50 down payment, for writing fifty-four songs over the next three years. As neither were of age—Reg was only twenty and Bernie only seventeen—their parents, Sheila Dwight and Robert Taupin, were required to add their signatures to the contract to make it legally binding.

  “So we signed with Dick James for three years as songwriters and he guaranteed us ten quid a week each,” Elton said. “That was less than I was getting in the group, but it was all I needed.”

  “We all went for a curry at L’Orient—which Elton called Leyton Orient, after the soccer team—all of us just ecstatic,
” Caleb said. “It was a great time.”

  Now officially on the payroll, Elton and Bernie were tasked with churning out formulaic pap—frothy Top 40-style pop tunes that the Engelbert Humperdincks of the world might deign to record. “We had no qualms at first,” Bernie said, “because we were getting paid, and getting paid to write songs wasn’t too bad because I could be driving a tractor or shoveling dead chickens into an incinerator.” Reg, however, was a bit less pardoning. “Music publishers only know about yesterday’s hits, so they’d say, ‘Hey, you guys, you gotta quick write a tune like “I Am the Walrus,”’ or whatever else was popular at the moment. They never once wanted us to write our own kind of music.”

  Though prolific, the pair had little luck placing their songs with established artists. “So many times,” Elton said, “we were told that Tom Jones or Cilla Black was going to record one of our numbers, and we used to go home thinking we’d finally made it. But nothing would materialize, because basically the songs were crap.” The failures hit Bernie even harder than they did his partner. “I used to get more down about it,” the lyricist admitted. “Usually [Reg would] be the one keeping both our spirits up.”

  Making matters worse, Reg and Bernie were relentlessly mocked by DJM’s stable of more experienced writers, men who seemed impossibly old-fashioned to the young upstarts. “It was like the changing of the guard,” Bernie said. “A lot of the guys who had office cubicles within Dick James’ office were like artifacts of the music hall days. We’d hang out in the pubs and listen to all the old cronies talk about ‘the good old days’ and have them point fingers at us and say, ‘You’re not professionals, you’ve gotta be around a long time to be called a professional.’”

  DJM’s newest messenger boy, Clive Franks, would prove a more supportive force for the songwriting duo. Not long after he came aboard, Caleb Quaye decided to leave Dick James’ employ to join Bluesology—whom Reg was still playing with, in-between his efforts with Bernie. “[Reg and I] got talking,” Clive later told Tom Stanton and James Turano. “I was quite mad, actually, because I had been there two months and I was earning seven pounds, ten shillings a week. He was signed up for ten pounds a week, and I thought, ‘What’s so special about you? Why are you getting more than me? You’re the new boy.’” Any displeasure Clive felt quickly evaporated when he was promoted to the lofty position of studio engineer. Working closely with Reg on his latest demos, the two became friends. “We’d go out to the pictures together,” Clive said. “But I could not have foreseen what was coming, the huge international fame. In fact, his music didn’t really appeal to me. It was very odd stuff.”

  At the same time, and quite unexpectedly, Long John Baldry scored a hit in late November with a syrupy ballad called “Let the Heartaches Begin.” Instead of furthering his group’s professional horizons, however, Baldry’s hit actually set Bluesology back.

  “We went from playing really nice places like the Rikki Tikki and the Mojo Club, into playing the Cavendish Club and sort of cabaret places and sort of having to set your equipment up during bingo sessions,” Elton said. “We were the nightclub entertainment to help the food go down nicely. The most insulting thing for a musician, if he’s enjoying his work and really putting a lot into it, is to play to people that aren’t interested in what he’s playing.”

  Reg secured a co-writing credit—along with Baldry and Tony Macaulay—on the single’s B-side, “Hey Lord You Made the Night Too Long.” But this modest success did little to quell his growing dissatisfaction. Adding insult to injury, Bluesology—which was now being billed as The John Baldry Show—were forced to set down their instruments during the show’s climax while Baldry stood alone in the spotlight, mining to a pre-recorded orchestral track of “Let the Heartaches Begin.”

  “As competent as Bluesology was,” Pete Gavin said, “John didn’t want us to play on that one live. He wanted to play the prerecorded backing track through the PA, to which he would sing over it. And we’d stand like goons around on stage waiting for the track to be over, which I thought was really silly, because we could have done it justice. Nevertheless, that was what John wanted to do, so that’s what he did.”

  Reg could clearly see the writing on the wall. Not helping matters, Baldry’s often illogical stage antics could be supremely off-putting. “I remember one gig at Haverford West,” Elton said. “[Baldry] was standing there in his smart suit, singing his big hit, playing the star bit to the hilt. All the chicks were screaming and grabbing for him, and he was loving every minute of it. But then one girl pulled the microphone cable and broke it. Instead of brushing the incident aside and dismissing it with a showbiz-style gesture, he got all serious and angry, and he said to this chick, ‘You’ve broken my microphone. That’ll cost you fifty pounds,’ and then he walloped her on the head with the mic. I just collapsed.”

  “A lot of people didn’t care for John at all,” Pete Gavin agreed. “He’d get up there and he’d do his camp bit at the front of the stage, and they’d be throwing pennies and all kinds of stuff at the stage, because they didn’t appreciate the camp bit at all. John really forsook the blues thing entirely, which may or may not have been a mistake, ‘cause his sophisticated bit really didn’t get him anywhere. The frilly shirts and the fancy neckties and whatnot just didn’t work.”

  On Christmas Eve, 1967, after Bluesology’s gig at the Cavendish Ballroom in Sheffield, two hundred miles north of London, Reg met the towering, towheaded Linda Ann Woodrow between sets, when she came up to compliment him on his playing. The haughty fashionista was accompanied by a popular midget DJ who fashioned himself “The Mighty Atom.” But the diminutive record-spinner proved no match for Bluesology’s organist. “Reg and I got on well, we clicked on straightaway,” said Woodrow, who, at twenty-four, was several years older than Reg. “I found him funny and I really enjoyed his company…I suppose I was flattered because of who he was, and that he took an interest in me.”

  “It was the oddest thing,” Baldry said. “Over the week that we were up there, the relationship between her and Reg solidified, and all of a sudden the dwarf was out of the picture.”

  “I was with a waitress from the club that night,” Caleb said. “The four of us go back to mine and Reg’s hotel room. The next day after the girls left, Reg gave me a pair of socks as a Christmas present. That was really touching. Those socks were all he could afford. Really touching.”

  Stephen James, Dick’s twenty-year-old son and right-hand man, began personally shopping demos of Reg and Bernie’s songs around the London music scene. His efforts met with little success. “The songs were criticized as too airy-fairy. And no one could think of an artist to record them.”

  When Johnny Franz at the Philips label suggested that Reg possessed a strong enough voice to record the material himself, Stephen was intrigued. Mentioning Franz’s assessment to his father that night, the elder James readily agreed. A couple days later, on January 10, 1968, he offered Rega five-year recording contract. For his efforts, Reg would receive two percent of each record’s retail sales price, and a £50 down-payment bonus.

  Reg signed the contract with James’ This Record Co. (“This” being an anagram of “Hits” and “Shit”) to record at least four sides of seven-inch records each year. “I was sort of pushed into being a singer because nobody recorded our songs,” he admitted. “I never thought…that I would be a singer or a performer, because I thought, ‘I’ve had enough of this playing to people eating chicken-in-a-basket, I’ll be a songwriter.’ But once I got a taste of performing, I really liked it.”

  That weekend, Reg and Linda Woodrow—and Linda’s two yapping lapdogs—celebrated by renting a furnished cold-water basement flat at 29 Furlong Road, Holloway, North London. Reg and Linda had been fairly inseparable since their first chance encounter, and cohabitation seemed the next logical—albeit rushed—step. “He seemed genuinely excited about the idea of moving in together,” Woodrow said. “It was a decision that was made by both of u
s.” At Elton’s insistence, however, Bernie moved in as well. Woodrow reluctantly agreed to the arrangement. “It was a given that where Reg went, [Bernie] did. But I didn’t mind. I was in love and wanted to be with him.”

  The lyricist, for his part, was less than enthusiastic about the run-down neighborhood they’d relocated to. “We were in the Watts of London,” he said. “We were really scraping.”

  If the area bothered Reg, he was keeping silent about it. He had larger matters to focus on. Soon after moving in, he lost his virginity to his older and more experienced girlfriend. “When we rolled into bed, he was clumsy and, frankly, didn’t have a clue,” Woodrow claimed. “He was a gentle person by nature, and he was that way in bed. I was so keen on him that I didn’t really mind.”

  Not everyone was quite as acquiescent, however. Caleb, for one, found Reg’s relationship with Linda nothing short of comical. “I didn’t dislike her, but she was really snooty, dressing in high-fashion with a really superior upper-class air. Tall and thin, and Reg always wore this huge fur coat at the time. One day the three of us all went to get a curry together, and on the way back to the studio I’m looking at Reg holding the leash to Linda’s ratty little dogs, and she and Reg just looked like the numeral 10. I just lost it and fell against a lamppost in hysterics.”

  With the ink still wet on his recording contract, his first solo publicity session under his belt with photographer Val Wilmer—complete with wolf-skin jacket and leopard-skin hat—and the promise of newfound love sparkling in his battened-down heart, Reg felt secure enough to finally cut the umbilical cord with Bluesology. His final performance with them occurred in February, 1968. “We played our last gig at Greens’ Playhouse in Glasgow,” Caleb said. “The stage had a cage around it to stop flying beer bottles, just like The Blues Brothers years later.” Though Reg had long contemplated leaving the group, his Vox blowing a fuse during their final Scottish set helped him decide the matter once and for all.