Before playing the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis on October 11, Elton was visited backstage by soul singer Al Green. The pianist was elated, having been a huge Green fan for years. Excited by his visitor’s presence, Elton gave a particularly exuberant performance, blending past triumphs with the promise of a giddier and more wholly volcanic future. As a result, over 3,500 fans stormed the backstage area after the show, forcing Elton to barricade himself in his dressing room for nearly two hours.
“This really is like the Beatles, isn’t it?” he asked cheerily. “[It’s] madness, I tell you.”
After a similarly frenzied show at Auburn’s Memorial Coliseum days later, Elton hopped the Starship 1 and flew east to catch Iggy Pop and the Stooges set at Poor Richard’s, a small club in Atlanta. Arriving to the gig in a lifelike gorilla suit, Elton rushed the tiny stage halfway through “Search and Destroy,” grabbed the shrieking Iggy in a bear hug and lifting him bodily off the stage.
Believing he was under attack by a real gorilla, Iggy scrambled desperately out of Elton’s grasp and cowered behind the drum set.
“I was unusually stoned that evening to the point of barely being ambulatory, so it scared the hell out of me,” Pop later acknowledged. “I look to my left and a great fucking gorilla is lumbering towards the stage. I was scared. For all I knew, it was a crazed biker on methedrine in that gorilla suit.”
Stooge guitarist James Williamson raised his Strat over his head, preparing to bash the gorilla’s skull in.
“[Elton] lucked out,” Williamson said, “because he was smart enough to take his head off to let people know who he was, just in time.”
Making sure that Iggy’s drug-addled heart was still beating properly, he bid the Stooges farewell.
“Elton’s a swell guy,” Iggy enthused, while, for his part, the pianist simply noted, “I simply can’t understand why [Iggy’s] not a huge star.”
The Elton juggernaut finally spun down in Gainesville, Florida on October 21. During the show, a half-full can of Budweiser came winging out of the darkness and smacked Elton on the back as “Love Lies Bleeding” was coming to its molten end.
“Bloody Christ!” he snarled, stopping the band cold. “Hold on!”
He picked up the beer can, stared at it a moment, then tossed it over his shoulder.
“Saturday,” he commanded his band, who immediately launched into a scorching rendition of “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting).”
Gavin Sutherland was watching the incident from the wings, along with other members of his band. To a man, they were amazed. “We were all in awe,” he said. “Not only did [Elton] carry on, but he had the foresight to play a very relevant song and now had the crowd at a higher level. They were roaring.”
The next day, with his tour already in the record books, Elton flew out to L.A. to contribute driving piano to Jackson Browne’s “Redneck Friend,” which would be released as the first single from Browne’s For Everyman album. Because his U.S. work permit had expired the day before, Elton was forced to appear under the pseudonym Rockaday Johnnie.
“I think there are probably better session pianists around than me,” he said with characteristic modesty. “My name is valuable, but there’s always Billy Preston, and…I’d rather have Billy Preston playing on [my] record than me. I‘d rather have Nicky Hopkins, probably, because…[he’s] so good. They can fit in so easily.”
While in L.A., Tony King invited Elton to a television commercial shoot at Capitol Records on October 24 for John Lennon’s Mind Games album. King, who was dressed as Queen Elizabeth for the shoot, made the formal introductions between the pianist and the ex-Beatle, who was there with May Pang, his loyal consort during his eighteen-month, Yoko-less “Lost Weekend.” “The two men shook hands,” May later noted in her memoir, Loving John. “I don’t know how the meeting would have progressed under more formal circumstances, but Tony’s hilarious getup broke the ice. John and Elton were both very witty men and they began to tease Tony about his scepter, his crown, his dress…They laughed and quipped with each other for an hour, and at the end of an hour they were friends.”
Eventually, the two Brits began talking music.
“You know, [career-wise] I’m going through my Beatles period now,” Elton told Lennon. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when it’s over. You stopped at the top, John. You never ran down.”
Lennon shrugged. “At least you’re aware that you’ll peak. It’s going to happen, and I’m tellin’ you to be prepared. It’s advice nobody gave me.”
The ex-Beatle took Elton out clubbing later that night.
“We just hit it off and got on like a house on fire,” the pianist said. “Obviously, I was very intimidated to meet him, but he put me at ease straight away.” As to what John Lennon saw in Elton, the pianist surmised, “I think outrageousness and being true to myself and not giving a fuck...I never saw the other side of John, the Harry Nilsson drinking side of John, where he’d turn on a sixpence. I only saw the gentle, gorgeous side of John.”
“They’re both fabulously warm, sympathetic, intelligent people,” King said. “I felt that they would have a lot in common. And I was right.”
“[Lennon’s] probably the first big star who I instantly fell in love with,” Elton said. “It usually takes me about six or seven meetings with someone, ‘cause I’m very withdrawn. But he’s so easy to get on with. The first time we met, we got a Mercedes limousine, and we were driving down past the Roxy, and the Dramatics were there, and everyone’s really dressed up to the hilt to go in, all the black people, and they look fabulous. So John and I went past and started going, ‘Right on! Right on!’ through the roof. It was great.” The two headed over to the Troubadour, where they ended up jamming onstage with Dr. John. The evening then concluded with Lennon twirling a drag queen across a dimly lit dance floor while Elton snapped Polaroids of the pair.
“Fred Astaire and Ginger Beard,” Elton teased.
“I’m gonna impound those photos till I get me green card,” Lennon replied.
Lennon invited Elton to a recording session days later, as the ex-Beatle worked on tracks for his Rock ‘n’ Roll album with famed producer Phil Spector. “He used to come over to our house to rehearse and he was carrying guns,” May Pang said. “And I said to John, ‘Does he have to wear these guns? Why’s he coming here with guns?’ ‘Cause he was a short man with a Napoleonic [complex], and he would come in the night when the sun would go down, and he would leave before the sun rises. My girlfriend and I would say, ‘Quick! We’d better get a mirror, he could be a vampire.”
Despite Spector’s notoriously outlandish behavior, Elton was in awe of the legendary producer. “I think he did a bloody good job for the Beatles, because he made an album out of nothing [with Let It Be],” he said. “If you’d heard the original tapes, you’d know what Spector did for them. The only thing I can really get against him is ‘The Long and Winding Road’, which was beautiful without strings and all the other rubbish.”
Back in England, and with DJM’s publishing contract about to expire, Elton and Bernie launched their own publishing company, Big Pig Music, on November 10. Big Pig’s advent added further fire to the songwriters’ already burning bellies. “We want to try and write songs for other people,” Elton told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch. “We’ve just written one for Roderick [Rod Stewart] on his new album, and we’ve just written a couple for Kiki.” More than anything, he was keen to write a song for Ray Charles, whom he considered to be one of the all-time greats. “It may be a disaster. I may send him a song and he’ll say, ‘Piss off, I don’t want it.’ But we’re gonna try, because it’s something we’ve never tried before.”
Elton joined Rod Stewart at Morgan Studios in London two days later to lend his piano skills to the song that he and Bernie had written for him that spring, “Let Me Be Your Car,” which was slated to appear on Rod’s forthcoming Smiler album. The first night of the two-night session—which included gu
itarist Ronnie Wood and drummer Micky Waller—ended running late into the night, as the two friends tossed back glasses of brandy while performing a string of off-the-cuff soul classics.
“We just played and played,” Elton said. “We spent the whole session singing old Sam Cooke numbers and didn’t record anything, and got drunk. It was such a relief to be able to do that.”
Elton found himself back in a studio yet again on November 19—Trident this time—with Bernie, Gus and his band in tow. Their mission: to record a just-written song of gratitude to their fans for having given them such an amazing twelve month run. Entitled “Step Into Christmas,” the song was especially tailored as a stand-alone single. “It’s very echoey, and it’s got a lot going on,” Bernie said of the chiming track, which purposefully emulated Phil Spector’s famed “Wall-of-Sound.” “It’s a real fun record. I guess it’s that thing that everybody wants to make a Christmas single, or Christmas record, at one point in time. It does have a great Christmas feel to it. As soon as it begins, you can almost feel the snow falling.”
“It had been in our minds for a while,” Elton said. “We were going to make a semi-joke single and give it away like the Beatles used to do, but then Taupin said, ‘Why don’t we make a good one?’ and spoilt everything. But the A-side really knocked me out more than anything I’ve ever done. Because it was so sudden, I suppose.”
As for the flip side, “Ho! Ho! Ho! (Who’d Be a Turkey At Christmas?),” Bernie saw the recording “almost like a John Lennon kind of thing—doing all those silly things in it. We just wanted to do something for the B-side, so that was that.”
“It’s a loon,” Elton agreed. “A jolly larf.”
Elton, Bernie and the band shot a promotional clip for the song the next day, racing maniacally around a soundstage and generally having a blast, the lot of them high on single malt.
“Step Into Christmas” was rush-released into the record shops on November 26, a mere five days after it had been recorded. In the U.K. it peaked at Number 24, an unusually high placement for a strictly seasonal song, while in America—because of Billboard’s policy to not include holiday singles on their Hot 100—it never officially charted, though it did hit Number 1 on Billboard’s Christmas Singles chart. Given the robust number of copies it shifted, industry insiders figured it would have easily made it high into the chart’s standard Top 10 as well, if not for their arcane rule.
“Another smash denied,” Gus said with a merry grin. “I’m absolutely sure of it.”
Not content to simply bask in the glow of an amazing year, Elton immediately went into rehearsals for a year-end, thirteen-show British tour. The campaign was scheduled to kick off at the Colston Hall in Bristol, where—two years earlier—he had fallen afoul of the venue’s management when he’d leapt atop their concert grand and danced wildly upon it. This time around there would be no such issues, as Elton was bringing his own piano along.
“He can bathe in it, for all we care,” a Colston Hall official quipped.
Such mundane concerns had, of course, long since ceased to grab Elton’s attention. His focus now was grander, his enthusiasm unbridled. “We’ll basically be doing some of the old hits, and a lot of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, much more than we did in the States,” he said. “This tour we can really do what we like as long as we don’t ignore some of the old ones, which people sometimes shout for. But in the States people want to hear different things—they shout for weird things like ‘Levon’ and also ‘Amoreena’ and ‘Tiny Dancer,’ whereas here, they want to hear ‘Rocket Man.’ So it’s two different sets, really.”
Kiki Dee, who had just scored Rocket Records’ first Top 20 hit with Loving and Free’s “Amoureuse”—a silky love song composed by French singer Véronique Sanson, with English lyrics by Gary Osborne—again joined the tour as the support act.
This brief outing would also see another enhancement to Elton’s lineup, with the inclusion of noted session percussionist Ray Cooper, who had made his bones playing with everyone from the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton to Carly Simon and Harry Nilsson. The pianist had been looking to augment his band since Greg Allman had played with them onstage in L.A. a couple months earlier, and was keen on getting Ray in the band. “It was amazing, the effect one extra instrument made,” he said. “Now we’ve got to the point where we’re really playing well as a band, and we want to expand.”
Ray Cooper was surprised by the invitation. “I looked like something out of a dissident gulag, I just couldn’t envisage myself in this band at all,” he told journalist Robert Sandall. “I went to see their show in Bristol and there were screaming kids in high heels everywhere. I was mystified. Then I started to think like an actor doing a rock ‘n’ roll person. And without any rehearsal, at the next gig in Liverpool, I just went on and performed it.” The percussionist ended up fitting in perfectly, prowling the back of the stage like a rabid panther as he vaulted from marimba to congas to tubular bells. A maniac on stage, he often overshadowed Elton with his wildly theatrical behavior. “I see percussion as a watercolor,” he said. “You play something, then go back into the shadow, adding color simply where it is needed, but not all over the canvas…I try to be clean, leave space, and give the music a chance to breathe.”
“[Ray Cooper is] like an ax murderer on stage,” Nigel said. “Off stage, he’s the loveliest guy you would ever hope to meet. He’s calm, cool and collected.”
Lovely or not, critic Simon Frodsham failed to be impressed by the percussionist’s efforts. “New member Ray Cooper’s assorted percussion fits in well, but I can’t help feeling his personality doesn’t,” he asserted. “His continual rantings and self-obsessed exuberance led me to think he was a frustrated superstar, and therefore had no place playing with King John.”
Elton himself begged to differ. “[Ray] takes a lot of work off me as far as the visuals go. I can have a rest every now and again because I know he’s having a bit of a leap about.”
The press—less Frodsham—proved equally taken with the whole glitzy, hard-charging affair. Hail Elton! Rock Saviour! Melody Maker proclaimed in boldface type after a November 29 show at King’s Hall, Manchester. “As an act, the E.J. band has reached a peak in which both show business and musicianship blend happily without overdoing any of the departments,” Roy Hollingworth reported. “A few flashing lights on the grand piano, a hint of dry ice and the odd taped sound effect, and that’s it. The rest is down to Elton, and his right little, tight little band…Hail Elton—saviour [sic] of the British rock scene.”
Such adulation only fueled the pianist’s desire to embark on a joint road venture with Rod Stewart. “Rod and I both think that not enough is being put back into the business, and there are lots of things we’d like to do next year,” Elton told Melody Maker’s Chris Welch. “It would be nice to do a package tour, just go on and everyone have a laugh. See six big groups in one night for a pound. There’s always someone to say, ‘Oh no, it can’t be done.’ But it can be done. Everyone else used to do it—why can’t we? We don’t need a massive PA system. We could go and tour the cinemas. The Who, the Faces, the Bonzos and us…If you did it for a week—could you imagine the lunatic things that would go on? It would just be insane. And wouldn’t it be a great live album?”
Bryan Forbes released a cinema verité documentary on the pop phenom that same month. Shot in stages throughout the year and entitled Elton John and Bernie Taupin Say Goodbye Norma Jean and Other Things (which had been changed from, simply, Reg, when Elton had balked at that title), the documentary covered the entire song-making process, from Elton and Bernie’s initial authorship of a tune, through the process of committing it to recording tape, to its final live incarnation onstage.
Having attended a private screening of the film a week before its proper release, Elton was pleased. “It’s not going to be boring,” he promised. “It’s not going to be like Mad Dogs and Englishmen. I can’t stand all those films. Woodstock was the one good one, and
that was it. They’re so boring. I came out of Mad Dogs and Englishmen and felt I’d done an American tour…The only good thing about it was Claudia Lennear wobbling her tits around, that was the only stimulating thing. And Leon [Russell], his piano playing.”
Goodbye Norma Jean and Other Things opened with Forbes’ hyperbolic—though hardly off-the-mark—description of the cherubic superstar: “At twenty-six, he walks confidently on five-inch heels where lesser angels fear to tread. Sporting coats, hair and spectacles of many colors. Sometimes as bright and unyielding as the diamonds he wears on his fingers, sometimes plunged deep into self-critical gloom. A child with every toy in the shop and not a key to wind them with. Now possessing no inhibitions, now totally inhibited. Seeking fame one minute, determined to reject it the next. The life and soul of the party. The party destroyer.”
Elton proved to be a forthcoming subject for Forbes’ camera. “I regard songs as postage stamps,” he said. “You lick them, put them on a letter, and you never see them again. I can’t remember the lyrics or some of the melodies or chords to the album I made two years ago. Like Tumbleweed Connection, I can’t remember how any of the songs go. I’m more interested in the ones I’ve just written.” As for concerts? “Kids want to hear noise…They just like to have their eardrums splattered…I think groups just keep going at a certain rate. I think it’s very important to start up there, go down, start up. Just keep letting them down, and the final climax comes towards the end.”
Captain Fantastic: The Definitive Biography of Elton John in the '70s Page 32