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

by David DeCouto

  Ultimately, everyone was pleased with the final product.

  “[‘Candle in the Wind’] is the only song I’ve ever written where I get goose bumps every time I play it,” Elton said. “When in doubt, write a hymn. There’s nothing more poignant than a good, melodic hymn.”

  One of the more unique tracks from the entire sessions—also recorded on May 7, which was turning into a prolific day, even by Elton’s already industrious standards—was the bluesy “Bennie and the Jets.” Elton realized from the outset that the song would hold a unique spot in his catalog. “When I saw the lyrics for ‘Bennie and the Jets’,” he said, “I knew it had to be an off-the-wall type song, an R&B-ish kind of sound or a funky sound.”

  Lyrically, the track was a clever send-up of the glitter-rock scene. “I’d always had this wacky science fiction idea about a futuristic rock ‘n’ roll band of androids fronted by some androgynous Helmut Newton-style beauty,” Bernie said. “I’m not sure if it came to me in a dream, or was somehow the subconscious effect of watching Kubrick on drugs. Either way, it was totally formed as a concept.”

  Interestingly, the name ‘Bennie’ was a nod, conscious or otherwise, to one of the lyricist’s early paramours, a trendy free-spirit named Sally Bennington who lived behind the gasworks in Bernie’s old village, and went by ‘Bennie’. “I thought she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen,” Bernie later confessed in his memoir, A Cradle of Haloes.

  While others in the band lacked the build-in affinity Bernie brought to the lyrics, they still were able to appreciate the inherent beauty of the odd track once Elton had set it to music. “We would be kind of surprised at some of the things he did, like ‘Bennie and the Jets’,” Davey said. “To me, it is a major masterpiece.” The producer, however, was initially confused by the song. “When I saw the title ‘Bennie and the Jets’,” Gus told journalist John F. Higgins years later, “I imagined an out-and-out, straight-ahead, powerful rock thing. Instead, we got this really quirky, weird thing, which I would have never expected at all.”

  The idea to turn the track into a live-sounding recording would come to Gus—much as it had with “Rock ‘n’ Roll Madonna” three years earlier—while he was mixing the track. “It was just a fluke,” the producer said. “It just so happened before that track started [Elton] played a chord and it happened to be exactly one bar [before the song started]. I don’t know why he did it, but he just happened to do it. While we were playing the mix, it never occurred to me to make it live. But I kept hearing it and thinking I was going to have to cut that off. I was just about to say to the engineer, ‘Don’t forget, we need to mute that piano part.’ And I kept thinking, this reminds me of when somebody’s onstage and they go, ‘Ready, everybody. Okay?’ And they play a chord to give themselves a starting point. I thought this is kind of like a live thing, and it triggered this whole thought process: ‘Let’s try making it live.’”

  To achieve the affect, Gus used audience atmospherics and applause from the beginning of Elton’s 1972 Royal Festival Hall performance, added Digital Delay Line to give the song a stage-echo “live” feel, then folded in handclaps on the wrong beat. “If you notice, it’s on the on-beat, not the off-beat,” he said. “Because English audiences always insist on clapping on the wrong bloody beat…English audiences always clop on the ‘on,’ rather than the ‘off’ beat. Basically, they haven’t got a fucking clue. And I got one of the tea boys to do one of those whistles.”

  “Also, an interesting thing about the end of that track,” Davey said. “There’s a very weird thing that happens. I had this dumb idea of doing a double-speak guitar thing with Elton. So we slowed the tape down and then we played this impossibly hard-to-play lick that I have to play live that’s almost impossible.”

  Tellingly, not a single person involved in the song’s creation felt it held a scintilla of commercial potential, and would end up merely one more buried jewel on a ceaseless musical excavator belt. “Nobody in the band thought it was going to be a hit single,” Davey said. “Not one of us.”

  “Another one done and dusted,” Elton joked as the track faded into the ether. “Next, please…”

  The album’s signature rocker, “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” was tackled next. A British working-class burner, the track seemingly harkened back to the rowdy nights Bernie had spent at the Aston Arms, a Market Rasen pub of his not-so-distant youth. “I feel slightly guilty because I’m not sure that I actually did write it about that,” the lyricist later confessed. “People say, ‘Oh, Bernie wrote it about a pub he used to hang out and get into fights at.’ It’s quite possible there’s a germ of truth in that. Did I say to myself, ‘I’m going to sit down and write a song about my childhood, watching the Mods fight the Rockers?’ No, I don’t think that I did. With so many of my songs, the lyrical content has been misconstrued, misinterpreted, and you get to the point where you feel like you have to make something up in order to make somebody happy.”

  The track’s musical genesis was far less confused. “Whenever a song came up,” Davey said, “I’d immediately start working on what I should do. Elton would write so fast, and I had to be just as quick to keep up. As soon as I heard him writing ‘Saturday Night’, I knew it was a total guitar-rocking track.” In the end, the fret master laid down eight separate lead and rhythm guitar parts, chunking out rampaging sixteenth notes on his ‘62 Les Paul Gold Top (poured through a customized Ted Wallace stacked amp), before adding additional tracks of serrated power chords played on a Fender Champs. “With each guitar track it sounded better and better. Elton kept saying, ‘Another one! Another one!’”

  Despite the lack of Caribbean drama, the song still proved tricky. “Even though we tried for hours,” Elton said, “we couldn’t get it down right with just the four of us as a band doing it live in the studio. It kept running away with itself, or speeding up, or disintegrating into an unruly mess.”

  Deciding that the answer was to record the track sans piano, Elton roared around the studio while the rest of his band tore into the track.

  “Come on already, you lazy bastards!” he screamed. “Fucking rock!”

  A single take was all it took. After Davey double-tracked eight separate guitar lines, Elton added a few glissando-filled piano lines, after Dee convinced him that the track needed a Jerry Lee Lewis-like touch to it. Listening to the playback of the six-minute-and-thirty-second-long recording, a visibly pleased Elton called the song “so commercial, it’s ridiculous.”

  Another caustic, guitar-powered rocker came in the guise of “All the Girls Love Alice.” The tale of a misguided lesbian was, as Elton succinctly put it, “about youth and the dangers of being seduced. I don’t think there is any danger in being seduced, but there you go.” The track was a daring mix of fiercely gritty garage-rock and louche sensuality, the effective amalgam highlighted by Davey’s Uni-Vibe-pedaled guitar and flippant backing vocals from Kiki Dee, making her debut on an Elton John recording.

  To add a malevolent atmosphere to the outro, Nigel recorded himself roaring up and down the gravel drive outside the Château in a Mini-Cooper, while Davey double-tracked steel bottle openers sliding across the neck of his guitar to help create otherworldly atmospherics. Everything happened spontaneously, to great effect.

  “That’s the thing about being a small outfit,” the guitarist said. “We would do all these things and it wouldn’t take long.”

  The session’s karmic root lay in the sweeping F-minor lament “I’ve Seen That Movie Too,” which utilized filmic metaphors to describe a romance sabotaged by deceptions and infidelities. Though Elton’s growling tenor captured the wounded lyrics perfectly, the song’s focal point came with its impassioned, backward-masked, guitar solo. After playing the backward-guitar part twice—the final result was a blend of both takes—Davey then executed a forward-tracked guitar line, playing the main theme over the latter half of the solo, which was later accented with a soundscape of cascading strin
gs.

  The result was an operatic requiem that would prove highly influential across generations of musicians. Guns & Roses front-man Axl Rose—who would call Elton and Bernie’s songs his “classical music”—would go so far as to quote the song directly on his own track, “You Could Be Mine,” from Use Your Illusion II.

  “Your Sister Can’t Twist (But She Can Rock ‘n’ Roll)” offered a pleasing mélange of early-‘60s rock steeped in swooping Beach Boys harmonies, as well as a torrid opening blast which recalled the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout.” If the point was missed, Elton drove the allusion home with a soaring organ solo that purposefully recalled Freddy Cannon’s 1962 smash, “Palisades Park.”

  “I can’t play organ, I’m the worst,” the pianist said. “I just love messing around with shitty organ sounds and things like that.”

  In the final chorus, Elton substituted “surf” for “twist,” a nod to the influence that the Beach Boys—especially their post-“Fun Fun Fun” recordings—continued to exert on him, while Dee, Davey and Nigel sang “Fee-Urk-Nay, Fee-Urk-Nay” in the background through stoned Icelandic accents.

  “They were actual words we had invented,” Davey said. “Just real juvenile stuff.”

  As with “Skyline Pigeon” the year before, Elton reached deep into his back catalogue to revisit another favored older tune during the sessions. This time it was “Grey Seal,” which had appeared as the B-side to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Madonna” in 1970.

  The new version was propelled by Dee’s syncopated bass triplets and endlessly inventive chromatic Dorian-scale runs. Adding to the dynamic urgency, Davey refrained from playing guitar except during the intro, choruses, and newly added outro—as he’d done with “Crocodile Rock” the year before. “When the verse comes in, it’s just bass and drums and piano,” he said. “And then the guitar comes in strong on the chorus. It would suddenly give the track a different dimension and highlight a part when it comes in…It’s something I learned from George Harrison. I’m a huge Harrison fan, and if you listen to a lot of Beatles tracks, there will be songs where the guitar comes bombing in and then it will be out again.”

  The wildly oscillating “Grey Seal” proved to be as bipolar lyrically as it was musically.

  “It’s oblique,” Bernie admitted. “I hadn’t a clue what I was writing about. It was just images.”

  “Bernie hates that lyric,” Elton said. “But I like it, because of the mixture of music and lyrics which is kind of Procol Harum-ish absurd, like a Dali painting.”

  The nonsensical mood loosened further still with “Jamaica Jerk-Off,” a slice of island-flavored pop which served as a subtle kiss-off to the locale which had proven so troublesome for the Brits. Showing a stylish sense of humor, the infectious cod-reggae track was credited to the songwriting team of “Reggae Dwight and Toots Taupin,” ‘Toots’ Hibbert and his band the Maytals being major reggae stars in the early ‘70s.

  Elton and Bernie briefly debated changing the title to the less dubious “Jamaica Twist,” but nixed the idea when it became apparent that that title wouldn’t scan properly with the melody. “People [will] probably take it the wrong way and think we’re having a go at Jamaica,” Bernie said. “It’s not rude or anything. Well, it’s never very rude.”

  To fill out the sonic foreground, Gus provided various “vocal interjections” over Elton’s organ solo; his enthusiastic efforts would be credited under the pseudonym “Prince Rhino.” “I love rhinos, you see,” the producer explained. “Jamaicans, maybe not quite as much. No, I shouldn’t say that.” He laughed. “At the end of the day, I can honestly tell you [that] I’m happy with that track.”

  The next song attempted was the one which would eventually provide the entire proceedings with its title: “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Written in Jamaica, the imagery in Bernie’s lyrics were based on the iconic MGM classic The Wizard of Oz—the first film both he and Elton had ever seen.

  Bernie’s lyrics posited himself as a captive imprisoned by the bright lights and questionable lures of the big city.

  “There was a period when I was going through that whole gotta-get-back-to-my-roots thing,” the lyricist later said, “which spawned a lot of like-minded songs in the early days, this being one of them. I don’t believe I was ever turning my back on success or saying I didn’t want it—I don’t believe I was ever that naïve. I think what it was, was I was just hoping that maybe there was a happy medium, a way to exist successfully in a more tranquil setting. My only naïveté was in believing I could do it so early on.”

  Elton successfully matched the inherent contemplativeness in his partner’s lyrics with one of the most achingly haunting melodies he’d ever created. “When I write, I usually get a chord sequence,” he said. “And I stumbled on [the introductory chords to ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’] by accident. It was the intro that I got first.” The simple, descending chord preface led to a comparatively complicated melody. “Man, there are something like twenty-odd chord changes in that song,” Davey said. “When Elton wrote a song, we’d rehearse it, record it and start overdubbing. So there was no time nor need to write down the chords or anything. But for ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ I remember thinking, ‘I’d better write a quick [chord] chart here.’ Because there are so many chord changes.”

  To complement the song’s labyrinth structure, Elton employed his falsetto, imbuing the track with an intimately lilting sweep. Many critics would assume that Gus had doctored the tape speed to achieve the effect, yet that was hardly the case. “I don’t know why he did it,” the producer conceded in the Classic Albums: The Making of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road documentary. “He just went out and sung in a sort of sped-up voice…It’s just the weird way he decided to do it. That’s Elton.”

  While still a huge fan of Paul Buckmaster’s brooding string arrangements, Elton made a conscious effort to move toward a lighter pop touch on these latest sessions by bringing arranger Del Newman into the fold. Newman, who had worked on Cat Stevens’ Tea for the Tillerman album—as well as on Paul Simon’s classic “American Tune”—added achingly melancholy orchestral flourishes which lifted “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” to another level. “Elton told me which tracks he wanted me to be involved in,” Newman said, “which was a sort of big deal for me because Gus was involved. He had a chat with me and explained what Elton wanted. He then sent me the material, which was a rough mix without orchestra…I tried to follow the vocals, as I wanted to be part of the band, rather than working against the vocals.”

  Unlike “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “The Ballad of Danny Bailey (1909-34)” was a brand-new song written at the Château. As with many of the best John/Taupin tunes, it was the result of instantaneous inspiration. “I don’t know if I’d seen a movie or read a book,” Bernie later told Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene, “but I came up with the first line…and that was it. It could have gone a number of different ways, but it ended up being a tune about a bootlegger.” Indeed, the lyric was ultimately to feature Bernie’s fanciful compound of Depression-era racketeers like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, outlaws who met their untimely ends at the hands of the law. “He’s my composite gangster,” Bernie said. “I love creating characters.”

  “Now that is a great song,” Davey said. “I love ‘Danny Bailey’ ‘cause it’s so different. It’s got an interesting chord sequence and a great story in the lyric. We had a really good time with that jam at the end—especially Dee and I. Elton was really into that piano vamp [during the coda], and Dee was so good…so inventive. Elton could get to be the keyboard player he wanted. Nobody was trying to outplay anybody else, that was the beauty of it.”

  To achieve the ominous sound effect that followed the “Dragnet”-like piano intro, a shotgun was fired out a Château window at four in the morning. That blast was then mixed with the sound of Nigel pummeling his snare drum, while Dee stroked a delicate watercolor flourish on his Fender Jazz.

  “Art, you see,” the bassist
said with a laugh.

  Halfway through the sessions, Elton recorded a barrelhouse piano demo of a new song that he and Bernie had written specifically for Rod Stewart. Entitled “Let Me Be Your Car,” Elton was pleased with the way that the propulsive tune came out. “It’s the best rock ‘n’ roll song I’ve ever done,” he said. “I guess it’s just an indication of our changing state of mine, because…we never really wanted to write for anyone else.” Elton shrugged. “I don’t know if [Rod will] release it as a single or an album track or what. Just have to wait and see, I guess.”

  Another favorite song—though in a decidedly different vein—was “Sweet Painted Lady,” an accordion-accented, Noel Coward-styled cabaret number about seaside prostitutes.

  “[It’s] a song about the old ‘say no more, say no more,’” Elton said. “If you want to pay for it, you can have it.”

  The morning after a fiercely drunken intra-band Ping-Pong tournament—eventually won by Dee Murray (“Elton was fucking pissed!” the bassist chuckled)—the group turned their attentions to one of the strongest tracks of the entire sessions. Entitled “Screw You,” the hammering blues-drenched track—which featured Dee, Nigel and Davey’s backing vocals slyly name-checking Bowie’s “The Jean Genie” after the final chorus—would inexplicably fail to make the final album lineup, and would instead be relegated to the relative obscurity of a B-side. It was shabby treatment for a song that so completely fulfilled its aim—starting with a memorable opening guitar figure. “It was two twelve-string guitars,” Davey said, “so they were slightly out of phase with one another. Then I added two guitars and tuned every string to the same note, which I don’t think had ever been done before. All six strings were tuned to, I think, D. And we double-tracked it. Then when it gets to the chorus, I quadruple-tracked it. You can really hear them on those grinding chords in the chorus.”