The tour began in smaller rural cities—much like a Broadway show opening out of town before ultimately moving on to the Great White Way—so that it could be as polished as possible before it hit the major L.A./New York/Boston markets.
Starting in Mobile, Alabama, Elton provided rock ‘n’ roll theater at its outrageous best each night, indulging his penchant for unhinged flamboyance with a vengeance. “I felt like I could have carte blanche to do what I want—and I did,” he said. “When I put my costume on, that’s when I know I’m ready to go onstage. It’s such a necessary thing for me. I’m putting on a show for people and I not only want to give them something to listen to, I want to give them something visual to look at as well.” Bernie, for his part, was less enthusiastic about his partner’s sartorial excess. “I shook my head and rolled my eyes and thought, ‘Ok, maybe he’ll grow out of this.’ It was ridiculous.”
Elton played his first American stadium gig early in the tour, selling out all 28,000 allotted tickets on August 19 at Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium. Headlining such an enormous room had the pianist’s adrenaline pumping even harder than usual. “At Kansas City, I was so excited I jumped off a twelve-foot stage into the audience and I couldn’t get back up again,” he said. “I had to run around to the back [of the stadium], then lap back to the stage. Good Lord.”
Each night, Elton made his entrance onto stage sporting a twelve-foot cape and a pair of battery-charged glasses which spelled out his name in flashing lights. The extravagant specs were created by Dennis Roberts and Hans Fiebig of Optique Boutique. “This is genius,” Roberts said. “This is the most unique pair of glasses ever made in the entire history of the world. They are optically perfect. They are a masterpiece of electronics and engineering.”
“[Elton] suggested that it would be nice if we could create a pair of glasses with teeth above and below each lens that would open and close like separate mouths,” Fiebig said. “We have not done that yet.”
After parading back and forth across the stage with his E-L-T-O-N glasses blinking out in the Acapulco Gold-scented darkness, the pianist would exchange these prohibitively heavy frames for a slightly less-extravagant pair—one with working windshield-wipers, perhaps, or an ivory pair surrounded by sculpted dragons. Shrugging off his cape, he’d give a quick nod to his band before launching headlong into a hammering “Elderberry Wine.”
Besides the usual hits (“Your Song,” “Honky Cat,” “Rocket Man”), Elton dug deep into his catalog for rarer treasures such as “High Flying Bird,” “Teacher I Need You” and “Hercules.” He also premiered several as-yet-unreleased tracks from Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, including the title cut, “All the Girls Love Alice” and “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” before ending the shows with a balls-out interpretation of his “favorite rock ‘n’ roll number,” the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”
Elton’s black grand had been draped in a gold-trimmed pink satin cover for the tour, a string of Christmas lights flashing beneath. As always, he treated the instrument like a jungle gym, thrashing the keys with his feet, throwing his leg over the keyboard, and diving beneath to play with only one hand, lying prone next to the pedals. The rocker was unapologetic for his histrionics. “I think people expect to see a show when I come onstage, and I really enjoy doing the show,” he said. “I treat my audiences with respect, and they think a lot of that, because so many bands come on and don’t treat their audiences with respect…I think a lot of pop musicians take themselves seriously for no reason at all, because in a hundred years’ time nobody’s ever going to remember Stephen Stills, Elton John, or any of us.”
The opening act chosen for this tour was the oddly-named folk-rock combo, Sutherland Brothers & Quiver.
“We were actually in the studio one day,” Gavin Sutherland—the band’s bassist and lead vocalist—later recalled, “when we got a phone call, and our manager came in and he said, ‘Hey! Guess what, guys? Elton John wants you to go to America. Are you into it?’ And it took us about three seconds. Because Elton had just broken big. We said, ‘Yeah,’ and we got this long list of gigs. It was all these places steeped in the history of rock ‘n’ roll—words like St. Louis and Chicago and Memphis and Nashville were just like magic to us.” Sutherland laughed. “And, I have to say, Elton was a really cool tour boss. He regularly came into the dressing room just to see that everybody was okay, that everything was chugging along. He was very much into a family kind of deal. These were the people on the road with him—everyone from the guys selling the T-shirts out front and the road crew and the light guys and the sound guys and us—and we were all part of the team. And he really was a good team player, ‘cause he knew that, at the end of the day, if everybody on the tour is happy, if everybody is willing to do that extra bit, stay up that extra bit later or get up that extra bit earlier and go and do whatever needs to be done, then the tour is better. So it was great that there was no bullshit between us, no ‘I’m the man’ status thing. We were all sort of just British people lost in America, even though Elton was such a big deal. And we didn’t realize what a different league he was in till we got over there. Playing to tens of thousands every night, it was really cool. No matter where the tour landed, we were the talk of the town. It was brilliant.”
“We had a whale of time,” agreed Sutherland Brothers & Quiver’s guitarist Tim Renwick, who was to later record with Elton on his 1978 long-player, A Single Man. “Besides visiting every major town, we also did masses of local radio promotion and interviews. Fascinating to be able to see the way that record promotion worked over there. This was proof that the music industry was actually being taken seriously—a far cry from the ‘What will you do when you’re twenty-five?’ attitude that we had all become used to the UK for so long. And it’s hard to describe how massively popular EJ was in the States—I guess his music just fitted perfectly into the American way of life, people really related to it. Plus he had worked very hard, endlessly touring, to get this sort of acceptance.”
Indeed, every show was met by a level of hysteria that even took Elton by surprise. “From now on, I’m only going to make one tour of America a year,” he vowed. “People get more excited if you only go once a year.”
Not long into the tour, “Crocodile Rock” was added to the set list. The band rehearsed it with Elton on piano, but it sounded flat. “I want to play organ on this,” he declared. A Farfisa organ was quickly scared up. It sounded good, yet something was still missing. “[The song also] needs the piano,” Elton determined. “What am I going to do?” He turned to Clive Franks. “Hey, you play keyboards.”
“Yeah, but I’m out here mixing. What do you want me to do, set up [a keyboard] out here?”
“No, you can come up onstage and someone else can mix that song.”
“You’re kidding me?”
Elton just grinned.
That night, the press-ganged sound engineer found himself standing nervously behind Elton onstage, sweaty hands plunking out a counter-melody on the organ’s plastic keys.
“The first night, I’m sure I wet myself,” Clive later told journalists Tom Stanton and James Turano. “We’d finish the song and I would run back and carry on mixing the show.”
Life on the road wasn’t all music, however. “There were many ‘never again’ nights,” Davey told musicradar.com. “Many ‘never again’ three-night/seventy-two-hour stretches where you literally never went to sleep. And then, what did you do? You did it all over again, twice as hard. We did as many drugs as you can imagine, and drank as much alcohol as we could possibly pour down our throats. But because of the music we played, we were never linked to the drug culture like, say, the Rolling Stones. People didn’t assume we could be decadent, even though we were. We never got hassled, and we were twice as hardcore than so many other bands.”
The signature gig of Elton’s tour happened early in the itinerary.
The Hollywood Bowl would serve witness to a visceral spectacle on
a scale that would have made Busby Berkeley blush. For Elton, there was no other way. “I don’t like to look at groups who come out looking like they’ve just been drowned for five years at Big Sur. A lot of English people are very theatrical—like the Faces for example, and I think that’s why the American kids like it.”
“Playing the Hollywood Bowl for us, you try to be cool about those sort of things, but obviously we were like little kids in a sweets shop,” Gavin Sutherland said. “It was late at night and it was really warm—Tinseltown—it’s kind of unreal, but it’s got a magic quality about it. The whole thing was different. It was our first go over there, and it was a bit surreal.”
The show—which cost Elton twenty-thousand dollars to stage—was a true prestige gig. Twenty-four hours before he took to the boards, tickets were trading hands on the black market for up to four-hundred times their face value. Yet no one was consulting their checking accounts the night of September 7, as multiple searchlights swept across the Californian sky. As their beams grew parallel, an eerie silence swept over the 18,000 in attendance. The house lights abruptly cut off and Tony King—whom Elton would soon hire away from Apple Records to help run Rocket Records in the U.S. as its general manager—portentously announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, this evening’s hostess…the star of Deep Throat, Miss Linda Lovelace.”
America’s fellatrix du jour stepped onto stage dressed as a 1920’s flapper as an enormous 65’ x 28’ backdrop of a top-hatted Elton fluttered down to reveal a stage filled with palm trees, a glittering staircase, and five grand pianos perched across a back riser, each painted a different hue of the rainbow.
“I’d like to welcome you to the Hollywood Bowl,” Lovelace said. “On this spectacular night we hope to revive some of the glamour that’s all but disappeared from showbiz. In the tradition of Old Hollywood, I’d like to introduce some of tonight’s guests, very important people and dignitaries from around the world who wouldn’t dare have missed this gala evening.”
A host of famous lookalikes paraded down the center stage staircase: Queen Elizabeth, John Wayne, Elvis Presley and Mae West. Batman and Robin. Frankenstein, Groucho Marx, Marilyn Monroe, the Pope, and, finally, the Beatles. It was the Sgt. Pepper album cover come to life. The star-studded crowd—which included Steve McQueen, Ali MacGraw, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Britt Ekland, Muhammad Ali, Carole King, Peggy Lee, Robbie Robertson, Bruce Johnstone, Carl and Brian Wilson, Mac Davis, Martha Reeves, the Fifth Dimension, Johnny Rivers, Lou Adler and Dyan Cannon—ate up every over-the-top moment.
“This was all Elton’s idea,” John Reid said. “He’s been looking forward to this show for weeks. He wanted it to be a big party for everyone.”
Anticipation escalated as the famous lookalikes turned in unison to await the man of the hour.
“And now,” Lovelace trilled, “the gentleman you’ve all been waiting for. The biggest, most colossal, gigantic, fantastic man, and the costar of my next film…Elton John!”
Elton made his grand entrance to the triumphant strains of the Twentieth Century Fox theme. Dressed in a white-and-silver cowboy suit drenched in white plumage, a matching three-foot-hat and red-tinted white-framed specs, the pianist grinned robustly beneath the klieg lights. Raising a fist in triumph, the lookalikes lifted the lids of the five multi-colored grands that littered the stage to display E-L-T-O-N in giant silver letters. Hundreds of white doves escaped from the instruments, fluttering wildly into the night. “Well, some flew out,” Gavin Sutherland said. “A lot of the birds were panicked, and the road crew had to get underneath the pianos and bang them, trying to get the bloody things to fly out.”
Elton took off his hat, sat before his own grand piano, and wordlessly began pounding out the first frenetic chords to “Elderberry Wine,” as absolute bedlam descended.
“It was the most spectacular entry onto a stage I and probably everyone else at the Bowl had ever seen,” Melody Maker’s Chris Charlesworth reported.
A chaotically supercharged “All the Girls Love Alice” soon followed. The song built to an impassioned crescendo as the former Reg Dwight rocked back and forth like a sped-up metronome.
For “Crocodile Rock,” Clive Franks made his onstage appearance behind the organ dressed as the titular lizard. “That was my idea,” he told Tom Stanton and James Turano. “I knew that the show was going to be very outrageous. I though, ‘Well, if they can do it, I can do it’…My hair was very long then, over my shoulders. I would pull my hair way back and put some water on it, sort of slick it back. At the Hollywood Bowl, I went to an outfitters. They had the crocodile head, but the last person who used it had ripped the body, it was all torn. I put this darn head on and said, ‘Now what?’ The guy said, ‘We’ll cover you in a black cape.’ I looked totally ridiculous. I didn’t tell anybody in the band about the outfit. And then Elton turned around. If you listen to that recording, he hardly sings a single word throughout the whole song. He’s laughing.”
During “High Flying Bird,” a single dove appeared out of nowhere and slowly circled the audience for the entire song. “The lights pointed it out,” Clive said, “and everyone thought this was amazing choreography. But it was not planned. Then when the song reached its final chord, the dove came to the stage. A true story.”
Elton changed outfits halfway through the carefully paced show, emerging in a brown Lurex two-piece suit covered in musical notes of yellow and orange and blue.
“Rock ‘n’ roll!” he cried, sending his piano bench tumbling during the crescendo to “Hercules.”
Collapsing to his knees, overcome by paroxysms of musical madness, his infectious energy ignited the crowd, which rose as one. “Ninety percent of my act is music,” he later said, “the heart of it is music. But the ten percent theatrics is fun. For me and for the audience.”
The critics lavished the performance with heartfelt praise. “The crowds were in the mood for rock ‘n’ roll, and Elton gave it to them with ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting),’” Sounds magazine noted, “which signaled the release of more birds as Elton jumped up on the piano to conduct the massed choir of the Hollywood Bowl Auditorium. He [even] played ‘Honky Tonk Women’, which cooked along like crazy.”
“It wasn’t so much a rock show as an event,” Chris Charlesworth wrote in Melody Maker. “An event that every ticket scout in Southern California had been anticipating for weeks…The crowd was stunned, the crowd went wild, and that was the tempo for the entire night.”
Rolling Stones’ David Rensin sounded the only faintly dissenting voice. “We’ve learned to expect different and novel things from Elton John,” he opined. “[Elton] is a man, however, whose patently non-outrageous music often clashes with his glam stage show, something that has progressed from mere acrobatics to a full-blown production. But does Elton need all this? His music holds its own.”
“I think we play better in America, I think we play twice as well,” the pianist said. “It’s this feeling you get when you’re over there. Just the whole atmosphere. Bigger, somehow. Better. It all moves fast, it’s big-time. England is a bit lazy, isn’t it?” Regarding his stagecraft, he explained, “I like to lift them up, drop them down, lift them up again. It’s the same as having an orgasm. You try to save the very best till last.” He grinned. “It’s like fucking for two hours and then suddenly finding out there’s nothing you can do after that. It’s so emotional and so physical, you don’t ever want to do anything else. It’s the only point in this business that gives you an adrenaline rush.”
Moments after the concert ended, a swarm of screaming teenage girls descended upon Bernie as he was heading toward his limousine. “I was looking behind me to see who they were looking at and just walked straight into them,” he said. “Then suddenly I was getting grabbed and kissed…It was all very strange and I was very scared, and by the time I drove away I was dazed and wondering, ‘Did I enjoy that or didn’t I?’”
A confused Bernie had his chauffeur drive him to a
n after-show party at the Roxy on Sunset Boulevard. Elton used the occasion to get to know Linda Lovelace. “She’s a very nice lady, actually,” he told NME’s Charles Shaar Murray. “She was far more demure than I thought she’d be. I spoke to her for quite some time and I was very, very impressed. She’s been totally misrepresented…I don’t give a shit about being misrepresented. If you know down in your conscience that you’re all right, you’re all right. If you’re misrepresented, then you have to fight against it.”
The pianist retired to his darkened limousine soon after, lost inside a post-concert, post-party melancholia. Yet his massive momentum kept pushing him forward, with copies of his latest single, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” landing in record shops that same day. Backed with “Young Man’s Blues,” the single reached the Number 6 spot in the U.K. and Number 2 in America, where it was to remain throughout the Christmas season.
The single would quickly prove to be one of his most admired creations ever. “He was mixing his falsetto and his chest voice to fantastic effect,” piano rocker Ben Folds noted decades later. “There’s that point in ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ where he sings: ‘on the gro-o-ound…’ His voice is all over the shop. It’s like jumping off a diving board when he did that.”
Chapter 17:
Fred Astaire and Ginger Beard
After playing a well-received show at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, British Columbia—the sole Canadian gig of the tour, and the final concert before a brief Hawaiian hiatus—Elton flew to Colorado to check out a studio he was considering recording his next album at. The sprawling 3,000-acre Caribou Ranch housed a state-of-the-art studio in a reconditioned barn 8,600 feet up the white slopes of the Rockies. Located just north of the small town of Nederland—midway between Boulder and Denver—the cavernous, wood-paneled studio was owned by Jim Guercio, manager and producer of the brass-dominated rock group Chicago.
Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 30