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

by David DeCouto

  Miffed or not, Elton soon hired on a new employee, twenty-seven-year-old chauffer Bob Halley. The first time Halley laid eyes on Elton was when he arrived at Heathrow Airport, dressed in multicolored feathers and six-inch platform boots. “I remember driving very carefully down the motorway,” Halley said, “and all of a sudden I heard Elton turn to John Reid and whisper, ‘Can’t he go any faster?’”

  In time, Halley would become one of Elton’s closest friends and confidants.

  Elton was to realize a lifelong ambition that May when he joined the Board of Directors of his beloved Watford Hornets. Though he’d already been a vice-president of the club for several months, that position—an honorific, at best—didn’t fire his imagination the way a directorship did. “Now I’m a vice-president, but it isn’t enough,” he’d noted only weeks earlier. “Anyone with £53 can become one of those. If you want to help the club you have to put money into it, and to do that you have to be a director. I’d dearly love to put some cash into the club. They are such a nice bunch of lads, and despite the problems they’ve been having, the morale is pretty good.”

  Elton’s business agent, Vic Lewis, never saw the rocker as excited as he did the day he took him to Watford to finalize the details of his directorship. “He was over the moon,” Lewis said. “With a grin which spread from ear to ear and back again, [Elton] told me, ‘This has to be the happiest day of my life.’”

  Indeed, Watford was truly where Elton’s heart lay. “I love it as much as music itself,” he conceded. “It’s like erasing five or six years of my life, and I’m here as if nothing had happened.”

  Concurrent with his increased involvement with Watford, Elton took fourteen-year-old Maldwyn Pope, a recent Rocket Records signee, under his wing. “Elton was something like a big brother,” Pope said. “A lot stuff had come out in Britain around that time about inappropriate relationships between famous people and young people, but he was just fantastic, there was nothing ever inappropriate. And he always wanted to do special things. I think he just likes promoting young talent and encouraging it, for no other reason than I think he realized he needed that support when he was young. I think it brings out the father-figure in him, or the big-brother-figure, and that certainly happened with me.”

  Between sessions for Pope’s first album, produced by art director David Costa, Elton drove him over to Vicarage Road, home of the Watford Football Club. “As we travelled,” Pope recalled in his memoir, Old Enough to Know Better, “Elton played a copy of Paul McCartney’s album, Band on the Run. At one point, he stopped the car and turned the volume up. He wanted to point out some out-of-tune guitars on the song ‘Bluebird’. Elton couldn’t believe that they had let it slip through.”

  Once at the club, Elton and Pope joined the first team on the main pitch, running through drills with the professional athletes and even taking their turn heading balls toward the goal from the manager’s crosses. Pope was impressed. “I think the only other person Elton had taken training at Watford was Rod Stewart—who was also a massive football fan—so I was in quite a select band of people. It was fantastic.”

  Hours later, as they were motoring away, Elton ejected Band on the Run from his car’s stereo and cranked up BBC Radio 1.

  “In which year did Elton John have a hit with ‘Your Song’?” the DJ asked.

  “1970!” Elton barked at the radio. “1970!”

  “Wasn’t it 1971?” Pope asked.

  “1971,” the DJ said.

  Elton just shook his head.

  Elton headed to Ramport Studios in London days later to record “Pinball Wizard,” his lone contribution to the upcoming Ken Russell-helmed film, Tommy, based on the Who’s famed 1969 rock opera.

  Everyone in the pianist’s camp was excited about the project. “We knew we had the best song,” Gus said.

  Though the rest of the soundtrack was performed by the Who, Elton insisted on using his own band—and Gus’ matchless production abilities—on his track. And as a special treat, he invited Maldwyn Pope along to attend the sessions. “He told me he had something unique set up, but he wouldn’t tell me what,” Pope said. “I was staying at a hotel in Central London, and a black cab came and picked me up and took me to this big house, and I knocked on the door, and it opens and it’s Pete Townshend wearing a jumper knitted by his wife on her knitting machine, and it said: Pete Townshend, Pete Townshend, Pete Townshend…A lot of Pete Townshends.”

  Elton was slightly more glamorously attired. Wearing the same tiger-skinned jacket and pink-framed glasses that would soon grace the cover of his upcoming Caribou album, Elton led his band through “Pinball Wizard” in two quick takes. “They had a piano booth there on the left-hand-side of the studio, so it was isolated,” Pope later said. “And they sat me above that so I could watch Elton. I can still see his stubby little fingers playing [the opening chords to] ‘Pinball Wizard’. Ken Russell, the director, was there too, but the scariest thing for me was Keith Moon, because his eyes [were] just wild. Pete Townshend was trying to placate him all day, just to make sure he didn’t go off.”

  Elton knocked out his lead vocals while sipping from a glass of Laphroaig single malt, completing the task in only ten minutes. Nigel, Dee and Davey then completed backing vocal duties in less than an hour.

  The Who were astounded by their focus and speed.

  “It was a revelation,” Pete Townshend later noted in his autobiography, Who I Am, “how quickly and efficiently Elton and his band worked, nailing a driving track with solos, lead and backing vocals in less than four hours.”

  Indeed, Elton’s involvement in the project had more than a whiff of the inevitable about it. He’d originally declined Russell’s offer to appear in the film, in fact, and it was only producer Robert Stigwood’s steadfast pleading that brought the pianist around to finally accepting the part.

  “The role was originally offered to Rod Stewart,” Elton said, “and he said to me, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘Oh no, not a film now. Bloody hell, what are they going to do next? It will be a cartoon series soon.’ Rod and I are friends and kind of rivals. Then they romanced me so much that in the end I did it, because Pete Townshend rang me up…So I told Rod not to do it and I ended up doing it. He was really furious, and rightly so. I don’t think Rod’s quite forgiven me for that.”

  Any potential fall-out with Rod was more than compensated by the opportunity to work with Pete Townshend, whom Elton had admired for years. “Pete has always been a very big supporter,” Elton said. “I remember Pete sitting out there when I first started, and I’m a great believer that if people have done you great favors or have been supportive, you should do things back for them.”

  Shooting his scenes for Tommy at the King’s Theater in Portsmouth a fortnight later, Elton performed in four-foot-tall Doc Martens attached to his legs with metal braces. “I can’t stand heights—the experience was dizzying,” he said. “I’m all right in an airplane if I’m 35,000 feet, but when you’re sort of five feet off the ground and have to walk on them, and Ken, of course, the more I was terrified, the more he would make me walk on them.”

  With his fourth-division-dwelling soccer team deep in the red, Elton’s first official act as a director was to volunteer his services for a benefit concert on Watford’s Vicarage Road grounds to help pay off the clubs substantial debts. “I’m doing this concert in spite of canceling my British tour because I have supported Watford ever since I was a kid,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to see them go under, and for this reason I will do everything in my power to save them.”

  As a token gesture of apology for usurping the Pinball Wizard role, Elton invited Rod Stewart—whom he called the best rock ‘n’ roll singer he’d ever heard, as well as the greatest white soul singer—to join him onstage on May 5, in front of 40,000 rain-soaked fans who’d each paid £2 for the honor of rocking through a deluge.

  After an opening forty-five-minute set from the Scottish hard rock outfit Nazar
eth, Elton took to the stage in a specially commissioned suit in Watford’s colors of yellow and black. Halfway through the performance, he unveiled a cover of the Beatles’ classic, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Though he’d been debating about recording a cover of the Stylistics’ soulful ’73 smash “Rockin’ Roll Baby”—produced and co-written by influential Philly maven Thom Bell—he decided that afternoon to record the Beatles song instead, after witnessing the tremendous ovation it received. “It went down incredibly well, staggeringly well,” Elton said. And besides, as he’d later point out, “the Stylistics song had a line about an ‘orthopedic shoe’ that wasn’t natural for me to sing.”

  Rod Stewart then came on to help close the show in style.

  “Good evening, sir,” Elton said, grinning from behind his satin-draped piano.

  “Good evening, sir,” Rod replied, bowing regally. Grabbing a crumpled lyric sheet off the piano, he sang a duet with Elton on “Country Comfort” before launching into rave-up versions of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock ‘n’ Roller” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Angel.”

  As Rod’s brief set closed, Elton led the sodden crowd in a gleeful chorus of “Singin’ in the Rain” before ending the festivities with a thunderously multi-textured reading of “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting).”

  Fair to say, everyone left the muddy grounds very wet, and very satisfied.

  “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me,” the leadoff single from Elton’s upcoming Caribou LP, was released in the U.K. on May 16. Backed with “Sick City,” which would prove popular enough in its own right to garner significant airplay, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me” did well, peaking at Number 16 in Elton’s homeland.

  Two days on, the pianist performed a benefit concert at the Royal Festival Hall, a curated overview of his career (“An evening of semi-nostalgia”) from his DJM days right up through “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me.” “The Festival Hall gig will be something like the History of Elton John,” he promised, “and we’ll go through from beginning to end. Sorry—to where we are now.” As he and Gus were drawing up the set list for the show, Elton made a mental inventory of all the songs he’d played onstage over the last four years. “It came to eighty-five songs,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any other act that can say that.”

  After a taped rendition of “God Save the Queen,” Elton appeared on the Royal Festival stage alone at his piano.

  “I’m the support act,” he joked. “[And] this one is a song which was the first song that Bernie and I ever really felt excited about that we ever wrote, and it’s called ‘Skyline Pigeon’.”

  After an impassioned reading of the plaintive hymn, Elton was joined by Dee Murray and Nigel Olsson, the three recreating their original 1970 trio for a soulfully thundering “Border Song.” Davey Johnstone and Ray Cooper then came on for such latter-day fare as “Honky Cat” and “Crocodile Rock,” with the percussionist’s fervent duck-call solo capably replacing an entire horn section on the former.

  The performance was a success in every respect, raising more than £10,000 on behalf of the Invalid Children’s Aid Society. Recorded by Gus Dudgeon, it would later become the “Here” portion of Elton’s second live offering, Here and There, two years hence.

  After the show, Elton and his entourage dined with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon at Kensington Palace. The unusual evening culminated with the grateful princess presenting the pianist with a pair of stuffed leopards as a thank you for his charity efforts.

  “The whole night was very odd,” Bernie said. “The thing that amazed me was that there didn’t seem to be any kind of security at Kensington Palace, other than a policeman at the gate. You just rolled up, knocked at the door, and were let in. The other thing I remember is that, getting out of the car, I split my trousers at the crotch. I had to borrow one of Lord Snowdon’s dressing gowns, while a lady-in-waiting sewed them up for me.”

  Elton remained calm throughout his partner’s embarrassing wardrobe malfunction; it was a stoicism borne from the memory of a previous royal visit. While dining at Windsor Castle months earlier, the presence of the Queen Mother had overwhelmed the usually calm-nerved pianist to the point where he lost track of his actions. “I was so scared,” he said, “I put sugar on my eggs hors d’oeuvre instead of salt, and then had to plow my way through it.” Worse still, when asked to play piano for the Royal Family after dinner, he’d gone upstairs to a grand bedroom to change into a stage suit he’d brought along for the occasion when Princess Margaret came wandering in for a chat.

  “She didn’t seem to notice I was in my underwear,” he said with a laugh.

  Elton left Kensington Palace at three in the morning, roaring drunk. As soon as he got home, he crawled into his king-sized bed and continued drinking. It was, by now, standard operating procedure. “I’d put on forty-five pounds because I was drinking at least half a bottle of scotch each day,” he said. “I just felt awful, and I looked at myself: ‘At twenty-seven, your hair’s going, your body’s going, you’re going.’”

  In an attempt to stave off a premature decline, Elton booked himself into Gardiner’s Tennis Ranch on Camelback Mountain in Scottsdale, Arizona. His routine included playing daily matches with six-time Wimbledon singles champ Billie Jean King, whom he’d met the summer before at a party held by Jerry Perenchio, promoter of Billie’s infamous “Battle of the Sexes” exhibition match against Bobby Riggs. “Elton came over to introduce himself,” the tennis star said, “and we were both embarrassed at first, but we got along from the start.”

  “It was the first time I’d been on my own for four and a half years,” Elton said of his stay at Gardiner’s. “I spent a month doing nothing but hitting a ball around, seven hours a day…The midday temperature out there on that ranch was about 112 degrees. Since then I’ve lost about two stone in weight.”

  On one particularly auspicious afternoon, top-seeded Jimmy Connors joined in for a heated doubles match. The few times the pianist managed a winning shot, Connors would collapse onto the court in a fit of laughter. Elton hardly minded—to the inveterate sports fanatic, the company of King and Connors was Heaven-sent. “I have more heroes in sport than anywhere else,” he said. “I think it’s always good to have idols, people you respect, and I’ve got more sporting heroes than anything else. I think you need to be a special kind of person to be a top sportsman…Anyone can be a rock star. ‘Wanna make a record?’ There’s a lot more dedication in being a tennis champion than being a rock musician. I’m sure the Stones don’t get up every morning and have a band rehearsal…I can’t imagine a bigger thrill than scoring a goal in the World Cup.”

  Elton was particularly touched when Billy Jean King presented him with a customized warm-up uniform featuring the logo of her team, the Philadelphia Freedoms, designed by Englishman Ted Tinling. “We gave it to him,” King said, “and as we were in the limo…he said, ‘Billie, I’m going to write a song for you.’ I said, ‘Sure you are,’ and he said, “No, I mean it. Just wait and see.’”

  While Elton was racing around the courts, Gus Dudgeon was running equally as hard on a parallel track, creating detailed mixes from the Caribou Ranch sessions.

  “Gus Dudgeon, I have to say, was the fifth member of our band,” Elton later acknowledged. “The actual sound and the quality of the recordings are extraordinary, and that was down to him. He was our fifth member. Like the Beatles had George Martin, we had Gus.” Bernie readily agreed. “It was collaborative, definitely, but Gus was holding the reins. He was brilliant in the studio, he was absolutely extraordinary. You just have to listen to those records…Sonically, there’s nothing to touch them.”

  The perfectionistic producer sent Elton multiple mixes of each song. “Gus does two or three different kinds of mixes and plays them for me,” the pianist said. “I just pick out the one I like best and make suggestions on how to improve the most superior of the lot.”

  The producer understood that the met
iculous work he put into crafting and perfecting each song would eventually pay huge dividends. “Gus mixed songs so that when you’re listening to it for the first time, you’re always hearing something new,” David Hentschel said. “Most times he’d leave the first verse and chorus alone, as you’re just getting into the whole mood of the piece. But then when the second verse comes around he’d start introducing other sounds—and he’d keep adding, so by the end you’ve got this dynamic build going on, and the intensity of the song is peaking at the right time.”

  Unlike with many other bands, Gus usually culled Elton’s mixes from a single master take. “With Elton and [Gus and] the band, it was as much of a performance as possible,” Hentschel noted. “Not manufactured, which I have seen happen with other producers and musicians. Obviously, if you got two-thirds of the way through the song and it was sounding great and someone made a howler, then you would do a last section and chop it on. But it certainly was not approached with, ‘Let’s just get a good verse and then let’s get a good chorus and we can stitch them together later.’ [Most] recordings would have been one [single] take. I’m not saying the first take…it may have been the fourth or fifth take…but one pass straight through.”

  “These days,” Davey said years later, “the way people produce music, it’s a little bit false, it’s a little bit sterile to me because everything is quantized, everything’s perfect. When we used to make albums…we’d go in and rehearse it and cut it and that would be it. We’d be done. Your first ideas, which are usually your best, would be on that record.”