Half an hour after the band had settled into their hotel rooms, Clive’s phone rang.
“Listen, I want you to play bass tonight,” Elton said. “I’ve just fired the band.’”
“You can’t be serious,” Clive replied, dumbstruck.
“But I am. So get ready.”
“You can imagine how I felt,” Clive said. “I just thought, ‘This can’t happen.’ But [Nigel, Dee and Davey] showed up for the gig. ‘Don’t worry, it’s blown over,’ [Elton told me]. And I’ll tell you, it was the best gig of the tour. They played a blinder.”
Elton’s sartorial wattage for this tour proved as outrageous as his impulsive temperament. His amped-up stage clothes came courtesy of British designer Annie Reavey, who provided costumes that included a red-striped black velvet suit, a quilted lemon ensemble, and a satin two-piece which featured an intricate design of tall grass around the legs, bricks around the torso, and a bird-filled sky about the shoulders.
“I call a lot of the clothes I make for Elton ‘tasteful glitter’,” she said with a laugh. Indeed, her outfits perfectly captured the colorful intricacies of the pianist’s personality—as he himself wanted. “I don’t go up to a designer and say, ‘Make me this and make me that’,” Elton said. “I go up to a designer and say, ‘You know who I am, you know what I am, and I’m slightly in this mood at the moment—make me something.’ Because I feel that creative people should be allowed to do what they want to do without being told.”
A free artistic hand also extended to the designers of the wide variety of specs that balanced upon Elton’s pug nose: heart-shaped frames, red, white and blue-striped frames, and hexagonal lenses in purple, blue and green. While Elton’s outrageous persona had grown in tandem with his spiraling popularity, it was intended as an ironic statement and the very opposite of tacky showbiz glamour. “I’m sending show business up,” he insisted. “I mean, Rod Stewart is exactly the same—he’s very flamboyant and wears pink satin suits and that’s showbiz, and yet it’s not. I just like to get up and have a lark. I do it tongue-in-cheek, with an ‘up yours’ sort of attitude. It’s like an actor getting into his costume for his part. I don’t really feel the part until I’m into what I’m going to wear.” He winced. “It’s a reaction against everything I wasn’t allowed to do as a kid. I wasn’t allowed to wear Winklepicker shoes in case they hurt my feet. I wasn’t even allowed to wear Hush Puppies. Can you imagine that? Not having had a real teenage life, I’m living all those thirteen-to-nineteen years now. Mentally I may be twenty-five, but half of me is still thirteen.”
While in Houston for a show at the Hofheinz Pavilion on April 28, Elton and his band were invited to NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center. After witnessing the splashdown of the three-man Apollo 16 mission—America’s penultimate moon-landing expedition—they lunched with astronaut Al Warden, Apollo 15’s Command Module pilot, before taking turns in a space flight simulator.
That night, Elton’s opening band, Family, suffered an earth-bound crisis when their gear failed to show up in time for their performance. Linda Lewis, who had flown over to visit her boyfriend, Family’s guitarist Jim Cregan, became the immediate center of interest backstage.
“I wasn’t expecting to be performing or anything, especially in front of such a huge amount of people that Elton had,” she later recalled. “I’d only ever played in tiny clubs before, and I only knew sort of three chords as well. But Family were all panicking about their equipment not showing up, and then Jim had the bright idea, ‘Why don't you go on and play the guitar and entertain them?’ And I was like, ‘No! You must be joking! I can’t do that! No no no!’ And he actually got on his knees and begged me, ‘Please go on!’ And Elton said, ‘You can do it, Linda. C’mon.’”
Linda finally acquiesced, much to Cregan’s relief. The tour had already proven unkind to his band’s ego, as they’d opened each night to universally indifferent reaction. “The only clapping in this huge stadium would be the guys doing the PA,” keyboardist John “Poli” Palmer said.
Cregan kissed his visibly nervous girlfriend, and gently pushed her onstage.
“I went on in a kind of dream state,” Linda said. “I mean, I wasn’t under the influence of anything, but it was basically an out-of-body experience, because I was so petrified.” She chuckled at the memory. “I went on, and the next thing I knew I was coming off to rapturous applause. People were going, ‘Oh my God, you’re amazing!’ And I said, ‘Really? I wish I’d been there.’”
After playing a final U.S. gig at Northern Illinois University on May 13, Elton returned to Great Britain to oversee the launch of his latest album, Honky Château, which was released on May 19—less than a month before the Watergate break-in.
The album packaging for the album, which derived its title from Elton’s nickname for the studio where the recording had been midwifed, was as simplified as the music. The front cover featured a two-year-old canvas-rendered photograph of a bearded Elton as he sat backstage before his first Troubadour gig in 1970, while the back cover displayed recent portraits of Elton, Nigel, Dee and Davey, along with Bernie and Jean-Luc Ponty. The inside gatefold, meanwhile, displayed typewritten lyrics transposed over a pixilated photograph of a jacketed Bernie standing in a field outside the Château.
Elton was pleased with the record, which he’d dedicated to the Château’s comely manager, Catherine Phillipe-Gérard. “I don’t want to say it’s the best thing I’ve ever done,” the pianist asserted, “because that’s what I said and felt about Madman, but people didn’t agree. It’s just that with this album no one can turn around and say, ‘Oh, it’s Elton John with his bloody 100-piece orchestra again.’”
Indeed, the LP—transcendent in its frenzied simplicity—was a creative and critical breakthrough which pointed promisingly toward the future. “John is here transmuted from dangerous poseur to likable pro,” Robert Christgau wrote in Newsweek. “Paul Buckmaster and his sobbing strings are gone. Bernie Taupin has settled into some comprehensible (even sharp and surprising) lyrics, and John’s piano, tinged with the music hall, is a rocker’s delight. Also, he does have a knack for the hook. If, like me, you love ‘Rocket Man’ despite all your initial misgivings, try ‘I Think I’m Going to Kill Myself,’ [sic] about the state of teenage blues, or ‘Slave’,” about slavery. A-.”
Creem magazine’s Charles Shaar Murray opened his review by noting that “these days you have to get fashionable before you get successful or else you get resented, and, if you get too successful without first being fashionable enough to please all the little cultists, they throw the whole shitbowl at you.” He went on to note that “Elton John is still growing, still playing, still creative and he’s still better than James Taylor and Leon Russell put together…Honky Château is going to be a hit album. Make no mistake.” Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau called the LP a “rich, warm, satisfying album that stands head and shoulders above the morass of current releases, and has now succeeded in toppling the Stones from the top spot on the charts in only three weeks. Musically more varied, emotionally less contrived, lyrically more lucid than Tumbleweed Connection, Château rivals Elton John as his best work to date, and evidences growth at every possible level.”
The album proved as commercially popular as it was critically adored, hitting Number 2 in the U.K. and catapulting to the vaunted Number 1 spot in America, where it remained for five weeks running. It also proved a Top 5 smash in Australia, Canada, Italy and Spain, and began a year-long residency in the Billboard albums chart.
Delighted with Honky Château’s success, Elton presented Bryan Forbes and his family with the white 1910 A-day upright he’d used to compose many of his early songs on. The piano was inscribed: “To Bryan and Nanette, Sarah and Emma with love, Elton John, May 31, 1972, original piano, lots of success with it.”
Bernie also signed the instrument: “Within this piano lays the ghosts of a hundred songs. Take care of them, they love you. God Bless from the one who writes th
e words, Bernie Taupin.”
Chapter 12:
Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player
Elton headed back to the Château days later to begin work on his next album. This time, however, the unbounded excitement that usually infused the start of a new project was notably blunted by a case of glandular fever. “I was very slow,” he admitted. “I said to Gus, ‘I can’t make this album,’ so he said, ‘All right, we’ll do it in September.’ Then I said, ‘Wait, I’m going on holiday in July, it would be nice to have it over by then.’”
Mononucleosis or not, Elton was soon back to his usual practices, writing a dozen songs in two days—seven on the first, five the next. The pianist credited his prolificacy, at least in part, to the artistic brotherhood of the era. “There was just an explosion of ideas going on,” he said. “It was just the most exciting era. You could buy at least ten to fifteen great albums a week and be inspired. We were listening to bass sounds, drum sounds, piano sounds. Things that were happening technically on records. And [we were] just filled with wonder.”
That sense of awe spilled over into the production realm, with the ever-perfectionistic Gus Dudgeon—now well-familiar with the Château’s quirky sound system—spending more time than ever creating a pristine monitor mix for each track attempted. “Everybody that’s working on the projects—engineers, musicians, even someone you’ve just brought in for an hour to do some backing vocals—it’s great if they can hear a great full mix in the cans [headphones] or the monitors,” Gus told Sound on Sound’s Sam Inglis, “and have some idea what it is that they need to project over, where they need to pitch it, how quiet or loud they need to sing or play. All the time I’m recording, everyone who’s working on it knows everything that’s going on and can hear everything that’s being played throughout the song, and won’t be saying ‘Can you turn that up at that point? It’s disappeared in the cans.’ So, in fact, at the end of the day, the mixes aren’t a massive surprise.”
As with Honky Château, Elton and Bernie’s new songs were completed quickly: rehearsed and arranged in the afternoon, and recorded in the evening. “I think that’s why those songs worked so well,” Davey said. “You weren’t hearing things that were sitting around for years and were labored over and had no energy. What you heard was all energy.”
The community feel fostered by Strawberry Studios paradiscal atmosphere aided in the group’s creative endeavors, though its close quarters also proved the cause of an occasional flare-up. “I do remember a few arguments with Elton and Sheila, Gus’ wife,” Stuart Epps later recalled an essay entitled Elton John: The Early Years. “She could really wind Elton up. She would come out with, ‘Don’t be so fucking stupid,’ in her broad Brazilian accent, which would have Elton raging and leaving the table. Gus was always trying to diffuse their arguments. Not very successfully.”
The first song attempted at these latest sessions was a reflective C-major calypso ballad entitled “Daniel.” Though some would surmise that the track was a subtle gay love song, it was in actuality about a wounded veteran. “I was reading Newsweek in bed, late at night,” Bernie said, “and there was a piece about the vets coming home from Vietnam. The story was about a guy that went back to a small town in Texas. He’d been crippled in the Tet Offensive. They’d lauded him when he came home and treated him like a hero. They just wouldn’t leave him alone, they insisted that he be a hero, but he just wanted to go home, go back to the farm, and try to get back to the life that he’d led before. I just embellished that and—like everything I write—it probably ended up being very esoteric. It is a song that is important to me because it was the one thing I said about Vietnam. But when I give things to Elton, it’s very important that I don’t lay a big message or my innermost feelings on him, because I’m putting words in his mouth. In some ways, I had to hide it a little. Maybe in ‘Daniel’ I hid it too much.”
Highlighted by Elton’s distinctively plaintive flute-mellotron solo and Nigel’s sprightly maracas, “Daniel” was recorded in just two takes. To add pathos to the lead vocals, Gus woke Elton early the next morning, so that his voice would be scratchy and sleep-worn. “It was perfect,” Davey said. “It sounded great because that was the right time to record that vocal. You don’t just sit there with a computer and say, ‘This note’s a bit sharp, this note’s a bit flat.’ You go for performance. Performance.”
The track, from its inception to its completed recording, was one of Elton and Bernie’s personal favorites. “When you write something like ‘Daniel’,” the pianist said, “you instinctively know it’s going to be a winner. It’s one of the best lyrics Taupin’s ever written.”
But why did Daniel want to go to Spain?
Bernie laughed. “Because basically it rhymes with ‘plane’.”
The spirited French brass quartet from Honky Château returned to Strawberry Studios to record on three tracks steeped in piquant nostalgia for the late ‘50’s rock ‘n’ roll scene: “Midnight Creeper,” “I’m Gonna Be a Teenage Idol,” and “Elderberry Wine.”
To fill out the sound on these tracks, veteran engineer Ken Scott—who had worked closely with the Beatles for years, and would later go on to further acclaim with Supertramp, Devo and Level 42—began double-tracking Elton’s piano with the tape speed set slightly faster than normal.
“Tricks of the trade,” Dee said with a laugh. “Ken was a genius. We were all geniuses there for a while.”
When not busy forging new musical works, Elton, Nigel, Dee and Davey would relieve tensions by holding foosball tournaments while the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s The Inner Mounting Flame blared in the background.
The matches usually ended with Elton holding his muscular arms up in victory. His hypercompetitive nature had much to do with his unrivaled winning streak, though it didn’t hurt that the rest of the band were usually as high as kites on red wine and weed.
“Our medication,” Davey said. “God bless it.”
“Crocodile Rock” proved an early highlight of the sessions. An exuberant shit-kicker, the song’s paradoxically somber theme—which explored how time can often take a heavy toll on one’s innocence—was easily missed amongst all the joyful ‘la-la-la’s. “This type of song is actually a very hard thing to write, because the temptation is to try too hard and go berserk,” Elton said of the early-‘60s pastiche. “I wanted it to be a tribute to all those people I used to go and see as a kid. That’s why I used [a] Del Shannon-type vocals and that bit from Pat Boone’s ‘Speedy Gonzales’. We also tried to get the worst organ sound possible. Something like Johnny & the Hurricanes used to manage to produce.”
Nailing the bass part proved a bit more troublesome. “Dee kept trying all these fancy parts and everything,” Gus said. “And every time I’d say, ‘Why don’t you play it like John Fred & His Playboy Band’s ‘Judy in Disguise’?’ You know, just that basic root stuff that works in rock ‘n’ roll. And he’d pull a cheesed-off face, but he knew what I meant.”
The moment Dee simplified his efforts, his driving bass line brought the entire song into sharp focus.
“Simplicity’s my trademark,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
For the Van Morrison-ish “High Flying Bird”—a tale about a woman fleeing from her lover’s controlling affections—Davey achieved an ambrosial flutter in his acoustic Ovation by running it through a rotating speaker. “I really like the Leslie [speaker] sound and want to work it out a little more,” the guitarist told Guitar Player magazine. “It gives such a full sound.”
Elton utilized the same methodology with his piano on “I’m Gonna Be a Teenage Idol,” for which his jubilant, pop-oriented melody proved the perfect counterbalance to Bernie’s darker meditations. Dedicated to T. Rex star Marc Bolan, the song was laid in a single take.
“We wrote that song about [Marc] because that’s what he wanted to be,” Elton said. “We played it to him and I think he liked it. He didn’t hit me, anyway.”
As the sess
ions progressed, Quebec singer Diane Dufresne scored a minor success with the single “En Écoutant Elton John” (“Listening to Elton John”). Taken from her album Tiens-Toé Ben J’Arrive!, the track had Dufresne enthusiastically singing about making love while Elton serenaded her and her lover from the stereo.
“Not my type,” Elton joked. “Sorry, Diane.”
Bernie revisited one of his signature themes—a loner’s desperate flight to freedom—on “Have Mercy on the Criminal.” A quasi-sequel to Madman’s “Rotten Peaches,” “Have Mercy on the Criminal” found Bernie’s unnamed felon desperately on the run.
Davey ran his acoustic six-string through a Uni-Vibe pedal to provide the track with uniquely opaque harmonics. “‘Have Mercy on the Criminal’ was so exciting,” the guitarist said, “because it’s a very dramatic song and we wanted to keep it as wild as possible—we recorded the guitar solo live, which is unusual, but fun.” Dee’s bass playing, meanwhile, was as melodically nuanced and innovative as ever. He credited Davey’s impassioned guitar work with freeing him up to play evermore intricate lines. Elton agreed. “I don’t think Dee even realized he could play like that till [Davey] came onboard.”
Paul Buckmaster, who’d recently scored massive success with Harry Nilsson’s “Without You” and Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” was brought in for a “sweetening session,” overdubbing a string chart onto the pre-existing band recording. The exercise proved frustrating for the arranger. “It’s rather sad for me to be called in to do string overdubs,” he said. “I’m not a string overdubber—I’m an arranger, for God’s sake.” Nonetheless, his peerless work added an epic grandeur to the song, as he layered weeping violas and violins onto the wailing triple-tracked electric guitar solo.
Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 23