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

by David DeCouto

  Elton recorded the next song largely alone. “This Song Has No Title” was an introspective ballad detailing a young artist’s yearning to find meaning in an otherwise formless existence.

  The enigmatic vignette featured Elton on two separate Farfisa organs, three acoustic pianos, an electric piano and a mellotron—as well as providing both lead and backing vocals. “It was great because he’d know instinctively what he wanted,” Davey said years later. “And I maintain to this day, you don’t really need anybody else if you’ve got Elton John.”

  “Dirty Little Girl” was, by contrast, a thudding, Leslie-distorted rocker, and yet another attempt by Elton to out-Stones the Stones. “That’s a filthy track…it’s such good fun,” Davey said. “When Gus was producing the early albums, it was great because it was like stereo piano, the whole deal, everything was really cool, like this was going to be the basis.”

  The unflinching lyrics—about a trashy washerwoman were perhaps a tad bit less innovatory than the music. In fact, they would earn Bernie a “misogynist” label by many in the heavily liberated ‘70s. It wouldn’t be the last time the lyricist would be so labeled. He easily shrugged it off. “C’est la vie, man. Y’know?”

  During downtime in the studio, Elton busied himself with an endless string of pranks. One night, he got drunk on hundred-year-old port and dialed up old acquaintances back in London at two a.m. “I vant to lick your body, yah? I vant to lick your body,” he groaned in a lascivious Dr. Strangelove-ian accent. “I vant to lick it now, yah? Give unt to me.” Early the next morning, he and the band tossed a sleeping Clive Franks into the pool—bed and all. “I nearly bloody drowned because I was still wrapped in the sheets,” Clive said. “I was pissed-off at the time, but I guess I can see the funny side to it now.”

  More productively, Elton had Davey show him a few basic chords on his acoustic. It was a slow process for the pianist. “I can play four chords and that’s it,” he said. “The only reason I’d like to play something else is because, when you’re writing a song on a piano, you can only go so far. And then, if you write a song on electric piano, for some reason you write a different sort of song, because it’s a mellower sounding instrument and you write different chord structures and you write in different keys to what you would on an ordinary piano. And so, if I could play the guitar well, I know I could write different songs on the guitar. It’s very frustrating. There are only so many instruments you can write on. I think you’re fairly limited. I can’t see myself picking up an oboe and writing on that. So I would like to play guitar.”

  One of the band’s favorite tracks was the woozy party groove “Social Disease.” A genial, whiskey-soaked rave-up, the song followed the drunken exploits of a Bukowski-esque figure who paid the rent by sleeping with his landlady and plying her with the grape.

  Recorded in a single take, “Social Disease” slowly faded up over the first verse while a bulldog barked in the background, as if the alcoholic narrator were shaking off a major-league hangover. Davey gave the cheery, banjo-inflected track an additional boost by overdubbing acoustic guitar and Uni-Vibe-phased guitar. “There’s all kinds of stuff on this track,” he said. “And the barking dogs [at the beginning] were from around the Château grounds. We just hung the mics out the window and they picked up the different sounds.”

  Leroy Gomez topped the whole thing off with a sleazy sax solo which lifted the entire song to another level of inebriated effervescence. Gomez’s performance—indeed, the very fact that he was at the Château at all—was serendipitous. A struggling American-born musician living in Paris, it was only at his roommate Michael’s insistence that they crash Elton’s sessions, after rumors reached them that Elton was looking for a sax player.

  “I did not see myself just barging in on Elton’s recording session uninvited,” Gomez later told eltonjohnworld.com’s Cheryl Herman. “Quite frankly, I was a little worried about being rejected. After all, this was an Elton John session.”

  After getting buzzed on Pelforth beer to calm their nerves, the two friends drove a VW van up to the Château. Arriving just after midnight, they climbed the backstairs which led to the top floor loft studio where Elton was recording. A red light shone above a soundproof door, indicating that a session was underway. “In the silence we could faintly hear someone singing on the other side of the door,” Gomez said. “It was Elton recording the lead vocals to the title track of the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, all those ‘ah ah ahs…’”

  The moment the red light dimmed, Leroy and Michael pulled the heavy door open and stepped into the studio.

  “Hey Elton,” Michael said breezily, pushing Leroy forward. “I heard that you’ve been looking for a sax player to lay down some tracks. Well, here he is.”

  A blushing Gomez stared at his feet. “I am sure most superstars would have been upset to have a couple of guys just barge into their recording session, but not Elton,” he later recalled. “He just coolly and calmly looked at us and said, ‘Great!’”

  Elton glanced around at his team in the recording booth—Gus, Bernie, engineer David Hentschel and assistant engineer Andy Scott.

  “Okay, change of plans,” he said. “Let’s record some sax.’”

  Gomez then laid down a raggedly melodic line for “Social Disease.” “I didn’t know ‘Social Disease’ from a monkey on the back of a dog,” he said. “You just get in there, and they have this amount of space that they have to have filled-in on the song, so you listen to a little bit of what came before and what came after, and then it’s, ‘One-two-three, drop me in. I think I got it, I know what key we’re in. And basically that’s what it is when you’re a session musician. You don’t get more than a couple of takes before they say, ‘Thank you very much for your time.’ Either they like it or, that’s it.”

  The session with Gomez ran so smoothly, Gus then suggested he add his chops to “Screw You” as well. After a couple run-throughs, his work was completed.

  Gomez and his friend were invited to remain in the studio as Elton continued recording. At five in the morning, with the session complete, Elton walked the two men outside and shook their hands.

  “So how much do I owe you?” he asked.

  Gomez quoted his normal session fee, and Elton shook his head no.

  “You’re worth more than that, Larry,” he said. “I’m gonna make sure you get paid double.” He put his hand on Gomez’s shoulder. “Never sell yourself short. Charge more for your work, because you deserve it.”

  The saxophonist could only laugh. “To think that just twelve hours prior to this moment, I was worried about being rejected.”

  The languorous, steel guitar-laced “Roy Rogers,” which explored Bernie’s love for celluloid cowboys and B-feature pistoleros, provided a reflective moment. “He was my hero,” the lyricist said soberly of the famous actor. “He was my savior.”

  Elton, who also held Rogers in high regard, sang a duet with himself on the diaphanous waltz—a vocal nod to the Everly Brothers—while Del Newman’s synergistic strings elevated the choruses of the quietly riveting portrait to a sublime level seldom achieved within the depths of the pop idiom. “It was general practice for the artists to allow me to do what I thought would enhance the emotional quality of the songs, and it seemed to work very well,” Newman said. “Elton was just as trusting as many other artists. I guess it was a matter of leaving things alone and wanting to be surprised.”

  “Whenever You’re Ready (We’ll Go Steady Again)” followed. Featuring Elton’s most impassioned Jerry Lee Lewis stylings to date, as well as tasty fills from Davey’s vibrato-drenched slide guitar, the song was strongly being considered by Rod Stewart as a potential single.

  Next came what Bernie termed “a fun bit of flak,” the countrified “Jack Rabbit.” Clocking in at a mere 1:52, the brief track was a double-time throwaway that featured mandolin, acoustic guitar, banjo, electric guitar and slide guitar. “It was like, ‘Okay, Davey, this one’s yours,’�
� the guitarist said. “[Elton] loved that we could take it from a piano band to a guitar band or whatever. I mean, he wrote it on piano, obviously, but then he pretty much said, ‘This is a country song…no piano necessary.”

  “[‘Jack Rabbit’ is] a kind of a fun bit of flak,” Bernie said.

  “Harmony,” the final song attempted at the sessions, was a lush love song to music itself.

  “If you take that song and read the lyrics to it,” Bernie said, “it’s really, really banal. But it’s got a nice tune to it and the sentiments are quite nice…I’m really a stickler for simpler songs.”

  The melodic elegy effectively shifted from minor key verses to major key choruses, cloaking the song in an ethereal duality. Intriguingly, the humble track took the longest of any track to actually record, with two full days devoted to the backing vocals alone. “We just went crazy adding all these vocals at the end of ‘Harmony’,” Dee said. “Different parts here and there. We nicked a few ideas. [It] came out great.” Davey agreed. “We stole a lot of Beach Boys ideas…Following the bass line [with our vocals] and that kind of thing…Everything was done track by track by track. By the end of it we were all destroyed, but it was worth it.”

  Mixing “Harmony” proved nearly as rigorous as recording it had been. “Any closed sound, like an ‘Oooo’—a mellow sound—you have to change the actual EQ [equalization] on it generally to make it more present,” engineer David Hentschel said. “Because it’s a very warm sound that doesn’t cut through, it tends to ‘swamp’ very easily. But then when they go to the open sound of the ‘Ahhh’, then it’s a very bright open sound coming out of their throats, so then suddenly you have to drop the EQ settings down some.”

  As with most of the songs on these sessions, a potent mix was required to maximize the music’s emotional impact. To that end, Gus and his engineer split the recording console duties in half. Gus commandeered the left-hand side of the board, personally pushing Nigel’s fills up and down as each track progressed. “The drums were recorded on four tracks,” Hentschel said. “The bass drum was separate. And the snare drum was also on its own track. Then all the rest of the drums and the cymbals were all recorded and mixed down to a stereo pair. So when Nigel hits the tom-toms, Gus would push that up so you get a more dynamic effect for the song. The fill actually leads you nicely into the next section of the song. Gus would do it with the piano fills as well, in-between the vocal lines. The little flourishes.”

  After the tracks were all properly mixed, Gus spent an enormous amount of time cutting the record, to get it as loud and vibrant as possible. “I hated the whole vinyl-cutting thing, which was one compromise from beginning to end,” he said. “You have no idea how many times I had to cut albums like Tumbleweed Connection, Madman Across the Water or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to get anywhere near the kind of dynamics I had originally planned. I knew I would have a problem when it came to mastering, but I would just deal with it then.”

  His intense efforts reaped immediate results. On June 29, the leadoff single from the sessions, “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting),” was released—the disc’s picture sleeve featuring a photograph of Elton downing a bottle of champagne at Rocket Records’ launch party—and quickly shot up to the Number 7 spot in the U.K. In the States, the fiery song landed at Number 12. Backed with a double B-side of “Jack Rabbit” and “Whenever You’re Ready (We’ll Go Steady Again),” the 45 proved a rare instance where an Elton John single performed better in his homeland than it had in America.

  Chapter 16:

  ‘And Now, the Gentleman You’ve

  All Been Waiting For’

  Rocket Records’ official U.S. launch was held on July 10 in L.A., on the Western Town set of Universal Picture’s back lot. Elton took the opportunity to clarify the financial situation surrounding the venture. “Everybody thinks that because I’m associated with it, there’s millions of dollars pouring into the office daily. In fact, I didn’t invest any of my money in it. We were given an advance from MCA in the States, so we’re living off that at the moment. We are poor, and until we have hit records we’re going to stay that way. It’ll take about a year and a half, I think, to get us on our feet. It’s going to be a struggle.”

  Budgetary concerns aside, no expense was spared for the launch party itself, which featured a lavish luncheon as well as a stuntmen-staged Wild West shootout. Guests included disc jockey Wolfman Jack, Al Kooper, Ricky Nelson and the Hudson Brothers, along with a clutch of MCA executives.

  Elton, whose hair by this point was orange, pink and green, helped bring the event to a climax by jamming away on an upright piano, banging out scintillating renditions of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On” and “Crocodile Rock” while Nona Hendryx and Dusty Springfield sang spirited backup behind him.

  Wolfman Jack dropped his glass of champagne as he enthusiastically applauded the pianist’s efforts. “Can’t touch him, man,” he said. “Elton’s poppin’.”

  Six weeks before Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was set to be released, MCA hired out KTLA Studios, a Sunset Strip television facility, to hold a press conference to help build excitement for the album. “We booked a room and we decorated it like a Holiday Inn,” Gus said. “We sent out special gold-embossed invites to all the top people in New York and L.A. I was going to be introducing Elton in L.A.—to the people there—and in New York it was going to be Bernie doing the introducing. We told them Elton was going to be in a hotel room in Greensboro, North Carolina, and it was going to be bounced off a satellite.”

  In actuality, Elton was sitting in a room around the corner, fifty feet from the press. There was never any satellite involved. “We put some flicker up on the screen and then Bernie and I got to say our introductions,” Gus said. “I said, ‘So, gentlemen…can we get…are we in touch yet? Can anybody tell me…?’ And I’ve got a mic in my hand and the screen sort of flickers. Some snow comes up and then a bit of Elton comes through and then it disappears again. ‘Oh…oh, can you hear me, Elton? Can anybody hear me out there?’ And then a voice: ‘Yeah, hello, is that you, Gus?’…Elton was really playing it up. Every now and then he’d [tap his headset], ‘Hello? Hello? I’m sorry, can you repeat the questions?’”

  After twenty minutes of this pantomime, the ‘press conference’ ended and the attendant press gathered around a buffet table. Elton slipped into the room in disguise, in a herringbone blazer and tweed cap, sans glasses. “He’d been there for at least ten minutes, mixing with everybody,” Gus said. “And somebody turned around to say something to him like, ‘Can I get you a coffee?’ or something. Just standing there with a plate, waiting to get some food. And they went, ‘Oh my God…it’s Elton!” Gus laughed. “They loved it, and the fact was we got tremendous press immediately. It paid off like a treat. It was brilliant.”

  As clever as the satellite charade had been, it was but a mere warm-up for the massive forty-three-date U.S. tour Elton had lined up, an outing which would easily shatter long-standing attendance records set by Elvis Presley over a decade earlier.

  Elton chartered the Starship 1 for this outing. A three-engine Boeing 720 with ELTON JOHN TOUR 1973 painted in gold letters across the maroon fuselage, the plane was the largest, most luxurious and expensive jetliner in the world, having been entirely retrofitted with sofas, showers, video screens, carpets, a pillow-filled lounge, a faux fireplace, dining chairs and a pair of bedrooms complete with fur-covered beds and Plexiglas nightstands.

  “There were a pair of stewardesses who had been selected for their good looks,” said journalist Chris Charlesworth. “Every detail was accounted for.” Accommodating forty, the Starship 1—a five-star hotel in the sky—also boasted a fifteen-foot mirrored bar, complete with its own Hammond organ. “It was so glamorous,” said Kiki Dee, who had been chosen as Elton’s opening act for the sonic crusade. “There was a chill-out room with a fluffy rug, and they had a bar where you could sit and have a cup of coffee. And they’d have these—so American, so e
arly 1970s—packets of vitamins on the bar so that you could get your daily supply.” Kiki would begin a romance with Davey Johnstone whilst sailing 30,000 feet above America. “Me and Davey got to know each other on tour,” she said, “and our friendship became something more.”

  With New Orleans serving as home base, the Starship 1 would fly Elton’s entourage from city to city for each night’s show. “When you have your own plane,” Chris Charlesworth noted, “you can run the tour from one city. So you stayed in one hotel…and from there in the afternoon they would get on the plane and go to another city to play, and the tour was planned to be within an hour’s flight from the hotel city. Set off at 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon to get there and do the soundcheck and do the show, and then after the show it was into the cars, back to the same hotel. The show finished about 10:30, and you are back in your hotel by midnight. The convoys of limousines would have a police escort as well, so you would whiz through the traffic. Through red lights, too. Then they would move to another central point and start again for a couple of weeks.”