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

by David DeCouto

  Despite—or perhaps because of—all the explosive ammo, the “Singin’ in the Rain” routine would steal the show every night. No one was more pleased by this than Smith himself. “They were screaming for me, dear child,” he told Circus’ Cathi Stein in disbelief backstage at the San Diego Sports Arena. “Screaming for little old Bonzo Larry. It’s unbelievable.”

  In late October, Elton was booked for multiple shows at the 18,500-seat L.A. Forum. The afternoon before his first gig, Elton invited David Bowie—deep into his Ziggy Stardust phase—over to his hotel suite.

  “His entire living room was barricaded with huge stacks of record albums,” Bowie later recalled in his memoir, Moonage Daydream. “He sat, small and bewildered-looking, in the middle, as if in some kind of bunker…I couldn’t see how anyone could keep up with the amount of vinyl with which he was ensconced.”

  The two icons shared tea cakes and made small talk about America.

  “After a polite half-hour,” Bowie said, “I made my apologies, declining a further cuppa, and went for a wander down Sunset.”

  That night, after Elton closed the first of two Forum shows with a blistering twenty-minute, wah-wah-guitar soaked, glam rock/neo-soul mash-up of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” and “Hercules,” everyone in attendance were on their feet.

  “Elton got over a half-dozen standing ovations because of musicianship, not freakiness,” Nat Freedland wrote in a Billboard review of the show. “Elton is now able to consistently play it for kooky laughs, while making music that is spectacularly better than ever.”

  “Just before midnight,” another reviewer noted, “Elton and the band finally fell off stage. Soaked with sweat and elated beyond any pitch they had known before, the only reaction they could give was to fall into each other’s arms and weep.”

  “Crocodile Rock” was released as a single in the U.S. three days later. The self-referential homage became another Gold record for Elton, as well as his first American Number 1 single, easily knocking Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” out of the top spot. The track also did well in the U.K., becoming Elton’s second Top 5 showing in his homeland. It also hit Number 1 in Canada, Number 2 in Australia, and Number 3 in Germany, firmly cementing the pianist’s status as a global superstar. “The song…probably changed the critics’ opinion of me,” he later reflected. “My career wasn’t about ‘Crocodile Rock’, it was just a one-off thing, but it became a huge hit record, and in the long run it became a negative for me, because people said, ‘Oh, fucking “Crocodile Rock”…Rolling Stone reviewed it and gave it two stars, and I said, ‘Oh, fuck off.’ It was a great fucking pop record. Shut the fuck up.”

  Elton interrupted his U.S. tour—reshuffling several gigs and cancelling his Phoenix appearance entirely—to fly back to England for a Royal Command Variety Performance at the London Palladium, before the Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, on October 30.

  “We were summoned,” Elton said, “I think that’s the word, summoned—‘If you don’t play, we’ll break your legs’—to do the Royal Variety Show, which is the kiss of death for anybody.”

  In actuality, the pianist was honored to be the first rock star since the Beatles back in 1963 to be asked to perform. Others on the bill were to include ‘60’s pop crooner Jack Jones, the Jackson Five, and Hello, Dolly! star Carol Channing.

  A sleep-deprived Elton shared a dressing room with Jack Jones. The two were sharing a mordantly sly conversation about actress Susan George when Elton’s childhood idol, Liberace, suddenly entered. Liberace ushered in several trunks full of clothes, all of them containing but a single costume: a suit covered in electric light bulbs. “I knew I was outclassed,” Elton said. “How could he play the piano with all those rings on? Maybe that’s why he missed some of the notes—he had fun. He said ‘Fuck you’ to everyone…He was the most professional person on that show.”

  Seated at a white grand and wearing a lustrous red, white and blue tailcoat and top hat, Elton sang two numbers for the Royals: “Crocodile Rock” and a glam-bam rendition of “I Think I’m Gonna Kill Myself,” during which a clutch of farting balloons were released from the stage. “The audience was full of the most dreadful people imaginable,” the pianist said, “and all these balloons were going ‘pffft, pffft, pffft’ all over the audience, and they were all sitting there in their tiaras going, ‘Ooh! Ooh!”

  Blushing hard, Nigel looked over at Dee as the song swung into its rousing final chorus.

  “I hope this is a bloody dream,” he shouted.

  Dee just shrugged and laughed.

  Though his band received the most enthusiastic ovation of the entire night, Elton left the Palladium wildly unimpressed with the enterprise. “What an awful show,” he said. “As a musical event, it was the biggest nonevent of all time. The most horrendous two-day stretch I’ve ever had…Backstage pressures, lack of sound amplification, too many acts packed into four hours…It was carnage.”

  Elton and his group immediately winged their way back to the U.S. to continue their tour. When they hit Philadelphia for a concert at the Spectrum on September 30, the pianist rang up his old friend Patti LaBelle, whom he hadn’t seen since his days with Bluesology.

  “Hello, this is Elton John,” he said. “Can we get together for dinner tonight?”

  LaBelle chuckled. “Elton, I don’t even know you.”

  “Sure you do. I’m Reg Dwight. Remember?”

  “Reggie!” LaBelle shrieked. “What are you doing being Elton John?”

  When they met face-to-face later that night, LaBelle was stunned by the transformation her former keyboard player had undergone in the intervening years. “I mean, this guy who used to play piano and I used to beat in cards was now Elton John,” she said disbelievingly. “Now he’s on this very high level and I thought he’d be high and mighty, but he wasn’t. He’s still a good person.” She laughed. “I wish I could play [Tonk] with him now.”

  The tour hit Memphis on November 11. Before his gig at the Mid-South Coliseum, Elton took Bernie to the famed Stax studio on McLemore Street simply to “pay homage to the…eight-track machine with the valve [amps], because the valve made a difference on the Al Jackson snare drum [sound].”

  “We were and always will be fans first,” Bernie said.

  A bevy of winsome Rockettes joined Elton and “Legs” Larry Smith onstage for their “Singin’ in the Rain” extravaganza eight days later as they performed the first of two Carnegie Hall appearances.

  Critics appreciated the effort put into the show.

  “There are rock singers and musicians who believe that art is enough,” Ian Dove wrote in his New York Times review, “standing unadorned onstage, paying homage to their material as if it were the latest tablet down from the mountain. Not Elton John…With his partner Bernie Taupin, Mr. John has managed to write some of the best rock songs of the last five years…Therefore Mr. John has less need than most to decorate his concert appearances. But decorate he does, and he did at his Carnegie Hall concert on Monday evening…Mr. John does not really need the frills—his own stage dress was a glittery silver, green and red suit of lights—but it’s nice that he takes the trouble.”

  With all of New York’s finest shops laid bare, Elton’s already notorious flair for shopping truly blossomed; indeed, the star was nearly as extravagant before a cash register as he was before an audience. From Déco figurines to samurai dolls to endless piles of records, there was little that Elton failed to open his bulging wallet for.

  His largess extended others in his circle as well. During their Big Apple stand, Davey spent several days lusting after a mandolin at Manny’s music store. Priced at $800, the hand-crafted instrument was well out of the guitarist’s price range. After endlessly debating it over for a day and a half, he finally decided to buy the instrument, only to find that someone had beaten him to it. Slinking dejectedly back to his hotel room, he found the mandolin waiting for him on his bed—a gift from Elton.r />
  “He is so generous, it’s unbelievable,” Davey said.

  Of his fabled largesse, Elton admitted that he’d read about it in the papers. “‘He does it because he’s insecure.’” He laughed. “Shit, I love giving people things, ‘cause if I’m able to give someone something they couldn’t possibly afford that I can afford to give them, it’s great. I’m not doing it because I want to be Mr. Generous. But the whole point is: Christ, we’re only around for a short time, and I intend to enjoy it, and the fuck with it, let’s give some other people some enjoyment as well.”

  The charitable rocker’s tour ended in grand style at Bay Front Center, St. Petersburg, on November 26. The band was well-received, being called back for six encores.

  By the evening’s end, Elton was well past exhausted. Even so, his stage duties weren’t quite done for the year. Barely back in England a week, the pianist was asked by the Pinner County Grammar’s Stag Society to play at their winter dance on December 7. Elton was only too happy to oblige his alma matter. Pulling up to his old school in a bright green Ferrari—and dressed in a bright vermillion suit, blood-red specs, and a long fox cape—Elton was the prodigal son incarnate.

  “This is a special night,” he said as he took to the school’s tiny stage. “Let’s have fun.”

  Pounding the keys to the same Steinway he’d once played during school shows a decade earlier, Elton treated the prepubescent crowd to his entire two-hour-plus set.

  “All the masters who taught me were there, and they were very nice and they just said, ‘Well, you’ve done very well. You’ve got on.’ They looked just the same, and I thought, ‘What will they think of my act?’ because it was a bit wild. But they were really nice. And when I drove away, I thought, ‘You’ve made it. You’ve arrived.’ It was a nice feeling.”

  As the year drew to a close, Elton felt compelled to answer a growing charge being leveled against him—that his music was too overtly apolitical. “It’s power that runs and changes any country,” he said, “and you can’t change things overnight with a hit song. The idea of rock singers getting into politics is rather stupid, because most of them can’t even organize their own lives…Those people who scream and rant about unemployment and whatever in their songs—will they go out and vote at the next election? Probably not.”

  Bernie felt similarly. “What positive reaction can you get from the stoned ramblings of someone screaming a political message?”

  Enough music fans seemed to agree with them. The apolitical Madman Across the Water was announced as the year’s tenth best-selling album on the Billboard and Record World charts, while Honky Château sat at Number 3.

  On top of that, Elton was named the top-selling male album artist of the year, as well as one of the premier singles artists and concert draws.

  It seemed that he couldn’t possibly get any bigger.

  But looks, as the bespectacled star would be quick to point out, could often be deceiving.

  Chapter 14:

  Jamaica Jerk-Off

  Elton kicked off 1973 by issuing “Daniel”—backed with the recently re-recorded “Skyline Pigeon”—in the U.K. on January 10. Usurping “Crocodile Rock’s” originally proposed follow-up single, “Elderberry Wine,” “Daniel” proved wildly successful, quickly reaching Number 4 in the British charts, Elton’s highest charting single yet in England. In the States, the single peaked at Number 2, held out of the top spot by Paul McCartney & Wings’ “My Love.” The song would ultimately remain in the Top 40 for twelve weeks—a sweet victory for Elton, who’d had to fight valiantly for its release.

  “‘Daniel’ isn’t an instant single,” he said, “but most people I played it to before it was released went away whistling it. It’s one of the best things Bernie and I have ever written, and I don’t care if it’s a hit or not. I just wanted to get it out…Dick James said he didn’t want another single released to detract from sales of the new album, so I’ve more or less forced him to put it out. He has disowned it, so I am having to pay for all the advertising. But he said he will pay for the adverts if the single makes the Top 10. Isn’t that nice?”

  “We are releasing ‘Daniel’ as a single solely because of pressure from Elton,” Dick James affirmed in a press release. “It is also against the wishes of MCA, who distribute Elton’s records in America.”

  True to his word, James would eventually reimburse Elton for all advertising expenses. But his obstinacy came at a cost, exacerbating a hairline fracture in his relationship with Elton which might eventually prove unfixable.

  Interviewed backstage at a Dusty Springfield show at Carnegie Hall on January 20, Elton told NME that he had “never really done a major British tour, so I really would like to do one of about three and a half weeks, and do ballrooms and places like that. There’s definitely going to be a big tour, either in February or March. We do neglect England, but it is just finding the places and the time to play. I find touring rather boring—not the gigs, but driving to Bolton isn’t quite as glamorous as driving to Santiago. But we really have got to get our finger out to do it.”

  While the preliminary logistics for a British campaign were being sorted out, a dispute regarding the legal ownership of the Château forced Elton to find a new studio at which to record his next album. When Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts told Gus that the studio had been conducive to hard work on their just-completed Goat’s Head Soup disc, the producer decided to scout out Byron Lee’s Dynamic Sound in Kingston, the famed facility where Bob Marley and the Wailers had recorded their Catch a Fire LP. Gus liked what he saw.

  “Jamaica,” he told Elton.

  “Let’s do it,” the pianist said. “Let’s go.”

  Elton and company arrived in a land of shantytowns and turquoise beaches on January 23, the day after George Foreman’s heavyweight title beatdown of Joe Frazier. The island was electrified, the squalid streets brimming with the threat of violence. Not helping matters, Elton had been booked into the Pink Flamingo in downtown Kingston, while the rest of the band luxuriated across the island in the resort area of Ocho Rios.

  Feeling totally shattered, Elton checked into his hotel at five in the afternoon, and went almost straight to bed. He was awoken at 10:00 p.m. on the dot. “This great noise started going on which sounded like the rising of the Third World,” he said, “and we all leapt out of bed and found out that it was [jazz virtuoso] Les McCann playing outdoors to nobody. So we went and listened to him.” He beamed appreciatively. “That was a saving grace. I just used to go and watch him every night.”

  McCann, however, would prove one of the few good things about the island. “I was afraid to go out of the room,” Elton admitted, “because it was pretty funky in downtown Kingston.” Instead, he stayed behind his locked door, experimenting with liquid ganja and composing music to a dozen and a half songs in only two days on a rusted electric piano. “Apart from the hassles, and there were a lot, Kingston was still very conducive to songwriting,” he said. “I loved it because of that, and also because of all the music that I heard blaring out of all those record shacks on the street.”

  “Elton goes mad if he’s stuck sitting around the hotel,” album designer David Larkham said. “To alleviate his boredom—and also to give me an idea of the kind of music he’d been creating, so I could start thinking about cover designs and so on—he and I went off to the recording studio one morning after breakfast. I sat off in a corner while Elton played the piano and sang me all the songs he’d thus far written. I have to say, it was the best concert I’ve ever attended. So many songs, each one better than the last.”

  Unfortunately for Elton, his prolific creative streak was tempered by a heated strike raging at the record plant which was housed within Dynamic Sound’s walls. On their first trip to the studio, Elton’s entourage was greeted by angry protestors amassed outside a barbed wire fence, yelling obscenities at the Englishmen. As their VW bus passed by, picketers blew crushed fiberglass at them throug
h crudely fashioned blowpipes.

  “There were Zulu warriors leaping out of hedgerows, blowing darts at us,” Gus said. “We all came out in rashes.”

  “There wasn’t a positive vibe in the place,” Bernie agreed.

  Worse still, Dynamic Sound proved anything but. Because the facility was predominantly used for reggae records, percussive low-end proved virtually nonexistent. “It sounded fucking terrible,” Gus said. “The Stones had just been there and they were checking out as we checked in. They told us a few slightly scary stories, like, ‘Don’t open the piano lid too fast or you’ll upset the cockroaches that live in there.’”

  To compound matters, there was nary a grand in sight. “There was never ever a sign of a good piano,” Elton said. “They were always getting it the next day. There was only a five-foot Yamaha, which is fine banging away in the background of a Rolling Stones record, but for me a piano is very important.”

  Things went from bad to worse when the studio failed to provide a proper number of microphones, the most basic of recording equipment.