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

by David DeCouto

  “One more time,” Gus insisted. “Just one more.”

  “Ah, fuck off!”

  The producer was taken aback. “It was the first time I ever had a serious quarrel with him…Eventually, he flung off the cans and said, ‘OK, let’s hear what we got.’ When I played it to him, he said, ‘That’s a load of fucking crap. You can send it to Engelbert Humperdinck, and if he doesn’t like it, you can give it to Lulu as a demo’…When he sang the line ‘Don’t discard me’, he put on this really ridiculous American accent, so it came out ‘Don’t diszgard me.’ I was going to bury it in the mix, but Toni Tennille said, ‘No, leave it. It sounds good.’”

  The band headed off on a snowmobiling expedition near the Continental Divide while Elton labored over the next track largely alone. “Ticking” was a harrowing, emotionally complex seven-and-a-half minute mini-movie which detailed a murderous Columbine-like rampage undertaken by an unbalanced young man.

  Powered by Elton’s highly syncopated grand piano—the only instrument to feature on the recording beside a bit of understated ARP synthesizer work courtesy of David Hentschel, who was co-engineering the session along with Clive Franks—the ennui-soaked song would unfortunately prove apocryphal. “‘Ticking’ was probably the deepest lyric [Bernie] has ever written,” Elton said. “I don’t think it’s pretentious, it’s just a very heavy lyric.”

  The intricately aggressive piano line necessitated that Elton record the vocals at the same time he laid down the piano—the first time he’d had to do so since “Talking Old Soldiers” back in 1970. “I would think so much about the voice that I wouldn’t play the piano right,” he said. “Gus was always a stickler for separation, but I had to tell him, ‘Look, the only way we’re ever going to get this thing done is by doing the voice and piano together, and forget about the leakage.’ It would only be the voice leaking anyway, so why care?”

  The concurrent voice-and-piano methodology “Ticking” employed was imperative given Bernie’s asymmetrically unbalanced lyrics. “[‘Ticking’] was just line after line,” Elton said. “I’ve gotten so used to splitting things up into sections, I don’t even think about it anymore. It helps that I can sometimes say eight words in one line whereas earlier in the song, where it’s the same melody, I’ve said only three. It’s just a matter of…” He paused. “I think I’m an expert on squeezing words into lines.”

  “Sick City,” a sauntering rocker, was ultimately doomed for B-side status despite the hours of vocal experimentation that were spent on the pounding track. “We tried something weird on ‘Sick City’,” Gus said. “We tried doing the backing vocals backwards. We spent a hell of a long time on it and it was a complete waste of time because [Nigel, Dee and Davey] had to learn what ‘sick city’ sounds like backwards. In other words, we recorded it forwards, then we turned it around and listened to it. And it was coming out, ‘Ahy-is-cus, ahy-is-cus.’ So they were trying to sing ‘ahy-is-cus’ all together. It’s difficult enough to get three people to start and end at exactly the same point in any one phrase in the best of times. But when it goes, ‘Ahy-is…’? When it has to fade in? We were trying to get it to sound like it was some kind of ‘sick city’ weirdness. That was an experiment that didn’t work.”

  Lyrically, this blatant critique of groupies and hangers-on was very much a product of road weariness. “It was a very cynical sort of song,” Bernie admitted. “Probably another potshot at New York. I’ve had this love-hate relationship with New York. Actually, I like New York, but there’s no way I could live there.”

  “I’ve Seen the Saucers” was, by contrast, an impeccably catchy tale of alien-abduction accented by Ray’s delicate congas and otherworldly water-gong. The track also underscored how drastically Nigel’s approach to drumming had changed, specifically because of the studio itself. “Caribou Ranch was the difference,” he said. “The sound was so much different. Gus had me in this little box. He built these boxes and had me in the box. We used to spend about three days just building the box. At Caribou it was so much different from the Château, because the Château was closed in, with carpet on the floor. At Caribou, there were wood floors, glass, rock. The control room at Caribou was unheard of. Jimmy Guercio wanted this thing to look like an old western movie set, [with] a rock fireplace in the control room. The room was so much different because of the ambience.”

  That ambience was on full display on “Grimsby,” a whimsical look at a less than glamorous seaport on the Lincolnshire coast. “‘Grimsby’ is the name of the town where Bernie was born,” Elton said. “It’s a fishing port. A very dull town, grim. I once said to Bernie, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to do a song about Grimsby?’ It’s such an absurd idea to write a song about Grimsby, it’s one of the most putrid places. It’s not romantic in the least. The song is up-tempo. I think it sounds like the Beach Boys. Anyway, Randy Newman did a song called ‘Cleveland’, so I thought we should do the English equivalent.”

  Fair to say, “Grimsby” hardly set Gus’ creative heart aflame. After Elton had played it for him on the piano the first time, the producer was flabbergasted. “I thought, ‘What the fuck can I do with this?’ You would just hope that someone else would have an inspired guitar solo. The brain just doesn’t kick in. It’s a bit like digging a road then.” Still, Gus kept his critique to himself. He was all too well—even with someone as prolific as Elton—getting a composer to execute extensive rewrites was problematic at best. “If you tell a songwriter, ‘I think this section’s great, and this section’s great, but you could really do with a better verse,’ or whatever, they always say, ‘Yeah, yeah, you might have got a point, I’ll do something about it.’ But they never do. What they do is go off and write another song, which they think is better. So you never get from A to Z. You always get as far as K, and then they stop. It drives you mad.”

  Gus’ complaint was ultimately a small one, for—in general—he was ecstatic about the musical manna that Elton and his band continually tossed in his lap. “The feeling that an incredible master is just around the corner is incredible,” he said. “When you know it’s coming, and you’re encouraging it, pulling it out—that’s the most exciting thing for me…When you know that moment is just around the bend, it’s the same type of feeling that you get just before an orgasm.” With a forthrightness that rivaled Elton’s, the producer admitted that everything he did in the studio was only to satisfy his own personal tastes. “If I had to constantly worry about what the public wants and what public taste is, I wouldn’t want to do it…When I push the button and tell Elton he can do better than that, and he says, ‘Right, I know. I’m mucking about’—it’s as if he were singing for me personally. When Davey plays a great guitar solo and starts roaring, it’s as if he were doing it for me, as a friend, and that’s what it’s all about.”

  A tune that didn’t prove particularly euphoric was the acoustic guitar-driven “Ducktail Jiver,” a vintage, “Hercules”-esque rocker about an aging ‘50’s outcast desperately trying to keep relevant.

  A freewheeling rhythm track and lead vocal turn were recorded, yet the potentially intriguing song was shelved. “I put it to one side because I thought it wasn’t anything terribly special,” Gus said. “Maybe [it was] a mistake. Who knows?”

  The team quickly rebounded with the elliptically buoyant “Solar Prestige a Gammon,” a nonsensical, Continental-steeped confection in a similar vein as the Beatles’ “Sun King,” and an anagram, intentional or not, of “Elton’s Program is a Game.” With incomprehensibly fragmented lyrics, the song was written as a direct response to the over-analysis their songs routinely received.

  “I love it, because I always suggest things that Bernie Taupin’s going to get knifed in the back for,” Elton said of “Solar Prestige a Gammon,” which he merrily sang in a faux-operatic voice, to further confuse matters. “I thought it would be great to write a song with English words that didn’t mean a thing, but that sounded fantastic when put together…It’s really just a fun song
, something like McCartney might do…[And] it has five fishes in it, so people might think it’s religious. People are always reading things into our music. Especially in [America]. They think there’s hidden meanings in everything. Bernie’s going to get crucified for it.”

  “Pinky,” a traditional John/Taupin ballad detailing the frozen frolics within Bernie and Maxine’s Caribou cabin, “Running Bear,” was a more straightforward offering, and a sequel of sorts to Honky Château’s “Mellow.”

  “The words are really nice on this one,” Elton said. “It’s very influenced by the cold winter in Caribou.”

  The romantic track was followed by several songs which were doomed to end up as B-sides, including the staggeringly inventive “Cold Highway,” a slinky rocker which featured multiple time-signature changes that perfectly matched the darkly twisted lyrics, which told of a childhood friend of Bernie’s who’d lost his life on an infamously treacherous road in Lincolnshire. “It was basically a stretch of highway where I came from in England that was known as an accident ‘black spot’,” the lyricist said. “We used to always make jokes about it when we were teenagers. Then one day one of our friends was actually killed there, and it became a grim reality.”

  “Stinker” provided a tonal counterbalance, dealing as it did with a morally questionable skunk. The thumping blues tune, which featured Tower of Power’s Chester Thompson on organ, was, more than anything, an offhand homage to the Beach Boys’ “Sail On, Sailor.” “The biggest influence on me from a production standpoint,” Elton would later tell journalist Timothy White, “was Brian Wilson. I mean, I love the Beatles, I love their records, but I don’t think they influenced me as songwriters. The Beach Boys sound…[was] a much bigger influence. Brian Wilson was the genius and always will be…Production-wise, his idea of initially using echo vocals on a track and then using dried vocals, I mean it completely changed the face of recording vocals.”

  Though the band knocked out the music for “Stinker” in one take, Elton struggled with the lead vocals, ultimately having to record them six separate times—a frustrating anomaly for the normally assured Brit. “If you do the vocal more than four or five times, you start to think about it too much,” he said. It was all part and parcel of the strange circumstances surrounding the sessions as a whole. “To be honest, for a time I thought I was going to have to redo all the vocals on Caribou. I did redo one, ‘Dixie Lily’. Making Caribou was a very trying experience.”

  With his frustration levels high, it was a small kindness that the pianist once again made himself scarce when not actively recording. “Elton never went to any session other than a session that he was physically working on,” Gus said. “He never went to any orchestral overdubs. No backing vocal sessions, no guitar overdub sessions, no synthesizer overdub sessions, no percussion overdubs. No mixes. Not even mastering. He didn’t even get involved in the choice of running orders…Because he trusted people. He trusted people to get on with it, which was great. It’s actually very unique. Not many people in this industry trust anybody to do anything properly.”

  Chapter 19:

  Pinball Wizard

  As the sessions were drawing to a conclusion, a quite unexpected thing happened: Detroit’s leading urban station, WJLB, began playing “Bennie and the Jets” on heavy rotation. “Within three days it was our number one request item,” disc jockey Donnie Simpson said. “For the three or four weeks during its airing, eighty-percent of the requests at WJLB were for ‘Bennie and the Jets.’ It was just phenomenal to see that whole thing, that whole scene take place.”

  Soon enough, other black-oriented stations began picking up on the song. Taking note of the phenomenon, MCA promotion director Pat Pipolo immediately rang Elton up and urged him to release “Bennie and the Jets” as his next American single, instead of “Candle in the Wind,” which was already sitting primly at the Number 11 position in Britain.

  The pianist was unsure, having never imagined “Bennie and the Jets” as a hit song. “Sometimes an artist doesn’t know what’s good and what’s bad,” he said. “He knows what he feels about a track, but he doesn’t know how to pick singles.”

  Released in the U.S. on February 4, “Bennie and the Jets,” backed with “Harmony,” slammed into the top of the charts in a matter of weeks, becoming Elton’s third million-selling single in six months and giving him his first smash record on the soul charts.

  The centrifugal force of Elton’s ceaseless momentum carried him to every conceivable corner of the globe. After a successful jaunt through Japan, he flew straight on to Australia for a series of highly-anticipated shows. “I’m the balding Elton John now,” he told waiting reporters as he leaned nonchalantly on a silver-tipped cane, over $200,000 worth of personal baggage stacked neatly behind him. His luggage was epic, including as it did one trunk dedicated solely to his glasses, while another housed his hats, and a third accommodated his stack-heeled shoes. Total excess baggage charges ran well past the $6,500 mark.

  The investment was more than justified, as Elton summarily broke attendance records up and down the coast. At the South Melbourne Football Ground alone, over 19,000 fans clamored to see the flashy superstar in action. Critic Tony Wilson was as impressed as the punters in the cheap seats, gushing how Elton’s piano playing was “comparable to the venom of Jerry Lee Lewis, with at times the delicate touch of a classical pianist.” In Sydney, a record-setting 25,000 souls came to witness Elton’s concert at Randwick Racecourse, a superior performance which was soon to be bootlegged as Live in Australia.

  “They loved us in Australia,” Dee said. “That was never a question. They were always really good to us there.”

  With hardly a moment to catch their breath, Elton and his band flew off to New Zealand for a one-off concert at the 35,000-seat Western Springs Stadium outside Auckland; demand was so intense, tickets for the February 28 show sold out in less than two hours.

  The stage seemed set for another triumph. Yet the silver clouds of unstoppable success would reveal a dark lining, as an afternoon press reception in Parnell—organized by Festival, Elton’s Australasian record company—turned to custard, in the parlance of the locals. When the bar ran out of whisky, John Reid turned his ire on reception organizer Kevin Williams, throwing a glass of champagne in his face. Appalled by Reid’s actions, socialite Judith Baragwanath called him out on his behavior.

  “How dare you, you rotten little poof,” she exclaimed.

  Reid responded by punching her in the face.

  “A reflex action,” he’d later claim, before adding, more reasonably, “It’s a despicable thing, to hit a woman.”

  Elton’s entourage was rushed back to their hotel, but the drama wasn’t quite finished. At an after-party nightclub reception for teen heartthrob David Cassidy later that night, journalist David Wheeler, a friend of Baragwanath’s, promised that Elton’s group were all marked men.

  Elton grabbed Wheeler by the shirt and forced him against the wall.

  “Who the fuck do you think you’re threatening?” he growled.

  When Wheeler attempted to fight back, Reid interceded, knocking the journalist to the ground and chipping his tooth.

  “We left the club posthaste,” Elton said, “and were all physically threatened that anyone to do with the Elton John tour had better watch it. Then when we got back to the hotel we got a phone call saying, ‘There’s a carload of people on the lookout for you, so just stay inside your hotel.’”

  Early the next afternoon, on the day of Elton’s Auckland show, Reid found himself under arrest on assault charges. Refusing to take the stage with his manager in jail, Elton was able to get Reid temporarily released. Yet as soon as the concert had ended, the Scotsman was taken back into custody and sent to Mount Eden Jail, where he began serving a 28-day prison sentence.

  “We got the largest crowd in New Zealand history for one show, thirty-five thousand people, one percent of the population,” Elton said. “And yet that one
incident ruined it.”

  “I guess [Reid] was a good manager, but he had a very aggressive streak,” Clive Franks later reflected. “He was a Jekyll and Hyde character. Very similar to Elton in that respect…From one day to the next they were different people. There were times when John was a friendly and loving person, but that doesn’t excuse that other side…I’ve seen him almost strangle a hotel receptionist because his room wasn’t ready.”

  “John certainly wasn’t a normal person,” Stuart Epps agreed. “He could be the best guy, incredibly generous and great. Or he could be the total opposite, and suddenly he’s trying to strangle you and stuff.”

  Elton scrapped a planned vacation in Tahiti and flew grimly back to England instead. Not long after landing, he impulsively canceled an imminent seventeen-date British tour which had been scheduled months before.

  “When all the trouble started and my manager was sent to prison, I had time to think,” he said. “The thought of going on another tour, for the time being, was impossible. If we didn’t stop now, I think it would have been the end…I’m the sort of person who’ll say yes to things a year in advance, and then when it comes round I’ll think, ‘Fuck, I don’t wanna do that.’ I’ve been told that I’ve got to calm down on decisions, be told what to do for a change.” Not for the first time, the superstar contemplated retirement. “Honestly, I’d really be happy to have my own record shop…My idea of happiness would be to stand behind the counter at a place like Tower Records in Los Angeles to see what people bought.”

  While Elton suffered through his personal dramas, Bernie found himself going through trials of his own. Being married to an American girl who wasn’t nearly as enamored of the English countryside as he was caused a rift that the lyricist hoped to heal by selling his modest Piglet-in-the-Wilds and moving to the posh London suburbs. Toward that end, he purchased a Georgian mansion on the Wentworth Golf Course called Bourne Lodge. “I went from the sublime to the ridiculous,” he later told author Philip Norman. “We’d been living in a tiny four-room cottage. Now we’d got…this enormous place…just down the road from Elton at Hercules. Far grander than his place. I mean, he was just living in a bungalow. I was living in a hunting lodge. I think he was a bit put out by that.”