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

by David DeCouto

  Though every concert was rapturously received, there were also a few inevitable hiccups as the caravan wound its way across the States.

  In Mobile, Alabama, a faulty sound system sent Elton into a black mood. Kicking his stage monitor over, he refused to come back for an encore until the audience’s endless chanting and stomping finally convinced him otherwise.

  In Houston, a pair of security guards began throwing fans to the ground during “All the Girls Love Alice.” This not only enraged Elton—it also got John Reid’s back up as well. “John used to go berserk if the security men turned on the kids,” Dee said. “I’ve seen him do some incredible things—launch himself off a lighting tower to mix it with some huge Texan bouncer built like an all-in wrestler. You couldn’t fault the guy for guts.”

  “John Reid was quite a scary character,” Linda Lewis concurred. “He was a great guy if you were on the right side of him, but he was a typical Scots hooligan. They’d as soon head-butt you as look at you. I saw him head-butt someone once actually, while on tour [back in ‘72]. We’d all gone to see Beyond the Valley of the Dolls at a private sitting, me and Elton’s entourage. And they put on Valley of the Dolls by mistake. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was much more sort of a racy kind of thing, and Valley of the Dolls came up [instead] and Elton wasn’t pleased, so John hit the roof and just went about starting fights with everybody in this tiny little theater that he’d hired. He was quite heavy.”

  The manager blamed his behavior, at least in part, on the overwhelming exhaustion which befell him while on the road. “The only time you can relax is when Elton is back safely in his hotel room,” he said. “As soon as you wake up the next day, it all starts again.”

  As the ‘70s were nearing their bespangled midpoint, Elton continued dominating the radio airwaves as clearly as he was the concert stage. This preeminence was perhaps best exemplified by Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’s final track, “Harmony,” which had become the most requested song on American radio stations during the summer and fall of ‘74. On WXLO-FM’s popular “Battle of the Hits” radio program, listeners voted for the effortlessly catchy ballad over legitimate releases by major artists for a record-breaking thirty-three weeks straight.

  “That has never, ever happened in the history of radio programming,” RKO vice-president Paul Drew said. “Especially for an album track.”

  Meanwhile, WBZ-FM in Boston, which kept its own record charts, listed “Harmony” as their Number 1 song for well over a month. This phenomenon played itself out over and over again across the country.

  “I never understood why [‘Harmony’] wasn’t a single,” Gus said years later. “It was a bad mistake. It was actually a B-side twice, which is really ridiculous.”

  “That could have been another single,” Elton conceded. “It’s one of my all-time favorite songs. But I wanted to get new stuff out.”

  Any regrets the pianist may have had over missing out on yet another hit single were set aside long enough to arrange a surprise birthday party for his loyal sound engineer. During the L.A. leg of the tour, he insisted that Clive Franks attend a dinner party at Chasen’s restaurant.

  “I didn’t even want to go out that night,” Clive said. “I was complaining because—it being Chasen’s—I had to borrow a jacket and a tie to wear. I walk in, and there’s this huge table with everyone round it, and Elton’s at the piano playing ‘Happy Birthday to You’. Cheech and Chong are at the table, and Fred Astaire’s sitting downstairs. I remember Fred Astaire said ‘Hello’ to Elton.”

  Elton spent the afternoon before the first of three sold-out shows at the L.A. Forum manning a two-hour DJ shift on KMET-FM. He chose his own records, and ad-libbed comic routines between songs. A typical moment: “That’s the wonderful Joe Cocker and ‘I Can Stand a Little Rain’, and before that you heard John Lennon and ‘Nobody Loves You (When You’re Down and Out),’ and I think right now it’s commercial time…A live advertisement from Elton John—this is me? Oh yeah? Hi, this is Elton John for Licorice Pizza. I’ve never had a Licorice Pizza. What’re they like? Gives you a good run for your money.” He let out a Goon-like bark of amusement. “Did you know that the largest record store in the known world is here in Tower Records? Yes, it’s Los Angeles. Tower is in the heart of the Sunset Strip, and because I’m doing this commercial they’re paying me seven million. They’ve put a stack of my Caribou albums just inside the front door, and from today to Sunday midnight they’re paying compensation to everyone who falls over them.”

  The pianist was clearly in his element spinning records by Little Feat and Aretha Franklin. “I’d like my own radio station,” he told journalist Henry Edwards. “From the time I was a child, I adored watching the labels on recordings spin around. That’s why I still love to play records.”

  Elton’s first two Forum shows went as smoothly as his radio gig had gone. On the third night, however, things turned dicey when excited fans rushed the front of the stage during “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting).” A cadre of security guards dispatched themselves into the fray, manhandling the teenagers and violently throwing bodies in every which direction.

  “Get the fuck out of it!” an infuriated Elton screamed in an eerie replay of his Baltimore show the year before. Then to his fans he announced, “This is your concert! Come down if you want to!”

  A thousand fans immediately swarmed the stage.

  Forum manager Jim Appel was enraged by Elton’s behavior, which he saw as grandstanding. After the show, he threatened to have the Brit arrested if he ever caused any similar “incitements” in the future.

  “Just let him try,” Elton said. “I would have loved to have been arrested on stage. I would have ground [Appel] into the floor.”

  The tour briefly snuck north of the border on October 14, landing at the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver. Elton made his entrance in grand style, riding through the venue in a convoy consisting of seven silver limousines. During “Burn Down the Mission,” a fan threw a British Union Jack onstage. Elton picked the flag up reverently, wiping a tear from his eye.

  “You always get emotional when you see the British flag, or when you meet Britons abroad,” he later explained.

  Draping the Union Jack over his piano, Elton finished the concert with a renewed sense of vitality. His performance elicited rapturous screams from the 17,500 in attendance, as well as glowing notices from the critics, who weren’t as studiously jaded as their American counterparts. “Elton John is…one of the few real entertainers this music [rock ‘n’ roll] has produced since its early days,” noted the Vancouver Sun’s Ritchie Yorke. “[Elton] is a showman, singer, and musician par excellence, of a class unique in rock ‘n’ roll. His Vancouver concert was a dynamic exercise in poise, precision and perfection attained.” Yorke’s only complaint was how difficult it was “to find fresh words sufficiently free of the pollution of hyperbole, but still meaningful enough to emphasize Elton’s uniqueness.”

  Elton John’s Greatest Hits was released two-thirds of the way through his tour—on November 4 in the U.S., and four days later in the U.K. The album featured an iconic cover photograph by Terry O’Neill of a white-suited Elton sitting before his piano in his living room. “You would not believe how many times we had to retouch the…front cover,” said album designer Hogie McMurtrie. “I can’t remember any other album where he was so picky about how this would look, and it’s not like now, where it’s a digital process. All the stuff was done by hand. And it would be thousands of dollars every time we’d touch it up. And he would say, ‘The shadow here is a little off,’ and ‘My finger is wrong here,’ over and over again, and of course this is Elton, so you’d have to do it.”

  The painstaking effort proved well worth it—the disc quickly became a transatlantic smash, keeping the Rolling Stones’ It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll out of the top spot in both territories.

  Elton John’s Greatest Hits became MCA’s fastest-selling album in their history, and the firs
t “Best Of” compilation to ever top the American charts; by the second week of release, the disc was Number 1 in both the U.S. and the U.K. Even Elton was astounded by the album’s success. “I thought it was unbelievable when I heard the news,” he said. “People said that some greatest hits albums do much better than ordinary albums, but I said I wasn’t too sure, and looked at a couple of examples. Alice Cooper’s Greatest Hits hadn’t done as well as a normal album of Alice Cooper would, for example, so I just couldn’t believe it. It’s probably because it’s a pretty strong album.”

  The critics generally applauded the release. Circus magazine labeled the album “a single streamlined disc,” noting that “there is certainly enough fine music on Elton John’s Greatest Hits to tempt even the most reluctant admirer of the wacky prince of piano.” Robert Christgau, however, didn’t agree that singles were Elton’s métier. “His method is too hit-or-miss to permit such a surefire formula, and some of his best stuff (‘Your Sister Can’t Twist,’ ‘Solar Prestige a Gammon’) has proven too wild or weird…There are no clinkers here, and I suppose if you only want one of his albums this is it. But it’s stylistically ragged, two of its four great cuts are also on Honky Château, and I’d just as soon hear the first side of Caribou. B+.”

  Elton, for his part, found the album a document to be proud of. “Most of it,” he said, “apart from ‘Border Song’, which I wanted to stick on although it wasn’t a sales hit, was recorded when people really started taking notice. They wanted to put a hits album out last year—you know what record companies are like when they’ve got product to merchandise—but we said no, because there was no point in it last year. It would have been filled with things that weren’t hits. This year, I thought it would be good.”

  Though the LP lacked the vinyl space necessary to include such perennial tracks as “Tiny Dancer” or “Take Me to the Pilot” or “Levon”—or even more recent hits like “The Bitch is Back” or “Pinball Wizard”—it would remain in Billboard’s Top 200 for a staggering two years running, ultimately selling over seventeen million copies in America alone, as well as millions more worldwide.

  Chapter 22:

  ‘Here We Go Then, Over the Hill’

  “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night” was released as a single days later, on November 16. The track, a virtual duet between the most popular singer on the planet and the founder of the most popular band in the universe, quickly reached Number 1 in America, knocking Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” out of the top spot. The song was Lennon’s only post-Beatles’ track to attain such lofty heights, and Elton was ecstatic—his friend had been awarded the success he so richly deserved, and he himself had won their bet.

  “Elton was gracious,” May Pang later recalled, “and said to John, ‘Look, if you don’t want to do it [appear onstage together], you’re not obligated.’ And John said, ‘No, a bet is a bet.’”

  They decided that Elton’s Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden would be the ideal event for their joint appearance. To get a feel for the proceedings, Lennon and May Pang flew up on the Starship 1 to Elton’s November 20 show at Boston Garden. “[His private jet] was just beautiful,” May said. “You sit in a lounge. There’s seating that goes around the plane, but there are places where you could just lay down. It was great, like a home away from home.”

  By the time they arrived at the Garden for a soundcheck, Charlie Watts was running Elton’s band through an impromptu rehearsal. While “The Bitch is Back” blared, the ex-Beatle looked in awe at the massive rigging and tons of equipment scattered across the stage.

  “My God, is this what it’s all about?” He turned to Nigel. “Nige, how many microphones are on them drums?”

  “Maybe sixteen.”

  Lennon shook his head in amazement. “Fuck, we were lucky to get three for the vocals when we were on. And even then, one of them wouldn’t work.”

  The ex-Beatle clearly felt completely out of his depth. “I was nervous watching [Elton],” he admitted of that night’s performance. “I was thinking, ‘Thank God it isn’t me,’ as he was getting dressed to go on.’”

  The concert itself was, to no one’s surprise, another raving success.

  “John and I loved the concert from the moment Elton made his entrance,” May said, “prancing onstage wearing a four-foot-high ostrich plume headdress.”

  After “Funeral For a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” “Candle in the Wind” and “Grimsby,” Lennon turned to his girlfriend with a droll smile. “This is exciting,” he said. “This makes me wanna get up and go on tour.”

  By the time the finale arrived nearly three hours later, the ex-Beatle had a change of heart, deciding that touring would be far too much responsibility for him alone to shoulder.

  “I don’t think I can do it all meself,” he said in his unmistakable Liverpool dialect. “We only had to do twenty minutes, and that still used to seem like an hour to me.” He turned to Elton. “There were four of us, but you do two-and-a-half hours on your own. How the fuck do you do it?”

  Lennon and May Pang flew back to New York with Elton after the show and hung out with him in his hotel suite at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel on Fifth Avenue, where three massive white steamer trunks worth of clothes took up half the room. Lennon and Pang busied themselves trying on various jackets, hats and glasses, like children playing dress-up while Elton sat on a couch and laughed.

  “The thing I loved was trying on his glasses,” May later recalled. “What great fun. And I remember asking, ‘How much could this [pair] be?’ And someone said, ‘Five thousand dollars a pair.’ And that was in the Seventies. You go, ‘Okay, this goes down. I’m not touching this one.’ But John liked me in a couple of the ones that I was wearing, so it was really funny.”

  Less amusing was a visit several NYPD officers paid the trio later in the evening. Informing Elton that an anonymous call had been placed to the police, stating that a crazed man was in the hotel, looking for Elton, they warned him to be extra vigilant.

  “Just be careful,” one of the policemen said. “Just in case. Okay?”

  Elton thanked the officers and double-locked the door after they had gone.

  “After the policemen left,” May said, “everyone became very upset. John was especially nervous, since he was about to appear live onstage for the first time in three years.”

  On the Sunday before the Madison Square Garden show, Lennon and May Pang joined Elton and his band at the Record Plant in New York City to practice their shared set.

  “When we got there,” May said, “Elton had already thoroughly rehearsed the band. He was a perfectionist and he felt honored by John’s desire to appear with him. Determined that when he and John performed they would sound exactly as they had sounded on record, he had gone to the extent of making sure that the horn section would play their parts note-for-note, like the horns on the record. The precision was astonishing.”

  “It was [Elton’s] band and his show,” said Tony King. “John came in and said, ‘It’s all yours,’ and they routined the show and the songs. Elton was the leader of the band, and Lennon was happy for it to be like that.”

  As the rehearsal proceeded, brandy and ganga made the rounds, convivial laughter flowing easily. “John was already a friend,” Davey said, “and we’d had some riotous times together. The rehearsal was a blur.”

  The musicians began their hour-and-a-half practice session with a run-through of “Whatever Gets You Thru the Night.” “I’ll never forget Elton saying that he wanted everything to go right for John, knowing that John hadn’t been onstage for a long time,” May Pang said. “There’s even a part in the horns where Bobby Keys normally takes the lead in ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ [on the original recording], and it sounds a little flat. And Elton made sure that note was just the way it was [in rehearsals], he didn’t want to make it perfect, because that may not have been the way John wanted it, and he went as true as he could
to the record, to how it was.”

  After tearing through the song twice, the band next rehearsed “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which Elton had just released as his latest single on November 18. Realizing that the fans would want at least one more song together, Elton suggested doing “Imagine” as their final number. But the ex-Beatle, who was wearing a curly blonde wig for absolutely no reason whatsoever, was having none of it.

  “Boring,” he said with a yawn. “The last thing I wanna do is come on like Dean Martin doing his classic hits. I’ve done it before. Let’s do a rock ‘n’ roll song. We’ve done a song of Elton’s and a song of mine. Let’s pick a neutral number.” He paused. “Let’s go all the way back.”

  “So I thought of ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which was the first track on the first Beatles album,” Elton said. “And he had never sung it. It was McCartney who sang it. John was so knocked out, because he’d never actually sung the lead before.”

  After the rehearsal ended, Elton and Lennon retreated to the Sherry-Netherland and methodically became as high as was humanly possible.

  “We were so naughty together,” the pianist said. “We laughed our heads off.”

  Sometime after midnight, Elton tripped over a coffee table and plummeted to the rug. With unsure hands, he adjusted a pair of giant metallic frames as Lennon burst into hysterics.

  “For fuck’s sake, Elton! Take those glasses off and face the world already!”

  They both started laughing uncontrollably again. The hilarity continued for some time, until “Time in a Bottle” came on the radio. The two Brits suddenly fell silent. Since Jim Croce’s untimely death in a plane crash the year before, his songs had been in heavy rotation. When “Time in a Bottle” faded into “Rocket Man,” Lennon snapped off the radio with an acidic groan.