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

by David DeCouto

  “We thought it might be nice to have light strings, like on some of B.B. King’s things,” Elton said. “But it turned out heavier than that.”

  The band next tore into the gleefully perverse “Midnight Creeper,” a James Brown-esque soul-stomper that came ripping out of the stalls as a unified whole—nearly. “In all the time I’ve worked with him,” Gus said, “[Elton] only asked me to take one instrument off one song, which was a banjo that used to be on ‘Midnight Creeper,’ a sort of McGuiness/Flint-type banjo. For some reason, he didn’t like it. But that’s it.”

  “Blues for Baby and Me,” a tale of escape and absolution, came next. To give the track a distinctive flavor, Davey again ran his Ovation through a Lesley cabinet, though this time he combined it with a Uni-Vibe pedal and a wah-wah pedal, before, most notably, adding a separate sitar line. “I ordered the sitar through an Indian magazine,” the guitarist said. “It took six months to get to me from Bombay. I picked it up at the London docks. It was like Dracula. It was like in a coffin. A sitar is pretty big…I’m not proficient in it. I [only] play it and use it for color.”

  Elton appreciated the extra effort his band put into turning what could have otherwise been a faceless tune into a memorably sweeping musical statement. “This is a stock Elton John number,” he admitted. “It could have been on any of my albums.”

  “Teacher I Need You” proved a different case. A carelessly brilliant schoolboy fantasy, the retro rocker was equal measures Bobby Vee and the Moody Blues, with Dee’s insistent yet restrained bass line adding an intriguing underpinning to Elton’s sprightly piano triplets. “You have to pick your spots and serve the song,” the bassist said. “That was always my primary aim, especially in the studio.”

  On the alt-country ode “Texan Love Song,” a Randy Newman-esque answer to Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” Elton stepped into the role of an angry southern redneck. Labeling the song “Fairport [Convention]-like,” Elton abstained from playing piano on the track, opting instead for the harmonium, which blended well with the understated arrangement of acoustic guitar, bass, mandolin and drums. To add an element of down-home atmospheric verisimilitude, Gus placed a microphone next to Davey’s tapping foot, much like he had with Elton on Tumbleweed Connection’s “Love Song.”

  “[It’s] a misunderstood song,” Gus later said. “But a really good one, at the same time. Davey was brilliant.”

  Toward the end of the sessions, Elton and his entourage huddled together in the dining hall for a late night confab. After many bottles of wine, discussion turned to Davey’s inability to secure a label to release his recently recorded solo album, Smiling Face, despite the fact that Elton, Dee and Nigel had all played on it, and that Gus had helmed the project.

  Labeling the album “like finding a box of buried treasure,” Elton was determined that it see the light of day. “We were sitting around the table saying, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I think it was me, actually, who said, ‘Start our own fucking label,’ because we’d all been drinking wine—the Château produces its own wine. We all said ‘Yeah!’ and went to bed. Next morning we all got up and said, ‘Was everybody serious?’ We decided that we were.”

  Though nothing would happen for months, the seeds for a new record label had been sewn.

  Two days before Elton was scheduled to depart from the Château, Sheila Dudgeon urged him to revisit “Skyline Pigeon,” a song she’d always been particularly fond of. Feeling similarly, Elton admitted that “the version on the Empty Sky album is a bit weedy.”

  A superlative full-band take of the lovingly crafted hymn was quickly laid down, the new version uncovering hidden depths of emotional anguish the original had only hinted at. The recording also helped underscore the importance Nigel’s descriptive drumming played. “I always knew where to put the fills in and where to leave them out,” Nigel later told Music Radar’s Joe Bosso. “I’d think to myself, ‘All right, going into the chorus, I need to do something interesting, so I’ll do this…You’re part of the storytelling process in that way. You can’t go over the top on a ballad.”

  Though “Skyline Pigeon” would never be issued as an A-side in either America or Britain, the stately track would attain colossal success in territories as far afield as the Philippines and Brazil, where it was adopted as an unofficial national anthem.

  Elton completed his efforts on these latest sessions by recording a pair of never-issued tracks: a cover of pianist Tommy Tucker’s 1963 blues classic “Hi-Heel Sneakers,” as well as a dynamic Brit-pop nugget called “Tell Me What the Doctor Said.”

  With his work thus complete, Elton headed off to Paris to indulge in a bit of profligate looting at some of the finer stores up and down the Champs Elysées, while Gus and the band stayed behind to work out their backing vocals. “Elton was always a pleasure to work with,” the producer said. “He always left us alone to do whatever we wanted. Once he’d done his bit, he never came [back]—which was a blessing.”

  Davey, Nigel and Dee were determined to take what they’d accomplished vocally on Honky Château and expand on it exponentially.

  “We were allowed to do whatever [we wanted],” Nigel said. “If anybody had an idea, we’d try it. It wouldn’t be, ‘Oh no, that’s crap, we’re not going to do that’… And mostly we didn’t have to change anything.”

  The three singers made “a wonderful noise,” Gus noted. “Individually, none of them were great. It was a total accident, but those three voices together, with their ideas and imagination and their desire to impress Elton [blended stunningly]…Elton’s chord changes had that sort of slightly classical edge, so there were always nice inversions to sing.”

  In most cases, the trio would create their sumptuously audacious vocals over multiple takes across six tracks, bouncing the tracks down as they went, and leaving the final four tracks free for orchestra, percussion and synthesizers.

  On June 3, Elton joined the Beach Boys onstage at the Crystal Palace on a cold and rainy afternoon to help supply electric piano on “Help Me, Rhonda.” Elton was more than happy to assist, as he viewed Brian Wilson as a peerless pop maestro; it hardly mattered that the pianist himself understood pop music to be a highly disposable medium. “Quite honestly,” he said, “I regard all pop music as irrelevant in the sense that people two-hundred years from now won’t be listening to what is being written and played today. But I think they will be listening to Beethoven. Pop music is just fun. That’s one of the reasons I don’t take myself seriously. I love pop music. It’s my whole life. But I love it because it’s fun.”

  Bernie was on the same wavelength. “Disposable songs are for the time they’re in the charts and three months later they’re completely forgotten and nobody bothers with them again,” he said. “I think that’s healthy, in a way. You should always have fresh material coming along.”

  Elton winged his to L.A. two days after the Crystal Palace gig for a long-overdue holiday, his first extended break since he’d broken through at the Troubadour seemingly two-million years earlier. The lack of a proper vacation showed—by the time he arrived at LAX, he was looking very much the worse for wear. “As soon as I got off the plane, people said to me, ‘Hey, you’re having a nervous breakdown.’ I was on the verge of a crackup. Personality-wise, I was unbearable—moody and shouting at people. I’d had bouts of exhaustion before, but had never been in a nervous state like this.”

  The pianist unwound in a rented beach house he dubbed “Malibu de Bum Bum,” along with Bernie and Maxine, John Reid, and Nanette Newman and Bryan Forbes. “MCA offered Elton a Cadillac for his holiday,” Forbes said, “but Elton told them he’d rather go to Tower Records and just help ourselves to some records. MCA agreed, of course, so we all drove down to Sunset Boulevard and looted the place for maybe $70,000 worth of records and tapes. Really over the top. Wonderful.”

  Forbes’ repaid Elton by making his wide circle of Hollywood friends available to him. The pianist was enthralled, p
erhaps no more so than the night that he and Bernie met aging sex-symbol Mae West. Now in her late seventies, West was as bawdy as ever.

  “We were all taken into this room that was totally white,” Bernie said. “We sat down on this big white couch, on this white shag-pile carpet. At the end of the room there was a sort of butler figure standing in front of a curtain. ‘Gentlemen,’ the butler said, ‘Miss Mae West.’ The curtain was drawn back and there she was. She looked at Elton and me on the couch and said, ‘Well! Wall-to-wall men!’”

  Elton threw a party the next night. Guests included David and Angela Bowie. “They had a huge barbecue on the beach,” Angela Bowie said, “and five or six chefs preparing all this food. It was really quite beautiful, and a marvelous use of the spectacular beauty of Malibu. Just absolutely exquisite. Reg was in top form. He was with John Reid, and they seemed to be fairly happy at the time.”

  Another party guest was Mae West herself. “She sat there all evening at the end of the room,” Bernie said, “not moving or saying anything. It was just like having a stuffed dummy of Mae West at your party.”

  Returning from a second record-buying outing at Tower Records the next afternoon, Elton found Bryan Forbes lighting their beach house’s fireplace, despite the fact that it was over ninety degrees out.

  “Someone’s coming to dinner,” the director told Elton. “But they insist that the fire is on.”

  Fifteen minutes later, a frail knock sounded at the front door. Elton answered it to find comedy legend Groucho Marx standing before him in an overcoat, looking every one of his eighty-one years.

  “When’s dinner? When the hell are we gonna eat?” Groucho whimpered, stepping infirmly into the house. “It’s too damned cold in here.”

  Elton was speechless. He looked at Forbes, who merely shrugged.

  With theatrical aplomb, Groucho whipped off his overcoat. The whole thing had been a ruse.

  “They tell me you’re number one,” Groucho said to Elton, “but I’d never heard of you until I went into my office this morning and said I was having dinner with Elton John. They all fainted. After that, I lost what remaining respect I had for you.”

  Elton, Groucho and their entire group attended a performance of the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar. As the production was beginning, Groucho—who had somehow managed to commandeer a pair of teenage nymphets onto his lap—called out: “Does this have a happy ending?”

  The evening concluded with Groucho presenting Elton with an autographed Marx Brothers poster. He signed it: “To John Elton, from Marx Groucho.”

  “Because your name’s backwards,” Groucho explained, pointing his index finger at him like a gun. “Now why’s that?”

  The pianist held up his hands in mock-defense.

  “Don’t shoot me,” he said, referencing French New Wave director Francois Truffaut’s classic 1960 crime drama, Shoot the Piano Player—and perhaps recalling the sign he’d seen hanging over Leon Russell’s twin pianos two years earlier. “I’m only the piano player.”

  Chapter 13:

  ‘I’m Inclined to Be Extremely Moody’

  Elton was awarded an RIAA gold disc for Honky Château on July 24. Weeks later, John Reid quit DJM and started his own incorporated company, John Reid Enterprises. Launched with a £5,000 loan from Barclays Bank, Reid had leveraged his management contract with Elton as collateral. “I don’t think I actually slept for a year,” Reid said. “I must have read all of Elton’s contracts about fifty times [each] to get used to them, having not read a contract before.”

  Elton was all in favor of the arrangement. “It’s just that [John Reid] can handle me very well,” he said. “He can sort my moods out. I’m inclined to be extremely moody, and he can handle it.”

  With his management situation securely set, Elton returned to the U.K. to launch a brief eight-date tour, a low-impact preamble to the more ambitious offensive planned for the States that fall. As was becoming increasingly the case, the overwhelming majority of notices Elton received were quite positive. “It is not all fun with Elton John,” reported The Times in a typically glowing review. “His songs have a way of purveying the sadness of life as well. Therein lies his strength.”

  The day before the tour’s final date at Oxford’s New Theater, on September 9, “Honky Cat” was released as a maxi-single. Backed with “It’s Me That You Need” and “Lady Samantha,” the single stalled at a respectable Number 31 in Britain; in the United States it fared considerably better, peaking at Number 8.

  Understanding the importance of singles, Elton was ecstatic. “I’m sure singles do help an album,” he said. “And I’m also sure you can afford to have two hit singles off an album. Singles now are getting much better. A lot more people are putting out maxi-singles, which is a good state to be in. But I won’t necessarily be tied to releasing singles off albums. If I suddenly come out with a monster song, I’d probably go in the studios and work it out.”

  Elton’s most ambitious American tour to date—a 40-city blitzkrieg—kicked off on September 26 at Barton Hall in Ithaca, New York. Foregoing the usual 4,000-seat university halls, Elton’s latest foray concentrated on significantly larger 20,000-seat basketball arenas. Even with the outsized venues, the sprawling offensive easily sold out in a matter of days. “We could have done it a year and a half ago,” Elton said, “but we wanted to build up slowly. Anyway, I don’t think we could have played the big halls as a trio.”

  The pianist would often make his appearance onstage in a luminous red, white and blue lamé suit, complete with matching top hat and stacked silver boots—an iridescent red “E” glittering on the right boot, a “J” on the left. His set list was equally as flashy, featuring an impactful assortment of musical treasures, from the pounding raw soul of “Susie (Dramas)” to the epic sweep of “Have Mercy on the Criminal.”

  Nigel drove the tightly wound band particularly hard this outing, crashing his way through one bluesy rocker after another on a fifteen-piece, double-bass Slingerland kit—de rigueur for any self-respecting sticksman in ‘72. “The reason for the massive size of the drums was because I loved the low tones I could get,” he said. “The deeper and the bigger the drums, the richer and more powerful the sound. As for the double-bass setup, it was mainly for the look. A bit of flash, you know? One wanted to look impressive on stage, and a giant kit certainly helped. If you couldn’t see me, you were certainly going to see my drums.”

  Elton poured his ceaseless energy into every performance, leaping off the piano in eight-inch heels (“It was a miracle I didn’t break my fucking ankles!”) and skittering manically across the lip of the stage as he clapped, mugged and shook his Technicolor thatch in time to the music. Though some claimed his appearance garish, the pianist remained untroubled, realizing that—ultimately—everything in life was comparative. “I could get out of a car…and some woman would say, ‘Look at that freak, he’s got green hair’,” he said. “And she’d have bright blue hair and a bikini on, and be about eighty-six years old. And she’d think I was the freak.”

  The pianist’s stage clothes also gained a measure of added extravagance this time around. Silken suits of gold and blue, leather suits of red and brown—nothing was too wild for the extroverted introvert. His steadfast writing partner, meanwhile, could still be found watching from the wings, though his Courvoisier had been replaced by his new tipple of choice, Coors beer, which was now written into his contractual rider. “I was always regarded as part of the band, only I just didn’t perform,” Bernie said. “I was just a hanger-on, man. I was sort of a groupie, I guess. It was such a whirlwind, I don’t remember ever having the time to breathe.”

  Time was perhaps even more restricted for the team of roadies who traveled with the tour. In each city, they’d invade an empty arena at high noon, forklifting hundreds of tons of amps, monitors, lights, drums, and the star attraction’s nine-foot Steinway onto stage. Working without a break, they had to make sure that everything was
in place and operating properly well before Elton and the band arrived to run through a soundcheck.

  Setting monitor levels from a soundboard twenty-five rows back while perched on a worn piano bench and threadbare Oriental rug, Clive Franks would work out a proper mix as Elton’s band played to an empty hall. Once achieved, the sound engineer would give a double thumbs-up and the band would disappear offstage.

  “Soundchecks were tremendously important,” Clive said. “If you didn’t get them just right, it could throw the entire [concert] out of balance.”

  Elton’s latest show pushed the boundaries of audaciousness—particularly when “Legs” Larry Smith tapped his way out of the wings during “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself” dressed as a Prussian guard, replete with a bridal train and a silver crash helmet upon which bride-and-groom figurines had been glued. With his appearance, Elton donned a long trench coat before joining Smith in an unhinged version of “Singin’ in the Rain,” the two dancing in unison to a pre-taped instrumental version of the song, while tuxedoed tour manager Marv Tabolsky sat at Elton’s piano miming to the background track, which the band had recorded live on stage in Boston at the start of the tour.

  “Have you got a light, Mac?” Elton would ask in his best Bogey voice.

  “No, sirree!” Smith would answer gleefully, as Maxine Taupin, along with a host of midgets dressed as sailors, showered the crowd in silver confetti.

  The two ended their act each night by whipping out magic wands from their coat pockets and firing lighted tissue paper at the audience; it was one of Stuart Epps duties to load the wands full of gunpowder before the shows. “‘Legs’ Larry Smith was just this mad bloke,” he said. “He had all these mad tricks and weird magician’s stuff in a trunk, and part of it was these magic wands, which used to explode a ball of fire. So part of my job was to load them up and make sure everything was alright. Sometimes I used to put a little bit more gunpowder than the night before, thinking, ‘Well, this will be fun,’ and then I’d put the magic wand in Elton’s pocket. He used to put his hand in his pocket just to make sure it was there. And on one night, he set the bloody thing off. While he’s standing on the side of the stage, his whole pocket turned completely fire-red and it all went up. The next minute I’m whacking him and he’s going, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m saying, ‘I’m putting you out! You’re on fire!”