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

by David DeCouto

  “It was a charged evening,” Russ Regan concurred. “Elton and Nigel and Dee just brought the house down. We knew within forty-five minutes that we had a superstar. It was electrifying. I mean, it was just an electric night.” Ray Williams felt much the same. “As history will show, those shows at the Troubadour were absolutely brilliant. Nigel was super, and Dee was like the glue that held the band together. There was something very simple and strong about the way he played and joined in. He was just very melodic, a great bass player. And Elton, of course, was a wonderful performer. It was phenomenal.”

  Indeed, the Brit pounded restlessly on the ivories all night long, his stubby hands a blur as they hammered out one tasty legato blues phrase after another.

  “I started cheering so loudly,” Neil Diamond said, “[that] I spilled my drink.”

  Elton and Nigel and Dee let go of any remaining inhibitions as they swung down the riotous homestretch of a fourteen-minute “Burn Down the Mission,” which incorporated an energetically majestic cover of the Beatles’ “Get Back.”

  “Suddenly, the Troubadour audience was on its feet,” Robert Hilburn said. “The guy next to me wasn’t whispering any longer. He joined in the thunderous applause.”

  “Rock ‘n’ roll!” a sweat-soaked Elton cried, doing a handstand off the keyboard and falling to his knees, his head shaking as if he were having a seizure. As the song climaxed, he leapt atop his piano and pumped his fist into the smoky air. The crowd imitated his gesture, mesmerized by the energy he gave off.

  “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I felt released.”

  Chapter 4:

  Is New York As Hip As California?

  Elton compared his opening night at the Troubadour to The Eddy Duchin Story. “One of those old films,” he said. “‘Look, the boy is conducting the orchestra, he’s fourteen years old and he’s blind and he’s got one leg and everybody’s going ‘Hooray!’” He laughed. “Everybody thought I was going to be a very moody person…fainting after every three songs. In fact, I came out with shorts on and flying boots and Mickey Mouse ears and played rock ‘n’ roll, and they went, ‘What is this?’”

  Music critic Robert Hilburn understood exactly what it was.

  “Rejoice,” he declared in the August 27 edition of the L.A. Times. “Rock music, which has been going through a rather uneventful period recently, has a new star. He’s Elton John, a 23-year-old Englishman, whose debut Tuesday night at the Troubadour was, in almost every way, magnificent.” Hilburn was effusive in his praise of the pianist’s “staggeringly original” music. “By the end of the evening,” he concluded presciently, “there was no question about John’s talent and potential. Tuesday night at the Troubadour was just the beginning. He’s going to be one of rock’s biggest and most important stars.”

  “Everything stemmed from Hilburn’s article,” Dee said. “[It was] just mind-blowing.”

  Elton felt similarly. “That one night, and that one review, saved me a year’s work. It flew, word-of-mouth…It was a kind of fluke.”

  Yet Hilburn wasn’t alone in his critical assessment of the Englishman’s musical prowess. Kathy Orloff of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that he “was a major star before the end of his first set…The future seems incredibly bright for John,” while John Gibson of the Hollywood Reporter proclaimed “it’s not often that someone gets a standing ovation at the Troubadour, but Elton John did—twice…He got the entire audience singing, clapping and stomping…Audiences don’t usually join in on the enthusiasm, but he was irresistible.” The Los Angeles Free Press noted that “recently there’s been a lot of loud clatter about Elton John. And there’s going to be a lot more. For once, the hype is mostly true.” The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner proclaimed Elton “a spectacular talent,” while Rolling Stone simply declared the Brit’s show “one of the great opening nights in Los Angeles rock.”

  “My whole life came alive that night,” Elton said. “Musically, emotionally…everything. It was like everything I had been waiting for suddenly happened. I was the fan who had become accepted as a musician. It was just amazing. [And] there were so many people who suddenly wanted to know me. Instantly I went from being a nobody to Mr. Elton John. I must have shaken a million hands and had people slapping me on the back and calling me the Great White Wonder and all that.”

  As to his seemingly instant success, he had no idea why it happened. “I think it’s a matter of luck, and being in the right place at the right time. I’m a great believer in that—if you keep plugging away, you’re going to make it sometime. I had to wait seven years, but no one was more surprised when it happened than me.”

  The spectacular evening was capped off by a telephone call from rock impresario Bill Graham offering Elton a pair of fall shows at the Fillmore’s East and West.

  “$5,000,” Graham said. “It’s the highest fee the Fillmore has ever paid for a new act.”

  “Sold!” Elton said.

  “We knew we had done something right,” Nigel said, “when KHJ, which was the big Top 40 radio station in L.A., played ‘Your Song’.”

  “The new Rock Messiah is here, ladies and gentlemen,” the disc jockey portentously intoned as “Your Song” became “Take Me to the Pilot.” “And the new Messiah’s name is Elton John.”

  Russ Regan, who was driving Nigel and Dee to get hamburgers at the time, pulled their car off the Hollywood Freeway, laughing through unbidden tears. “I love you guys,” he told them, genuinely moved. “I love you guys.”

  Word of Elton’s phenomenal prowess spread quickly. The subsequent nights’ shows were packed with a litany of Los Angeles culturati; Graham Nash and David Crosby turned out to see the British powerhouse in action, as did the Everly Brothers, Gordon Lightfoot, Bread’s David Gates, the Beach Boys’ Mike Love, Quincy Jones, Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein.

  Elton took their presence in stride. He was hardly the type to get star-struck—at least until halfway through “Burn Down the Mission” on the second night, when he noticed Leon Russell sitting in the audience, all flowing hair and aviator glasses.

  “I nearly died,” Elton said. “I didn’t see him until the last number. Thank God I didn’t, because at that time I slept and drunk Leon Russell…He was sitting there, with his beautiful silver hair, looking like Rasputin…I regarded him as some kind of god. And I saw him and I just stopped.”

  “I had heard [Elton] with Long John Baldry,” Leon said. “I sat down in the first row at the Troubadour, and he was brilliant. I wish we could have got him for Shelter [Records, a U.S. label Leon had founded the year before].”

  Leon invited Elton and Bernie up to his house, The Mission, high up in the Malibu Canyon hills, the next afternoon. “I figured this was it,” Elton said, “[Leon’s] going to tie me up in a chair and whip me and say, ‘Listen here, you bastard, this is how you play the piano.’ But he was really nice instead. It was like a schoolboy’s fantasies coming true…If I ever had to write one song in my life, it would be ‘Song for You’.”

  Russell was equally enamored by Elton. “He was quite a beautiful soul singer,” the American pianist said. “He had a huge blues awareness that I found interesting. I thought my career was over, ‘cause he was a lot more active and a lot more showmanship. I figured I’d had it.”

  Elton and Bernie shyly marveled at Russell’s manse, barren except for an oversized brass bed, matching baby grands, and a massive stereo that sat by itself on a polished hardwood floor. It was a bizarre site that they’d soon get used to. “For some reason,” Bernie said, “all rock stars’ houses were exactly the same.”

  As Elton’s voice was blown-out from his recent performances, Russell shared a gargling potion that the Brit would continue to use throughout his career. “You gargle some vinegar and some honey with the hottest water you can take,” Elton said. “From that day on, we’ve had it in the dressing room.”

  Russell told his English counterpart that he wanted to reco
rd his own version of “Burn Down the Mission,” and that he’d written “Roll Away the Stone” after hearing “Take Me to the Pilot.” He then entreated Elton to jam with him on twin pianos which sat down in his basement, beneath a sign reading: Don’t Shoot the Piano Player.

  “Let’s record something together sometime,” Russell shouted as they swung into a bluesy boogie-woogie in G.

  Elton nodded mutely, flabbergasted.

  “It’s worth five-million good reviews if someone you respect as a musician comes up and tells you they like what you’re doing,” he said.

  After his final Troubadour show, Elton sat at the end of the club’s bar with David Ackles, sharing a bottle of scotch that Ackles had bought him as a congratulatory gift.

  “It’s been a real blast working with you,” Ackles told him as they sipped their drinks.

  Elton was moved. “David Ackles was brilliant. I made a point of watching him every night. [He] told me how much he enjoyed working with me…which is utterly incredible, because I had been a number one fan of his. To see the audience just chatting away while he was singing those lovely songs just tore me apart. People were there because the buzz had got around that I was the guy to see, and they didn’t give a toss about a great person like him.”

  “To the future,” Ackles said, holding his glass up high.

  “Do you know,” Elton later reflected, “that meant most of all to me.”

  To help celebrate Elton’s successful stand, Danny Hutton took him and Bernie on a late-night trek to Brian Wilson’s home in Bel Air. The reclusive creative force behind the Beach Boys was living in a house once owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, now painted bright purple, the driveway lined with drum kits.

  Hutton buzzed the intercom. “I’ve got Elton with me,” he said.

  A moment later, Brian Wilson’s unmistakable voice came singing back: “Ah, Elton. ‘I hope you don’t mind, I hope you don’t mind…’”

  The sweet-natured Beach Boy warmly embraced Elton and Bernie at the front door. Glassy-eyed and mumbling to himself, he was clearly in another land. The Brits—who’d never taken a drug in their lives—were freaked out.

  After a quick tour of the premises—which included a sand-filled dining room—they ended up in Wilson’s fully equipped recording studio. He sat at an eight-octave midnight-black Bösendorfer and sang them “This Whole World,” his sole contribution to the Beach Boys’ imminent LP, Sunflower. The moment he finished, he leapt off the piano bench, threw his large frame himself behind a mixing console, and started playing the master tape of “Good Vibrations.” “[I had] the volume turned up and the sliders pushed down, which allowed the intricacies that are buried on the record to fly out,” Wilson recalled years later in his autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice. “Elton was knocked out.”

  After playing the song through four times, it was Elton’s turn to impress. He sat at Wilson’s piano and played “Amoreena.” Halfway through, Wilson stopped him.

  “Great, Elton. What else have you got?”

  Elton began playing ‘Border Song’. Halfway through, Wilson stopped him again.

  “Terrific. What else?”

  Elton launched into “I Need You to Turn To.”

  Wilson sat back and smiled, deeply affected by the strength of the pianist’s compositions. “It was the most impressive string of new material I’d ever heard,” he said. “Elton asked if I were still writing and I said not much, which was hard considering how jealous I was of Elton at that moment. Listening to his songs, I knew he was hot, that he was tapped into the great source. I’d been there myself.”

  KPPC, a local underground station, took out a full-page advertisement in the Los Angeles Free Press to rave about Elton’s talents, and to bid him a quick return to the City of Angels. His star clearly on the ascent, Viking Records decided to capitalize on the positive press by releasing “From Denver to L.A.”—erroneously crediting the disc to “Elton Johns.”

  Furious at the impertinence, Dick James slapped an injunction on the record and had it withdrawn from the shops.

  “So if you have a copy,” Elton said, “it’s worth a small fortune.”

  Elton and his entourage decamped to San Francisco the next day for a string of shows at the Troubadour’s sister club. Critic Robert Hilburn followed the caravan up, holding an interview with Elton and Bernie at a soundcheck before the first show. Unlike Janis Joplin, whom Hilburn had interviewed the year before, the critic found Elton full of energy and eager to talk. “Asked to name some of his favorite artists, he went on for several minutes, mentioning a third of the artists I had in my record collection, starting with the Beatles, Dylan, and everyone on Motown,” Hilburn said. “His enthusiasm was evident when he stepped to the stage for the soundcheck. Normally, soundchecks last fifteen to twenty minutes, but Elton spent more than an hour on this one, running through not just his own songs, but also some favorites from childhood and others that were more contemporary—from “Long Tall Sally” and “In the Midnight Hour” to “The Weight” and “Long Black Veil.” He was like a human computer of rock n’ roll.”

  After the soundcheck, Elton grew even more animated when he was told that John Reid, the twenty-year-old label manager for the British division of Tamla Motown—Reid had been responsible for pulling “The Tears of a Clown” off Smokey Robinson’s three-year-old Make It Happen album and releasing it as a hit single in Britain—was in town for the label’s tenth-anniversary convention. The Scotsman was an acquaintance of Elton’s from London, having been introduced to him months before by Harvest Records’ David Crocker, who occupied the office next to Reid’s.

  “One day,” Reid said, “David came in and said, ‘This is my friend Reg.’ That’s how I met Elton. He scrounged some Motown American singles, I can’t remember what. He said, ‘I made a record,’ and gave me a white label of what became the Elton John album.”

  Elton gave the label manager a call.

  “He rang me, a lost English soul in San Francisco,” Reid said, “and he told me about how the critics had received him in Los Angeles, and he was bubbling over, he was dying to tell someone about it. I was the nearest Englishman, or the nearest thing to an Englishman.”

  During his first show on the Bay, Elton wore what Reid thought were “pretty outrageous clothes: jumpsuits with the zips up in back, bib overalls and star-spangled T-shirts, and I thought, ‘What is this guy?’…He was something I hadn’t seen before. Or since, really. He is just a one-off.”

  The show went down well, The San Francisco Chronicle concurring with their fellow critics down the coast as they noted that “[Elton] had hardly opened his mouth when it was apparent that he is going to be a very, very big star.”

  After the performance, Elton and the Scotsman headed back to Reid’s room at the Japanese-style Miyako Hotel, where they became lovers.

  “I was basking in my glory,” the pianist later admitted. “I suddenly thought, ‘To hell with it, here goes.’”

  Days after his San Francisco stand, Uni Records released a full-page ad in all the major music trade magazines featuring the cover of the Elton John album, along with the headline: Is New York As Hip As California? With true early-‘70s hyperbole, the ad copy went on to ask: “Who is Elton John? Who are you? Some of the answers to these questions are contained in Elton John’s songs. Some are contained in your head.”

  The advertisement-cum-philosophical-treatise was timed to appear in conjunction with Elton’s performance at a private midafternoon press luncheon showcase at the Playboy Club in Manhattan. Journalists sat shoulder-to-shoulder with representatives from The Tonight Show, The Ed Sullivan Show and The David Frost Show, who took detailed notes on each act, grading them as to their suitability as future television bookings.

  Elton was scheduled third on the three-act bill, behind McKendree Spring and Ken Lyons. By the time he took to the stage, lunch was well over with and nearly two-thirds of the audience had left, leaving the Brit to
play to a plethora of empty seats.

  “He didn’t have his heart in it,” Russ Regan said. “He didn’t do well. He was very upset about everyone having left. What they did wasn’t good, putting us on so late. We were all pissed off.”

  As Eric Van Lustbader reported in Record World, by the end of his brief set, Elton “was beside himself, tears of rage in his eyes.”

  Elton stormed out of the Playboy Club, Bernie tagging along quietly behind. After a conciliatory meal at the Carnegie Deli, Elton’s mood lightened enough that he decided that he and Bernie should pay a visit to the Apollo Theater in Harlem. “It was dangerous for people to go up into Harlem, but Bernie and I wanted to go,” he said. “Being white guys from England, it took us quite a few taxi drivers before we found one to take us up there. I just wanted to stand outside that theater and look at it, and think of all the great music that had come out of it.”

  Elton and Bernie spent the night at Lowe’s Midtown Hotel on Eighth Avenue, in the urine-soaked shadows of Times Square. The Englishmen were unilaterally unimpressed with the city. “It really smells, the whole city seems to have gone off,” the pianist said. “Everybody who lives there keeps apologizing for it. New Yorkers get really upset about what’s happening to the city, but they say it just gets worse and worse.”

  Just past three a.m., the songwriting duo were awakened by a gun battle out in the street. They watched incredulously as a policeman shot a vandal dead before their eyes. Inspired by the incident, Bernie grabbed his notepad and began scribbling down a new lyric: “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” a cynical response to Ben E. King’s “Spanish Harlem.”

  “When I first saw New York, it terrified the crap out of me,” he admitted. “It actually scared me.”

  Elton’s final gigs on his maiden trip to the United States were two nights at Philadelphia’s Electric Factory, on September 11 and 12. Uni/MCA was concerned how the shows would be received, for despite Elton’s recent West Coast triumphs, his eponymous album was yet to see any kind of spike in sales.